When Gordon Lockheed’s response to the publishing industry questions raised in my early reports was posted on dooneyscafe.com, it summarized some of the larger issues facing book publishing and book-selling:

So what are the big questions and answers being skirted here, the ones beyond the immediate situation? Are we approaching some sort of cultural Armageddon that will wipe out our book publishing industry while transforming Chapters/Indigo into a purveyor of cultural bric-a-brac and scented candles in which a few novels aimed at the diminishing stock of novel-reading little old ladies occupy a small corner of the stores? I hope not, but personally, I can’t see any way past the Chapters/Indigo mess for either publishers or writers.

At the macroscale what has happened is partly the result of the evolution of consumer capitalism and partly the product of technological changes in media, which together have reduced both the number of readers and altered the attentional choices (and perhaps, capacity) of the average citizen by creating alternative, and largely emotion-based reception and transmission devices for information. Yet another cause, perhaps particularly in Canada, is weakening government resolve. Governments across the West have decided their mandate is to act primarily as a component of the economic system and a cheerleader for the corporate sector, and now merely seek to serve those purposes—whatever they happen to be aimed at at any given moment. We can also lay some blame on the disintegration of our education systems, which has taught the young little more than how to have a nice day filled with consumer preferences and emotionally-authenticated opinions for several decades, and has transformed our higher education system into a job-training pipeline for the corporate sector, for which knowledge is simply another form of merchandise.

But behind that is the most difficult question of all, one that we have neither experience with, or any perceivable will to answer: what happens to a society that loses the technical ability to analyze and mediate its own activities?  Because that will be the consequence of the collapse of book reading, which is the primary platform for this depth of analysis in contemporary civilization, and the ground of the political and intellectual discourse required to keep the cognitive equipment operational.

McLuhan’s multi-disciplinary committees within the Global Village have failed woefully to do anything to head off this unforeseen scenario. The academic world has degenerated into ideological gang warfare, translating “multi-disciplinary” to “inter-disciplinary”, which is little more than shoals of ambitious professors vying for jargon supremacy.  Newspapers, trying to compete with the Internet and television, have imposed limits on most reportage to 800 words or less, thus obviating any serious analysis of issues. And television, likewise following McLuhan’s lead, has news anchors pestering flood victims and the like for some sort of expression of their feelings. And then there’s the Internet, where unargued opinion and unresearched blogging has supplanted research and analysis.

The trouble is real and profound, and it ain’t going away anytime soon.

*                              *                            *

I wonder if similar concerns and discussion are happening with other art forms, in other areas of the humanities? When I was teaching at university and Mike Harris was slashing education spending, unless you were in science or business, there was a lot of discussion about the humanities being at risk in academia.

In late October 2010 SUNY Albany’s President announced that several departments in the Humanities at that institution were to be eliminated. What follows is an open letter to George M Philip, President of the State University of New York At Albany

Dear President Philip,

Probably the last thing you need at this moment is someone else from outside your university complaining about your decision. If you want to argue that I can’t really understand all aspects of the situation, never having been associated with SUNY Albany, I wouldn’t disagree. But I cannot let something like this go by without weighing in. I hope, when I’m through, you will at least understand why.

Just 30 days ago, on October 1st, you announced that the departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts were being eliminated. You gave several reasons for your decision, including that ‘there are comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs.’ Of course, your decision was also, perhaps chiefly, a cost-cutting measure – in fact, you stated that this decision might not have been necessary had the state legislature passed a bill that would have allowed your university to set its own tuition rates. Finally, you asserted that the humanities were a drain on the institution financially, as opposed to the sciences, which bring in money in the form of grants and contracts.

Let’s examine these and your other reasons in detail, because I think if one does, it becomes clear that the facts on which they are based have some important aspects that are not covered in your statement. First, the matter of enrollment. I’m sure that relatively few students take classes in these subjects nowadays, just as you say. There wouldn’t have been many in my day, either, if universities hadn’t required students to take a distribution of courses in many different parts of the academy: humanities, social sciences, the fine arts, the physical and natural sciences, and to attain minimal proficiency in at least one foreign language. You see, the reason that humanities classes have low enrollment is not because students these days are clamoring for more relevant courses; it’s because administrators like you, and spineless faculty, have stopped setting distribution requirements and started allowing students to choose their own academic programs – something I feel is a complete abrogation of the duty of university faculty as teachers and mentors. You could fix the enrollment problem tomorrow by instituting a mandatory core curriculum that included a wide range of courses.

Young people haven’t, for the most part, yet attained the wisdom to have that kind of freedom without making poor decisions. In fact, without wisdom, it’s hard for most people. That idea is thrashed out better than anywhere else, I think, in Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, which is told in Chapter Five of his great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. In the parable, Christ comes back to earth in Seville at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. He performs several miracles but is arrested by Inquisition leaders and sentenced to be burned at the stake. The Grand Inquisitor visits Him in his cell to tell Him that the Church no longer needs Him. The main portion of the text is the Inquisitor explaining why. The Inquisitor says that Jesus rejected the three temptations of Satan in the desert in favor of freedom, but he believes that Jesus has misjudged human nature. The Inquisitor says that the vast majority of humanity cannot handle freedom. In giving humans the freedom to choose, Christ has doomed humanity to a life of suffering.

That single chapter in a much longer book is one of the great works of modern literature. You would find a lot in it to think about. I’m sure your Russian faculty would love to talk with you about it – if only you had a Russian department, which now, of course, you don’t.

Then there’s the question of whether the state legislature’s inaction gave you no other choice. I’m sure the budgetary problems you have to deal with are serious. They certainly are at Brandeis University, where I work. And we, too, faced critical strategic decisions because our income was no longer enough to meet our expenses. But we eschewed your draconian – and authoritarian – solution, and a team of faculty, with input from all parts of the university, came up with a plan to do more with fewer resources. I’m not saying that all the specifics of our solution would fit your institution, but the process sure would have. You did call a town meeting, but it was to discuss your plan, not let the university craft its own. And you called that meeting for Friday afternoon on October 1st, when few of your students or faculty would be around to attend. In your defense, you called the timing ‘unfortunate’, but pleaded that there was a ‘limited availability of appropriate large venue options.’ I find that rather surprising. If the President of Brandeis needed a lecture hall on short notice, he would get one. I guess you don’t have much clout at your university.

It seems to me that the way you went about it couldn’t have been more likely to alienate just about everybody on campus. In your position, I would have done everything possible to avoid that. I wouldn’t want to end up in the 9th Bolgia (ditch of stone) of the 8th Circle of the Inferno, where the great 14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri put the sowers of discord. There, as they struggle in that pit for all eternity, a demon continually hacks their limbs apart, just as in life they divided others.

The Inferno is the first book of Dante’s Divine Comedy, one of the great works of the human imagination. There’s so much to learn from it about human weakness and folly. The faculty in your Italian department would be delighted to introduce you to its many wonders – if only you had an Italian department, which now, of course, you don’t.

And do you really think even those faculty and administrators who may applaud your tough-minded stance (partly, I’m sure, in relief that they didn’t get the axe themselves) are still going to be on your side in the future? I’m reminded of the fable by Aesop of the Travelers and the Bear: two men were walking together through the woods, when a bear rushed out at them. One of the travelers happened to be in front, and he grabbed the branch of a tree, climbed up, and hid himself in the leaves. The other, being too far behind, threw himself flat down on the ground, with his face in the dust. The bear came up to him, put his muzzle close to the man’s ear, and sniffed and sniffed. But at last with a growl the bear slouched off, for bears will not touch dead meat. Then the fellow in the tree came down to his companion, and, laughing, said ‘What was it that the bear whispered to you?’ ‘He told me,’ said the other man, ‘Never to trust a friend who deserts you in a pinch.’

I first learned that fable, and its valuable lesson for life, in a freshman classics course. Aesop is credited with literally hundreds of fables, most of which are equally enjoyable – and enlightening. Your classics faculty would gladly tell you about them, if only you had a Classics department, which now, of course, you don’t.

As for the argument that the humanities don’t pay their own way, well, I guess that’s true, but it seems to me that there’s a fallacy in assuming that a university should be run like a business. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be managed prudently, but the notion that every part of it needs to be self-supporting is simply at variance with what a university is all about. You seem to value entrepreneurial programs and practical subjects that might generate intellectual property more than you do ‘old-fashioned’ courses of study. But universities aren’t just about discovering and capitalizing on new knowledge; they are also about preserving knowledge from being lost over time, and that requires a financial investment. There is good reason for it: what seems to be archaic today can become vital in the future. I’ll give you two examples of that. The first is the science of virology, which in the 1970s was dying out because people felt that infectious diseases were no longer a serious health problem in the developed world and other subjects, such as molecular biology, were much sexier. Then, in the early 1990s, a little problem called AIDS became the world’s number 1 health concern. The virus that causes AIDS was first isolated and characterized at the National Institutes of Health in the USA and the Institute Pasteur in France, because these were among the few institutions that still had thriving virology programs. My second example you will probably be more familiar with. Middle Eastern Studies, including the study of foreign languages such as Arabic and Persian, was hardly a hot subject on most campuses in the 1990s. Then came September 11, 2001. Suddenly we realized that we needed a lot more people who understood something about that part of the world, especially its Muslim culture. Those universities that had preserved their Middle Eastern Studies departments, even in the face of declining enrollment, suddenly became very important places. Those that hadn’t – well, I’m sure you get the picture.

I know one of your arguments is that not every place should try to do everything. Let other institutions have great programs in classics or theater arts, you say; we will focus on preparing students for jobs in the real world. Well, I hope I’ve just shown you that the real world is pretty fickle about what it wants. The best way for people to be prepared for the inevitable shock of change is to be as broadly educated as possible, because today’s backwater is often tomorrow’s hot field. And interdisciplinary research, which is all the rage these days, is only possible if people aren’t too narrowly trained. If none of that convinces you, then I’m willing to let you turn your institution into a place that focuses on the practical, but only if you stop calling it a university and yourself the President of one. You see, the word ‘university’ derives from the Latin ‘universitas’, meaning ‘the whole’. You can’t be a university without having a thriving humanities program. You will need to call SUNY Albany a trade school, or perhaps a vocational college, but not a university. Not anymore.

I utterly refuse to believe that you had no alternative. It’s your job as President to find ways of solving problems that do not require the amputation of healthy limbs. Voltaire said that no problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking. Voltaire, whose real name was François-Marie Arouet, had a lot of pithy, witty and brilliant things to say (my favorite is ‘God is a comedian playing to an audience that is afraid to laugh’). Much of what he wrote would be very useful to you. I’m sure the faculty in your French department would be happy to introduce you to his writings, if only you had a French department, which now, of course, you don’t.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you have trouble understanding the importance of maintaining programs in unglamorous or even seemingly ‘dead’ subjects. From your biography, you don’t actually have a PhD or other high degree, and have never really taught or done research at a university. Perhaps my own background will interest you. I started out as a classics major. I’m now Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry. Of all the courses I took in college and graduate school, the ones that have benefited me the most in my career as a scientist are the courses in classics, art history, sociology, and English literature. These courses didn’t just give me a much better appreciation for my own culture; they taught me how to think, to analyze, and to write clearly. None of my sciences courses did any of that.

One of the things I do now is write a monthly column on science and society. I’ve done it for over 10 years, and I’m pleased to say some people seem to like it. If I’ve been fortunate enough to come up with a few insightful observations, I can assure you they are entirely due to my background in the humanities and my love of the arts.

One of the things I’ve written about is the way genomics is changing the world we live in. Our ability to manipulate the human genome is going to pose some very difficult questions for humanity in the next few decades, including the question of just what it means to be human. That isn’t a question for science alone; it’s a question that must be answered with input from every sphere of human thought, including – especially including – the humanities and arts. Science unleavened by the human heart and the human spirit is sterile, cold, and self-absorbed. It’s also unimaginative: some of my best ideas as a scientist have come from thinking and reading about things that have, superficially, nothing to do with science. If I’m right that what it means to be human is going to be one of the central issues of our time, then universities that are best equipped to deal with it, in all its many facets, will be the most important institutions of higher learning in the future. You’ve just ensured that yours won’t be one of them.

Some of your defenders have asserted that this is all a brilliant ploy on your part – a master political move designed to shock the legislature and force them to give SUNY Albany enough resources to keep these departments open. That would be Machiavellian (another notable Italian writer, but then, you don’t have any Italian faculty to tell you about him), certainly, but I doubt that you’re that clever. If you were, you would have held that town meeting when the whole university could have been present, at a place where the press would be all over it. That’s how you force the hand of a bunch of politicians. You proclaim your action on the steps of the state capitol. You don’t try to sneak it through in the dead of night, when your institution has its back turned.

No, I think you were simply trying to balance your budget at the expense of what you believe to be weak, outdated and powerless departments. I think you will find, in time, that you made a Faustian bargain. Faust is the title character in a play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was written around 1800 but still attracts the largest audiences of any play in Germany whenever it’s performed. Faust is the story of a scholar who makes a deal with the devil. The devil promises him anything he wants as long as he lives. In return, the devil will get – well, I’m sure you can guess how these sorts of deals usually go. If only you had a Theater department, which now, of course, you don’t, you could ask them to perform the play so you could see what happens. It’s awfully relevant to your situation. You see, Goethe believed that it profits a man nothing to give up his soul for the whole world. That’s the whole world, President Philip, not just a balanced budget. Although, I guess, to be fair, you haven’t given up your soul. Just the soul of your institution.

Disrespectfully yours,

Gregory A Petsko

                *                               *                           *

It is worth noting that in August 2003, Pontecorvo’s masterpiece film “The Battle of Algiers” made the news after the Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict at The Pentagon offered a screening of the film, regarding it as a useful illustration of the problems faced in Iraq. A flyer for the screening read:

“How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.”

Ah, stories and art as propaganda.

*                                  *                            *

1993 Jury: Lord Gowrie, a Conservative Party politician for some years, including a period in the British Cabinet, and was later Chairman of Sotheby’s and of the Arts Council of England; he has also published poetry. Professor Gillian Beer, now Dame Beer, a literary critic, specialty Victorian literature. Anne Chisholm, biographer and critic. Nicholas Clee, is the joint editor of the book industry newsletter BookBrunch and the author of Eclipse. Olivier Todd, writer and French journalist.

Michael Ignatieff—Scar Tissue VPL

This novel received great reviews when it was published, all of them deserved. The book is an examination of loss, grief and acceptance. The first-person narrator watches his mother drift into dementia and his father struggle to cope. The father dies first; his two sons are left to cope with the mother.

I was deeply moved by this book. It was the first Booker novel in a while I’ve had trouble putting down. Perhaps it is because the book touched my own grieving, and acknowledgement that you must grieve in your own way, in your own time. But it would be dismissive to say it was only the personal connection. This is a powerful book. Articulate and well written, deeply philosophical, recognizing both intellect and feeling but also exploring the lines between. Everything is complicated and nuanced. Nothing is easy or quick. I was impressed by the thoroughness of argument but also the concise nature of the book.

It is also an examination of stories, the telling and recording of stories. It’s about words. The book affirms the power of fiction.

Scar Tissue is the work of a powerful and uncompromising intellectual. Perhaps that is why Ignatieff is so challenged by politics where fast, knee-jerk sound bytes seem to be the current method of running for office, and running the country.

Carol Shields—The Stone Diaries VPL

Guest report from Frank Davey:

I included The Stone Diaries in a graduate course in postmodern Canadian literature at Western in 1994. I didn’t mention to the students that it had been a Booker winner – didn’t want to prejudice them against it. And today I don’t know if any of them knew. I still think of the Booker mostly as a sign of commercial ambition and, for Canadian books, of necessarily minimized reference to Canada. I hadn’t paid much attention to Shields before. Most Canadianists at the time thought of her as a Readers Digest version of Alice Munro – Munro without complexity or covert critical intelligence. Somewhat later in Paris, after her much-publicized death, there was Carol Shields conference. I enjoy being in France, but I was as much tempted to go as I would have been to attend an exhibition of Hallmark artists. I also regretted her early death, but not the empathetic narratives which accompanied it and reiterated the predominantly humanistic readings that had been given to her fiction.

            But The Stone Diaries did seem a good text with which to begin a study of postmodernism. Its postmodernist devices were laid over an otherwise mundane chronological narrative with such obviousness and awkwardness: suggestions of indeterminacy were laid over a narrative that otherwise seemed to assume an omniscient narrator; coy hints of genre ambiguity – hints that the story might rest on actual diaries, be ‘faction’ rather than fiction, or perhaps even be autobiography – were inserted into a text published as “a novel.” In this regard it could be read not only as Alice Munro for dummies but as Daphne Marlatt or Gail Scott for them as well, whose novels the course would be looking at subsequently. Or perhaps as a watered-down version of bpNichol’s novel Andy (1969) or of David McFadden’s intermixing of poems and family photos in Letters from the Earth to the Earth (1968). Not that I am suggesting that Shields might have read many of these.

            There were other things I liked about The Stone Diaries. I liked its portrayal of the porous US Canadian border of pre-World War II. The portrayal of Manitoba as closer culturally to Minnesota than to other parts of Canada reminded me of BC’s historical relationship to the US west coast, of Toronto’s to Buffalo and Detroit, Quebec’s to Vermont, Halifax’s to Boston, although I found the characters’ superficial and careless understandings of citizenship annoying. As is so often in Shields, the portrayal is evocative but the novelist’s implied understanding of it seems uncritical. I liked its use of photographs and the challenge to ekphasis that they constituted. I liked the concept, that is, although I didn’t like the imprecision of their effect. Umberto Eco would include photographs much more effectively to hint at autobiography in 2004 in The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.  Also intriguing in Shield’s novel was the fate of the failed artist, stone carver Cuyler Goodwill. He is carving at the height of the Art Deco period in North America, a period which left much greater art works than The Stone Diaries, including Vancouver’s Marine Building, Burrard Bridge, and Lions Gate Bridge, but there is little indication in the novel that anyone, include him or the narrator, has insight into its aesthetics. That art is reduced to an “ugly piece of backyard sculpture” that awaits a wrecking ball – arguably a pomo reference to the novel we are reading: a novel that has a relationship to historical postmodernist art similar to that of Cuyler’s backyard pyramid to historical Art Deco. I suspect that Booker jurors could have had minimal awareness of North American architectural Art Deco, and have missed that reference.

            There is a possibility I suppose that I am misreading a work of attempted self-satire. With simplistic chapter titles – “Birth,”: “Childhood, “Marriage,” “Love,” Motherhood” – Shields does overdetermine the elements of predictability and superficiality in her events and characters, even while also contrasting these with utterly unpredictable events such as Mercy’s birth or Harold’s semi-suicidal death in the town of “Corps”  when drunkenly surprised by his bride’s sneeze. This is a novel whose central character Daisy aims above all to be “moving right along. And along and along. The way she’s done all her life, Numbly. Without thinking.” Who leaves behind descendants whose greatest ambition is to retire in bourgeois comfort to Florida. Could Shields have been trying to mock such ambitions? Like Munro does? Of course The Stone Diary chapter titles could also be merely devices to foreground its genre gestures to being a diary. I can’t tell.  It can be difficult to create art out of boredom. John Cage did it well though. Call this John Cage for Canadian readers in Florida.

I agree with Frank that there are things in this novel to admire, but Shields is no Munro. And the monotonous domestic detail, egad.

She sat down at her aging Mac computer to write her report. She didn’t really need to write anything since a reader had agreed to do a guest report, but her Scottish protestant upbringing obliged her to say a little something, at the very least. The keys on the computer looked smudged. She made a mental note to get the cleaner out from under the sink, where all the household cleaning materials were kept, even though these days the cleaning ladies brought their own supplies. A movement out the window caught her eye. That darn squirrel was after the spring bulbs she had just planted. Perhaps she didn’t put in enough bone meal, or the bone meal isn’t as good since Mad Cow disease swept the UK and the media. Wasn’t there something about that problem in the recent newsletter from the local plant shop? She’d ask Bob next time she walked through the nursery on the way to the video store.

David Malouf—Remembering Babylon VPL

Gemmy, a lad from the British slums finds himself at 12 as a cabin boy, and then is cast off on the coast of Australia where he is taken in by an aboriginal tribe. He lives with them for 16 years until a new Scottish settlement draws him to his white roots. But Gemmy has learned about the land from the aboriginals and although he tries to tell the whites the language of the place, except for the socially inept pastor, they can’t understand. Malouf uses a shifting narrative voice, often retelling an event from the perspective of another character. This device underlines the cultural divide, and the inability of the community to see beyond its own whiteness. The family that takes Gemmy in finds itself an object of those fears, and even after Gemmy disappears they find they have been affected for the rest of their lives.

We have been wrong to see this continent as hostile and infelicitous, so that only by the fiercest stoicism, a supreme resolution and force of will, and by felling, clearing, sowing with the seeds we have brought with us, and by importing sheep, cattle, rabbits, even the very birds of the air, can it be shaped and made habitable. It is habitable already. I think of our early settlers, starving on these shores in the midst of plenty they did not recognize, in a blessed nature of flesh, fowl, fruit that was all around them and which they could not, with their English eyes, perceive, since the very habit and faculty that makes apprehensible to us what is known and expected dulls our senses to other forms, even the most obvious. We must rub our eyes and look again, clear our minds of what we are looking for to see what is there.

Caryl Phillips—Crossing the River VPL

Another historical novel about the slave trade using endless letters and journal entries as the narrative device. This post-modernist approach is getting old, let me tell you.

There are several distinct sections in this book with a short piece at front and back acting as bookends. The front piece and back piece are from a large omniscient voice. The book begins: “A desperate foolishness. The crops failed. I sold my children. I remember. I led them (two boys and a girl) along a weary path, until we reached the places where the mud flats are populated with crabs and gulls.” The sections between the bookends are lives of these children, not literally but lives of example.

1830s. Nash, given freedom by his American master, goes to Africa as a Christian-educated minister to bring the word of God to the natives of Liberia. He goes native.

Late C19th. Martha’s daughter and husband are sold, dispersing the family and Martha heads to California. This section particularly falls into the category: alternative views of history. This is not the wild west of Bill Hickock or Hollywood.

1940s. Travis, a US GI stationed in Yorkshire meets a lonely young woman, and they conceive a child. When the young mother learns Travis has died she is persuaded to give up her mixed-blood child for adoption. Years later, the son returns to find his mother.

The final 21/2-page section explains through the large omnipotent voice, again, that he is listening “as the many-tongued chorus of the common memory begins again to swell.” This last section is pretty heavy-handed. Shouldn’t an attentive reader have figured out that is the whole purpose of the rest of the book? “Survivors all”

Phillips was one of the Hot Young Writers in the UK in the early 90s.

Category: Alternative View of History

Tibor Fischer—Under the Frog UBC

After 58 rejection letters, Polygon press in Edinburgh published the novel which established Fischer’s career and put him on the world stage.

The book won a Betty Trask award, “awarded to a writer under the age of 35 for a first novel. The author must be a Commonwealth citizen, and the work must be of a romantic or traditional nature, i.e. not experimental.” Nino Ricci received this award in 1991 for Lives of Saints. Well, neither Fischer nor Ricci won the £10,000 prize. They received an “award”: £3,000 and £1,500 respectively. In other words, you must be careful to distinguish between “prize” and “award.” It’s a way of getting around “4^th place in the 1992 Betty Trask competition.”

Under the Frog has been much praised as a brilliant presentation of Hungarian life under communism. The bookjacket claims it is “very witty and very sad.” It’s also very hard to follow. Gyuri and Pataki belong to a traveling basketball team. Twelve patchwork sections tell about their friends, womanizing, drinking and dreams of escaping to the West. And it is a patchwork, not a coherent narrative. It would probably help to know a lot of the history of that time.

Often the writing is self-conscious, sometimes simply preposterous.

“Gyuri thought he knew the whole Makkai, childless widower, glum scholar, whose erudition was a handicap, as if he were chained to the decomposing carcass of an elephant. The smile made Gyuri realize that there were whole departments of Makkai he had never glimpsed; it was like turning a dusty vase stationed on top of a wardrobe for years to discover the reverse has an unseen design.”

Or

“He had unrolled as much of the answer to question one as he could, when a glance to his left established that his gaze had a direct flight path to the left breast of the young lady there; either she had forgotten to do up her blouse or the buttons didn’t feel like working but light was taking off from untextiled skin and crashlanding into Gyuri’s retinas.”

The text is littered with unnecessary, showy works; sesquipedalian, manumittance, mulierosity, stultiloquence. And then there’s the contrived noun-verbs, ozymandiased or frankensteined.

“Gyuri loved her alert breasts. He loved her runner’s legs (she had dabbled in sprinting) paradisiac containers of aphrodisiac.”

Had those breasts had too much coffee?

And the final sentence of the novel: “Tears, in teams, abseiled down his face.”

If you are interested in UK publishing bitchiness check out Fischer’s scathing attack on Martin Amis: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3594613/Someone-needs-to-have-a-word-with-Amis.html#dsq-content

Roddy Doyle—Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha UBC–WINNER

Fictional Barrytown, again. This time through the eyes of 10-year-old Paddy of the title. The book is remarkable for capturing moments of childhood, things mostly forgotten; pulling tar off the road on hot days, reading with a flashlight under the covers, obliviousness to the happenings of the adult world. But there is no nostalgia in this telling, rather childhood is not a place of innocence but the ongoing excitement and terror of the uninformed. Several times I thought, when I was a child I thought that exact same thing but I never told anyone. How does he know? It is that deep sense of intimacy that carries the book.

From Magill Book Reviews:

Family life largely centers on the television; school seems little more than an endless round of intimidation and humiliation. In the world between, the world of disappearing farms and half-finished building sites, Paddy and the other Barrytown boys play soccer, defend their territory, run through their neighbors’ yards, steal boards and nails, and, in neighboring Bayside, magazines. Mostly they try to belong, though to a group that can only define itself in negative terms, on the basis of someone being excluded. Helpless witness to the breakup of his parents’ marriage, Paddy becomes that someone, his vulnerability like some physical weakness that the others find vaguely threatening. With great sensitivity and without a single misstep, false note, or moment’s condescension, Doyle renders Paddy Clarke’s world in terms of what his young protagonist can see but only dimly and reluctantly understand.

This novel has surety and utter lack of pretentiousness.

I’d got the bike for Christmas, two Christmases before. I woke up. I thought I did. The bedroom door was closing. The bike was leaning against the end of my bed. I was confused. And afraid. The door clicked shut. I stayed in bed. I heard no footsteps outside in the hall. I didn’t try to ride the bike for months after. We didn’t need them. We were better on foot through the fields and sites. I didn’t like it. I didn’t know who’d given it to me. It should never have been in my bedroom. It was a Raleigh, a gold one. It was the right size for me and I didn’t like that either. I wanted a grown-up one, with straight handlebars and brakes that fit properly into my hands with the bars, like Kevin had. My brakes stuck down under the bars. I had to gather them into my hands. When I held the bar and brake together the bike stopped; I couldn’t do that. The only thing I did like was a Manchester United sticker that was in my stocking when I woke up again in the morning. I stuck it on the bar under the saddle.

Gillian Beer from The Guardian

Olivier Todd, the French novelist, shrugged his shoulders at our second judges’ meeting: no lunches with publishers, no approaches from agents, he complained – what an odd English bubble of propriety we were gathered inside. He was joking, but only just. And it is one of the remarkable things about being a Booker judge that no one tempts you with hospitality. You simply sit and read, and talk, and read again, over several months. The pleasure is in the reading, and in the talk. One of the rewards of going to see a new film is the conversation straight after, but reading new novels can be a lonely business. Not in this case. In 1993 I remember impassioned defences of books one of us had grown attached to, but no quarrels, just engrossing talk. Our chair, Grey Gowrie, came up with an ingenious criterion: novels must have “radioactivity” to stay in the running. He meant we must remember them weeks, months later. They mustn’t fade. A self-proving criterion perhaps, but reassuring.

One novel that certainly had that quality and yet just missed the shortlist was Trainspotting and it was in arguing about Irvine Welsh’s book that we came nearest to quarrelling. Getting from long to shortlist was painful, worse than sorting out the winner among that final six. Some wanted the prize to go to David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon, while Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River and Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries had strong support as well. But Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the day with its extraordinary technical achievement and its emotional force, taking us inside the voice and experience of a 10-year-old boy in the midst of family break-up.

December 16^th 6377 words

This post from Macedonia includes observations about two cities: Skopje, the capital city of  FYROM [Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia], and Thessalonica, Greece’s second largest city and the capital of Greece’s northern province, Macedonia. I include them both in “Macedonia,” not only for the historical reason that they both occupy territory once called Macedonia before the Balkan Wars (1912-13) divided it up among Yugoslavia, Greece and Bulgaria, but also for the much more interesting reason that both cities make a very big fuss about the ancient Macedons, Philip II and his boy Alexander, as ancestors.

Actually, they have been doing this for a very long time, and the Thessalonians do it with some justification: the royal seat of the House of Macedon was located in Pella, near Thessalonica; the magnificent Macedonian golden hoard from important gravesites (such as that of the above-mentioned Phillip) was excavated at Vergina, 80 km from Thessalonica; and the city of Thessalonica itself may not improbably be said to have been founded and named for Alexander’s half-sister. However, it is much more contentious to claim that today’s Greeks in Macedonia are in a direct line of descent from the Macedons of yore, given the mish-mash of peoples who crisscrossed these terrains over the centuries or even to claim that the Macedons of yore were Hellenes. (Aristotle, himself born in Macedonia and who tutored the young Alexander, didn’t think they were.)

In any event, I suppose that today’s Thessalonians wouldn’t be nearly so exercised about this identity if it weren’t for parallel and competing claims by their ex-Yugoslav neighbours to the north in Skopje, who have also got it into their heads (the heads of ultra-nationalists, that is) that they too are descendants of the Macedons. In order for this to be even remotely viable, the modern FYROM Macedonians would have to be indigenous to the territory they live in and not descendants of a much later migration of people (much later, as in 1000 years later), namely the Slavs who entered the Balkans in the 6th century. Which is what every sane person knows to be the case.

(An aside here for a mention of Bulgaria, of its important city, Plovdiv, originally known as Philippopolis because it was founded by Philip II of Macedon – him again – and to whom the Plovdivians have erected a statue in the middle of the semi-excavated Roman stadium: sensibly, the Plovdivians do not claim to be Macedonians.)

I have known of these issues for some time but nothing prepared me for the sight of Skopje’s central square, Macedonia Square, since I last saw it 3 years ago. In the centre now rears an 8-storey-high equestrian statue of Himself (Alexander the Great, coyly named only as The Warrior in official circles), at the base of which roar several lions who also serve as spouts for water sprays in a fountain that is very popular with citizens.)

At one end of the square has also been erected a monumental statue of Justinian – “The holy and right-believing Emperor Justinian I (483-565 CE)” -  said to have been a Slav and born in a village near the Roman town of Scupi, today’s Skopje. So far, so historical. But at the other end of the square, equally monumentally, sits Tsar Samuil, claimed by today’s Macedonians but historically known as a Bulgarian Tsar and who lost a terrible battle in 1014 to the Byzantine Emperor Basil II, forever after known by the sobriquet, The Bulgar-Slayer.  So far, so Bulgarian. But Samuil also once resided in Ohrid, in present-day FYROM, and so presto! he becomes a Macedonian Tsar. Just off the Square the finishing touches are being put to a massive (in the style of a)Triumphal Arch. “What triumph?” my friend, a retired literature professor, Ljubica snorts. “We don’t have triumphs, we are always being crushed by our neighbours.”

Among other reasons, this fantastical historiography is why some of my friends in Skopje refuse to go downtown: they are embarrassed, even humiliated. Equally egregious is the current program of constructing a series of public buildings along the Vardar River (the same river that flows down to Thessalonica where it is known as the Axios). By their imperial scale these buildings rival – I swear – those of Imperial Rome, not to mention those of Imperial Constantinople – but the effect, in this small, economically-struggling, hapless republic, is to reduce it to the downright puny.

But there is a third reason to loathe this bombastic self-display of the current government: when I asked my friends where on earth the money is coming from to build such extravaganzas, they shrugged and said “from us.” meaning from the schools and universities, the hospitals, the culture ministry, not to mention from the next generation and the one after that…. “And they call us old socialists ‘komuni,’” said one old friend, bitterly. In this charged nationalist environment – the bombast directed as much at the resident Albanian, Moslem minority as at the neighbouring Greeks – the generation whose patriotism was linked with the achievements of socialist Yugoslavia are now derisively dismissed as Commie pinko finks.

While walking along the river promenade, I take a good look at a piece of Soviet-era public art, a monument commemorating the liberation of Skopje in 1944. The style is pure Socialist kitsch, but not quite Realist: its figures are just too muscle-bound and their faces depersonalized.  And yet, however idealized these fighters are, you can still see in the group something intensely lived – the young soldier slumped in the arms of a comrade, the half-naked dying man , the barefoot peasants wielding weapons from earlier wars, the grim-faced leader launching a grenade, the big-shouldered woman for once not holding a baby or sheaf of wheat but her own rifle. They, or people like them, lived and died in such actions right here. But Philip and Alexander?

What is happening to Skopje? It’s always been an unlovely city, or at least since an earthquake in 1963 devastated most of it.  Rebuilt, it entered the modern age of Brutalist Socialist architecture, even its Orthodox Cathedral.  Yet these edifices did not quite overwhelm the public space. There was still that other city left over from the quake, ramshackle perhaps, but still proportionate and mindful of Macedonia’s historical mixture of Slavs and Vlachs, Greeks, Jews, and Albanians, Bulgarians and Armenians…or am I being romantic in the face of a capitalism that is eating its own young?

Of a Sunday, summoned to Divine Liturgy by the peals of the bells of the church dedicated to St Demetrius, I crossed the river on the lovely Ottoman stone bridge (the leaders of the Karposh rebellion had been executed here back in 1689)  into the old part of town once occupied by the Turkish bazaar. (In fact, it remains the market area, with its winding and twisting cobble-stoned pedestrian streets.) The church was full, and this being an Old World Orthodox church there were no pews. People shifted their feet every couple of minutes or, in the case of the men, left the church periodically to go outside into the little courtyard for a sit-down and a smoke. As with my church in Edmonton, a choir of enthusiastic amateurs warbled from the loft at the back while the priest and deacon officiated in the sanctuary, the rest of us having very little to do except light slender beeswax tapers and make the sign of the cross at every mention of “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” I deduced that  the language of the Liturgy was Old Slavonic not Macedonian, as the words I recognized had case endings [nominative, genitive, dative, accusative etc  etc) whereas modern Macedonian has none.

The service  was homely (even the clerical vestments seemed homemade) and it was a deep pleasure after to stroll into the market area and seat myself under the vast branches of a chestnut tree in full, luscious foliage, next to a chortling fountain and to be served a cappuccino by an elegant Albanian man in a suit and lavender shirt with whom I exchanged pleasantries in French.

As with all substantial towns in the Ottoman era throughout the Balkans the market or bazaar had once been enormous, with shops in the thousands, but even in its reduced state it still presents an impressive topography of narrow streets twisting every which way, with shop windows displaying idiosyncratic collections of wares, whether bolts of ornate (synthetic) fabrics, gold  bangles, antique Turkish coffee sets, shoes or sinister-looking machine parts, with the proprietor sitting in a stool in the door frame, his small cup of coffee on a box before him, not visibly concerned whether anyone was buying. A few women in hijab walked together arm in arm and I saw a few old men in round white skull caps, but if there is a majority Albanian or Turkish Moslem presence in the market area I could not discern it. There are still Ottoman monuments here – some working mosques and disused hamams and hans – and my friend Slavica, an instructor in the Faculty of Fine Arts, is lucky to work in a renovated han or inn called the Suli-An, a graceful structure from the 15^th century: Monday morning we sat in the sunny courtyard with tiny cups of Turkish coffee and admired the harmony of the arcade.

Then back I drifted across the Stone Bridge, remembering how a decade ago it was lined with Albanian and Roma men, women and children selling little piles of cheap goods – socks, alarm clocks, plastic toys they wound up and demonstrated how they jumped around – but now the bridge has been swept clean, as it were, the better to appreciate the looming proportions of the Warrior straight ahead. By the sixth or seventh encounter with Himself, I had to admit my resistance was weakening: here on a Sunday afternoon le tout Skopje was out in the enormous square, licking ice creams cones, taking pictures of the roaring lions and the dancing waters of the fountain, and posing for the friends back home as they pointed up, way up, to the noble head of the ultra Macedon.  (Judge for yourself from this CNN clip: When my friend the poet, Alexander “Sashko” Prokopiev, suggested we meet “by the lions” for a coffee date, it began to seem unsporting to keep on complaining about them. Nevertheless, when we were shortly joined by a senior poet (b. 1933 so he’s seen it all), I felt vindicated when he asserted unambiguously that the historical panorama on the Square was “inauthentic,” a word he kept repeating, while Sashko added that there had been citizens’ protests against the “development” to no avail. He was particularly incensed by the erection of the new Court House, a building of such stupefying proportions that its only rational purpose is to remind the sniveling citizens that, summoned there, s/he will be shortly crushed. To lighten the mood, Zvonko, the Senior Poet, kissed my hand then ordered large pieces of cake to celebrate his grandson’s birthday – the young man is studying clinical psychology in New York and wants to stay there. Mnohaia lita!

Sashko’s daughter lives in Barcelona where she edits a bilingual Spanish-English magazine. She is unlikely to return to Macedonia, either.

But what of these younger ones we see as we leave the Square? Into the Sunday afternoon hubbub have erupted hundreds of exuberant teenagers (mostly girls) dancing a choreographed routine set to the explosive music coming from a stage set up at one side of the Square. Sashko explains that the song is about the need for young people to respect each other; no surprise, then, to learn that the kids are part of a UNICEF project (Sashko introduces me to the co-ordinator) aimed at the eradication of “violence in education.” That’s what their big, colourful banner says: Young People Against Violence in Schools. They come from various Macedonian cities and include a couple of Albanians (most Albanian school kids now go to separate Albanian-language schools) and the main point they want to make is “for tolerance.” I cannot get a direct answer whether this refers to bullying or racism or sexual harassment or…? Perhaps all of these. Inspired by a Dutch project, One Minute Videos, school kids are being supplied with video cameras and invited to compete for a place with their own one minute videos. I am mesmerized by the dancing, by the youthfulness of bodies and souls that have no memory of a Macedonia that belonged to any other world. They are gloriously lovely.

Speaking of other worlds, I have heard nothing of Canada through the usual media – CNN and BBC World News on hotel televisions – and there are no foreign language newspapers for sale in Serbia, Bulgaria or Macedonia, at least not the places I frequent. Canadian headlines pop up when I open up Yahoo or Telus home pages so I know that women now are premiers of Alberta, and PEI and Newfoundland. I know that the NDP has been returned to power for the fourth straight time in Manitoba and friends in Athens are bringing me up to speed about the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the call for similar actions around the world on October 17 (including at the Toronto Stock Exchange). I’m missing everything! On October 17 I will be in Istanbul and will keep my ears open for any action there. So, for me no hockey scores (no loss there) but instead, a television interview with Michael Moore. (Clearly, I am not reading Canadian papers on line, mainly because internet cafes supplied with computers are so hard to come by that when I do find one, I catch up with mail and plug away at a blog post.)

When I decide to spend a day outside of Skopje; several people advise me to visit Bitola, known to the Ottoman Turks as Manastir, in the deep  south almost on the Greek border, and redolent of Balkan history to the nth degree.  The bus passes through Veles and Prilep so that by the time I return to Skopje that evening I feel I have been on a whirlwind tour of Macedonian geography, history, architecture, and linguistics. (Speaking of linguistics, I have been depending on my Berlitz Bulgarian phrase book to get by in Macedonia, but each of these languages has its peculiarities: why is it that in Macedonia you do not get on the bus at a “sektor ”(bus bay) as you do in Bulgaria but at a “peron,” as in Serbia? ) As I watched the landscape roll by – rolling hills staggered against each other, stretching out in dry, red plains before plunging into the clefts of river gorges – I could imagine the partisans and troops and militias and guerrillas of all descriptions who have negotiated this coveted terrain, leaving the graves of slain comrades and the ashy tumuli of scorched villages in their wake.

As with all such landscapes, this one too has been normalized, so that what we see now are fields of late summer red peppers, grape vines, corn, cabbages and tobacco, the stuff of the Saturday farmers’ market in Bitola. I watch one exhausted woman with her strings of dried peppers, her jars of preserves, her plastic bottles of I don’t know what, I watch her try to entice customers to her offerings but really they are neither more nor less attractive than all the others on view, and I ache for her: how will she make her living if we don’t stop and buy her apples? Or what about the elderly man with a single small sack of walnuts, the elderly woman with a single bunch of withering flowers from her garden going to seed?

As with all the Balkan cities I have visited, Bitola provides the single most civilized amenity of Balkan urbanism, the pedestrian street. I approach it through a large city park (another such amenity) its walkway flanked by busts of young men and women who all died in 1942, in their twenties, as “national heroes.” What happened in Bitola in 1942? Perhaps a sacrifice to the Communist state that was being born, for here is the pedestrian street, named for Marshall Tito, a hero that Bitola is not ashamed of, and here is his well-tended bronze-headed bust. The street opens into a square where, against the frame of a large and handsome mosque, an equestrian statue of Philip II, Bitola’s founder, is a gathering point. All roads eventually lead to the market place or bazaar, which first opened for business in 1389 when the Turks became Bitola’s new landlords. Wholesalers from Bitola – Turks, Vlachs, Jews – traded with Venice, Trieste, Vienna, Leipzig and east to Constantinople and south to Alexandria from their 2500 shops and enterprises, a reminder of just how “globalized” earlier empires were. Until 1920, the mosque property alone included 11 shops, 18 tailors, 7 gunpowder magazines, a bakery and a tambourine shop, among others, and its income supported fountains, a dervish residence, the kindergarten, and primary and high schools.

On to Thessalonica, my first visit in ten years to the city where I began the “Demetrius Project” in 2000, the city of the Demetrian cult from where it spread out into the Slavic Orthodox world eventually getting to the Ukrainians too. And ten years ago, the first thing I did once I had unpacked my bags in the small hotel a few steps away from the Basilica of St Demetrius was to rush over to the church and down into its crypt for a Vespers service. But this time I first make my way down to a bookstore in the city centre down by the Old Port. I have been invited by Despina, a friend of a friend in Belgrade, to her book launch.

But this is not a literary event. The book is the product of a human rights project organized with representatives of Thessalonica’s migrant (immigrant) communities who are having a very hard time of it as the economic and political crisis deepens in Greece. (It’s difficult for them at the best of times, and how the Chinese migrants with their trays of knickknacks and household gadgets for sale make a go of it, or the young African men with their handfuls of pirated DVDs, or the Philippino teenagers with their blankets spread out to display orderly and colourful rows of sneakers, how they all survive is beyond me.)

As the book launch event, with a panel of speakers, is going to be conducted in Greek, I do not linger longer than to arrange to meet Despina the next day, in the café of the new Photography Museum in the Old Port. (It is characteristic of Despina and her politics that she chooses this café with its view onto the cranes of the new port where workers are working, rather than the chic café bar that faces the other direction from the other side of the wharf, onto the picturesque scene of Thessalonica’s seaside promenade. Despina once lived in South Africa, “in struggle.”) I learn that the book launch the night before had been disrupted by an “industrial action,” a crowd of shouting protestors outside the store. Their “action” was ostensibly linked with the on-going national protests against the austerity measures imposed by the government during the economic crisis here but in fact, says Despina, they were friends of a disgruntled employee of the store who claimed he was owed vacation pay. She is incensed that this protest took place without any thought or care being given to the fact that the public inside the store were supporting a human rights initiative.

She is incensed again a couple of nights later when, at the official opening of the Youth Art Biennale in the forecourt of the new city hall, a very loud and persistent group of protestors attempts to disrupt the proceedings. The protestors are municipal employees, afraid for their jobs (reasonably enough) who are misdirecting their wrath, Despina feels, at this hopeful and co-operative event, the Biennale, at which young artists from around Europe are gathering in solidarity with each other if not with their governments.

As an outsider to all this, I find it difficult to judge the efficacy or even the purpose of the public agitation and indignation in the streets of Greece as the Greeks I have talked with are agreed that the cause is lost, that the European Union and its banks are already imposing “solutions” on the Greek economy, and that Greeks will just have to “suck it up” until the economy is put on a sound footing.  (In the meantime, a retired professor has had his pension reduced by 1000 Euros a month  and a young waiter has had his hours reduced to part-time, even though the cafes, bars and tavernas all seem to be doing a roaring business. This will all change, he says, when the weather changes—and when even these middle class patrons will be feeling the pinch on their wallets.) Even those very sympathetic to the protests, especially to the young whose “actions” have been peaceful, are disgusted by the general passivity to the pervasive and profound corruption at all social and political levels that is being exposed. My friend Stephie, a Greek-Canadian who has been living in Greece for twenty years, describes her encounters with the driving instructor who demanded a bribe to pass her driving exam and the land titles officer who declared  that her file was “missing” an important page which would cost her 3000 Euros to replace but that he could expedite matters if she gave him 500 Euros. The building in which she owns her apartment seems neither to have any elected council nor to come under any formal regulation such as a Condominium Act.  People with grand lifestyles apparently have no taxable income. It goes on and on. Stephie has been photocopying a year-old article from Vanity Fair which says it all, she feels. Read it and weep.

For a very readable account of the economic crisis and the options open to the Greek government, read John Lanchester in the London Review of Books.

But I came to Thessalonica to deliver copies of my book to two scholars whose assistance at the beginning of my journey proved to be very enlightening.  Prof. Anthony-Emile Tachiaos, whose work has focused on Slav-Byzantine relations, and  Prof Aris Mentzos who is a historian of Byzantine archaeology: it was he who had guided me through the ruins of the Roman Agora and around the splendid interior of the Basilica of St Demetrius which dates back to the 7^th century (those parts of it that have survived earthquake and fire, that is). Mentzos gave me copies of work of his own, including a monograph that established that a celebrated mosaic in the basilica, so long mis-identified as St Demetrius or St Sergius, is actually St George. Here he is and he is beautiful:. A Saint by any other name…

December 18, 2011, 3837 words 

Meslier is barely a footnote to that history today, but he deserves better than that. As British journalist Colin Brewer wrote in a 2007 article in the New Humanist, “Meslier was arguably the first to put his name to an incontrovertibly atheist document.” What makes that document even more interesting, and the cultural obscurity of its author all the more confounding, is the fact that Meslier spent most of his life serving as a Catholic priest.

Meslier was born in Mazerny, France, a small village in the Ardennes region of the country, in 1664. He joined the seminary as a young man, and on January 7, 1689, he became the priest at Étrépigny, in nearby Champagne. Except for a running dispute with a local nobleman that lived in his parish over the treatment of the poor, Meslier lived the same life of worship, public service and penury as other Catholic priests of his era. But there was one crucial difference between Meslier and other men of God: he spent the last ten years of his life producing a 633-page treatise against organized religion. “All the laws and orders that are issued in the name and authority of God or the gods are really only human inventions,” he wrote, “invented by shrewd and crafty politicians, afterward cultivated and multiplied by the false seducers and charlatans, then accepted blindly by the ignorant, and finally supported and authorized by the laws of the princes and rulers of the earth who used these human inventions to keep a tight rein on the community of men and do with them what they wanted.” Even the eternally caustic Christopher Hitchens would struggle to do better than that.

Meslier was well aware of the conflict between his private views on religion and his public duties. “I have had the displeasure of seeing myself in this annoying obligation of acting and speaking entirely against my own sentiments,” he wrote. “I have had the displeasure of keeping you in the stupid errors, the vain superstitions, and the idolatries that I hated, condemned, and detested to the core.” But, as he noted in his testament, the Church had recourse to the pyre, and he didn’t particularly feel like dying for his beliefs. Instead, he transcribed three copies of his testament and left them by his death bed, where they quickly made their way into what Brewer describes as “the lively world of illicit reproductions.”

His testament eventually found its way into other hands, and many of the ideas contained within it were borrowed – some have said plagiarized – by Voltaire some fifty years later in his own writings on the subject. Yet today, aside from the work of French scholar Michel Onfray, who wrote about Meslier in his 2007 book In Defence of Atheism, Meslier’s life remains a mystery to most of us. This is perplexing. By virtue of its ironic value alone, the story of a Catholic priest who made a convincing case against faith ought to be more widely told. But what makes Meslier’s anonymity most confounding is the fact that he is precisely what is missing from the stories that have been told by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and other prominent atheist authors in recent years: a hero.

***

I went in search of that hero, or at least some trace of his existence, this past summer. I suppose if I were a Christian or a Muslim or a member of another monotheistic faith I’d describe my trip as a pilgrimage. It was, after all, sufficiently excessive (and obsessive) to qualify as one, given that I had voluntarily left Paris – in June, no less – so that I could spend five hours navigating the treacherous French autoroutes on my way into the Ardennes in order to pay a visit to Mazerny, a village that had once been the home of a man I’d only read about.

My ambitions for the trip were modest. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to find Meslier’s grave, since he was buried in an unmarked plot on the property of descendents of a nobleman that he had quarreled with repeatedly during the course of his life – more irony – and I knew better than to expect any grand monuments to his existence in the town itself. But I had expected to at least find some trace of his existence, some thread to pull on. I was wrong. There was no Musee de Jean Meslier, no Rue Jean Meslier, and no mention of his existence on or near the town’s only church.  This struck me as more than just an historical oversight. But even if his heresy had offended the town’s religious sensibilities, and they had decided to deliberately ignore his existence, it still didn’t add up. In a town with 78 official residents according to the most recent French census and a local economy that depended entirely on what the surrounding fields could provide, how could they afford to ignore him?

They weren’t ignoring me, though. Children stared from the second floor windows of their two-story brick houses, while the adults working in their gardens or trying to fix some thing or another in their garages looked up and monitored my rented Peugeot’s slow progress past their property. It was no wonder, given that it had probably been a long time since the people of Mazerny had seen a tourist in their town, much less one that wasn’t there in search of a restroom. I thought about trying to explain what I was there for but my French wasn’t nearly good enough to communicate my interest in the atheist who had lived in their village three centuries ago. After making three complete loops of the town and with dusk already on the horizon, I decided that it was time to look somewhere else for some clues.

I retreated to the commune of Poix-Terron, a town of a few hundred residents a few kilometers north that felt like New York City by comparison. I also needed to eat something, so I stopped in at what appeared to be the only restaurant on the town’s main drag, a family tavern that curiously advertised the fact that it sold pizza. Here, at least, I was more welcome, and the kindness of the family that ran the joint was sufficiently heartening and friendly that I decided to abuse them with my defective French. Had they heard of Jean Meslier, I asked? Did they know anything of this atheist priest that had lived just a few kilometres up the road from them? They huddled in order to translate both the meaning and intent of my unusual request. Eventually, the woman who ran the place came back to me with their answer. “Non,” she said. “Jamais.”

***

Meslier hasn’t always been invisible. In the early 20th century his legacy was conscripted by the Soviets, who saw it as a useful counterpoint to organized religion. They engraved his name on an obelisk that was erected in Moscow’s Red Square in 1919 along with other leading communist thinkers like Lenin, Engels, Charles Fourier and Jean Jaures, and treated him, for a time, as a significant philosopher. But they stopped talking about Meslier when it became clear that his could just as easily be seen as a role model for insurrectionary behaviour and anti-establishment thinking, values that conflicted with the unthinking servitude that the Soviet leadership demanded of its people. The obelisk was quietly moved to the Alexandrovsky Gardens, near the Middle Arsenal Tower of the Kremlin, in 1967 to make way for a timelier piece of propaganda, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

If his value to communist propagandists was obvious, his appeal to contemporary atheists ought to be even more so. Yet somehow, in spite of all the ink that’s been spilled in recent years on the subject, today’s atheists have all but ignored Jean Meslier. Colin Brewer, a British writer and dramatist who played Meslier in 2007’s The Last Priest, noted in a 2007 article that Meslier was even absent from two high-profile television documentaries on atheism, one of which was produced by Richard Dawkins. Brewer thinks this has a great deal to do with the fact that his work was both poorly circulated and widely borrowed against by atheist intellectuals who followed Meslier. There is Voltaire’s famous “Extract,” which Brewer says inaccurately described Meslier as “a fellow-deist and entirely suppressed Meslier’s anti-monarchist, proto-communist opinions.” Meanwhile, the definitive, annotated French edition of his testament did not appear until 1970, and until the 2009 publication of Michael Shreve’s Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier only fragmentary English translations could be found. Shreve’s translation, meanwhile, is ranked number 355,280 on Amazon’s best-sellers list. By way of comparison, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” checks in at number 700.

I had assumed that Meslier’s invisibility was an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, and that in France I would find a more receptive environment for his message. Sure, I hadn’t found any pamphlets at Charles De Gaulle about Mazerny and Meslier, and there were no signs on the highway near the town indicating that a point of historical interest was nearby. But I had assumed that I would have been able to find some trace of his influence, some thread to tug on. How could somebody who ought to be so important remain so consistently invisible?

I spent most of the three-plus hour drive back towards Paris that same day – well, that evening – preoccupied with trying to resist the temptation to just close my eyes for a few seconds and keep my little Peugeot between the yellow lines. But in those moments where I wasn’t fighting to stay awake, I was trying to figure out what had just taken place in Mazerny. Okay, I thought, a small, rural French village probably isn’t the most appropriate environment for a shrine to an atheist apostate, but shouldn’t there have been something? Surely, some enterprising local resident would have realized that there was considerable monetary potential in branding the town as the home of Europe’s most outspoken atheist? But maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a case of their ignoring him. Maybe they just didn’t need to remember. Life in Mazerny may not have been what I would want, but it was a pleasant, civilized town, in an undeniably beautiful part of the world. Maybe that was enough.

Contemporary atheist thinkers have no such excuse. Almost by the day, it seems, another unfathomably foul-smelling layer of the onion that is organized religion gets peeled back, and for all the notoriety that writers like Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have earned with their atheist treatises, the project to which they’re dedicated hasn’t made any detectable progress. In this environment, the story of a 17th century Catholic priest who quarreled with the church, stuck up for those being abused by the rich and powerful and eventually committed his ideas about the failure of religion and the promise of atheism to writing ought to be tremendously attractive.

So, too, should the testimony that this most unusual priest left behind, one that is at once more convincing and more inspirational than anything written on the subject in recent years. Meslier’s testimony aims at something greater than merely rejecting religion or describing its faults, the subjects to which today’s atheist writers seem to restrict themselves. Instead, it is a declaration of the moral and ethical virtues of a Godless existence: an atheist manifesto, in the best sense of the term. As Meslier wrote in his testament, “It has been long enough that the poor people have been so miserably abused by all kinds of idolatries and superstitions. It has been long enough that the rich and the rulers of the death have pillaged and oppressed the poor. It is time to deliver them from their miserable slavery. It is time to open their eyes everywhere and make them know the truth of things.”

***

There are some curious similarities between the approach taken by people like Dawkins and Hitchens and that of the Soviets a few generations back. It was the Soviets, after all, who set up museums of atheism in old eastern orthodox churches in an effort to undermine organized religion, and it’s clear that today’s secular spokespeople would do the same if they could get away with it. While the aims of today’s atheists are both more moderate and more moderating than those of their Soviet predecessors, they share the same basic conceit in thinking that if they accumulated enough evidence of organized religion’s misdeeds the faithful would eventually awaken and realize the error of their ways. But nobody will exchange something for nothing, even if that something is demonstrably flawed.

That’s where Jean Meslier ought to come in. For all the good work that professional atheists have done in highlighting the flaws of organized religion, they have done almost nothing to present an affirmative case for atheism. According to Michel Onfray, a French scholar who has worked diligently to revive Meslier’s legacy, he didn’t write his manifesto in the hopes of destroying Christianity but instead of replacing it. “Atheism does not constitute an end in itself but a beginning, a necessary base, an ethical foundation. Meslier negates the principle of God in order to arrive at a caring morality of a joyful body, of happy existence, of peaceful relations between beings and between sexes.”

Atheists, of course, are no more a monolith than any other cultural or religious group, but they do share some common beliefs. They respect the rights of individuals, freedom of thought and inquiry, the equality of all people, and an appreciation of natural and man-made wonders. Atheists don’t discriminate, they don’t withhold rights from particular groups, they don’t fear scientific progress and the frequently baffling explanations of the world it provides, they don’t wish for the end of the world, and they don’t insist upon imposing feelings of guilt and failure onto the thoughts and actions of others. Perhaps most importantly, atheists are engaged in the one life that they’re given rather than simply enduring it in anticipation of something better to come.

Meslier articulated all of this in his manifesto almost 300 years ago. His philosophy of “social hedonism,” Michel Onfray writes, “proposes the happiness of all and of each individual. Not an ideal happiness, but a real one, concrete, pragmatic: to work, by which people can eat healthfully and sufficiently all the time, live and sleep in a decent and heated house, be nourished, be clothed, have the means to educate their children, and be cared for in illness.”

Most atheists would resist the term, but it’s tempting all the same to describe Meslier as a prophet. In the same way that Jesus Christ’s apostles articulated the values and beliefs that form the foundation of contemporary Christianity, so too does Meslier’s manifesto serve as a template for all atheist thought that has followed. And like Christ himself, Meslier serves as a role model for those who share his beliefs, his life an example of how to be good and decent in a world that often isn’t. The key difference, of course, was that Meslier was completely, and contentedly, of this world.

Maybe that’s why Meslier continues to languish in obscurity. Atheists aren’t prone to idolatry, after all, and the idea of placing someone at the spiritual forefront of the movement would be anathema to many of them. Still, maybe it’s time for them – for us – to take a different approach, given the pitiful returns of our efforts so far.  In a world where atheism ought to be making significant cultural inroads, it is instead barely able to hold its own. The odds of an openly atheist candidate getting elected to the highest office in the land in North America are about the same as those of an openly gay communist with a penchant for flag burning. With that in mind, maybe it’s time we found somebody to worship, to lead by example, to serve as an archetype for everything that’s good and decent about the non-religious life. I can’t think of a better candidate than Jean Meslier.

.

Edmonton – November 9, 2011 – 2,782 words

When I travelled through eastern/south-eastern Europe in the 1980s – this would result in the book Bloodlines in 1993 -  I did not go to Bulgaria, quite deliberately. Among other things at the time, I was trying to situate my Slavic origins in Slavic histories in Europe, especially in those places as in Ukraine that were Orthodox and used the Cyrillic alphabet. Bulgaria should have been an obvious destination – Cyrillic and Orthodox with a vengeance, although this wasn’t so obvious during the Communist period .  But I didn’t go because, in my mind, Bulgarians weren’t Slavs. I’m not sure what I thought they were – Bulgars, I suppose, hailing from Central Asia in the 8^th century.

Well, I have since been corrected. Bulgarians speak a Slavic language, so culturally that includes them with the Macedonians, Serbs, etc. But their racial/ethnic origins change with the political winds. During the socialist years, their Slavic identity was promoted, linking them with that Great Brother People, the Russians. Nationalists have since downplayed the Slavic side in favour of its Thracian identity (it helps their cause that stupendous hoards of Thracian artefacts of gold have been unearthed in great burial mounds in the Thracian Plains: I saw some of these in Sofia’s Archaeological Museum, some predating the Egyptian dynasties, and I can appreciate why today’s Bulgarians would want to lay claim to such illustrious ancestors. I also noticed the preponderance, almost fetishistic, of a figure called the Thracian Horseman, whose iconography almost exactly prefigures that of the great Byzantine warrior saints, George, Theodore and Demetrius: seated militaristically on a horse with his cape blowing in a stiff wind.)  More scientifically-inclined nationalists suggested that proto-Bulgarian was an acceptable source of the Bulgarian identity. And nowadays, I have been told, DNA evidence suggests that the Bulgarians have never had anything to do with Central Asian steppes and Turkic peoples but are rather descendents of Iranians, making them Aryans.

Whatever. Today Bulgaria is in the European Union and the distinctive blue flag with the circle of gold stars of the EU flies alongside the national flag. I arrived in Sofia September 21 just in time for a 3-day national holiday, one of several liberally distributed through the year that commemorate Bulgaria’s protracted and bloody liberation from what is called the Turkish Yoke. All of Sofia seemed either to be sleeping in late or hanging out day and night at the cafes or taking the air in the countryside. This tranquility during days of a late summer heat, the light filtered through the still-lush greenery of the many city parks, fountains splashing and old men playing chess, made Sofia even more attractive than I remembered.

As in Serbia, my purpose for revisiting Bulgaria was to again meet people who were terribly important as informants while I was pursuing St Demetrius in old Byzantine lands (I started eleven years ago!) and to give them a copy of my book, Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium.  For example, Dr Ivan Biliarsky, a youthful Byzantinist when I first met him and picked his brains about the cult of St Demetrius and Byzantine spirituality. We set off on a slow stroll through the centre of Sofia which, besides being quiet for the holiday was also marking the European Day of No Traffic. We were able to walk in the middle of streets without fear of being slaughtered (Sofia drivers stop for no man or woman).

This being a national day of celebration, there were folk dancers in one of the main squares, and I made a bee-line for them. All male, they were splendid in tight white pants and embroidered shirts. It became clear that they were professional dancers – by the way they pointed their feet – and that they were acting out an insurgency: they shot pistols in the air and unsheathed their knives, flashing them around in sinister swerves, and paid a kind of obeisance to an older man who then led them in a very sexy kolo, or round dance. But Ivan found the whole thing distasteful. He said they were representing Macedonian insurgents; and Bulgaria had once had claims on what is now the Republic of Macedonia as Bulgarian land (so did the Greeks and Serbians in what are called the Balkan Wars before WW I: all this is in my book, if you are having trouble following this). Ivan is content to “let Macedonia be Macedonia now: their self-identity, their language and literature are now recognized as Macedonian, not Bulgarian, even though it is a ‘constructed; language – but aren’t they all?” (Another friend reminded me that Bulgaria was the first country to acknowledge the independent republic of Macedonia when it finally and somewhat reluctantly declared itself independent of Yugoslavia, and this in spite of the fact that a ‘constructed’ Macedonian history has appropriated a medieval Tsar the rest of the world knows as a Bulgarian, Samuel, he whose army was decisively overwhelmed by the Byzantine emperor Basil, known then and to us as the Bulgar-Slayer.)

Ivan and I settled into a terrace cafe called the Mausoleum – not as morbid as it sounds. In fact it’s a political joke, being laid out right alongside what is left (a cement pad) of the enormous gravesite Mausoleum of Communist Bulgaria’s first leader, Georgi Dimitrov. A decade ago, the tomb was already gone, to be replaced by a mighty replica of a box of Johnny Walker Red. This too is now gone, thank heavens. On the other hand, one can now patronize Starbuck’s, KFC, Subway and – the latest shopping sensation – Ikea.

Ten years ago, when I thought my Demetrius Project was solely about the sufficiently exciting topics of Byzantine and Balkan history, I was bemused by the number of scholars I was meeting and interviewing who were Orthodox believers and unabashed to say so. Ivan was one of them. Now that I’ve made my own way back to the Orthodox Church, he and I talk as fellow adherents – and confess our respective frustrations about Orthodoxy. Ivan is disgusted by the recent decision of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church to canonize some souls murdered in one of the many atrocities (on all sides) in the aforementioned Balkan Wars: villagers of Batak, who took sanctuary in their church from the assault of Turkish soldiers (and some Bulgarian accomplices, in another version) and were burned to death there. Victims they certainly were – but saints? Ivan accuses the Church of exploiting a purely national/political agenda while it does very little of what it’s supposed to do: act as the Body of Christ. He does admit, though, that even this corrupted version of an Orthodox Church has not dared to canonize one of the truly revered, and doomed, revolutionary heroes, Vasil Levski, who was guilty of murdering a boy on grounds of “treachery,” although I haven’t been able to find this story via Google.

This theme of the “corrupted” Bulgarian Orthodox Church comes up again, vehemently, with a friend in Plovdiv, Br. Simeon, who is still in a rage about the Church’s decision a decade ago to withdraw from the World Council of Churches, to withdraw in fact from any kind of conversation with other faiths (“I’m all right, Jack!”) or even to “witness” to the many social and economic injustices that have befallen their flock of the faithful (mainly women, it must be said) who nevertheless in the gravest sincerity still come to church, light candles, kiss the icons and drop their meager coins into the collection boxes…

Caveat lector: my current visit to Bulgaria has had an awful lot of church content, which you may choose to skip for the next several paragraphs. But it was inevitable that this was a big theme of my conversations and wanderings: not only because I was “winding up” the Demetrius project but also because Bulgaria is the site of some of the earliest Christian events in the Roman Empire – persecutions of Christian martyrs in Plovdiv in 304, for instance, the same year as the martyrdom of St Demetrius in Thessalonica, and the building of a baptistery in the 4^th century Rotunda of St George in Sofia – my favourite church –  when the city was known by its Roman name Serdica, described  as “my Rome” by none other than Constantine the Great himself.

I arrived at St George in time for Vespers, an hour-long version (preceding Sunday Mass) with all the Tropars, Kondaks and Irmoi [hymns] intact, apparently. Five cantors took turns at singing, including two young women whose voices considerably alleviated the intense Byzantine drone of the chants, while above us flew the faint 12^th-century outlines of angels circling the base of the dome.

After the Bulgars settled these lands and became Christians via Constantinople, they built a great many more churches and filled them with the distinctive iconography of Byzantium and the peculiar calligraphy of  Old Slavonic letters known as the Cyrillic, so I had to (re)visit all these churches too. They are hard to miss, seemingly around every corner in downtown Sofia; or occupying an entire square to itself in the case of  the massive Byzantine-style Cathedral Church of St Alexander Nevsky (built in honour of the Russian soldiers who died during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, as a result of which Bulgaria was liberated from Ottoman rule). On my way one afternoon to hear Vespers in this church, I sat straight down on a cement wall to listen, heart pounding, to the great peals of the Cathedral bells rolling out under the heavens. (It is to be noted that in Plovdiv, there are pious complaints about the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer on Fridays at the lovely 14^th century mosque in the heart of the city, just as there are atheists in the West who complain about their Sunday mornings being disturbed by the church bells plaintively calling the neighbourhood to worship.)

The Church of the Sedmochislenitsi, dedicated to Cyril and Methodius and their five disciples who brought Christianity to the Slavs, is described in my book as a dark and damp interior I took shelter in during a winter rain storm back in 2001. Now it is a glorious late summer morning and the church is a cheerful place to stop for a few minutes, light some candles for family and friends, and study the frescoes. A placard outside tells visitors that here once stood the Kodja Mehmed Dervis Djami called the Black Mosque because of its minaret strikingly tiled in black. It was built on a design of the genius architect Sinan Pasha in 1528 on the initiative of Mehmed Pasha, great Vizier of Suleiman the Magnificent. The caravanserai attached to it later served as a prison in liberated Bulgaria until the new state got around to building is own (every self-respecting nation state has to have its own prisons…) Speaking of the Ottomans, the proud new democratic states of eastern Europe may well regret the enthusiastic fervour with which the nineteenth-century anti-Turkish liberators destroyed the Ottoman architectural legacy on these lands, leaving very little for the unaware visitor to appreciate of a 500-year-long Empire. Even Bulgarians flock to Istanbul to breathe in the atmosphere of a very particular Muslim civilization.

In conversation with my friend Ivan, I sincerely wanted to know if there have been intellectual currents to stir up Orthodoxy’s pot in the last, say one hundred, years? He mentioned the sainted Seraphim Sobolev, and I quote from an article online from Orthodox Russia Nos. 21 and 22, 1994 : “The spiritual founder of the Bulgarian Old-Calendarist Orthodox Church was Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev)-the well-known theologian, profound expert on the works of the Holy Fathers, the fiery defender of holy Orthodoxy. People who knew well his struggle for the purity of the Orthodox faith called him ‘the conscience of Orthodoxy.’ Archbishop Seraphim lived in Bulgaria for thirty years.  By his righteous life, filled with deprivations, calamities and persecutions from the dark powers of evil, from the powers of this world, he drew to himself spiritual children. Seraphim began to nurture them in the strict Orthodox spirit. For example, he was able to introduce Confession before Holy Communion again into the life of the Bulgarian Church.  At that time, the Mystery of Confession was almost completely forgotten in Bulgaria.”

Well, not exactly what I had in mind as an “intellectual” current, but Ivan then whisked me off to visit Seraphim’s tomb, a place of great popular veneration in Sofia, in a little chapel in the gorgeous Baroque-style Russian Orthodox Church reached from a side door. In the antechamber, visitors – mostly women – sat writing prayer-petitions on the paper provided, while others stepped one by one into the chamber holding the sarcophagus to say their prayer. It was a homely scene and at least far removed from the dispiriting reputation of the official Church.

On Day Two of the national holiday  I met my friend Eta Mousakova, librarian in the National Library and a specialist in ancient documents (she’s in my book too, and the only person I know who can read Glagolitic). We met in front of the Library, named for the great saints Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica (we’re talking 9th century here) who devised the Glagolitic for the newly-Christianised Slavs of Moravia, a lost cause as it turned out, when the Moravian prince switched to the Catholic Church. But Cyril and Methodius’s disciples would carry on, this time coming up with the Cyrillic script (in their mentors’ honour) for the Bulgarians, also newly-Christianized, and who remain eternally grateful, to judge by the many representations of this event – religion and alphabet delivered together – in public and sacred frescoes.

Over supper in a garden restaurant serving standard Bulgarian fare (roasted red peppers, grilled chicken, and pretty decent Merlot) Eta brings me up to date about her work, namely that the National Library like every other public institution is struggling to fund itself. Eta’s boss came up with the fund-raising idea of “adopt-a-book,” meant to raise funds for the restoration of old books and manuscripts, and dumped the file on Eta’s desk. As the filthy rich in this town are only interested in donating money to splashy popular projects like sports, Eta has so far managed to raise only 200 levas ($160) for adopt-a-book, all of it from one high school outside Sofia, enough to restore one small 17^th century Polish school primer.

Plovdiv was founded as Philippopolis by Philip of Macedon whose triumphant statue has been newly-raised in the middle of the partially-excavated ruins of the Roman stadium, the rest being irretrievably covered by a pedestrian street full of shops and cafes. Br Simeon sarcastically points out that Philip was yet another conqueror of an indigenous people, in the case of Plovdiv, the Thracians. But the Hellenes and then the Romans stayed a very long time, and one of the most exquisite museums I’ve seen in this region is to be found in a pedestrian underpass at the level of a semi-excavated mosaic floor from a Roman villa, later an Episcopal palace. Along with the floor, many small objects of extraordinary craftsmanship in glass were uncovered and are now on display, their intense and unclouded colours and forms restored to something like their original beauty.

An ugly side of modern Plovdiv was on view the two days that I spent there: bawling mobs a thousand strong of mainly very young men surging up and down the main pedestrian street waving flags and bellowing “Death to the Gypsies! Death to the Turks,” finally rallying at the mosque and setting off blasts of firecrackers, where they were finally pushed back by the police banging thunderously on their shields.

Emotions had been inflamed against the local Roma because of an incident a few days earlier in a neighbouring village: two young men, one Roma and one Bulgarian, got into an altercation, which ended in the death of the Bulgarian, run over (accidentally-on-purpose?) by the van of the Roma boy, who has been arrested. An angry crowd then set fire to several Roma homes. (I saw some of this on morning tv, including images of young people holding up their cellphones and taking pictures of the fire.) Br Simeon told me that about half of the Roma women who work sweeping the streets of Plovdiv were too frightened to show up for work the next day. Indeed, aside from Br Simeon there was not a Bulgarian I spoke to who is in sympathy with the Roma Bulgarians (there follows a depressingly familiar list of grievances against them) but even the Roma can be their own worst enemies, as in the story Br Simeon told me of the luckless efforts of a young Roma man intent on cleaning up the votes-for-hire political culture of his community: he was assaulted by goons on behalf of the local Gypsy King (as he’s known) who feared the loss of a lucrative source of illegal lucre.

At the invitation of the Secretary of the Plovdiv Writers Association, I met with a group of high-school writers (mostly girls and mostly writing poetry) whom she has organized into a kind of creative writing club. We gathered in a room at the back of one of Plovdiv’s most famous old houses, the one in which the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine stayed a few days on his way to Constantinople in 1833, the guest of the Greek merchant Georgi Mavridi and which is mentioned in all the tourist guides as a must-see example of the urban architecture of this 19-th century Old Town linked with ideas of the Enlightenment. Even then-President Francois Mitterand of France had visited and left his signature in the visitors’ book (in 1989, to give local democrats a boost, presumably). Impressed by all these connotations, before I met with the students I rehearsed until I was mellifluous the few verses I remembered from high school French of Lamartine: Sois sage o ma douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille. Un atmosphere obscure enveloppe la ville, il descend, le voici, aux uns portant la paix, aux autres, le souci. It was all in vain: they had never heard of Lamartine.

But we had a lively talk together about Byzantium and martyrs, Bulgarians and Canadians and empires, about Cyrillic letters and cellphone publishing. And by the end of the evening the instructor had even come up with a Bulgarian equivalent for “creative nonfiction”:  beyond-fiction literature. I like it.

Frank Davey sends yet another reading of Mistry’s Such a Long Journey:

What’s most interesting to me about Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey is the alternate view of world history that it constructs. That may have also interested a Booker jury – one would hope. In this it resembles M.S. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack, although without quite the same narrative emphasis on chronology and family descent. Like Vassanji’s expatriate South Indian Ismaili Moslem community in East Africa, Mistry’s Parsi community in Bombay is one defined by religion and ethnicity but not by nationalism. Unlike the Ismailis, however, the Parsis can recall a lost national identity: in the Zoroastrian Persian empire of Xerxes and Darius, and in its smaller medieval successors. Gustad Noble, the point-of-view character of the novel, has named his sons Darius and Sohrab, the second after the legendary warrior-son of Firdousi’s medieval Persian epic, the Shah-nama. The Shah-nama is also cited in the first of the novel’s three epigraphs, which begins

He assembled the aged priests and put questions to them concerning the kings who had once possessed the world. ‘How did they,’ he inquired, ‘hold the world in the beginning, and why is it that it has been left to us in such a sorry state?’ 

This question about history gestures to two questions which haunt the bank clerk Gustad Noble: how have the Persians or Parsis so declined from the romantic times of Xerxes and Darius, or of Sohrab and Rustum, and how has his own family declined from the prosperity of his grandfather’s and father’s generations. In the opening chapter Mistry shows Gustad sitting at his long-dead grandfather’s large black desk, a desk that he has dishonestly inherited, and recalling the grandfather’s shop.

Gustad remembered the sign on the shop. Clearly, as though it is a photograph before my eyes: Noble & Sons, Makers of Fine Furniture, and I also remember the first time I saw the sign – too young to read the words but not to recognize the pictures that danced around the words…. like the furniture in my childhood home.

Later in this chapter he undertakes a semi-disastrous project to buy a live chicken and kill, dress, and cook it just like his family had been able to do, with the help of many servants, during his childhood.

            Throughout, the novel focuses on Gustad’s longing for affiliation: with his Zoroastrian/Parsi past history, with the wealth and status of his grandfather’s generation, even with belonging to a larger possible family of Mother India, personified for him in the early parts of the novel by Indira Gandhi. While death, government treachery, municipal corruption, and family betrayals make it impossible for anyone in the novel to keep or recover most material things — goldfish die, businesses go bankrupt, the municipality at the end of the novel destroys the wall that protects the apartment complex in which Gustad and his fellow tenants  live –  memory persists, and eventually comes to act as a substitute for Gustad for what has been lost. He may not be able to hand on his grandfather’s furniture business and carpentry skills to his son Darius – only the grandfather’s hammer remains – but he can pass on the memory of the grandfather. His friend Major Billimoria cannot be saved from betrayal by a corrupt Indira Gandhi, but the story of his betrayal can be passed on through Gustad and remembered.

            At a cultural level Such a Long Journey acts to insert both Parsi memory and a period of twentieth-century Indian history into Canadian literary textuality – implying that there are other journeys than those recounted in Western literature from Homer to Lancelot Andrewes and T.S. Eliot, from whose poem “The Journey of the Magi,” and its quotation from Andrewes, the title is taken. Contrary to the suggestion of Eliot’s arguably Eurocentric poem, and Andrewes’ arguably Eurocentric sermon, both of which put Western words into the mouth of a middle-east speaker, Christianity has not caused  “bitter agony” and “death” of all pre-Christian mid-Eastern religions and cultures. However, I doubt that such an insertion was Mistry’s aim. The novel’s implied audience seems more likely to have been an Indian one, or a Booker one, than a Canadian one. The epigraphs seemed aimed mainly at British readers, and the Parsi narrative at Indian ones. Parsis are invisible in Canada but in India have been attacked and killed, as a somehow over-privileged minority, during inter-ethnic rioting.

Frank’s point about alternative views of history is useful, because during the 1980s and 90s it seemed to be a focus for the Bookers, whether or not the novels involved merited international recognition for quality of writing. It’s a category: alternative view of history. For 1991 the novels by both Okri and Mo would also fit the category.

***

When I first began this project I included my choice of winner for the year. I’ve noticed I’ve stopped that practice. It wasn’t a deliberate choice, but on reflection I realize that making the judgment has ceased to interesting me. Is this book better than that book? So I was particularly interested in the following piece:

Montreal’s Miguel Syjuco disappointed to be shut out of Canadian book prizes

Wednesday, 20 October 2010 14:33 Cassandra Szklarski, The Canadian Press

TORONTO – Montreal writer Miguel Syjuco admits he got the career boost of a lifetime when he won the Man Asian Literary Prize for the manuscript that would become his debut novel “Ilustrado.”

But that early acclaim may have set expectations so high for his resulting book ”a sprawling historical analysis of the Philippines and an indictment of its pampered elite” that satisfying the critics was impossible, he suggests.

Syjuco, 33, says he’s disappointed to be shut out of Canada’s three major book prizes, and posits a variety of reasons for the snub, ranging from “Ilustrado” (Penguin) being too political, not Canadian enough, or just plain inadequate.

“There are so many theories that anyone could come up with,” Syjuco says from Vancouver, where he is attending the Vancouver International Writers Festival this weekend.

“Essentially, the judges have their own tastes and opinions and it does become something of a lottery. The novelist Julian Barnes called the (Man) Booker Prize, for example, ‘posh bingo.’ And in a way, it is. I got very lucky with the Man Asian Literary Prize and I’m happy with that. Prizes are important, I think, to writers because they push your work to more readers and that’s ultimately what we want….. (But) it is a little disappointing.”

Syjuco exploded into the spotlight in 2008 when he claimed the $10,000 prize for his ambitious manuscript, marking an auspicious start to a fledgling career that had until then been marked by rejection letters.

But his name was notably absent among the Canadian writers who appeared on the recent nomination lists for the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Syjuco is among the finalists for a Quebec Writers’ Federation Awards, to be handed out Nov. 23.

The soft-spoken writer, who was a copy editor at the Montreal Gazette when he submitted “Ilustrado” to the Man Asian Literary Prize, says the intense publicity that followed the win made him nervous about his prospects as a published author.

“The book hadn’t come out yet and I thought, ‘Well, I’m worried about all of this hype. It can’t be good for it.’ I would rather the book came out and people decided for themselves rather than the book comes out two years after I won a prize so everybody’s thinking, ‘This is fantastic, it must be a masterpiece,’ and then they see it as a flawed, baggy first novel by somebody who’s trying to reach beyond his own capacities and grow as a writer,” says Syjuco.

“I’m still new to the Canadian writing scene. I’m still something of an outsider and I think my book is different from some stuff out there and maybe it just takes a little bit longer for people to enjoy it, if ever they do.

“Or maybe the book just isn’t good enough. I have good days, I have bad days.”

Syjuco’s first novel is a complex and ambitious work.

Ostensibly, it’s about the death of a Filipino literary hero and the student who investigates his mysterious demise. Woven throughout are snippets of the hero’s novels, essays and newspaper articles, leading the reader across centuries, continents, and generations that defined the island nation.

Reviews have ranged from glowing celebrations of the book’s unique blend of genres as a way to piece together a fragmented life and country, to derisive for a difficult, complex structure that some felt was overwrought.

“I’ve learned that I have to be happy with creating discussion and debate and that I shouldn’t be trying to write a book that appeals to the consensus,” says Syjuco, who moved to Canada at age one, returned to the Philippines at age 11 and settled in Montreal three years ago.

“It took me awhile. At first I was disappointed that the book wasn’t flying off the shelves in the U.S. or Canada or elsewhere. It’s doing OK, it’s doing fine, but it’s not one of those bestselling books and that’s really because there are those people who love it and there are those people who hate it or don’t get it or give up on it. And that’s great. because it creates discussion and it’s a great book for book clubs, I’m told, it’s good for lively conversation.”

He’s particularly disappointed that major newspapers in the Phillipines largely ignored the book, noting that “less than a handful” of articles appeared upon its release.

“It was a big deal when I won the prize,” he notes.

“So it’s not about the book; it’s about winning. It’s about succeeding and that’s really quite troubling. But maybe it’s just that people read the book and didn’t like it or maybe they found it too confronting, I don’t know.”

Syjuco says two things here that resonate with me, after so much time reading nothing but Bookers. I agree with him—the long list doesn’t matter, the short list doesn’t matter, only winning matters, though that isn’t the way it should be. Writers should not write for consensus. Now keep that in mind when you read the following.

Kim Goldberg was on the jury for the 2010 GG for poetry. There was a lot of discussion on her facebook page about the 5 short-listed writers. Kim decided the long list would be of interest to other poets and poetry readers so she made the following post:

I’ve been thinking about sharing this list ever since our earlier Facebook discussion of the shortlist of five finalists (http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150303943260301). And I have been feeling kind of cowardly for not sharing it. Nobody ever said we couldn’t release this list. And I don’t see how its release does anything but give some much-deserved recognition to some additional poets and their publishers. I would hope in future years that the Canada Council itself would release the GG long lists in mid-September, prior to the release of the finalists (shortlists) in mid-October and the winners in mid-November.

 171 poetry books published between September 1, 2009 and September 30, 2010 were submitted by their publishers for this year’s English-language Poetry GG. The three jurors were: Kimmy Beach (Red Deer, Alberta), Norm Sibum (Montreal) and me – Kim Goldberg (Nanaimo, BC).

 We each read all 171 books in private, with no communication with each other. Then ten days before we were to meet in Ottawa for our one-day adjudication process to determine the five finalists and winner, we were each asked to submit a list of up to ten titles that were our top contenders. Our three separate lists were compiled into one cumulative list (which I am calling the unofficial ‘long list’). And that cumulative list was emailed back to each of us so we could study those books more closely before we left for Ottawa. The books on that cumulative list were the only books we discussed when we met for our day-long adjudication session in Ottawa.

 Here is our cumulative list (the ‘long list’) of 22 books, alphabetical by title. The five finalists are marked with an asterisk.

 * &: A Serial Poem by Daryl Hine (Fitzhenry & Whiteside)

 A Good Time Had by All by Meaghan Strimas (Exile Editions)

 After Jack by Garry Thomas Morse (Talonbooks)

 Attenuations of Force by Lori Cayer (Frontenac House)

 Back Off, Assassin! by Jim Smith (Mansfield Press)

 * Boxing the Compass by Richard Greene (Signal Editions/Véhicule Press)

 * Circus by Michael Harris (Signal Editions/Véhicule Press)

 Decompositions by Ken Belford (Talonbooks)

 * Deepwater Vee by Melanie Siebert (McClelland & Stewart)

 * Exploding into Night by Sandy Pool (Guernica Editions)

 Huge Blue by Patrick M. Pilarski (Leaf Press)

 Ivan’s Birches by Barry Dempster (Pedlar Press)

 Lookout by John Steffler (McClelland & Stewart)

 Maple Leaf Rag by Kaie Kellough (Arbeiter Ring Publishing)

 My Darling Nellie Grey by George Bowering (Talonbooks)

 Neighbour Procedure by Rachel Zolf (Coach House Books)

 Ossuaries by Dionne Brand (McClelland & Stewart)

 Tattoo Land by Kathleen McCracken (Exile Editions)

 The Irrationalist by Suzanne Buffam (House of Anansi Press)

 The Reinvention of the Human Hand (Paul Vermeersch (McClelland & Stewart)

 The Semiconducting Dictionary: Our Strindberg by Natalee Caple (ECW Press)

 Wait Until Late Afternoon by David Bateman and Hiromi Goto (Frontenac House)

You will notice that the long list has some really good titles with a great range of poetics, while the short list is, well, pretty one dimensional. Kim says not all 3 jurors submitted lists with 10 books, that some lists were shorter. So the long list of 22 in itself confirms there wasn’t much consensus on this jury.

The posting prompted more discussion, including this from Shane Neilson, and good for him:

Better to have my own two feet in my mouth than the CC’s thumb. Or, teat. Your post reads like CC propaganda. Kumbaya etc. There’s no acrimony here! And by the way, the Schier fiasco can’t happen again! Not that we take responsibility for that in the first place!

It seems like you’re too nice… Stuart and Zach pulled you away from your initial post and you’ve agreed with them, in the Canadian way. If there really was an argument in the judging process, if there were strenuous disagreements, if there was an honest way to get to the best book, then I’d be glad for the CC to let us hear about it, not a nicey nice we all got along, aren’t we civilized, patty cake post. All the high fives you’re getting here attest to me that the whole CC process is rank, and no one wants to give offense, lest retribution come.

But since you mentioned it, a points system is stupid too. People should be allowed to not be mathematical about poetry. They should be allowed to persuade. Duel. Argue. Get mad. Feel a conversion. A points system is like phoning it in.

I can’t help but feel that the best books this year weren’t on the list (gasp! I risk offending the judges! The CC! The nominees!) because the consensus process necessarily excluded them, and in pathetic fashion, you seem to agree. How valid a process is that? Isn’t that my point?

Now for my favourite part of the story. Someone phoned the Canada Council to complain that Goldberg had posted the long list. The CC got in touch with her and asked her to remove the information from her facebook page, which she did. The CC also informed her that in future GG jurors would have to sign a confidentiality clause saying they will not disclose the long list. Just what we need—more rules and restrictions.

1992 Booker Jury: Victoria Glendinning, novelist and whining 2009 Giller juror. John Coldstream, at the time the literary editor of the Daily Telegraph. Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, and Tutor and Senior Fellow in English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford—also does BBC work and reviews extensively. Dr. Harriet Harvey Wood, then literature director of the British Council. Mark Lawson, journalist, broadcaster and writer.

Christopher Hope—Serenity House UBC

Max Montfalon is declining, his enormous house is too much so he makes a deal with his daughter and her ambitious politician husband—if they buy a new house with an apartment for him they get all his money. After 7 months the daughter is about to crack up dealing with her cranky and incontinent dad, so Max gets shipped off to Serenity House. The Lear overtones in the beginning are quickly taken over by black comedy, murder mystery, and anti-American themes—particularly the US media’s obsession with (glorification of?) death and killing.

The novel has a cast of eccentric characters, my favourite is Max’s granddaughter, a devotee of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, or at least until she takes up a new fad. Max had been a doctor, then made a fortune through corporate takeovers. Cledwyn Fox is doing his best to administer a home for the aged in an increasingly competitive market:

More and more people born. And living longer. Present population increase was about two per cent a year. At this rate the living space available to each of us by late in the next millennium was reduced to a few yards. Fifty billion by 2100 and a century later, 500 billion. Project the figures into the third millennium and the space available to each human being had shrunk to one square inch! Even if you could shoot them into space, you would have to expel around 10,000 an hour, for ever, to make much difference.,,A certain individual freedom was fine, but in the end, only large-scale intervention would deal with the problems.

The novel is deeply disturbing in its presentation of the industry and ugly commerce of aging and death. It’s both brutal and funny—a doctor who supports euthanasia pens a book titled The Joy of Passing. The novel is stinging, and no one gets off the hook. It puts euthanasia of British elders beside the holocaust, and Disney World. The last chapter of the novel absolutely clobbered me. When I finish this Booker project, I’ll search out other books by Hope.

Michele Roberts—Daughters of the House UBC

Loosely based on the real life of martyr St. Therese, the novel begins with Leonie waiting for the return of her cousin to the family house—Therese has spent the last 20 years as a nun. To fill the time waiting for her cousin Leonie is preparing an inventory of the house and those items become the titles for the very short chapters of the book—The Bed, The Biscuit Tin, The Cellar Key, etc.

The novel (maybe) begins with a short, heavy-handed, gothicesque dream, though it took me many readings to make any sense of it. It’s obviously written to make the reader think of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher or Hawthorn’s The House of the Seven Gables. Lots of doom, gloom and foreshadowing and a house that becomes a character, in essence.

Quickly (and the whole book is quick—if you added up all the white space it might not make the page count to qualify as a novel) the narrative (maybe) tells the story of the girls’ early years and the “miracle” that altered both their lives.

I’m reminded of Possession since this novel is clearly written to explore literary theories and specifically feminist themes. The few male characters in the novel are incidental. The concern is female relationships, mother and daughter, servant and mistress, and all other manner of womanhood, female martyrdom, virginity, sexuality, nurturing and secrecy. A brief online search does indicate that feminist critics are all over this one, and as far as I’m concerned, that can have it.

At its best the novel is examining the line (if there really is one) between fact and fiction, the act of storytelling, or stealing stories and making them your own. Leonie is the one who goes to the secret glade and has a vision of the Virgin. Therese makes modifications to the story, takes it as her own and convinces the clergy that she has experienced a miracle.

The writing is highly poetic in places, and mystical. It’s the sort of stuff you’d expect from a student in a conservative creative writing program (like the one at UBC) who thinks she is being edgy. It’s a poorly written YA novel, an imprecise fairy tale, about the passage into adulthood (both girls begin menstruating). Too much fussy description and way too many metaphors.

Did saints ever bat their eyelids and look sleepily self-satisfied as cats? Therese, lowering her lashes like a lacy brown veil and trying to smile too obviously, did not look modest. It was the same look she’d directed at the men all through lunch and they’d loved it. Leonie thought men were stupid to be so easily taken in. Look flutteringly at them, pout with all your maidenly charm, above all don’t say a word, and they were yours. She vowed that never would she resort to such cheap tricks. She would die rather than roll her eyes and wriggle and blush.

Patrick McCabe—The Butcher Boy VPL

The 1992 Picador edition has a scary portrait on the cover. The novel is as menacing as this cover image suggests.

Francie Brady is the first-person narrator, a young boy living in a small community where his broken-down mother and alcoholic father are known as the Pigs. Representing the upper class of the community is the Nugent family, and their son Philip, perpetually in his school blazer.

It’s chilling, right from the start, “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.” Some disturbing events take place during the narrative of the novel. At one point Francie is sent to a home for “bad” boys, which is run by bad priests (Francie works out payment for services with chocolates). But it isn’t so much the plot that is disturbing; it’s the increasing mental disturbance of Francie. He shifts from misguided to demented, and takes the reader on that ride. The reader is in Francie’s head, though you wouldn’t want Francie in your home. Or chumming with your children.

Francie is scary, but his innocence underlines the cruelty of the town. He runs away from home, his mother commits suicide and Francie is blamed. The community shuns him because of his family and class situation. He is emotionally abused by the authority figures who should be helping him.

Not far into the story Francie can’t always tell the difference between a real situation, one on television, and one in his head. It’s hard to like Francie but it’s impossible not to feel compassion for his situation, without condoning his actions. In Francie’s situation, he is cornered into anarchy.

Category: Scream of consciousness. We’ve seen this one before, repeatedly. Except this book goes way past eccentric. The line between the real and the imagined cracks, as Francie spins out of control. As so often with Irish novels, at heart is the class disparity and the usual Irish clichés, such as drunkenness. There is a larger sense of doom from the world’s situation with occasional mention of the Cuban crisis and predictions of the end of the world.

Mary had the same face as ma used to have sitting staring into the ashes it was funny that face it slowly grew over the other one until one day you looked and the person you knew was gone. And instead there was a half-ghost sitting there who had only one thing to say: All the beautiful things of this world are lies. They count for nothing in the end.

A movie has been made. And here’s an interesting site PSYCHOANALYTIC MEDIA CRITICISM BY HARVEY ROY GREENBERG, MD

“Harvey Roy Greenberg, M.D., a graduate of Columbia College, and Cornell University Medical College, is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, New York, where he teaches adolescent psychiatry and medical humanities. He practices adult and adolescent psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychopharmacology in Manhattan. Dr. Greenberg writes frequently on the psychoanalytic study of cinema, media, and popular culture.”

Here is his review of the movie:

http://doctorgreenberg.net/butcherboy.htm

Ian McEwan—Black Dogs VPL

Back cover blurb: “A terrifyingly beautiful political allegory in the form of a sublimely readable novel.” Ottawa Citizen

I wonder when people are writing book reviews if they are thinking, “quote me, quote me.”

This book is a fable disguised as a memoir about the nature of good and evil, the inherent evil in all of us and the possible redemption of love. June and Bernard are idealist, sexually they are highly compatible but are at odds about politics. June suffers a violent encounter with some Nazi dogs, left behind after the retreat, and makes the decision to assume a life of introspection and isolation. Bernard continues with the communist cause. They stay married and have children, but live apart. Or as Bernard accuses, she trades one utopia for another. Years later, with June dying in an old age home, their son-in-law tries to sort it out.

The writing is first-rate, and atmospherically the novel is a huge achievement. But the fable content makes the story/morale too obvious.

Michael Ondaatje—The English Patient GB library copy—WINNER, shared

Is there anyone in the Anglophone world who doesn’t have a story about this novel? Heck, it even became a special episode on Seinfeld, about how to bore someone. And I must admit that the first time I tried to read it, not long after it was published, I got to page 100 or so and packed it in. But it’s a Booker winner and under the rules I’ve established I had to finish it. And I did, and really liked parts of it.

When the novel captured me, it was by the quality of the writing. Specific scenes are wonderful, such as Kip’s relationship to his English mentor or the exploration of the Sistine Chapel by flare light. Ondaatje creates scenes and atmospheres that are luscious, sometimes ethereal. And it’s that quality that sometimes seems inappropriate, as others have charged, the aestheticization of war and suffering. Ondaatje often writers, in prose and poetry, about violence and endless academic papers have be written about this theme, or as some charge, obsession. Christian Bok notes, “Ondaatje in effect receives critical acclaim for his ability to stylize violence, to endow it with aesthetic integrity through both technical precision and emotional detachment.” In part, that’s what irritated me on my first reading and made me abandon the book.

One night George and I were having a drink with Mike Matthews, and we chatted about the novel. Mike said he thought Ondaatje is a brilliant scene writer but can’t tell a story. George said he has had conversations with Ondaatje who claims he writes scenes and pins them to a board, then when he is finished the scenes, stands back and decides in which order they should be placed. In other words, not a story in the usual sense but a collage. Then Mike M had an “ahay” moment, “Ondaatje is a painter trying to get out of a writer’s body.”

Hana is laying a fire, the shelled chapel—all lit suddenly, without shadow. Kip will walk with no qualms under the trees in his patch of garden during such storms, the dangers of being killed by lightning pathetically minimal compared with the danger of his daily life. The naïve Catholic images from those hillside shrines that he has seen are with him in the half-darkness, as he counts the seconds between lightning and thunder. Perhaps this villa is a similar tableau, the four of them in private movement, momentarily lit up, flung ironically against this war.

Ondaatje writes spots in time. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a better book, I think, but this novel followed by the movie made Ondaatje a superstar.

Barry Unsworth—Sacred Hunger SHARED WINNER

Category: Overwrought Historical Novel

Prologue, page 2:

The mulatto invented himself—it was why he was tolerated in the bars. Some aura of my own invention lies about him too. The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever; and I have had to rely on memory, since the newspaper itself has been long defunct and its files have been destroyed or dimply mouldered away.

Page 2, people. Egad. Dough of fiction, indeed.

William Kemp is a merchant who has seen a decline in his business so he invests in the Liverpool Merchant, a slave ship that sails for Africa under the leadership of Captain Thurso. The ship’s doctor is Matthew Paris, nephew of Kemp, recently released from prison for publishing pamphlets that disagree with the church. The other major character is Kemp’s son, the highly ambitious Erasmus. When the fortunes of Thurso collapse (and he offs himself) the son is left to bear the shame, and the great grudge he has against his cousin Paris.

Unsworth’s method is to use lots of description. The descriptive details for atmosphere are clumsily intruded on the narrative:

Light played over the long, beast-footed sideboard, flickered on the heavy brass clasps that held its doors, on glasses and decanter, on the triple-headed silver candlesticks that had belonged to his mother’s mother. These, and the gilded mahogany clock above the fireplace and the ebony book-ends carved as ravens holding the big Bible with its purple silk marker, were thing she had grown up with, as was his father’s voice, which had never to his recollection sounded the faintest note of doubt or misgiving.

That’s from page 14. I feel like I’m stuck inside a C18th House and Gardens Magazine.

One storyline follows the adventures and misadventures of the ship as it travels to Africa and collects slaves, then departs for the new world. The other is the path of Erasmus, his failed courtship of the rich girl after his father’s death, his loveless marriage to a wealthy heiress and his rise in both economic and social stature. The novel hits the themes you’d expect; historical ideas about race (at one point Erasmus in involved in rehearsal for a production of “The Enchanted Island” which allows for discussion about Caliban who has “no soul”), trading in heathens and ministering to them, marital customs, the destructive element of foreign trade, redemption, greed, malice, corruption, and so on. It’s historical in a big way, trying to hit all the appropriate themes.

The ships come and trade on the edges. You may think only the edges are fouled with this trade but it is not so. The flood of cheap manufactures, for which the people have no need, destroys their industries. They become dependent on this trade and the demand for goods can only be met by enslaving their fellows. To do this they need muskets in ever increasing quantities — which we supply. And so we spread death everywhere. But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all. The trade is lawful, they say, and that is enough.

Things on the ship go terribly wrong; slaves die and/or are thrown overboard, disease afflicts almost everyone and living conditions become intolerable. In the second section we find out after the event that mutiny has occurred, the captain dies and the few who remain hide the ship up a river in Florida and begin a utopian society, whites and blacks living in a community, even sharing the women (since there aren’t enough to go around).

Delblanc had seen more clearly than anyone that only concerted action could save them, not only from surrounding dangers but from one another. Perhaps there was already present to his mind the marvellous opportunity the mutiny presented to test theories, vindicate man’s natural goodness in this dream of a community living without constraint of government or corruption of money. A ship blown off course, a scuffle of sick and desperate men, the blood of a madman clumsily and almost casually spilt, he had seen in these a truth of politics, a revolution, the founding of a new order.

Does the new order work? Of course not; trade develops into commerce, which creates power, and the ability to enslave the lesser blessed. And just as the community is about to self-destruct on its own, Erasmus shows up to put them all back in shackles and recoup on his father’s investment.

The big ideas, observations and philosophies come from the strange narrative voice—none are truly embodied in the characters. For a morality play—and essentially that’s what this is with the bad slave traders, etc—it’s a shortcoming to use stick characters. The only character who holds any promise or hope is the mulatto child of Paris and one of the black women, but this son ends up a drunk in New Orleans, babbling about his birth in Eden. The two really interesting characters are Erasmus’s first love and his mother, but both women just disappear.

On the despicable scale Erasmus Kemp scores a 9. The novel also fits the Alternative View of History category.

From The Guardian 1992 Victoria Glendinning

My fellow judges were John Coldstream, literary editor of the Telegraph, Harriet Harvey-Wood, literary director of the British Council, Valentine Cunningham and Mark Lawson. We became intimate in the way of people thrown together in a scary but non-fatal railway accident. John dreamt one night that he was Spartacus, with the Roman legions advancing on him in the form of piles of new titles. It was a vintage year for rent-a-sneer in the media. Prominent journalists whinged chauvinistically about “far-flung authors”, deaf to the explosion of energy from Commonwealth novelists, which has been the most significant feature of the Booker’s 40 years. The prize was “essentially trivial”, pontificated AN Wilson in contemptuous mode in the Evening Standard; and, enraged, I wrote to the Guardian letters page to contest Richard Gott’s clichés about the decline of the novel and what he called the “tokenism” of the inclusion of Michèle Roberts on the shortlist.

Every book on our shortlist had one passionate supporter and one furious antagonist. When at the final meeting we locked horns over the frontrunners, it was suggested that we should reach our decision by taking into account second choices – proportional representation. This procedure gave Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient) and Barry Unsworth (Sacred Hunger) equal points. I turned to Martyn Goff, sitting behind me discreetly – or as discreetly as anyone can who is wearing a gold satin tie – and asked if we could share the prize between the two. He conceded there was no rule against it. So that’s what we did.

Before the meeting, I was so unnerved that I left my bag with all my notes in it at the bank. When stressed I become sharp-tongued, and at one point told a fellow judge that he was a condescending bastard. My notes on our sessions are, at this distance in time, enigmatic. What in the world, for example, was Val Cunningham on about when he said: “I am very interested in Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits and their role in literature”?

English: “The judges that year failed even to choose an outright winner, dividing the prize between Barry Unsworth and Michael Ondaatje; the evening seemed flat, anti-climactic, given over to timidity, compromise, and decorum. But soon after the two winners made their speeches, Ian McEwan, a shortlisted also-ran for the second time, took his publishing entourage and left Guildhall. Geraldine seized eagerly on this gesture. “Is it possible?” she wrote. “Yes! He’s walking out! Before the closing speech and the toast to Poor Salman, Who Can’t Be With Us!…What a relief. The Booker Prize for 1992 will have its scandal after all.”

Lainsbury’s long poem consists of “versions” of the North, or “scenarios” as the individual poems are called. Together, they illustrate what he calls the “psychopathology” of North – North as a dysfunctional state of mind. South, in his view, is a similarly but less evidently dysfunctional state of mind.

An “important point of reference”, Lainsbury says, is William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, which, according to Williams, is “a long poem [written] upon the resemblance between the mind of modern man and a city.” Williams personifies the city: “Paterson lies in the valley under the Passiac Falls . . . He lies on his right side, head near the thunder of the water filling his dreams!” And Williams objectifies his personified city as “modern,” seeing himself as representative of modernity.

Lainsbury doesn’t attempt personification as a structural device, nor much even as a figure. His long poem more resembles Wordsworth’s Prelude, which claims to illustrate “the growth of a poet’s mind” under the influence of natural settings. A major character in Wordsworth’s poem is a personified Nature (a “she” of course – to emphasize nurturing but also to leave room for an overriding “He”), but personification is not used structurally. The structural element in Wordsworth’s Prelude is an early form of behaviorism developed by David Hartley – the human mind as a kind of computer capable of progressive development in which Nature does the programming. Wordsworth spoke of the spirit that rolls through all things, including “the mind of man.” Lainsbury talks of “the forces” that “brought him to a particular place [North], and that have shaped the place where he finds himself.”

Wordsworth’s Nature is, like Williams’ Paterson, ultimately benign, not dysfunctional. The trouble with Wordsworth’s perspective is, as Coleridge pointed out, that he idealizes Nature and portrays the human mind as a passive recipient of Nature’s influence. As Coleridge well knew, the mind could convert the “natural” state of mind into negative states like, in Coleridge’s case, dejection. He wished that Wordsworth had delved into the pre-programming of Hartley’s computer (by the “He”) and/or into the other forces (a non-benign, non-human Nature) that must be involved in the programming.

Lainsbury actually attempts this. He sees North as his own dysfunctional state of mind: “The poem is both more or less than the ‘Idea’ of North . . .; it is, in the limited sense that is always ‘my’ sense, the embodiment of an uncertain North, weak and highly constrained by context.”

Ignoring the abstract and grammatically ambiguous nature of this statement, it sketches a legitimate ambition. Red Lane once described poetry as “introspection” of a special kind – “not from the outside looking in, nor from the inside looking out – more like from the inside looking inside out.” Lane used some analogies: “Surgery for the sake of surgery.” Or: “The hunter hunts in a circle and moves so swiftly that he comes up behind himself and shoots himself in the back – he falls, and cries ‘I’ve been murdered!’ Then he picks up his body, buries it and mourns his death. Then he goes out to hunt down his killer. He hunts in a circle.”

Sounds inefficient, but also very familiar. It’s a paradigm of induction/deduction, common sense, of which a good poem is, in my opinion, along with good prose and good science, an epitome. You arrive at a generalization that seems to explain a series of clear facts and then have that generalization killed by subsequent facts and resurrected in a new form only to be killed again. Gradually the generalization survives longer, and thus becomes more useful. The process fails when the thinker falls Narcissus-like into the infinity mirror of the Egotistical Sublime, into the production of images of himself, into “the still, sad music of senility,” as they said of Wordsworth. Generalizations are contrived to fit the facts, facts perverted to fit generalizations, and the thinking (the poem) gets moralistic and sloppy.

The opposite danger was courted by Coleridge: deliberate experimentation, with drugs, Platonic love, and/or theory, the latter featuring massive generalizations and omnium-gatherum, cherry-picking, “abstruse” research. Lainsbury is, like Coleridge, a self-confessed fucked-up polymath, and he can, like Coleridge, sometimes, especially when a good line or a promising idea pops up, be proud of it. He is also, like Coleridge, an attractive fuckup, candid at times, insightful, and comical in both what he says and does.

Lainsbury’s “Note on Text” for example, which postulates Paterson as a point of reference and describes the “Idea” of North also (Coleridge-like) anticipates and so seems to try to forestall objections. This is comical and also convenient for the reviewer, who doesn’t have to find flaws but has them listed for him. The poet, protesting too much concerning the unusual and therefore suspect features of his poem, accuses himself.

The first note in of this sort in Versions of North states that, “The poem began as a formal exercise in technique, the utilization of postwar cut-up technology to circumscribe the linearity of conventional poetic logic. Over the years I introduced a drafting process which included image-collage as the background to the emerging poem – the process of composition has been captured on video, which can be viewed on YouTube under glainsbu.”

No thanks. I found the poem too wildly associative, large parts of it incomprehensible, though regularly I crossed paths with excellent conceits and memorable phrases. Even though I’m inclined to think well of Lainsbury and to chance ingesting some shit because truffles keep appearing, I’m not inclined ascribe too much disconnectedness on the chance that a gestalt will emerge. I don’t do it in life, beyond occasional doses of wine and Viagra, and I don’t do it in reading and writing.

In fact I like to think that, through this review, I will be for Lainsbury a kind of visitor at Porlock, doing the same thing as the guy who awakened Coleridge from his laudanum-induced hallucinations to enquire as to where he was and thus ended “Kubla Khan” exactly where it should have ended. Or the “friend” who advised Coleridge that he should save the definition of “Imagination, the esemplastic power,” billed as the pivotal chapter of Biographia Literaria, for another book (as if that was ever going to happen), and to shut up about metaphysics and get on with his interesting autopsy of the long dead but still twitching corpses of Southey and Wordsworth.

Second, Lainsbury’s Note explains that “each mounting of the work is constrained by the technology of presentation. The work is first done on eleven-by-seventeen-inch sheets, and ‘reduced’ for chapbook publication to a seven-by-eight-and-a-half-inch page. Trade book publication has necessitated further work to fit the constraints of the page size made available to me by Caitlin Press. Thus my most observant readers will note that line breaks and spacing vary considerably in the various publications of the work over time, reflecting my interest in an improvisatory gestalt.”

In other words, line breaks and spacing play for/against grammar and logic as well as figures of speech, so there isn’t always an exactly correct place where they have to be. This is a legitimate point; it shows at least that Lainsbury, despite the bullshit about “improvisatory gestalt,” understands how lyrical measure works. In fact, I have taken him at his word when I quote him in this review, indicating line breaks and spacings only where they serve as a substitute for punctuation marks. I (as a logic-freak and failed poet) prefer my prosaic version. The fact is that if you happen to hear a lot of noise, as I did, you harbor a suspicion that you are not experiencing poems that are more than a summary of their parts. You suspect that you are experiencing parts, some of which may be noticeably better than the compositional whole. Given the choice—and Lainsbury gives it to us—why shouldn’t I make these attractive parts more attractive by punctuating them conventionally?

Third and finally, the Note lists some of the texts wherein Lainsbury indulged in those “abstruse researches” that tossed up the lines that make up the collage/gestalt. Coleridge’s “sad ghost” (as Eliot had it) appears again. In Biographia, the pivotal chapter on the “esemplastic power” starts with 20 lines from Paradise Lost, moves on to a paragraph (in Latin) from Leibnitz, to four lines of Greek poetry (in Greek), and to a summary of “Des Cartes, speaking as a naturalist and in imitation of Archimedes.” All of this wisdom, Coleridge then tells us, was condensed and epitomized by “the venerable Sage of Koenigsberg [Kant] in his essay on the introduction of negative qualities into philosophy.”

After a couple more pages of names and quotations in the lead-up to the definition of Imagination, with the reader confounded and confronted with having to read thousands of words in many languages in order to find the point, Coleridge’s “friend” mercifully intervenes. Coleridge takes his advice, and “Imagination” is defined in few words, the clearest of which are plagiarized from Schelling. If the reader needs more, Coleridge says, he can get that in an essay on the Supernatural soon to be prefixed to “The Ancient Mariner” – an essay that (you guessed it) was never written.

Coleridge lectured in the same way, and I imagine—having shared with Lainsbury the profession of college teaching—that he has done the same, avalanching students with quotes authored by people with foreign names and with lines from favoured poets. Coleridge’s lectures were popular, though again some of the best insights were plagiarized. The audience gave up on logic, picked up random insights, arrived at their own Gestalt, and went away inspired. This method is justified by us instructors by the fact that most students are smarter than (if not as well informed as) we are.

One of Lainsbury’s more abstruse speculations is that one of the “forces” that creates North, a “large” one, is Aristotelianism, a focus and dependence on reductive logic. It is identified in various ways in the poem: “Greek Abstraction” or “Aristotelian historicism,” or left-hemisphere brain activity (“thank goodness people’s right brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats”), or “the chronic atomization of consciousness.” This force, as mentioned, exists in/comes from the South but is hyperactive/super-obvious/inescapable in the North.

In the course of this atomization, politics and economics are reduced to “the post-Nation-State logic of Capital” and into the “essential Satanism of Commerce” whereby “the old North becomes the New West.” Learning is reduced to “planning and producing customized learning-objects for the One Big College.” Community is experienced mainly in bars, under the influence of booze and drugs. Love is fractured into “dosing” and “contemplation” and talked out in the terms of “the Happiness Project.” “The aesthetic disposition” is shrunk into “the disinterested consumption of all manner of cultural objects for their own sakes,” “deconstructive method” into “the execution of unconscious inclinations,” and poetry into “the solipsistic dead-end of the Romantic lyric.” Of course all of these events happen in the South too, but again are more obvious and affective in the North.

On the physical landscape this state of mind, in the past, manifested itself as the network of ports, forts and interconnecting routes and trails that covered  what Lainsbury calls “beaverland.” Lainsbury lives in one of the forts, telling us that, “Fort St. John is the oldest European-established settlement in present-day British Columbia.” Pelts are no longer so important, but have been replaced by wheat, oil, gas, electricity and lumber. A web of rail lines, highways, transmission lines and pipelines now covers the land.

Presently the “Energetic City” is the BC nexus of the oil/gas boom and is a light-industrial wasteland with plenty of bars and motels and acres of trailers and mobile homes. The country surrounding it is scarred by clear-cuts, “the paraphernalia of oil and gas exploration,” and hydro dams with their festering (flooded without being logged) lakes.

The settlers are described as being exiled or incarcerated. The population of Lainsbury’s favorite bar is representative of “the Gulag:” “our inhabitants include: rig hands in doghouses/whole villages from Cape Breton/one who doesn’t know what a suntan is/the alcoholic driver & the catskinner/recent parolees from federal institutions/economic migrants from dying prairie towns/bars full of sad promiscuous & angry souls/they’re often really fat & their clothes too tight.” They project “the cowboy image: proud, aggressive, competitive, vain, maudlin, controlled and violent,” “living life without benevolence, destroying without malice.” They are “Proudly born & raised/flesh & blood local heroes” and they “gut it out in the corners/Thanatos reasserts himself with a vengeance: love of debauchery.”

Left-brain domination results in right-brain revolt.

While he can only tell us about the psychopathology of his fellow settlers, Lainsbury can show us his own psychopathology in the way he writes and what he says about himself. The perspective is first person mainly but regularly slips into the royal “we” and sometimes from the third and second persons as Lainsbury comically speculates on himself as an object or brings himself into over-cozy proximity to the reader: “are you radioactive, pal? Has you the night sweats & the day sweats, pal? Do you float on a silver stream of impunity?” Even though he sees the Romantic lyric as a dead end, he provides, as an “Intertext,” six such lyrics, and they are largely, indeed, as if to prove his point, dead.

He tells us that he suffers from depression, a condition that came with him to the North. “Taking medication for depression for 20 years allowed him to be productive.” He cannot maintain friendships or a family life: “myself can hardly stand to touch my person to someone else’s.” He chances wild experiments of consciousness — high idealism, maudlin romanticizing and mean-spirited cynicism augmented by booze and (prescription) drugs.

Not even Coleridge indulged in self-justification to the extent of Lainsbury does when he argues: “If one’s ambition is vulgar in its magnitude perhaps one should give oneself over to lying dissolute and melancholy on the ground? To be able, at least, to romanticize one’s situation, even if hopelessly infected with cynicism [is] a sign of mental health, however tenuous.” Thus the reference to the Gulag. It is insulting to suggest a comparison between those who really suffered and those who mainly just imagine they do, but Lainsbury is a troubled and desperate man who, in his weaker moments, likes to see himself as a victim of forces beyond his control. But he is also self-aware enough to treat his histrionic tendencies and outbursts with contempt.

And not even Hamlet indulged in such flights of procrastination: “In the wings struts the hero of sensitivity feeling like he wants to kill people all the time/this excessive, non functional cruelty demands an outlet/distinguishing idleness & work-preparation/job descriptions of an absurd future distracting children for a living/a poetics for depression . . . . Oh, to take leave of the past/gaily to trace/the thin gold of imagination/through a rocky mass of metrical gab/its ascendance measuring the recession of the dreams. . . . To be in all this/a moral lever/to prise open our own/condition: ruthless, savage & rigorous/conquering God & the old life/in a last struggle to attain/the grand style in Art. . . . Then comes the turn; the speaker’s identification becomes literal/ha! Drunk on virility/obsessed with rank/winged indecision/moving in terror from bar to bar/the lector with no method but ethos. . . . How can a man like me be expected to live & work under such conditions? Why cast all thou hast into the fire, of course!”

The attraction of this outburst is its quick-mindedness.

The “we” and “you” in Lainsbury includes not only Lainsbury himself, of course, and the residents of Ft. St. John and North, and the reader, but also “Tanya,” to whom, along with “Ezra” and “the girls,” the book is dedicated. She is described as “the district psychologist” and also as Lainsbury’s “ex-common-law” wife. He avails himself of her services, comically: “It is her job after all to make him feel better/but most of the things he thinks about are of no importance to her: genre as social action/corporate semiosis/an episode of the Lone Ranger [Is this Lainsbury himself?] involving a black widow [a neighbor of African extraction who has lost her husband in a gas explosion?]/hygienic governance & social morbidity/the apogee of the asset bubble/the fluttering of an anxious middle/(also she thinks he is stupid).”

Tanya is an alternative to North, obviously a difficult one. The dedication also features a line from Pound’s Cantos, “if love be not in the house there is nothing.” This could indicate that things are not going well between Tanya and her patient. She refuses the role of earth mother, engaging in “tough love,” yet she shares his take on things and understands his frustration. “So where is this world they are advertising?” she asks as they drive North “through a critique of emerging meaninglessness/an ethnology of death/transcendent bleakness of taiga/Swan Hills Waste Disposal Facility/a station of my Gulag Archipelago.”

Another refuge for Lainsbury is the land itself, physical Nature – trees, animals and land-and sky-scapes—noted in the old Wordsworthian vein as representing and sustaining an older, right-brain state of mind. And then there are the aboriginal peoples – but this, Lainsbury knows, is tricky. Are we saying they are more “natural,” that they haven’t degenerated into right/left-brain dysfunction to the extent that Second, Third, Fourth etc Nations have? Are we accordingly participating in the European idealizing and therefore trivializing of “the Red Man” as a paragon of simple goodness, as Rousseau’s “natural man?” Are we again creating caricatures like Pochahontas, Hiawatha, Chingisgook, Grey Owl, and Tonto in order to salve our consciences for having committed acts of physical and cultural extermination?

Aboriginal people force Whites to deal with what is actually to be done about an unacceptable situation. If you don’t like Aristotelian Capitalism, what do you like? The White traditional way of life (five acres and a cow) is unacceptable and anyway will likely lead us back to where we are; the Aboriginal traditional way of life is even less practical. The northern social worker, teacher, and medical worker goes out to “marginalized” native communities to “help” – to bring modern medical and counseling services and training – taking care (before teaching welding rather than cedar-bark weaving or summoning Medivac rather than the shaman) to pretend to have come out to “learn” – to spout pious remarks about the evils of assimilation and the superiority of Aboriginal medicine, astrology, justice, and community services.

As one of the “sensitive” settlers, Lainsbury sees himself as “inheritor of the truly original inhabitants/of the Americas.” But he knows that this is an attitude that Aboriginal peoples would likely regard as presumptuous and condescending. A tribal council might as an act of good faith adorn the Minister of Indian Affairs with a ceremonial head-dress, but doesn’t want him wearing it around Parliament Hill all the time, especially when stepping up to the microphone to announce yet another stupid policy.

Lainsbury describes “the imaging of Indians as self-perpetuating industry,” and admits that he finds it convincing only when stoned: “a chronic consciousness of crisis/that odd state of soul when the void becomes eloquent/concealing our labours/bringing us all back home to the time before the new Safeway/before satellite dishes disrupted suburban rooflines/to when Dunn Za [Beaver Indian] real people/whose events take place only after being experienced in dreams/their adaptive success dependent on skill & knowledge of individuals [he was stoned out of his brain but knew a good idea when he heard it].

Versions of North illustrates the pace of “Northern development,” its improvisatory, desperate nature, and the onset of the pathology it represents and creates. The poet, like the engineer, bureaucrat and oil-worker, has no time for anything but speed and no energy for anything but improvisation: “what is left/ when armed with only shrunken experiences & subservient languages of banality and despair/but to attempt to stitch together a work consisting entirely of quotations . . . ? So when thinking you are losing your head consider the long pome as feasible & culturally necessary! Or at least as sort of barricade ‘gainst their massive data structures’.”

This is the long poem as filibuster, obstructing Roberts Rules of Order and what Lainsbury regards as the “linearity of conventional poetic logic” in their task of creating banal legislation of both the acknowledged and unacknowledged kinds. I don’t buy the filibuster idea generally, but is a legitimate tactic under certain difficult circumstances and a way to begin resistance. And Lainsbury is inspired by good models of the long poem deriving from Williams and Pound through Olson and Ginsberg.

The first and (in terms of number of references) most important of these models is George Stanley, cited three times: “’this was once a city’ proclaimeth George Stanley to those assembled in the parking lot/‘this plastic rose’ now inscribed in our species-being a moment in the history of capital/a dumping ground for scum/a vanguard machine dragging humanity after it/hungry ghosts everywhere.”

Stanley is the source/confirmation of Lainsbury’s view of capitalism as an oversimplified and therefore polarizing and destructive way of thinking. Stan Persky, in a review of Stanley’s book At Andy’s (set in Terrace/Kitimat), says: “Stanley is one of the few poets I know of who consistently takes capitalism – its social effects and the difficulty of comprehending its dual character of blatant obviousness and invisible workings – as a necessary feature of his subject matter . . . . Stanley’s world is realistic, ordinary, and informed by an understanding of macro-economic causality.” Stanley’s poetry,” Persky goes on, “is capable of overcoming the ‘difficulty’ of talking about the ‘ordinary’ effects of capitalism: “One of the notable features of Stanley’s poetry is that his mind’s processing . . . of the phenomena he encounters . . . is always a possible partial subject matter . . . . The events in his mind frequently interrupt, short-circuit, or, as they say these days, destabilize whatever he’s writing about.”

And yet Stanley is a master of the ballad, the quip, the expressive anecdote and other forms of lyrical logic. His long poems (Lainsbury cites Vancouver, A Poem in particular) contain connected short poems and forego scattered spacing (most lines starting at left margin, some tabbed in the usual consistent indents). They exhibit a “narrative arc” and build a consistent characterization of Stanley as a person with a Zen-like acceptance/understanding arising naturally from his “destabilizing” intellect. You destabilize to achieve stability.

Lainsbury’s “Ghost-Town Elegies,” part 3 of Scenario 3, begins with this advice from Vancouver, Part 8: “And I’ll tell you – it’s no big thing anyway, to be a person, with a Kind of life, yet that’s what people are interested in . . . .” Stanley goes on in that poem to say that, for poetry: “That it be interesting/to others [is] a simple test . . . . Everyone wants to know/what you don’t know, or are afraid to know./There’s no need to make anything up.”

Lainsbury’s other acknowledged influence is Barry McKinnon: “Another key event in the development of a shift in my poetic practice from the short lyric to the long poem was my meeting Barry McKinnon in the fall of 1994; I had recently moved from Vancouver to Terrace, and Barry’s reading at a UNBC literary conference made a significant impression on me; his influence on my practice as a poet and on this particular project are profound.”

Lainsbury’s “line” looks much more like McKinnon’s than Stanley’s, though McKinnon’s has lately tended more to blocks of prose. McKinnon also exhibits North as a dysfunctional state of mind, but that dysfunction is revealed more psychosomatically than psychologically: “city, mind – body.” And there is no progression to insight and understanding, only decay and the desperate hanging-on to original values of family, friendship, love. As a character in his own poems, McKinnon is opposite to Stanley in that he doesn’t theorize and find thereby any sort of “vision:” “I can’t find the grammar machine – make no proposal.” He favors irony and his conclusions are totally un-Zen: “the city hates itself.”

Lainsbury’s third long-poem northern poet – in the sense that he comes north (to Canada) regularly in pursuit of shirt-tail ancestors and the whole history of the alien in “civilization” – is Cecil Giscombe.  Giscombe is merely listed in the “Note on Text,” so I place him last. He is the Wallace Stevens in the group, exploring dictionaries and encyclopedias as well as vast stretches of prairie and northern turf, seeking a language that doesn’t distort the reality of the alien – a language between “linear logic” and romanticizing rhetoric, between what Giscombe calls “reference” and what he calls “metaphor.”

McKinnon can’t or refuses to find the grammar machine. Stanley plays with it, usually in subversive ways, Giscombe studies it and puts it to use, moving fox-like between its two extremes. Lainsbury’s place in the pantheon of long-poem poets of North seems closest to Giscombe’s. But it is unique due to Lainsbury’s tendency to Coleridgean/Poundian “abstruse research,” something not evident in Stanley and McKinnon and pursued in Giscombe only in the more traditional fields of history and cognitive psychology. Lainsbury has a more conventionally academic approach to the psychopathology of Capitalism.

Since psychology is the way by which poetics connects with the other disciplines, Lainsbury, in developing his poetry, may have to go back—as a student if not as a patient or husband—to Tanya. I advise this though I suspect that he doesn’t need my advice. He did dedicate the book to her.

 4271 words November 5, 2011                                                                                                                                                                         

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s way of shamelessly pressing it’s lips to the hindquarters of the Zeitgeist, where cutthroat business dorks are the culture heroes the mass media offers up for envy and emulation. CBC television’s Dragon’s Den is a Japanese-born format now running in 18 countries. The Canadian version features super-aggressive meathead Kevin O’Leary as the beast, Arlene Dickinson as the motherly capitalist, and a changing cast of fungible successful dorks to mouth the in-between slogans, the least objectionable of which was Brett Wilson, who actually went out of his way to help some of the struggling business people who went on the show looking for help and capital.

So nobody misses what all this is about, the CBC has cut all its arts coverage from its mainframe network, and has replaced it with a tidal wave of Harper-friendly glorifications of corporate business and entrepreneurial aggression in what will likely prove a futile attempt the massive cuts to its budget Harper has been waiting for a majority government to perpetrate. Since the CBC is now barely distinguishable from the privately owned television and radio networks in the country, few of its natural supporters are now going to work very hard to prevent the axe from following. What were they thinking???

Instead, in Sidetracked: The Struggle for BC’s Fossils, she does him one better. She tells the truth.

That’s more difficult than it might sound. After all, there are two potential narratives associated with Garnet Fraser’s experiences that more or less write themselves. In the first, you have a classic underdog story, with Dr. Fraser, an engaged but unqualified enthusiast in the field of paleontology, going up against accredited professionals who have an interest in keeping people like him out of their way or at the very least under their control.

In the second, you have a story of greed, envy and betrayal, complete with a helping of heavy-handed government bureaucracy, a proposed $50 million museum in nearby Tumbler Ridge and the ever-present possibility of fame and fortune (particularly rare dinosaur finds can fetch more than $1 million on the open market), that would be ripe for a Hollywood adaptation. Heck, it even comes with a dramatic climax scene involving a helicopter raid by the RCMP.

Lougheed decided to remain faithful to the trail that she’d set out to follow. Yes, she tells Fraser’s story and explores his frustrations, but she also tells the other side of it as well, offering an insight into the perspective of professional paleontologists who often find themselves torn between encouraging amateur participation and trying to minimize the potential damage that those amateurs can do to important finds. She draws out the important themes in the ongoing discussion between amateurs like Fraser and experts like Rich McCrae, the Tumbler Ridge paleontologist who first worked with before eventually working against Fraser’s efforts to participate in the documentation of his find. Equally importantly, she places them in the context of existing regulations surrounding paleontological excavation and the tension between getting it right and potentially losing it forever to erosion and resource exploration.

At its heart, the book is an examination of the relationship between scientists and hobbyists in the field of paleontology, as well as a reflection on the utility of titles like “expert” and “amateur”. On the one hand, paleontologists like McCrae engage in the kind of self-aggrandizing intellectual territorialism that seems to characterize so many of the so-called learned professions. As one of the characters in the book says, “only anthropologists have bigger egos than vertebrate paleontologists.” From this perspective, amateurs are useful only in as much as they’re willing to follow directions and fade into the background when major discoveries are made. It’s not quite exploitation, but it’s hard to avoid feeling like they’re being taken advantage of, particularly when all these committed hobbyists want is a bit of credit for their contributions.

Then again, the recent history of paleontological activity is full of stories of less altruistic amateurs who are more interested in digging something up so they can claim its value, whether it comes in the form of fame or fortune. This can do harm to the science of paleontology, as potentially significant finds are either lost to private collections and other locations that are beyond the reach of science or tainted by the work of people who aren’t willing to take the time that good science demands.

What makes Lougheed’s book so interesting is that it can be understood from both perspectives. Indeed, while the temptation to tilt the table in Dr. Fraser’s direction must have been strong, Lougheed resists it at every turn in the book. Even in her use of language she is meticulously impartial, never once slanting her description of events and interactions with loaded adverbs or adjectives. Instead, she takes a methodical, almost scientific approach to the material, letting the facts speak for themselves. In the end, they do just that.

Sidetracked: The Struggle for BC’s Fossils, by Vivien Lougheed, Creekstone Press, Prince George, BC, 2011, pb. $21, 193 pages.

When Rita Wong’s Forage, published by Nightwood Editions, won the 2008 B.C. Books Award for poetry, I thought that was all right. I can’t remember which good books were ignored by the judging committee that year, but other than Wong’s book, the short list was pretty punk, I thought. The whole business about book prizes has had a deleterious effect on writing and especially on publishing, but still, when you see a short list you do pick a book to cheer for, if only to avoid the rewarding of a real dog. It doesn’t always work: remember the 1999 Giller Prize. Woof!

The cover of Forage is beautifully composed, and it depicts a fearful modern ugliness, a vast hill of discarded computer memory boards and other such refuse. The book takes on perhaps our most serious subject—the connections between political injustices and industrial destruction of the ecosphere. Here is most of the reason for my liking of the book: it is also interesting in formal design. Usually, and sadly, you can depend on the poet who takes on serious political and social issues to do so with literary forms that have been long approved by the bourgeoisie.

Really, the only thing I did not like about the form was the absence of upper case letters and graphemic punctuation. These are the two “advances” that busloads of tyro poets hope will signify their modernity. Nowadays they look like nothing more than they look like the screens on teenagers’ cell phones. Talk about the usual!

Wong works with the page as her unit here. Sometimes it will consist of a square of lower case prose. Sometimes the poem zips around the page like a puppy looking for a warm spot. Sometimes we seem to see what look like short lyrics. There are plenty of those postmodern parentheses beloved of graduate students in English: p a r e n t (h) e t (h) i c a l . There are a few photographs. And then there is the stuff written beside and sometimes beneath the poems. Some of it is done in Chinese written characters. Most of it appears to have been done in the author’s handwriting (the Chinese written characters too?). Turning the book sideways, we may be reading notes about the writing of the poem, or more often quotations from Edward Sapir or Rachel Carson. There are also asterisks and footnotes.

All in all, the earnestness and skill of the work make the book, despite its targets, a pleasure to read. It is the poet’s second volume, and does show a few signs of eager novelty-making. The only one that made me bite my teeth was this one: “she/ tumults through school years”. High school kids used to do that, I remember.

So what is the problem I want to bring attention to? Well, it lies more in an attribution than in a strophe by Ms Wong. What we might call the title poem, “forage, fumage,” takes up two pages, has handwritten phrases down and up the margins, and is followed by three footnotes, the third being this: “It is not mere chance that the more inland provinces such as Quebec, Manitoba, Ontario, and Saskatchewan bear Indian names while the maritime provinces or external coastal zones such as Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, British Columbia and Northwest Territories carry names with European origins. The political economy of conquest and trade can give more detailed answers than philology”. This is identified as a quotation from Marwan Hassan in a book titled Velocities of Zero.

If you Google about you will find quite a few academics named Marwan Hassan, but if you look for the title you will find that it is a book published in 2002 by TSAR Publications. That’s the book-publishing branch of a journal called The South Asian Review, not the University of Pittsburgh magazine of that name but a much more recent Toronto journal for Canadian immigrants from Asia who are interested in literature and social politics. Mr Hassan is described by Google as a fiction writer. His books have been issued by an Ottawa publisher that I must admit was unknown to me. Its name is Common Redpoll Books, and information about it is hard to find, such as the names of other authors it publishes.

Well, to get back to “forage, fumage”. The poem is about the Indian names for North American places, (I am willing to go along with Mr Hassan’s name for the Natives of America) and the non-Indian names that have replaced them. It starts a little wonkily, I think: “from the georgia strait to the florida strait, it sounds so americanned”. I am going to assume that Ms Wong means that the canning was not so much by America as by the USA. Yet, in a poem that is sensitive to place names and their origin, we should expect to hear that Georgia’s strait was named for a British king, and that Florida’s bears a Spanish name. (Ms Wong, at the time of the book’s writing, was dividing her time between Vancouver and Miami.) Anyway, the poem proceeds in an instructive and entertaining way, ending with the aforementioned quotation from Mr Hassan.

That’s what I have trouble with (that and unsureness about Ms Wong’s attitude toward the passage quoted). Let me start with its beginning. I do not believe that it is enough to say “it is not mere chance.” I have found that when people say that they are not well prepared to say what it is if it is not mere chance. Sometimes that phrase is used by conspiracy theorists. Does Mr Hassan suggest that a conspiracy is responsible for the naming of the Canadian provinces? He does seem to suggest that if you have a province on the edge of the ocean, chances are that it will have a European name. I would still like to have a better argument than that.

But let’s have a look at those province names. Three of the provinces that are called “more inland” by Mr Hassan have shorelines on the ocean, these being Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba. On the other hand, Alberta, one of our two landlocked provinces, was named after a member of the British royal family, just as the Strait of Georgia was. That naming was not done by chance, I agree; it was done by Princess Louise Alberta’s husband, who was the Governor General of Canada.

Of course, wherever the European sailors and politicians went they named things after what they knew back home. It was a way of fending off the fear of the unknown. That’s why, when they saw a bird that was a bit red up front they called it a “robin,” though it did not otherwise resemble the English bird. For another example, check out the Australian “salmon” or “magpie.” Look at early European paintings of the St Lawrence valley and notice the ancient European trees growing along the river’s banks.

To get personal for a while, I might report that I grew up in the interior of British Columbia, mostly in the Okanagan Valley. When I was a boy that valley was full of fruit trees, by the way, though a few feet from the trees you would find sagebrush, cactuses and tumbleweeds. I grew up surrounded by Indian names, some of them attached to places, some of them to human beings, though the ones attached to human beings were often European. So I was born in Penticton, and spent a lot of my childhood in Osoyoos, Kaleden, Kelowna, Tonasket, Omak, Wenatchee and Keremeos.

Well, it is true that I was a boy in a “maritime province,” but I was 400 road kilometers from the coast. Maybe that coastline was peppered with the colonists’ christenings. But wait—when I moved to the coast I had to remember how to spell Coquitlam, Nanaimo, Qualicum, Tsawwassen and Squamish, not to mention Tacoma, Tillamook and Chehalis. I am betting that as a fellow growing up in British Columbia I knew a lot more Indian names than I would have growing up in Ontario, that “more inland” province.

You will notice that I am not calling down Rita Wong’s book or even her poem. I am just reporting a snag in my reading, and paying attention to an idea I picked up long ago as a young poet trying to learn—that a poem is not a jewel to be appraised by a jeweler, as I was instructed by my New Critics-reading English 101 professor, but rather the field to be entered by readers who are interested in learning more by interlocution. There is so much curiosity and attention and brain in Rita Wong’s forage, that you really do want to get in on the conversation and that way see where she will alight next.

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1486 w.  October 30, 2011