May 18, 2010

Deeper Withinness, and other thoughts on You Are Not a Gadget

Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget is incredibly provocative, and reviewers seem to be ripping it to pieces for sport. Not because it’s a bad book necessarily, or that Lanier’s ideas are particularly faulty, but because Lanier is critiqueing something the rest of us take for granted. And even if Lanier’s book was bad or his ideas were faulty, his book would still be worthwhile. It doesn’t necessarily have to be read as a polemic, as an assault on a whole way of life. Lanier could be 100% wrong the entire way through (and I’m certainly not one to determine whether he is or not) but I dare you to read this book and not learn something new. To not come away with questions you’d never considered before.

What I learned/considered: Lanier’s ties to the internet go back thirty years, and he takes great pains to point out that the internet could have developed any number of ways. That it developed the way it did because of decisions that people made for various reasons, some of them misguided, naive or ill-intentioned. That we overestimate the capabilities of computers and compromise ourselves in order to get along with them as closely as we do. That social media has much the same effect– in order to interact with Facebook, we reduce ourselves to catagories, keywords, standardized versions of ourselves. Twitter demands we communicate in short bursts of nothing. This is self-effacing, we’re playing into the hands of marketers. Content has become devalued by its treatment in the online world. Jonathan Coulton is an anomaly. Having finance in the hands of computer scientists as opposed to those who understand economics is a recipe for disaster. Remix culture sucks. With all the amazing advances in computer capability and open culture, all we have to show for it is LINUX and Wikipedia, both of which are just versions of things that came before.

Hive culture has come at a cost– we’ve killed journalism and music. Great art is not being made, rather we’re rehashing old art and doing it badly. We’re babbling about television recaps, writing blog entries without thought and posting idiotic movies on youtube. Lanier doesn’t reference literature. I’m not sure if this was a deliberate omission– could it be that books will fare better in this culture than other media? And I’m not talking about plagiarism– in most instances, I think there is a pretty clear distinction between plagiarism and “mixing” (and Opal Mehta is the former, FYI). But in the poetry I’ve read lately, by Michael Lista, PK Page and Julie Holbrook, I’ve seen some pretty beautiful things made out of recycle material. Perhaps poetry in particular lends itself to this? I’m not sure that a remixed novel wouldn’t totally suck. Or is the poetic trend towards this sort of thing a kind of omen? Is this what Lanier is talking about. The future as a place where originality goes to die?

And then there are literary blogs, or book blogs. Lanier doesn’t mention these either (perhaps he doesn’t read a lot of fiction? Though his interests are far-reaching. He is obsessed with cephalopods and ouds). I know I spend a lot of my time here rehashing other people’s ideas, or simply pasting them down as is. Is this pursuit any more worthwhile than episode recaps of So You Think You Can Dance?

The other day, Charlotte Ashley asked “Are bloggers/twitterers just unpaid publicity staff? What do we “get” out of this relationship?” So now what I’m thinking about has nothing to do with Jaron Lanier anymore, but it sort of does. I think this is the kind of question he’d want me to be thinking about. Why do I write a book blog? First, because it’s made me smarter. I am a much better reader than I was five years ago, and I have learned so much from the readers who’ve joined me in this conversation. Second, because although I am pushing goods here (books), those goods are culture, and there’s something a bit more noble about that than me pushing, say, lipstick (as long as I’m discerning, because, frankly, some books are lipstick). Because when I find a book that’s good, I can help nudge it farther out into the world. I get to be useful, and that’s a fine thing. And because even if nobody ever read this blog, it allows me to engage with the books I read (which is all too important when one reads too quickly like I do). Writing book reviews helps to figure out what I really read, and I really think about it. It makes reading a book a much deeper experience. Because books are worth talking about. Blogging about books, like talking about books, takes us deeper within them.

Deeper withinness being the whole point of virtual reality (which Jaron Lanier invented) so maybe he’d be on board afterall.

May 18, 2010

Figurative Devouring Only

Today we received in the post the latest from Rebecca Rosenblum. Her chapbook Road Trips has just been published by Frog Hollow Press, and is so incredibly gorgeous. The pages are a joy to caress, the endpapers are thick, fibrous and lovely, and I love the images inside which remind me of lino-cuts. And then there are her stories– I’ve read one before (though I imagine it’s changed since then) and the other will be new. How wonderful! This is one book the baby will not be permitted to eat. Figurative devouring only.

May 18, 2010

Literary Gala Raising Funds for Motherhood Research and Activism

With readings by Miriam Toews, Di Brandt, Margaret Christakos, Afua Cooper, Rishma Dunlop, Diane Flacks, Susan Glickman, Marni Jackson, M. Nourbese Philip, Althea Prince, Jane Satterfield, and Priscila Uppal

In support of the newly established Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI).

Friday, May 21, 2010
7 pm to 10:30 pm
Oakham House
Ryerson University
63 Gould Street
Toronto, Ontario

When Andrea O’Reilly founded The Association for Research on Mothering (ARM), the world’s first feminist research association for the study of motherhood, she was amazed by the enthusiastic response she got. “We started in 1998 at York University, and over the years our association grew to have more than 500 members from two dozen countries, and ARM’s work included an academic journal and press,” says Dr. O’Reilly. “ARM recently moved out of the university and has been reborn as Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI), an independent non-profit organization. Its focus remains feminist scholarship, activism, and community involvement concerning the issues of mothering and motherhood.”

Tickets are $65 per person and available at the website, or at the door.

May 17, 2010

Dispatches from another dimension

“Without question Tess was getting bigger and more complicated every day. But she was also growing her story. Growing a life that acquires its own description. Babies have only a handful of verbs. They eat, shit, cry, spit up, sleep, smile and wiggle. As a new parent, you live inside those few verbs with your child for the first year. In a sense, that’s part of the disorientation on top of sleep deprivation and all the other usual suspects. Some mornings I’d catch myself sitting with Tess and shaking the rattle, as I had the day before, and the day before that, or listening to her cry, or to her feed, and wonder where the hell all my verbs had gone. Could somebody open a window in there?

This might ultimately explain why parents are so punishing with their anecdotes. We are ecstatic, as if thawed from a long cryogenic sleep, with each rejuvenating action taken by our kids, no matter how banal. Like tourists with too many holiday slides, we prattle on to bored strangers, celebrating our return from new frontiers. ‘My god,” we say, ‘you should have seen the baby and the thing he did with the garden hose the other day! And this morning he made a brand new sound, sort of like he said, ‘multifaceted’ but, thing is, we don’t even use that word around the house, do we hon?’ Parents– all of us– send dispatches from another dimension where babies watching dogs, or futzing with garden hoses, is something blockbuster. And it is. Like, wow.

Or maybe you just had to be there.”

–from C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark by Ryan Knighton (and my review is here).

May 16, 2010

What Becomes by A.L. Kennedy

I’ve been devouring short story collections lately, one story after another without even a pause for breath in between. And then I read “What Becomes”, the first story in A.L. Kennedy’s new short story collection of the same name, and I had to put the book down for a while. The story, about a man who’s the only person in the audience at a small movie theatre, who’s been waiting for the film to start and then when it starts, it has no sound– the story was so brutally, heartbreakingly sad that I just needed a rest before I could handle another. Which was good intuition on my part, because the stories in Kennedy’s collection are unrelentingly bleak.

And yet, would it surprise you that the collection was also hysterically funny? In particular, the passage about gerbil installation: “You’ve had some right cowboys in here… Any chance of a cuppa once I’m done?” Kennedy’s characters are usually profoundly lonely, with a wry outlook, sharp intelligence and sense of humour that makes the loneliness even more tragic, because it’s clear how much they’re aware of their disconnect, that they’d probably make for fairly good company. So tragic yes, but still funny. Bleak plus hilarious does make for a vision that is quite singular.

In the title story, the man in the movie theatre has left a troubled marriage in which so much has gone unsaid, in which the right things have never been offered at quite the right time. “Edinburgh” is the story of a man who owns an organic fruit and veg shop (“Sell organic food and imitation bacon, and suddenly folk thought you’d tolerate anything.”). He falls for a customer, and their love story is a trick of tenses– perhaps a used-to-be, a could-have-been, a never-to-have-been, or the still purely hypothetical. Regardless, it doesn’t end happy. “Saturday Teatime” the story of a woman’s failed attempts to clear her mind in a flotation tank (which is more like a “Flotation Damp-Cupboard”). “Confectioner’s Gold” the story of a couple who’ve lost everything in the recent economic collapse. “Whole Family With Young Children Devastated” is about a character who peers too much into the heartbreak of others, when she can barely help herself. In “As God Made Us”, a group of young with various physical impairments are asked to leave a swimming pool because they’re upsetting nearby children. “Sympathy” is a graphic one-night-stand in a hotel room, delivered solely with dialogue.

There is not a story among these that doesn’t pack a solid punch. Kennedy’s atmosphere is so vivid, her characters’ interior voices so deeply authentic, and though her prose doesn’t call attention itself, it is as perfect as the voices are. Her stories are constructed of details, right down to the grouting between the tiles on the floor, and the things her characters know, trivia netted or wisdom earned– the characters become people by this. Kennedy’s first-person narrators are so convincing that they must be the voice of the author herself, and yet the voices are impossibly various, so of course they’re not. And this is truly the mark of a stunning fiction writer, that what’s imagined is made so vividly real.

May 16, 2010

The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton

To write about Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal in 350 words was one of the most demanding and complex writerly tasks I have ever undertaken, and my review of the novel appears on the April 2010 of Quill & Quire (available here online). The first novel by the precocious Catton, The Rehearsal is difficult, devourable, innovative, frustrating, and fascinating. I didn’t love it, but I don’t think it even wanted me to, and it’s a stunning novel in particular for being written in an time in which so many stories are the same. Truly, this is something different. And though the parallels are by no means straightforward, and I don’t think liking one is a recommendation for the other, The Rehearsal is more like The Westing Game than any other novel I’ve read as an adult. Trying to get it all straight, however– especially in 350 words– was completely exhausting, and my mind is shutting down now just considering it again.

So I’ll let others try. Stephany Aulenback recommends it at Crooked House. The Rehearsal is the May Book Club selection at Eye Weekly. And a rave review in The Toronto Star.

May 14, 2010

On BookCamp Toronto

I’m looking forward to being part of the Canada Reads session tomorrow at BookCamp Toronto at 2:00. Hope to see (and hear from!) some of you there to talk about the success of CBC’s Canada Reads program and the exciting possibilities for its future.

May 14, 2010

Rebecca Rosenblum's wonderful new website

My friend Rebecca Rosenblum has a wonderful new website, (which my husband made for her!). You should take a trip over and welcome Rebecca to her new home. Congratulations to Rebecca and Stuart!

May 13, 2010

C'mon Papa by Ryan Knighton

There is no better metaphor than blindness to describe new parenthood. Nobody knows what they’re getting into, nobody ever really sees the baby properly in the ultrasound, nobody expects what will happen when the baby arrives. Even those of us blessed with good vision have had trouble recognizing our newborns once they’re out in the world. And, um, even those of us with good vision have stuffed soothers into eye sockets and smashed fragile skulls into door frames. Parenthood is the kind of thing you have to pick up on the job, and there’s plenty of stumbling along the way.

All this is to underline the universality of Ryan Knighton’s experience as outlined in his memoir C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark. But of course to consider blindness as a metaphor is only part of the story. Knighton has been losing his vision since being diagnosed with a dengerative eye condition at 18, and he is now blind. What vision he has left has enabled him to see his daughter only in glimpses, as a blur. His story of fatherhood and blindness considers little details the rest of us take for granted– venturing out with the baby carrier when you can’t see where you’re going (though he should know that many of us have also walked around with our children facing out and covered in puke, and not realized it), how to find a silent toddler who has toddled away, how to change a diaper when you’re guided by touch, how to move around in the dark so the light doesn’t wake the baby (and it is perhaps here only that Knighton would have an advantage).

Knighton writes about life with a newborn better than any other parent-memoirist I’ve encountered. (The horror! The horror! Fear of colic! Fact of gas!) This might be because he’s the first father parent-memoirist I’ve ever encountered– I think most mothers get too lost in the murky swim of things to remember it all as pointedly as Knighton does, and even if they do, those memories fall victim to amnesia. What he gets really well, however, is how sound factors into early parenthood: the incessant newborn cries, the claustrophobia of being stuck in a car with a shrieking infant, that eerie silence once the baby is asleep and all ears are tuned listening to… nothing. Or was that a rustle? And oh shit, the baby’s up again. You go.

And did you know that baby monitors were invented out of the paranoia of the Lindbergh baby case? Um, and that if your baby woke up you’d probably hear it anyway, even without an electronic device?

Knighton’s book has a bit of the “There are the notes./ Now where is the money?” about it, which is refreshingly honest and illuminating. He describes the pressure to write, to produce, in order to support his family, which is probably common of most fathers and not something mothers would experience to the same extent. Because “Provider” is the one role that is defined for a father, the one job for which he’s not just a bystander. Knighton’s helplessness in supporting his wife in other tasks would not be limited just to a blind man– during pregnancy, labour and the newborn days, fathers are very much outside of the experience no matter how much they’re supportive, and Knighton does a fine job of describing what that helplessness feels like. So he does what he can do– he writes and writes.

Ryan Knighton belongs to that generation that believes it invented parenting (though it kind of did, grammatically speaking. was “parent” even a verb before that?) but as a father and as a blind man, he has a unique perspective to add to the mommy/daddy canon. His book is hilarious and beautiful, and a testament to love and to family.

May 12, 2010

So what is to be done with phone boxes

From “The Person in the Phone Booth” by David Trotter. London Review of Books 32.2:

“So what is to be done with phone boxes? Or, increasingly, without them? Some will no doubt survive, merged imperceptibly into the general fuzz of urban information. Others may enjoy an afterlife as tourist attraction, temporary internet office or excuse for performance art. The rest will vanish. But the question these cubicles have posed for more than a century is as pertinent now as it ever was. How are we to go on being private in public? The lesson to be learned from the history of the phone box is that the construction of privacy in public by physical rather than social and cultural means always tends to excess. The physical structure (box, booth or kiosk) brought about experiences which, although they did not concern telecommunication, became indelibly associated with it. The lesson to be learned from the representation of the phone box in folk memory, and in literature and film, is that we remember the piss and the phlegm, and the hauntedness. There is knowledge in that remembering, knowledge we wouldn’t otherwise have, of what ordinary coexistence in dense populations might actually amount to. We’ll miss out on a lot of inadvertency, both good and bad, if we give up constructing privacy in public by physical means. We may find ourselves in a world in which the boundary between public and private is either non-existent or policed by surveillance and legal constraint. That doesn’t sound to me like much of an improvement on those anxious, savoury minutes spent locked and lit up in the toxic aquarium.”