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                                                                                                                                                                         

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

Theresa Kishkan is the sort of human being I’ve spent my life avoiding. It’s not out of any particular dislike, although female poets who wear long dresses and use the Latin words for plants have never been among my favourite fellow humans.  It’s more the way that cats avoid dogs, and vice versa: a fundamental disagreement about the way the world works.

Then there’s her husband, John Pass, also a poet. I’ve long found his admittedly-skilled work incomprehensible –no, wait, the right word is inconsequential—in the same cats-versus-dogs way. He’s a walking perennial garden, where I can’t look at a plot of land, however small, without trying to figure out what you’d need to do to grow tomatoes.

So when Kishkan’s publisher sent me her Mnemonic: a book of trees and I opened the package and saw what it was, it was like a book rocketed in from Mars, even with the highly complimentary blurb from Terry Glavin, a writer I both respect and like. I let the book sit for a couple of days, hoping the Martians would decide it was all a mistake and take it back. Then I ran two tests on it, both of which you might find strange, but which are fairly characteristic of the way I see the world. First I checked the bibliography to see if Wendel Berry was listed anywhere. (I don’t have to explain that, do I?) Then I read the chapter on pine trees, which took a while to locate because  Kishkan uses the Latin term for pines. The test here was to see if she’d noticed that most of the pines in British Columbia were now dead.

She passed both tests. No Wendel Berry, the world’s most pompous, humourless, given-to-sinus-headache-inducing-homilies nature writer. Even better, Kishkan’s chapter on pines was fully cognizant of the pine-beetle infestation, although for her it was more a sensory tragedy than the ecological and human calamity I see it as. But it was also pretty interesting.

Anyway, I read the whole book. It’s a book with some faults, and I don’t just mean the bumptious overuse of  Latin or the use of the term “trembling aspens” over “stinking poplars,” which where I come from are trees with so much tannic acid in them they repel bugs, and make excellent chopsticks, neither of which uses Kishkan’s sensory array is equipped to register.

But the truth is, her sensory array is both complicated and profoundly educated, and if you can get over the rhetorical pomp and the sometimes insight-arresting sensitivity, there is an expressive richness to this book that’s quite a lot more than simply charming.

One gets the sense of a woman who wasn’t ever quite certain she was beautiful—and still isn’t sure—but has made a life filled with beauty and the determination to perceive the beautiful. The book’s most compelling chapter is Arbutus menziesii, ostensibly on the subject of the Pacific Arbutus which inhabit the dryer niches of the Northwest coast, but is anchored charmingly around passages from Cennino D’Andrea Cennini’s The Craftsman’s Handbook (written somewhere around 1437), which offers advice about how to construct an oil painting but also offers some fairly hilarious advice about women’s cosmetics. But what the chapter actually provides is a remarkably subtle meditation by Kishkan about her own body and it’s intermittent brushes with beauty, most of which are recorded through the eyes of others. Across the chapter she is by turn candid and indirect, often at the same time, and once you settle into the realization she’s not trying to convince you that she’s a great beauty insufficiently acclaimed, you’re able to relax into what she is offering you: a rare glimpse into a complicated and intelligent woman’s mind travelling at very high velocities, and in pursuit of startling verities.

I found myself spending an inordinate amount of time with the book, reading, and then rereading, usually on a search for some remark or reference glossed over and then evoked in a later passage of the book. A moment ago, I went back to the chapter on pines, most of which is taken up by a project to make a basket out of pine needles. But within a two page stretch, there’s a clinical description of how the pine beetles kill a tree; depictions of several locations where the devastation is extreme; some competent travel writing, and this:

I want to look at the crafts at the Big Sky gas station at Skeetchestn, so we pull in. there are some pieces of jewelry in a glass case and a few baskets, some of birchbark with coloured quill or imbrication work, and a couple of small pine-needle baskets. They aren’t as fine as some I’ve seen, but they give me hope. I imagine them as the work of girls learning from older women, their fingers learning about tension and scale. I’d like to ask to have a closer look at them, but the two women at work in the store are swaying to Patsy Cline, one of them holding the arms of the other, laughing about something one of them has said in a very low voice. No one notices me, examining the baskets intently; no one offers to open the case. I don’t want to interrupt an intimate moment as the women fall to pieces with Patsy, so I leave.

Readers shouldn’t mistake Mnemonic for a manual for the cultivation of trees, or even for their appreciation, although Kishkan’s appreciation for trees can be something to behold. The trees are there because they’re an important part of Kishkan’s sensorium. But the real subject is the sensorium itself, and the degree to which this one has become educated. Since it’s a pretty damned snazzy one, entering it is more than worth your attention.

Every year at this time, around the beginning of the “teaching season” (which more or less coincides with the opening of the football and hockey seasons), I sit down and read the current buzz-generating book about education. Okay, sometimes the book isn’t generating much buzz and is written in plodding academic prose, but I read it anyway. It’s my way of annually re-thinking what I think about education before I walk into a classroom right after Labour Day and start teaching. This year’s book is the pseudonymous Professor X’s In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, a lively if despairing account of teaching and learning in the Gorkyan lower depths of the North American post-secondary education system. Its prose is neither sluggish nor obscure, and the book is definitely generating some buzz because it challenges a prominent shibboleth of the American Dream, namely, that “college is for everyone.”

Although the author maintains his anonymity (mainly, he says, because he doesn’t want to get fired from his part-time teaching job), we learn quite a bit about Professor X in the course of his tale. He’s middle-aged (early 50s), lives in the exurbs somewhere on the U.S. east coast, married with kids, has a full-time not very exciting day job somewhere in government and, on top of all that, teaches English composition and literature a couple of nights a week as a part-time “adjunct” college instructor. Prof X, who once aspired to a literary career, accidentally fell into teaching as a result of a disastrous home ownership decision he made early in the previous decade that left him with more mortgage than money to pay for it. He may resemble the description he offers of the stereotypical part-time instructor: “mild mannered, we adjunct professors, in our eyeglasses and our corduroy jackets, our bald heads and trimmed beards.”

Portrait of the adjunct prof as a middle-aged drudge apart, he sees his cog-like function in the post-secondary education system as carrying out “the dirty work that no one else wants to do, the wrenching, draining, sorrowful business of teaching and failing the unprepared who often don’t even know they are unprepared.” I’ll come back to those “unprepared” students in a moment.

The first thing to say about Prof X’s book, which grew out of a hot-button-pushing essay in Atlantic magazine a couple of years ago, is that despite its grim news it’s a thoroughly fun read. Anyone who’s ever worked even briefly inside a classroom will recognize the accuracy of Prof X’s vignettes of teaching, his encounters with students, and his pondering of the mysteries of reading and writing. Those who haven’t taught will learn something interesting about contemporary education in this frontline report from the ivory tower, or at least its basement. On its journey from magazine article to book, as critic Dwight Garner notes, “It’s morphed into something new. The author hasn’t greatly expanded his argument, but he’s turned the book into more of a memoir. It’s a sad, haunted tale that zeroes in on all the things that send people into therapy (or memoir writing): money, class, failure and real estate.” (Dwight Garner, “An Academic Hit Man Brings More Bad News,” New York Times, Apr. 5, 2011.)

I like the book better than the headline-grabbing original essay. The book version is ruminative, and provides a deeper and more humane picture of both the melancholy narrator and the classrooms he inhabits. Despite his laments about his thwarted literary ambitions and failed novels, Prof X writes pretty good prose. I prefer the nuts and bolts chapters – those where he tries to explain to students what writing is about, or imagines the lonely blue glow of a nighttime classroom window seen from the highway, or wrestles with the temptations of “grade inflation” in a culture that is reluctant to admit that one student may be better than another – to the passages where he’s making his case. The “sad, haunted tale” rings truer than the argument about what to do with college education.

Still, much of the book’s polemics are also accurate. Prof X’s theme about the plight of adjunct part-time teachers is right on the mark. The practice of using adjuncts is now ubiquitous in American education. The adjuncts are woefully underpaid, have almost no benefits, and tend to be isolated from their teaching peers. The situation is not only grossly unfair to them, but also to their students who should be instructed by teachers who have a clear contractual commitment to the institution. At the university where I teach, a strong faculty union successfully argued for the prompt “regularization” of teachers once they get beyond the initial “probationary” stage, and adjunct teaching has been kept to a minimum. Avoiding a situation where lots of adjuncts are doing all the donkey work clearly makes for a more cohesive institution, as well as improving team morale.

Prof X is also largely right about the plight of the students. Too many of them end up with enormous educational debts that they’re going to have difficulty paying off, and the situation has only gotten worse in the last decade, as universities and colleges jacked up tuition fees while cash-strapped state governments in the U.S. reduced college funding. Fees currently run from $10,000 a year-and-rising at state universities to over $50,000 annually at the “prestige” schools. (They’re slightly lower in Canada, but only slightly.) It’s also the case that significant percentages of entering college students – who have bought into the drumbeat message that everyone must go to college – don’t complete a degree or certificate. In some ways, they’re the victims of false advertising, but the problem of who should be in university and for what purposes runs much deeper than that.

At this point Prof X turns to the argument that not everybody belongs in college. The components of the case for shrinking university and college enrollments include the claim that a) many students are in various ways “unprepared” to do university level work, and b) in any case, given the jobs they’re trying to get, they don’t need to learn the things Prof X and his colleagues are trying to teach them. Finally, c) the suggestion is that these students would be better off with simple, straightforward vocational training. Usually this line of thinking is associated with various rightwing thinkers and publicists (in Canada, for example, this is the argument made by conservative Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente).

But Prof X isn’t, as far as I can tell, a right-winger, nor is he an ideologue of the Margaret Wente type. Rather, he’s simply a beleagured guy who, it turns out, loves teaching, and is facing a bewildering situation. If the colleges where he teaches follow his advice and bar the door to unprepared and unlikely-to-ever-be-prepared students, he’ll be out of a job. If  they keep admitting warm bodies for a variety of bad (and occasional good) reasons, Prof X is doomed to a Sisyphus-like eternity where he’s forever reading student essays in which “the more complex skills, the synthesis of arguments and the development of a thesis, are simply beyond some of my students at this stage of their academic development. Some are poor readers. Some cannot read a journal article – or even a People article – and summarize the author’s stance. An alarming number of my students have trouble Finding the Main Idea.” What’s more, as Prof X notes in a chapter about “remediation,” or teaching students what they should have learned years ago, not all the ivory tower’s teachers or all its power point presentations can bring such students back up to speed.

So, from Prof X’s point of view at the bottom of the heap, the only thing to do, if we’re to be honest about it, is to let a lot of potential students know that college is not for them, but, hey, we’ve got a nice practical vocational program available here that will let them become welders, or dental assistants, or sheriff’s clerks. Professor X’s Basement is mercifully free of high falutin’ theorizing about education and society. But maybe it’s a bit too estranged from the bigger picture. Drum-roll and a very small amount of bigger picture theorizing to follow:

First, I’d ask a practical question. Just what percentage of students are we wringing our hands about here? Prof X is talking about students who are clearly failing or about to go under for the third time. I’ve been teaching first and second year university students for many years (admittedly, as a full-time faculty member teaching mostly in daylight) and I haven’t met a lot of the kind of students who constitute the majority of Prof X’s classes. Maybe five per cent of my students fit Professor X’s description. My students may not be geniuses, but they’re able to write average-to-good essays a lot of the time, and university seems to be the right place at the right time for most of them. I don’t want to overdo this contrast-and-compare between Prof X’s students and mine, but the difference is real, so the bigger picture may not be as grim as it appears from his sub-basement. That’s the sliver of good news.

Prof X doesn’t have a lot of time, given his situation, to muse about what colleges and universities are for, and who should be in them. So, I’m not blaming him for offering no more than a passing glance at other possibilities. I’m blaming the people who have turned post-secondary institutions into mere job-training factories in the last 30 years. They’ve been so successful in promoting colleges as purely high-class vocational schools (with lots of rhetoric about Information Technology, “excellence,” and “knowledge-based” societies) that they’ve almost made the citizenry forget that schools could be something other than factories.

It’s possible to imagine and want a society that helps create active citizens, fosters the development of cultured people, and encourages critical thinking. Colleges and universities should be among the institutions that have such a mission at their core, and not solely a jobs training purpose. Given the cultural context in which we live (a baffling array of shiny ramped-up tech devices and dumbed-down content that most people access on those gadgets) we’ve almost forgotten that full-fledged citizens, cultured human beings, and critical thinkers are even desirable figures in our picture of democratic societies. I won’t ramble on about this “bigger picture” because it’s such a long story that it’s better to make it short, given today’s truncated attention spans.

A second practical question, even if we aspire to universities for citizens, culture and thought (as well as professional training for occupations), is, What percentage of the population in a democratic society do we want educated? The right-wing college-is-not-for-everyone crowd loudly bemoans the wildly increasing numbers of students at the gates. It’s true that there has been educational democratization since the end of World War II. When I went to university in British Columbia in the ‘60s, only 7 per cent of 18-24-year-olds attended post secondary institutions. A half-century later, the figure is about 25 per cent (although if you add in various training and vocational post-sec programs, the number moves up to 35-40 per cent). The point is, however, that only 1 out of 4 18-to-24-year-olds is in university and 3 out of 4 are not. The defenders of educational elitism in democratic societies need not fear that the educated class will be much more than an elite anytime in the near future. Further, given that arts and science students are less than 10 per cent of the student body these days (the largest group of students is in business training) that means that among the 25 per cent in university, only a small minority of that number is obtaining a general education that resembles the picture of citizens and cultured adults I’ve sketched. Thus, I’m less enthused than some others about telling young people that college isn’t for them.

I’m probably as gloomy about the big picture as Prof X is about his lonely evening classes. It’s true that serious book reading is in decline, or as Prof X puts it, “For my students, reading is just another thing that they happen not to be into, the way some people aren’t into scrapbooking or Pilates or watching Lost.” It’s also true that fewer young people than 25 years ago are aware of being citizens or interested in culture, and that little in present capitalist entertainment encourages them to think otherwise. Although I fear we’re losing the battle, the college classroom remains one of the redoubts of resistance to ignorance and social amnesia. Once the teaching season got underway this year, I was among the happy few ready to take the field. As for Professor X, our underground man, his engaging Basement book gets better than a passing grade, and its sales are no doubt helping to pay off his burdensome mortgage.  

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Vancouver, September 9, 2011

I use the term “wilderness of nuance” in several senses, one of them self-inflicted.  I read the book on a Kobo, and can cite the passage only as 39 percent of the way through the book, or 5-7 of 11, given that Kobo, like other electronic readers, doesn’t observe pagination in any meaningful way, and you really can’t scroll back fast enough to avoid getting disoriented when you read a passage and think “what the fuck did that mean?” and try to establish some sort of context by flipping back a few pages and getting your bearings.

The other, more damning sense in which The Sentimentalists is a “wilderness of nuance” is that it is loaded with the over-the-top strain of emotionalized malarkey that conventional novels appear to have descended to in order to be, well, prize-winning.

I could cite a thousand passages from the book, and most of them would have properties like the one above: each is an interiorization of an external phenomenon—in the above specific instance, the narrator’s mother is responding to the removal of the narrator’s father’s half-built boat, which had been gathering cobwebs in a barn under the control of the mother for some years. Such specific details are usually very hard to liberate from the extravagant emotional speculations that are the spine of the narrative.

Take this one, which is, as far as I can tell, a description of a supermarket.

Then I’d stop at the grocery store, even though we never seemed to need anything. I liked the way that everything was so clean in there, and lit up as if from the inside, so that, though of course cluttered with many bright objects, it always appeared quite bare. Also, I liked the way that you could drift around in there with the other shoppers, in slow patterns, like birds, listening together to the constant hum of the music on the radio, which we hardly heard. Until, that is, a voice, in an authoritative burst, would interrupt to inspire within us a shared desire, which otherwise we could not have identified to be our own. I never came home empty-handed. (7-4 of 7)

At the risk of being pedantic, I ‘ll describe what’s happening here outside the system the novel is operating from:  These are the words of a young woman living with a crippled elderly man and a generally-drunk dying man in his 60s, so it seems logical to suppose that she does the grocery shopping. But never mind that. There’s the fatuous description of a supermarket, which are usually overlit, with high ceilings that give an artificial sense of airy, bright space. She thinks the Musak, which most alert persons understand all too well is corporately selected to be a soothing but not particularly intrusive incitement to shop, is a radio station. Then she describes the occasional announcements of products on sale that “inspire within us a shared desire” etc…

What bewilders me about this is the characteristic elevation of everything, even something as banal and contrived as a supermarket environment, which, in the logic of contemporary novelistic description, becomes an enchanted palace, into which the narrator is breathlessly tumbling, off the cosmic turnip truck of her um, will-to-emotionalize. Predictably, here she tumbles off holding a bottle of Dijon mustard “the voice” enticed her to buy, not the bright yellow hotdog mustard that apparently wasn’t on sale.

This is evidently the sort of human experience of the world that chain book buyers have decided that novels should provide to readers, and it was produced here by the specialized array of writing skills that the recent Giller Jury likewise deemed prize-worthy.

I don’t get it. I understand it well enough as what novelists now do, but I don’t see its artistic or social utility, not, at least as something worth sequestering in an art-form that once enjoyed vast ranges of expression and utility.

Skibsrud is what has come to be called a Creative Writing Mechanic. She has an MA from Montreal’s Concordia University’s creative writing program and The Sentimentalists was, as a matter of fact, her MA thesis, although one assumes it has since been extensively edited, even if there’s considerable evidence that it hasn’t been edited very carefully. I don’t know what sort of people taught her to write this way, but clearly, they taught her well, because this is a consistently constructed piece of writing.

Skibsrud’s ostensible subject is a culturally cluttered and idiosyncratically dysfunctional family: a mother, two daughters (one of whom is the narrator), a Vietnam War-vet father, all of them attached to the elderly father of the war vet’s army buddy, Owen, who didn’t make it back from Vietnam. But equally important is the setting.  It is cleverly Can/Am, with constant and symbolic border-crossings. The crucial landscape is a small town named—also symbolically—“Casablanca”, which sits atop the unflooded portions of an artificially-elevated lake that hides, just beneath its surfaces, the ruins of the old settlement, thus putting the past cleverly just beneath the literal surfaces of the water, and symbolically, under every other surface, making it psychologically impossible for anyone to live successfully in either the present or the past.  No one in the novel does anything that is wholly of either world, and the narration is a kind of running commentary on this—of a certain narrow dispensation which always moves vertically from the actions, as if unwilling to let its readers forget for a moment that everything possesses nuanced undertones and currents.

Skibsrub makes this entertaining because she’s clearly very bright, but she also makes a lot of  minor errors in her description of the physical phenomena, maybe because they’re the least of what she’s been taught is important: as a Creative Writing program mechanic, she’s only interested in the sub-rosa undertones and currents.  The errors of description she does make—boats set up on two blocks instead of four, etc.—mercifully don’t reach the level of banal hilarity that typifies the work of, say, a novelist like Jane Urquhart.

Where you wish she’d pay closer attention to this range of verity is in the last (and best) part of the novel, where she tries to unravel the fog that is the mind of the narrator’s Vietnam War-vet father—and where you realize, despite the emotionalizing fundamentalism of the Creative Writing Program manual, that her story is actually about something: Skibsrub’s real-world father’s PTSD experience of the world. At the end of the book, she offers an apparently-edited version of a real enquiry transcript citing his testimony concerning a war atrocity he was witness to. Unfortunately, the skills her Creative Writing manual gave her betray her here. She has no idea what the do with the materials, and the transcript is loaded with pointless editorial confusions: a perpetrator of the atrocity cited in the transcript as a Lieutenant in one instance, as a Corporal in another; confusion over the real-world locations, a pointless back-channel subplot that has two (imaginary?) historians arguing over the scale of the atrocity, and an opaqueness about the verity of the transcript. Skibsrud sticks with her manual, interjecting still more incoherent philosophizing about the uncertain nature of memory, what we can know with certainty, and so on, and more or less losing—or undermining—the possibility of exact knowledge.

In her defense, I should admit that she’s going with a McLuhanized culture she’s still too young to see through, and that really, Peter Mansbridge and his crew of reporter-therapists on the television news aren’t doing any better. When you see some poor Japanese tsunami victim being asked on television how she feels about her situation, or you watch Mansbridge asking a field reporter what kinds of emotions the people in Slave Lake are experiencing about the wildfires that ripped through their community without the slightest curiosity about why there were dangerous forest fire conditions in the area before fire season began (I’d bet on dead pine trees killed by the pine beetle infestation currently crossing the northern boreal forests of Canada), you realize that we’re all in the hands of something that is as pernicious as it is ubiquitous. By transforming everything into vicarious and egregiously carmelized emotion, we’re trivializing the real-world suffering of others, and destroying any possibility of either justice or understanding. Empathy, warm and fuzzy and self esteem-generating as it may be, is useless without understanding. We’re witnessing the cognitive amateurization of Western literature, and the long-term consequences of it are likely to be extremely dire.

Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists is an artifact of this amateurization, and a fairly minor one despite the Giller prize, which I imagine, in the absence of any plausible explanation, the jury conferred on it because all the other acceptable contestants were less competently amateurized. That said, if The Sentimentalists was the best work of conventional fiction produced by a Canadian last year, the trouble that literary fiction is in with readers—declining sales, cultural irrelevance—is deserved.

July 11, 2011  1600 words

1.

The first thing Marjorie Garber talks about in The Use and Abuse of Literature is the decline of reading. Or, rather, the first subject that Garber, a Harvard English professor and prolific Shakespearean and cultural studies scholar, seems to address in her book about the current state of “literature” is the general decline in “literary” reading.

That’s a plausible enough topic. After all, if readers of literature are disappearing, then that will surely affect the “use” (and “abuse”) of literature. But it turns out that Garber is not particularly interested in a cultural crisis one of whose symptoms is the decline of reading and, what’s more, right at the outset she commits a sort of scholarly “howler” in the little that she does say about diminished reading habits (I’ll get to the latter in a bit).

Here’s what Garber writes on the first page of her book. At the beginning of the 21st century, she notes, the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts “reported a disturbing drop in the number of Americans who read ‘literary’ works.” She cites the NEA’s 2004 report, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which “showed an alarming decline of reading in all age groups across the country, and especially among 18 to 24-year-olds.” Not only does the NEA report find that less than half of the American population reads literature, and that “reading among persons at every level of education… had declined over the past 20 years,” but that the decline of reading strongly correlates with the diminution of other forms of civic participation, including volunteer work and cultural involvement with the performing arts, and an array of “knowledge deficits” in other fields.

What interests Garber most of all, oddly enough, is not that there’s a big reading problem, but the “idea that fiction/nonfiction should be the determining category” in the findings of the NEA report. She notes that “literature,” for the purposes of the Reading at Risk study, is explicitly defined as including popular genres such as mysteries as well as “literary fiction,” and that “no distinctions were drawn on the quality of literary works.” So, a Harlequin romance or Tolstoy’s War and Peace are equally counted as literature, but not, say, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because it’s a work of nonfiction. Garber agrees with the NEA’s “democratic decision not to judge works on their putative ‘quality’,” since such judgments are notoriously unstable over time. She also understands the desire to make some sort of distinction between categories, but thinks that “the decision to exclude ‘nonfiction’… does seem to undercut a little the message” that, as the report itself puts it, “anyone who loves literature… will respond to this report with grave concern.” Or, as the NEA chairman Dana Gioia declared, the findings are an indication of a “national crisis” that reflects “a general collapse in advanced literacy,” and a loss that “impoverishes both cultural and civic life.”

Rather than expressing some alarm about this “national crisis,” Garber simply goes on in the next and succeeding sections of her introduction to discuss the ambiguous and historically determined ways in which the term “literature” has been and is used to describe everything from high quality writing to the instructions that come along with your package of pills in the drugstore. The central aim of her book, she declares, is “to argue for… the ‘uses’ of reading and literature, not as an instrument of moral or cultural control, nor yet as an infusion of ‘pleasure,’ but rather as a way of thinking.” This “radical reorientation” of “what it means to read, and to read literature… is the only way to return literature to the center, rather than the periphery, of personal, educational, and professional life.” I’ll come back  to these portentous intentions shortly. For now, I’m simply puzzled about how you put literature back in the centre of life if people are not reading.

Amazingly, Garber’s commentary on the decline of reading in the first pages of her book is also the last time she mentions the subject. There’s not another word in the following 300 pages about whether people are reading or not and whether that means anything. Instead, Garber is primarily interested in the use of the term “literature,” which is separated from nonfiction in that NEA report on reading. This is like witnessing a terrible auto accident and, instead of being concerned about the injured victims, focusing on, I don’t know, whether it was a hybrid or an electric-powered vehicle in the crash. Garber’s perspective seems inexplicably off-kilter.

While reading Garber’s book, I happened to hear a radio interview with her on a program called “Bookworm,” hosted by Michael Silverblatt. The conversation began with Silverblatt attempting to empathise with how tough the current situation in teaching must be. “My impression is,” he said, “that it’s become very difficult to teach literature in college, that people from high schools come unprepared to read, and that English [enrollment] numbers have reached colossal, all-time lows.” Not at all, replied Garber, “I don’t think it is difficult to teach English… the students are uniformly enthusiastic and they actually know a great deal and want to know more.” As for the declining number of humanities students, well, that’s a situation influenced by external social factors not germane to the discussion. So, in Garber’s view, no problem at all. Everything’s just hunky-dory in academia and, she assures us, she’s not just talking about those carefully-filtered $50,000-a-year tuition-paying Harvard students. (Gee, I hope I can wangle a faculty exchange with Garber so she can get a chance to meet my students, who are sometimes slightly less than “uniformly enthusiastic,” and who don’t always give many signs of knowing “a great deal.”) Having heard Garber live-and-unplugged, I was a little less surprised by her myopia about the reading crisis, as evidenced at the opening of her book.

However, I remain astonished by what strikes me as a significant scholarly blooper. Since the point of Garber’s opening riff is that the 2004 NEA report used only “literature” (however skewed the definition) to measure reading habits, you’d think it would be professionally incumbent upon her to let readers know that there’s a subsequent 2007 NEA report, To Read or Not To Read. (You’d also think that the Shakespearean allusion in the report’s title would have caught the eye of the author of Shakespeare After All.) As the NEA press release (Nov. 19, 2007) explains, “To Read or Not To Read expands the investigation of the NEA’s landmark 2004 report, Reading at Risk. While that report focused mainly on literary reading trends, To Read or Not To Read looks at all varieties of reading, including fiction and nonfiction genres in various formats such as books, magazines, and online reading.”

Get it? The 2007 report is about all reading, not about “literature,” or historical variables in category definitions, or anything else. And then come the report’s dismal findings, which I won’t reprise except to note that they’re more dismal than the findings in the earlier report. (The whole report is available online. Just google “decline of reading” or “NEA.”) The point is: “Americans are reading less”; “Americans are reading less well”; and “the declines in reading” correlate to (but aren’t necessarily the cause of) deficiencies in a range of civic, social, and economic matters. (I should mention, as a matter of scholarly niceties, that there was also a 2009 NEA mini-report that recorded a mysterious uptick in reading, but not such a huge increase as to write home or send a tweet about. Maybe it was the Harry Potter fad that caused it.) The findings in the NEA reports also form the basis of Mark Bauerlein’s book, The Dumbest Generation (2008). Bauerlein is an Emory University English professor who was directly involved in the NEA research. That Garber doesn’t mention (or is unaware of) the subsequent NEA reports or Bauerlein’s book is, to put it mildly, intellectually disturbing.

You would think that someone in the editorial rooms of Garber’s publisher would have said to her something like, “Yo, Marj” (or however they address her), “you’re sweeping the floor with the wrong end of the broom.” Or that someone would have pointed out the glaring absence of relevant materials in her opening pages about the decline of reading (or whatever her opening pages are actually about). But no one did.

Maybe that’s because the people in the editorial rooms were too busy writing jacket copy bumpf for Garber’s book. Although Garber of course isn’t responsible for the puffery, this book jacket copy is so remarkably inflated as to merit notice. Here’s how it begins: “As defining as Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education were to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively, Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature is to our times.” I immodestly note that Bloom’s and D’Souza’s reactionary books were not the defining books of my 1980s and 1990s, but let’s not quibble. In a genre (book jacket copy writing) notorious for hyperbole, this is hype beyond the call of advertising. I’m here to assure you that Garber’s book is not, as far as I can tell, “decade-defining,” though some of its observations about the use of “use,” the “canon,” or the quarrel about what is and isn’t literature are perfectly interesting, albeit in a minor key.

We know that the copywriters got as far as the first page of Garber’s book: “Even as the decline of reading… proceeds in our culture, Garber (‘One of the most powerful women in the academic world’ – The New York Times) gives us a deep and engaging meditation on… “ etc.  I hope you like the parenthetical endorsement from the NYT of Garber’s commanding powerpoint status in the groves of academe. In any case, “The Use and Abuse of Literature is a tour de force about culture in crisis that…” Can I skip the “brio, panache, and erudition lightly carried”? Thanks.

2.

If you find my mild-mannered comments about Garber’s book too tame for your tastes, then I recommend William Deresiewicz. Writing in Slate about The Use and Abuse of Literature, he begins, “Marjorie Garber’s new book brought me back to my days as an English professor; I thought I was reading a freshman essay.” Ouch! “My marginal comments” says the professor emeritus, “might as well have been written in red: ‘What is the point of this paragraph?’ ‘Where are we in the argument – and what exactly is the argument?’ ‘Sloppy thinking.’”, und so weiter (as they say in German when they don’t want to say, “Etc.”).  Though Garber’s book “purports to be a rallying cry for serious reading,” “once you pick your way through its heap of critical detritus – its mildewed commonplaces and shot-springed arguments, its half-chewed digressions and butt ends of academic cliché – you uncover underneath it all a single dubious and self-serving claim: that the central actor in the literary process is, what do you know, the English professor.” (William Deresiewicz, “The Right Questions To Ask About Literature,” Slate, Apr. 4, 2011.)

Deresiewicz is underwhelmed by Garber’s handling of “the ancient question of pleasure vs. use. Is literature valuable because it feels good or because it’s good for you?” Garber’s answer, at noted above, is neither. Rather literature is valuable as “a way of thinking.” Deresiewicz rolls his eyes. “The argument is both remarkable and banal.” Banal, he says, because the “self-enclosure” of literature “has been a commonplace of theory since the New Criticism of the 1930s” – “close reading,” and all that. The argument is remarkable “because it cuts literature off from the very thing it most obviously wants to connect to: the world.” The answer to the use-pleasure conundrum “is not neither, but both.” Literature is “useful,” says Deresiewicz, “because it wakes us up from the sleepwalk of self-involvement… and shows us the world, shows us ourselves, shows us life and experience and the reality of other people, and forces us to think about them all… Pleasure is use, use pleasure.” Didn’t Keats once say something similar about “beauty” and “truth”?

Garber’s repeated insistence on “the way something means rather than what it means” strikes Deresiewicz as “equally false.” He modestly counters that “form” and “meaning,” the “what” and the “way” are inextricably interrelated. It was ever thus. As for the “old warhorse” question, “What is literature?”, he notes that Garber says it’s not the right question. “A better question,” she says, “might be ‘Is it responsive to literary reading?’ Are these texts… ones of which… a critic can usefully ask literary questions?” Snorts Deresiewicz, “The critic, again, at the center of the enterprise.” He, too, thinks “Is it literature?” is the wrong question, “but the right one is, ‘Is it good?’”

Okay, okay, I’ll stop. Like Borges’ Pierre Menard “re-writing” Don Quixote word for word, there’s a tempation to quote the whole of Deresiewicz’s uncompromising critique, or at least to insist you google up the link. Because if there’s any tour de force going on around here, it’s not in Garber’s book, but in Deresiewicz’s review. I cite it at length because it’s so rare these days to find a critical piece that doesn’t indulge in what I think of as thumb-on-the-scale style reviewing; i.e., don’t say anything too harsh, we don’t want to bring down the fragile edifice of (already declining) reading. In any case, if Garber’s Use is one of those books that makes you ask, about 150 pages in, What the heck is this book about?, Deresiewicz leaves us with no doubt about what he’s thinking.

3.

I’ll keep the sermon short: There are books that say important things about reading and writing. There are even some books that face up to the decline of reading and the current forms of cultural impoverishment. Garber’s book is not one of them. Is there anything worth reading that does something interesting with these topics? How about, just to think of the ancient past for a moment, Jean-Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature? (1949), or more immediately, David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010)?  These, at least, are books that take seriously both writing and the world. They implicitly understand the poet Charles Olson’s “useful” battlecry, “Art is life’s only twin.”

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2387 words, Berlin, June 25, 2011.

Myrna Kostash has been a national treasure in Canada since the 1977 publication of All of Baba’s Children, which gave authenticity and glamour to ethnicity in Canada for the first time. That book was followed by Long Way From Home three years later, an at-once romantic and astute mash note to the New Left values as they applied to Canada. Since then she’s produced a succession of worthwhile books, No Kidding: Inside the World of Teenage Girls (1987); Bloodlines, (1993); The Doomed Bridegroom, (1998); and The Next Canada (2000). The books reflected her dual concerns with socially-progressive Canadian and Slavic culture, and all were uniquely sweet-tempered, well researched and perceptive.

In the early 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet empire deprived the left—even the un-Marxist and moderate elements—of its core belief that they could provide alternatives to the marketplace and hacking at one another with machetes, Kostash quietly began to search for some sort of sane personal alternative to the now frequently rancourously-entitled left wing nostalgia that emerged from the wreckage of Marxist “science”.  For Kostash, there were, one senses, conditions that had to be met. Any alternative couldn’t abrogate her social democratic values—that sense she has always conveyed that she is on the left because she believes that people ought to treat one another with generosity and be treated decently by their governments. She has been, as long as I’ve known her, a woman with a life-long yearning for human solidarity and community.

Kostash is also a writer who has always known who she is without having to reduce identity to simplifications and binaries. Thus identity, in her, is a place to look outward from. It doesn’t produce rigidity or blind pride but rather, a confident curiosity about the world, along with a willingness to articulate her confusions along with as her insights. This has made her both an unusually competent intellectual, and a slightly unpredictable one, since what she sees isn’t filtered through ideology or a need to appear consistent.

Maybe that’s why, when the left collapsed into irrelevant solidarities, it was almost inevitable that she would go back to her family and ethnic roots, and examine her upbringing in the Greek Orthodox church.  From the beginning, her examination wasn’t simply a matter of reading the gospels aloud or hanging out in church basements making perogies with elderly Ukrainian women, although Kostash, communitarian that she is, has cheerfully done her share of the latter. No, what she did was embark on an open-ended study of Greek Orthodoxy’s history and ritual practices with the same unblinking eye she has brought to everything else.

The result was a not-quite formal but fairly public conversion—or reconversion—to the Greek Orthodox faith. This, I suspect, was going too far in some people’s eyes, particularly for those on the radical left. Left wing social politics and Greek Orthodoxy seem inimical, don’t they?  Greek orthodoxy is intellectually authoritarian, patriarchal and littered with icons. Whereas left wing social politics…

The thing is, see, I’ve watched Kostash walk this tightrope, and I’ve noticed, along the way, how little her new spiritual values have altered her core values. Whenever we’ve been together—about twice a year on average—we’ve had the same wide-ranging and concentrated conversations that have marked our friendship since we met in the 1970s. I’ve been reassured by how little difficulty she has had reconciling where she’d been and where she is now. She is, and remains, all of a piece, with no diminishment of her curiosity and her intellectual acuity.

Still, when I heard that Prodigal Daughter was finished and that she was having trouble getting interest in it from left-of-centre and mainstream publishers, I wasn’t surprised. A spiritual journey in search of the origins and contemporary meaning of a Greek Orthodox saint who was martyred in the 4th century just wasn’t going to be a “saleable product” for today’s stressed-out publishers: I could hear the Chapters/Indigo buyers saying “we don’t see an audience for this” no matter how artfully the book was pitched to them.

Kostash finished the book anyway, and thankfully, the University of Alberta Press has published it. I bought a copy when Kostash launched it at a mostly Ukrainian gathering in Toronto but I confess that I let the book sit for a month before I read it, not dreading what I’d find in it, but as a materialist and a former Anglican, not quite paying full attention because of the subject.

I should have known better.  This is a real book, carefully structured, empirically sound in its observations, with exquisite pacing that gives it vitality and a gratifying immediacy: Kostash keeps her feet on the ground, never letting expressives replace articulation. She’s really intent on delivering St. Demetrius as a living, breathing presence. That’s no minor feat. Along the way, she creates a first rate travel book on a poorly understood part of the world, and a history of a powerful element of Christianity not well known to most Westerners: not small things, either.

St. Demetrius seems to be a figure about whose martyrdom little is securely known except that he was brutally murdered at the orders of Roman emperor Diocletian’s general Maximian Galerius in 304 and buried without ceremony beneath the Roman baths of Thessalonica, presumably for openly being a Christian. This was hardly a unique fate for Christian zealots before Constantine, who became Roman emperor in 312, halted the persecution of Christians (late in life converting himself), called together the Council at Nicene that, in 325, set the texts that would become the Christian Bible, and moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople.

But in the years, and then decades, and then centuries after Demetrius was killed, there were a series of impossible-to-pin-down evolutions. He became the protector of Thessalonica, and was increasingly militarized as various tribes flooded into southern Europe. But somewhere along the line he became more than simply the protector of a single city. He became the protector of many of the mostly Slavic tribes—Serbs, Ukranians, Bulgarians—that attempted at various points to overrun Thessalonica, perhaps because his militarization somehow never quite separated his image from the original murdered boy. “By the time he has migrated to the lands of the northern Slavs,” Kostash writes, “he is a young man wearing a greenish brown tunic and white breastplate with a feather pattern, his cloak is green, he is girded with a towel, in his right hand he has a lance, as well as a scroll on which it is written, o Lord, do not destroy the city and people; if You save the city, I will be saved with them, and if they are lost, I will be lost with them.”

Demetrius remains uniquely sensible (in the deepest definition of that word) no matter where he travels, never quite descending to the George Patton-style let’s-kill-the-bastards militarization of St. George or the brutally pious crusaders of  northern Europe: he doesn’t conquer; he protects. And so, while one part of my mind is thinking that Demetrius was really just a nice kid who was murdered and was then used by a horde of significance-obsessed factions to defend themselves and their gravy against outsiders, another part of me travels with Kostash: yes, there’s something uniquely sweet here, something beyond the reach of cynical understanding, something that ameliorates the violence of human enterprise. Generally speaking, the more you know about human history, the more amazed you are by the ingenuity of human imagination—and the less hopeful you are about our ability to survive one another. In St. Demetrius, Kostash makes a credible case that this isn’t the only way of seeing the world.

I won’t go any further than that  ( I don’t want to give away the detective element of the narrative)  except to say that Kostash’s search for St. Demetrius is a successful one, and that when she delivers her Demetrius, it’s more believable than any of the others her exhaustive research uncovers—and that the delivery betrays none of her values. It’s a very sweet moment in a very good book.

So at this point, I remain puzzled, not about the value of what Kostash has done or about the value of the book, which is considerable, but about the need for faith in the first place, and for a community of believers, whose built-in desire for exclusive truth has historically produced the sort of intolerance and violence that always targeted curious people determined to investigate human reality on their own terms among its first victims, collateral or not?

It seems to me that those of us who live in the global diaspora—which is now partitioned a thousand ways—must always live as rational individuals, however much we may long for a tribe to belong to. We have learned that what most successfully and consistently protects human autonomy and social justice is democracy and the rule of law—and not mistaking the gore-piles that human history has produced with depressing regularity for sandboxes. As the ersatz tribes of the 21st century proliferate, and with them the heedless believers in this or that exclusive truth—whether Allah or God or the Internet’s Singularity—we must keep our wits about us, first and, I think, finally.

Eastern Orthodoxy, which Kostash persuasively argues is among the gentlest of Christian beliefs, is, when all is said and done, an expression of the childhood of human consciousness. As we all know, childhood is sweet, when contemplated from beyond its miseries: the lack of volition, the supervision by arbitrary and often violent authority, the violence of the other children.

What I’m suggesting, I guess,  is that for better or worse, our species has moved beyond its childhood, and the return to religion that is occurring around the world is nostalgia for that childhood. Maybe what we’re currently evolving toward is only humanity’s adolescence, but there, the terrors are distinctly different, and they look more like the difficulties in front of us every day. We have to stare down the oligarchies of testosterone, technologies zooming out of control, and we have to face the knowledge—first delivered by Ivan Karamazov in 1880 and proven throughout the 20th century—that “everything is permitted” and that god, if she or he or it exists at all, is a passive observer, unable or unwilling to intervene in any meaningful way.  We are in charge of this small speck of organic vitality in the cold universe, one that, as the millenarians and the entertainment industry alike like to remind us in differently comical ways, could be obliterated at any moment by some cataclysmic and utterly impersonal cosmic event light years away—or by a whirling 30 square mile piece of rock traveling at random across the solar system.

It may be hard to find the unanswered question in the above sermon, but it is this: how do we integrate this childhood and adolescence into a workable frisson with which we can face the future? I admit that I don’t know. But Myrna Kostash, with Prodigal Daughter, has made a powerful contribution to building a framework that can understand what the question entails.

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1868 words  June 24, 2011

If we’re to take the narrative conceit of Frank Davey’s new book, When Tish Happens, seriously, he has kept detailed diaries from the age of two, which is the age at which he appears to have reached full intellectual maturity. Age two is where his private history of the “Tish Movement” begins and since the book maintains an unbending present-tense stream-of-self-consciousness from start to finish, what other conclusion can one reach?  Well, I can think of a few others, also on the evidence presented: that Frank Davey was Tish, and that Tish was and is Frank Davey. And really, never mind those other people who helped things along from time to time.

But what, you may be asking, was the “Tish Movement”, and why should anyone care about it? The answer isn’t simple, because Tish was and is many things to different people. To some, it’s a minor movement in Canadian poetry indebted to the New American Poetry movement in the U.S, while to people like Robin Mathews, it’s a nefarious agency of American cultural imperialism planted by Yankee professor Warren Tallman in the minds of some talented-but-easily-led young poets with fascist tendencies.  It’s been a vehicle for lucrative academic careers for Davey and to a lesser extent for several of the others involved in the movement; and it has been an industrial resource pit that several generations of CanLit academics (Davey makes a point of quoting the off-shore ones) have made careers out of mining—usually with the encouragement and sometimes supervision of Davey himself. And, Davey reminds us from time to time, subtly and always with his tongue firmly in his cheek, “Tish” is a transposed spelling of the word for that brown stuff that comes out of our posterior parts, ha, ha.

The important artifact of the Tish movement is a 19 issue mimeographed (and later in the run, offset) poetry magazine produced monthly between the fall of 1961 and the spring of 1963, when the principal participants dispersed across the country to begin their (mostly) academic careers in which they disseminated what Mathews and a few other crazy people believed were UnCanadian Ideas to the unsuspecting students of the nation.  After 1963, the magazine continued to appear irregularly until 1969, when Stan Persky somewhat hilariously euthanized it with a short series that parodied both the magazine’s ambitions and those of the generation of academics who by then desperately wanted publication in it to pump up their CVs. If you believe Davey, it and the Tish poets then went on to profoundly influence the subsequent history of Canadian writing, acting, both critically and creatively, as its anti-authoritarian Avant Garde.

The reality is somewhat less grand. Tish produced just one major Canadian poet: George Bowering, who would have turned into a major Canadian poet anyway.  A group of poets of lesser talent got their starts in its pages:  Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Davey, Lionel Kearns (who was the purest intellectual among them, and always had his own projects elsewhere), David Bromige, David Dawson, Robert Hogg, Dan McLeod and others. Gladys Hindmarch, a prose-writer of considerable early concentration was there from the beginning, and Jamie Reid, who joined the Maoists in the mid-1960s and denounced the whole enterprise as Leftist Hegelian counter-revolutionary corruption, got his start there, too.  As far as I can tell from Davey’s account, Fred Wah did most of the actual work of producing the magazine. Davey was sort of the rich kid  of the movement, providing the red TR-4 for the boys to ride around in while he pined for Daphne Marlatt.  Bowering wrote his poems willy-nilly, and the others did whatever they were able to get away with, which in those days was pretty well anything.

The best thing to be said about Tish is that it was exactly what young writers ought to do when faced by an older and mostly untalented and conservative generation of writers and teachers: it provided a work-space for experimentation and for imitating the best of the elders, (who, hoping for acolytes to secure their legacies, were generous with advice and sometimes facilities and funds.) It’s also what young writers have done since the beginning of the 20th century. Davey doesn’t admit this, but Tish wasn’t the only game going in those days. San Francisco’s Open Space published a magazine around the same time, edited by Persky and under the guidance of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, all of whom traveled to Vancouver to talk to the young poets during those years. The primary intellectual presences were Duncan, and the work of Charles Olson, particularly for his seminal essay, “Projective Verse”, which provided alternate goals and compositional processes for poetry.  But mostly, Tish was about a group of personable young people having fun while they learned their craft and kept one eye on possible entry points for careers.

If there’s anything unique about Tish and the Tishites, it’s that they were in the right place at the right time: the universities were expanding, and the careers were there for the taking. In some respects, it is curious how few of them actually did land in the upper echelons of Canadian academia.  Reid, as mentioned, joined the Maoists, Dan McLeod, with Pierre Coupey and others, was instrumental in creating Vancouver’s alternate newspaper, The Georgia Straight, Red Lane died young, and Wah and Marlatt were in and out of teaching most of their careers. Neither of them got much of anywhere until they began to explore, respectively, the powers of ethnicity and gender. Several Tishites landed in proletarianized teaching jobs in small colleges, and only Davey and Bowering ended up in major Canadian universities on tenure track; Davey was a conventional academic, while Bowering managed to make it on talent, never quite having to stoop to becoming an English Department hallway samurai.

The dismaying thing about When Tish Happens is that this review has already laid down more hard information and analysis than Davey provides in his entire impressionistic 325 page self-advertisement. Sure, some of the pictures Davey sticks in to spice up the narrative are fun: his 47 Ford “chick magnet”, his 57 Ford convertible, the red Triumph TR-4, what appears to be a 1967 Mustang convertible, a number of author photos of varying attractiveness, and even pictures of Davey in mid-career with a very large dog and still larger horse. There are childhood scenes from Abbotsford, B.C. where he grew up, pics of various relatives, a picture of Fred Wah doing the work on Tish’s offset printer, and quite a few of Bowering. In most of the Bowering photos, he is waving a drink at the camera while surrounded by women, which is presumably indicative of the way Davey perceives him. What we’re looking at, in other words, is autobiography and self-advertisement dressed up as literary history. And since autobiography and self-advertisement are very bad intellectual partners, there’s very little literary history here that can be trusted. But never mind that. Frank Davey has had a good life, a lucrative academic career that took him to hundreds of conferences, and this book is his proof of it.  It was, in Davey’s eyes, a glamourous life—so much better, as he puts it, than Emily Carr’s, and we should be gratified that Frank Davey could be at the centre of it all, even though not all of his collaborators seem to have noticed how much smarter and talented he was than they were.

There are some entertaining anecdotes along the way, not all of them intentionally framed that way. Davey, for instance, seems to have come close to a career as a semi-professional poisoner, having nearly killed a number of Tishites with his home-made saki, of which he appears to have produced several tanker-trucks worth over the years. We see Lionel Kearns at the hospital getting his stomach pumped, Jamie Reid barfing on Warren Tallman’s sidewalk, and seemingly the entire population of Pincer Creek, Alberta laid low, prevented from forming a lynchmob only by their head-splitting hangovers. There are also, to Davey’s credit, occasional passages of credible analysis, such as his description of the fission Charles Olson’s work created in the minds of the Tishites, which makes a lot of sense even though Robin Mathews won’t believe  it.

Alas, that analytical passage is instantly  followed by a dismissive critique of what others involved with Tish believed was the source and/or expression of its central energies. He’s particularly dismissive of Fred Wah’s understanding of the Tish Movement, pointing out several possible errors in fact Wah makes, and it doesn’t seem to register on Davey that since Wah did most of the work, he’s probably in a better position than anyone to get it right. No, in Frank Davey’s mind, the crucial energy came from his (evidently unrequited) passion for Daphne Marlatt, and his drawing her into the circle made it all happen. Davey sees this as getting him some feminist brownie points, somehow not noticing that it wasn’t exactly Marlatt’s mind he was most interested in.

The biggest weakness of the book, aside from it being relentlessly self-serving, is that it is mean-spirited. There are a thousand small digs at and diminutions of others, particularly the ones aimed at Fred Wah, who Davey evidently views as his main competitor, and Bowering, whose smooth charm and easy talent Davey clearly envies and therefore demeans at every opportunity, always stopping just short of overt insult. Bowering comes off as an amoral hoser who should have acted and written better he does, which is (the latter without a shred of textual evidence) less brilliantly than Davey himself does. Davey even runs down the Governor General’s Award for poetry as a corrupt crapshoot, probably because both Wah and Bowering have won it, and he hasn’t. He does rather like Barrie Nichol, who in Davey’s account agreed with him on virtually everything. Nichol, unfortunately, isn’t around to corroborate.

He’s a little more generous with the women, or maybe it’s that the demeaning is more subtle. He insults Gladys Hindmarch only by proxy, quoting Warren Tallman’s goofy odes to her, and he presents Daphne Marlatt as hopelessly obtuse, which is accurate enough if for the wrong reasons: she just doesn’t get Davey’s geeky and seemingly undying passion for her, insisting on treating him collegially at every encounter. One suspects she understood more than she let on, and was exercising a kindly discretion. Margaret Atwood, who doesn’t seem to have liked Davey much, is dismissed as an authoritarian Yeatsean, while Angela Bowering comes off as a eccentric with “really cute breasts”. If you were to trust Davey’s judgment, the most interesting woman in the book is his late wife Linda, who evidently had a bawdy common sense that made me wish I’d known her.  Davey does admit that she helped his career even though she doesn’t seem to have curbed his passion for Marlatt.

The book contains predictable advertorials for Davey’s post-Tish projects: Swift Current, which he describes as “the world’s first online literary magazine”, was merely a primitive chat-line for poets. If Davey approved of what you were saying, you got to yap, and your contributions landed, I suppose, in York University’s archives as a tax break for Davey.  If he didn’t like what you said, you got shouted down or kicked off. The impact of Coach House-produced Open Letter, which made the dubious contribution of introducing the post-structuralist vocabulary to CanLit, is likewise much inflated in the book’s pages, as are the various anthologies that Davey edited or approved of, all of them dovetailed into the Tish hagiography he wants readers to believe in. Whether Tish was a legitimately influential movement or a retroactively glamourized transport vehicle for Davey’s academic career isn’t convincingly argued in the narrative, mainly because Davey constantly undercuts his own believability by trying to kneecap his collaborators and settle old scores. It leaves those who care waiting for the definitive book on the Tish movement—not quite a tragic circumstance, but regrettable.

What else can I say? I can testify that the group of student/writers I came up with a half decade later in Vancouver completely ignored Tish and the Tishites, and not out of malice or envy. We produced our own magazines, were less ambitious than the Tishites were, less prone to manifesto-making, and, with Robin Blaser instead of Warren Tallman as our mentor and the revolution of the 1960s in full swing, slightly more political, less career-oriented, and intellectually more heteroclyte. We never quite formed a gang: the closest we came was a baseball team, which we called The East End Punks. It eventually amalgamated with the team several of the Tishites played for, actually.  We also didn’t have to deal with anyone like Frank Davey thrusting stilettos in our backs, on or off the ball-field. I feel lucky about that. On the evidence provided by When Tish Happens, with friends like Frank Davey, you really don’t need enemies.

2123 words, June 8, 2011

Herman Cohen would be the first to point out that Tom Rachman’s debut “novel” about superannuated English-language journalists in Rome, The Imperfectionists, is not really a novel, but a volume of linked short stories. Cohen is the curmudgeonly corrections editor at the newspaper in Rachman’s book. And after pointing out the correct literary category, Cohen would likely trumpet his credo term, “Credibility!”, in harumphing homage to a value increasingly endangered in a sloppy world where even copy editors fail to catch obvious imperfections. But as with many corrections, the goal of perfection may not matter all that much, except to the paper’s dwindling circle of fanatically pedantic readers (like those devotees of Toronto’s Globe and Mail who periodically pronounce themselves “shocked and appalled”).

Whether it’s a novel or linked short stories, Rachman’s tales of the bitterly disappointed hopes and loves of his ex-pat journos are brutal and effective. About the only happy person in the book is the aforementioned blustery Herman Cohen, who enters his overstuffed office filled with bulky reference works, “hikes up his belt, lines himself up with his desk chair, and inserts his bottom – one more bulky reference work returned to its rightful home.”

Once there, Cohen happily sets about pointing out that business reporter Hardy Benjamin erroneously referred to the former dictator of Iraq as “Sadism Hussein”; that the “nitwit” copy editors have permitted the acronym “GWOT” (for  Global War on Terror) to appear in the paper even though “the term should be understood as marketing gibberish” (according to Herman’s ever-exfoliating style guide, known locally as the “Bible”); and that when the phrase “he literally jumped out of his skin” appears in print, it should either literally mean it or the word “literally” should be deleted.

What’s more, Cohen still dotes on Miriam, his wife of several decades; contentedly counsels Kathleen Solson, the latest in a series of editors-in-chief; and whips up bowls of soup, acquacotta di Talamone, with culinary dedication. Cohen’s only imperfection is his besotted view of his boyhood idol, and former classmate, Jimmy Pepp, who’s visiting Herman in Rome.

Jimmy was destined to be the great writer of his generation, and is still working on his yet-to-appear magnum opus, while Cohen settled among the ranks of journalistic drudges. Perhaps Cohen would one day get to write the memoir of Jimmy’s youth and inexorable rise to world literary fame (an A.E. Hotchner to Ernest Hemingway in Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir). The deflating disillusionment that follows is one of the sweeter denouements in Rachman’s collection of bittersweet stories (emphasis on the “bitter”).

Speaking of which, there’s the previously mentioned Hardy Benjamin, the mature female business reporter who desperately takes in a 20-something Irish drifter-hippie in the name of humiliating love. There’s editor-in-chief Kathleen Solson, who runs into Dario, her former boyfriend (she’d long ago abandoned him for the sake of ambition). He’s now a PR flak for Italy’s notoriously corrupt Berlusconi regime, but he’s looking surprisingly good despite “temples graying,” and being “slightly jowly, wearing the sleepy surrender of the family man.” Would it be a journalistic conflict of interest for the editor-in-chief to get too re-chummy with a hack from the ruling party?

Then there’s chief financial officer Abby Pinnola on a flight to corporate headquarters in Atlanta striking up a conversation (and more) with the man in the next seat, Dave Belling, one of the paper’s copy editors whom she’s just had fired, although he doesn’t know it was her doing, or so she thinks as the flirtation deepens. And there’s Ruby Zaga, a copy editor on the brink of paranoia who spends New Year’s Eve alone in a rented hotel room and who’s taken to stalking the aforementioned Dario by cellphone. It gives nothing away to say you can imagine where these sour romances end up. If you can’t, there’s even a dog named Schopenhauer who comes to a bad end in the newsroom — he belongs to the dimwit publisher who announces to his surly staff the closure of this particular edition of the antiquated institution that newspapers have apparently become.

Rachman knows whereof he speaks, having worked as an Associated Press correspondent in Rome and for a couple of years at the Paris-based International Herald Tribune, the enterprise that his unnamed fictional newspaper obviously resembles (except for its relocation to Rome). London, England-born Rachman was raised in Vancouver, and graduated from the University of Toronto (where he encountered the G&M and its shocked and appalled readers), before going on to the Columbia School of Journalism. Much of the fascination of The Imperfectionists, in addition to its page-turning pleasures and crisp writing, is its ongoing sidebar story about the travails of an apparently dying institution. Rachman details the rise and fall of his IHT-like paper – an amorous folly launched by the founder of an American family corporation – in a series of interspersed vignettes that ties together the linked stories, which are mostly about people who get unlinked.

As someone who’s worked for decades at the fringes of print journalism (as a freelance columnist and literary critic), as well as someone with a score of disheartened friends in the business, I can attest to the accuracy of Rachman’s brutal depiction of the twilight of the newspaper industry. Before it became a dying industry, it was a necessary component of the public forum, or so we, reporters and readers alike, told ourselves. But even when it was a public watchdog, it was a private corporation where the bottom line was intently scrutinized even as its journalistic ethos provided the rhetoric of its self-portrait.

In my adopted hometown, Vancouver, the two dailies are owned by the same company, which is itself part of a series of devouring national chains, the latest of which is a near-bankrupt entity, CanWest, and the downtown newsrooms of the Vancouver Sun and Province have been progressively emptied over the years through attrition and buyouts. The papers’ politics have been anything but progressive, and no one resembling a left-of-centre columnist has had a by-line in its precincts since one-time owner Conrad Black denounced the “socialist sludge” sluicing down its op-ed pages. The story is little different at most other North American print dailies (the fiscally precarious, but politically liberal New York Times is the exception to the rule). What remains is the rest of media, which ranges from the rightwing ranting of Fox News on U.S. television to the braver online attempts to be heard above the din of the blogosphere, at cyberspaces like Vancouver’s Tyee, or The Huffington Post in the U.S.

Rachman’s thoroughly engaging book joins a tradition of fictional and non-fictional accounts of journalism that runs from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop in the 1930s to Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men in the ’70s, and is now updated into the newspaper world’s much diminished present. The Imperfectionists made a bit of a splash when it was published last spring (getting good reviews and popping up on a few Top Ten lists). If you missed it, the newly-published mass market paperback is worth catching up with. It reminds us that today, the hallowed cry of “stop the presses!” comes not from a reporter or editor with a scoop, but from the corporation accountant, who means it, as Herman Cohen would note, “literally.”

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Berlin, Feb. 18, 2011