k.i.press

Since I’m now actually forgetting what other books I’ve read for “fun” in the past year, I’m going to move on to what I read last summer for not exactly fun, but not exactly work: many, many magazines.

Now, mostly, reading magazines falls into the category of fun. Lately, my magazine of choice has been the iPad edition of Intelligent Life, the arts-and-culture arm of The Economist. This is a magazine with such good writing that it can get away with articles like (I’m paraphrasing here) “Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall: Which is the Best Season?” Seriously. The iPad edition is, currently, free, thanks to the fine sponsorship of its sole advertiser, Credit Suisse, a business I have absolutely no hope of patronizing. (This makes me wonder why they haven’t enabled location-specific licensing on this baby, but I’m not complaining.)

But the thing with reading for fun is that if you multiply it by a gazillion, it becomes work. Ask anyone who has taken a course in the Victorian novel.

This past summer, I was on the jury for Manitoba Magazine Publishers’ Association Maggie Awards. So, I read approximately one gazillion magazines. Some things I learned:

• Old-fashioned binders full of paper—many binders, and boxes, full of paper–are difficult to use while travelling.  I would have liked some PDFs. Chalk another one up for the iPad.
• Despite the awesomeness of magazines, I should probably stop volunteering for extra duties that involve filling out evaluation sheets.
• Columnists rule! There were, of course, some brilliant, informative, and moving feature articles in the competition, but my favourite reading of the summer—and hence, one of the hardest things to judge–was definitely the “Best Column” category.
• Yes, I really am an industry professional! Sometimes, working in the classroom, I start to doubt whether or not I have some grip on reality—though that’s partly because I carry around a lot of self-doubt in general. So an exercise like this was great if only to experience how my opinions—of magazines, in this case—echoed those of the other members of the jury. Other industry professionals agree: I’m not crazy.

I’m writing this now because the students in my program are working hard on their magazine projects now, and I am, as always, excited to see their prototype magazines. If you’re in Winnipeg, come down to the college (160 Princess Street) between 12 and 4 on Thursday, March 28, to see the results of their creative labour. And many thanks to the Manitoba Magazine Publishers’ Association for again sponsoring the awards at the end of the project–and to the Manitoba magazine professionals who will be judging the students’ efforts.

A New Year! Time to update the world about my sporadic media consumption via one of my less-than-even-sporadic blog posts.

To sum up what I did for amusement over last spring (which is far as I’ve gotten with this tale): after my Game of Thrones marathon, I felt the need for a little palate-cleansing via contemporary poetry, so I picked up (from my own shelves) a number of books I hadn’t gotten around to reading yet. The ones I remember best from this brief spring reading period were books by Canadian poets Paul Vermeersch, Jacob McArthur Mooney, and Ken Babstock. Now these are great poets and great people, some of whom I’ve had a number beers with back in the day, and I’d recommend their poetry unconditionally. Babstock’s book won the Griffin Prize. And yet–when I read them, I did not feel the complete literary palate cleansing I had been looking for. Way, way, different from the mass market stuff I’d been reading earlier. But still.

I needed to read some books by women.

This was way, way back last year – before CWILA came on the scene. If you don’t follow literary news, and Canadian literary news in particular, CWILA is Canadian Women in the Literary Arts, which last spring published statistics on book reviewing in Canada by gender, showing evidence for what was already felt—relatively low representation of women in literary discourse. CWILA’s inaugural “critic-in-residence” is Montreal poet Sue Sinclair.

The two books I went for immediately were Aislinn Hunter’s A Peepshow with Views of the Interior: Paratexts, which I’d been meaning to read for some time, and Kristjana Gunnars’s The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust, one of my favourite books.

I’ve read The Rose Garden many times—it has been an influential book for me, and I’ve written about it before. I’m not really a voracious consumer of new books, or movies, or shows—I have a tendency to re-read and re-watch what I love over and over. In the book, the narrator reads Proust by dipping in—opening to random pages and reading passages—rather than reading it in a linear fashion. This time, reading The Rose Garden, I used the same approach, and, unsurprisingly, it lent itself well to a non-linear reading.

I figuratively facepalmed myself for not having read Aislinn Hunter’s non-fiction Peepshow earlier—it covers a lot of the same ground I’ve been writing about in my languishing poetry manuscript. I’d heard her speak on the subject of “Thing Theory” before, but hadn’t quite grasped the close connection to what I was already working on until I read the book. It’s about things—objects, you might say—and our relationships with them. Definitely a book I will be coming back to again.

Next up: my summer of Manitoba magazines.

It’s been a while since I posted about my experience reading the first Song of Ice and Fire book. So what stories have I been reading and watching since then? This post is Part 1 of about eight or nine months’ worth of books and “TV,” but maybe that’s a good test of what actually stands out in my brain.

After reading A Game of Thrones, I ranted about how angry it made me, yet how addictive it was—and sure enough, I continued, for about two more months, reading, back to back, all five of the massive George R.R. Martin tomes. Only I read them all in my iPad by borrowing the ebooks from the library, so at least I didn’t have to carry them around. (Helpful hint: if there’s a waiting list for a popular book at the library, chances are the waiting list for the ebook is a lot shorter.)

Why did I keep reading? Clearly, because I’m socially conditioned to enjoy narratives glorifying painfully patriarchal and colonialist worlds, because, you know, we really need more of those (narratives, and worlds). To temper the previous statement: I have nothing against writing characters, worlds, or whatever, which are sexist, racist, or any manner of unpleasant things, because those things exist and we need to think about them rather than ignore them. Yet, even given that belief about art, which I hold dearly, I still have trouble with Martin. I am not convinced he is critiquing anything. I’m a conflicted reader.

I have to admit the Red Wedding is a pretty great plot point—but things more or less levelled off from there, so much so that I can no longer remember whether it was the fourth or fifth book that I really hated. The one with Cersei’s point of view. She may be the most annoying character in the history of books. Though the Maid of Tarth is a close second. And whatshername who is supposed to marry the evil boy king is a close third. Catelyn becomes more interesting after she is dead.

After reading all five books, it was time to watch the first season of the TV series, which I purchased on iTunes. (Still haven’t seen second season; I don’t have HBO and I, er, don’t download stuff—on principle, and because I don’t have the patience.)

Three main thoughts that have stuck with me since watching (and I have read no other commentary on this, so these are likely thoughts that everyone else already had a long time ago):

1. The TV series ameliorated the whole child-bride thing that made the first book particularly icky. In fact, no doubt due to all the legal issues inherent in, first, using child actors, and, second, showing that stuff on TV (even HBO!), the younger characters are all, I think, two years older than in the books (I believe they even rewrote the history of the realm to make the age differences make sense.) In the commentary on the first episode, it is noted that they rewrote Dany’s wedding-night rape to make it more clearly, you know, rape (the legitimate kind), instead of the “and then she found that she really liked it!” (not a direct quote!) nonsense that’s in the book.
2. I found the story more coherent and easy to follow when it was not restricted to the limited points of view used in the book. On TV, point of view tends to be a lot more neutral. Not always, but you know what I mean: we’re unlikely to find out something we didn’t know about something that happened in the past because now we’ve switched to the point of view of a character who remembers it differently. This does not exactly make the TV series better—it makes it easier. Which TV is, compared to books. Even books like this. Which brings me to number three:
3. The TV series cannot beat the books on character depth. Even given how caricatured Martin’s characters can be, they are still more complex than on TV, despite the high quality of this production, and the nuances the actors brought. This could partly be a reflection of how I’d read about 4000 pages on these people and then went back to the beginning to watch the first season of the show.

Next post: how I cleansed my palate.

I was sitting in my History of Publishing class while a woman gave a presentation on the history of literacy. The class was restless and confused. The presenter's visual aid–likely an overhead transparency–made no sense. The chart clearly depicted literacy steadily, and sometimes dramatically, decreasing over the ages.

Finally, someone asked a question. Was the chart accurate? Was she using some definition of literacy, some particular shade thereof, that we didn't know about?

She turned around and looked at her chart for a moment, then laughed. “Literacy, illiteracy–I always get those two things mixed up!”

Today is International Literacy Day. (Or, it was — I started writing this earlier, and then someone got up from her nap time.) Literacy is considered a human right, and as with all rights, I exhort us all to exercise it, and treat it with respect.

As I'll tell anyone who will listen, my daughter started reading this summer. This has probably been one of the greatest joys of my life, and I don't feel that my life is short on joy. Shortly after she was born, the health unit nurse dropped off the official provincial new-baby care package, which included a board book and a brochure extolling the virtues of reading to my child.

The Manitoba Government hardly needed to tell me that, but it's moments like that when my own privilege, and the privilege that my daughter grows up with every day, smacks me. It makes me sad that instructions must be given about reading to children. I know why, or think I do — inequality, historical and continued, that has affected and still affects access to education, of both formal and informal varieties.

My mother grew up in a remote, post-war farming community. Her father, typical of someone from his place and time, went to school up to grade eight. After grade eight, even if you weren't needed on the farm or in the house, there was no where else to go to school unless you wanted to be a priest. But he loved reading, and when the encyclopedia salesman came by, he bought the set. The neighbours considered this a wasteful extravagance–and it was extravagant. Encyclopedias had to be purchased on installment plans.

But my grandfather knew what he was doing. There weren't so many books available in that time and place. My mother read that set of encyclopedias cover to cover.

Where I grew up, the only bookstore in town was a Christian one, and as a Roman Catholic, it was not somewhere I could frequent (Catholics and Protestants didn't mix in THAT time and place). We'd buy books when we went to the bigger town down the highway, but often I just read what was available. My mother was doing her degree by distance ed, and had a stack of university English textbooks purchased through the mail — that's how I read Margaret Laurence. And the entire Norton Anthology of Poetry. At the town library, I rummaged around and tried something from every genre — I remember The Guns of Navarone. And a schlocky Judith Krantz novel containing some lesbian sex scenes that left me mildly alarmed. (Until then, homosexuality had been invisible to me. Time. Place. Roman Catholic.)

Even I am daunted by the absolute glut of reading material available now. And I'm not even talking about on-line–just regular old books are available to me in quantities that I would never have imagined growing up in a remote rural setting. For a long while, later, I didn't like to use the library because I wanted to own the books (and to write in the margins–yes, I'm a book-defacer). I wanted them to always be there. They made me feel comfortable and safe.

I've gotten over that now. In the past ten years at my house we've had to give away a thousand books, easily, simply because we don't have room for them all. (I'm sure we have at least a thousand more–and that's nothing compared to many book collectors we know.) Watching, and helping, my daughter learn to read makes me feel guilty for becoming complacent about reading. That's perhaps an irrational thought for someone who teaches writing skills every day, but I'm talking more about my own reading, and my own writing, which have dwindled more and more as I've entered those career/motherhood simultaneous crunch years that everyone's been talking about and turn out to be totally real.

Hard work certainly helps, but if you want to learn to write well, almost nothing, I believe, can substitute for a lifetime of reading. And so I feel pangs of something complicated–joy, regret about my own failings, excitement and trepidation about all the wonders that await–as I explain silent letters to a three-year-old (damn you, English!). I don't feel such essential pangs when I teach at college (sorry), probably because the students are not my offspring. But also because I don't have to give my daughter a grade. She is learning to read because it is simply essential to her–she has spent her whole life watching her parents read, and write, and must do the same.

So, a little over a week ago, we ordered Chinese food. My fortune read thusly:

In case you can’t read that terrible photo, it says, “Something interesting will happen soon at work.” Or, on the French side of the fortune, “Il se produira bientôt au travail quelque chose d’intéressant.”

Now, “interesting” is a weak, sickly and slippery word, so this fortune struck nervousness into my heart. A little bit. As Mindy says to Homer, “Desserts aren’t always right.” (It’s in the episode with Michelle Pfeiffer guest starring, for those who can’t quite remember the line.)

The next day at work, I got a mysterious email message from a new college librarian I’d never met before, saying there was a gift he wanted to give me that he’d had for a few years, and now that we were colleagues, he thought he should give it to me, sorry if this sounds creepy, etc.

The thorough LinkedIn background check I performed revealed only an affinity for books, and for rare books in particular, so I quickly assented to a meeting, despite feeling at the mercy of a fortune cookie.

It turned out I was gifted with the best surprise I’ve had in a long time: a copy of Henry J. Morgan’s 1903 illustrated biographical dictionary Types of Canadian Women. Volume 1.

Nearly six years ago, my book Types of Canadian Women—Volume 2—was published. It’s a mock biographical dictionary in poems and poetic prose, inspired, you guessed it, by Morgan’s Volume 1. I talked about the source material in the publishers’ bumpf, and in some interviews at the time. Morgan’s book says a Volume 2 was in the works, but, having never found trace of one, I thought I’d just have to write it.

I’d been in Winnipeg for about a year when Types came out. But our mysterious new librarian, Matthew Handscombe, was still in Toronto, where I’d written all but the last few drafts of the book–partly on Toronto Island at the fantastic Gibraltar Point centre, partly in a second-floor apartment in a Victorian brick oven in Parkdale, with no air-conditioning, one summer on a Canada Council grant.

Matthew was operating a tiny bookshop specializing in fine press books. My publisher, Gaspereau Press, does some pretty fine printing, so Matthew had no doubt seen my book in the catalogue, probably read one of the interviews, and may have been familiar with my earlier Gaspereau release, Spine, which contained, among other things, poems about fine printing. Somehow, my reference to Morgan’s Volume 1 stuck in his brain.

I used to consult Volume 1 in the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, as part of my work as a researcher on Canadian history books and book proposals. The Robarts had a circulating copy, and while I was aware of a few copies on offer from book dealers, even after I’d fallen for the book and decided to write Volume 2, acquiring my own copy—which dealers listed for around $300—had never become a priority.

Still with me? Let’s get back to Matthew Handscombe, who, somewhere in the depths of his brain, catalogued this detail about my interest in this book.

(Wait, I have to digress again to say how much I like librarians. There’s Wendy, with whom I hung out during my M.A. in Ottawa, and now works at Memorial University Newfoundland; my sister Christine who works at the library in the Law Courts in Edmonton and is finishing her MLS on the side; Brian in the cubicle opposite mine who teaches in the library tech program–Hi Brian!; his colleague Tabitha whose CanLit class I once bombarded with my collection of obscure–duh–Canadian poetry chapbooks. I used to think librarianship was my lost calling, but then remembered that I promised myself, after paying off my student loans, never to go to university again. In short–go visit your library.)

Matthew’s father, Richard Handscombe, taught linguistics and children’s literature at York University (scroll down the linked page for bio), and was an avid book collector. Though significant parts of his collection were donated to the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the U of T—particularly a collection of over a thousand items by and about John Cowper Powys and his brothers—when Richard died, Matthew was left with a massive number of books to find homes for. Thirteen thousand, I think, was the number he told me (he’ll correct me if I’m wrong. Right?).

Types of Canadian Women was not, alas, lurking in the collection. But slowly, as Matthew and his family donated or sold books, he started to acquire things from the dealers, essentially doing part of the transaction in trade, with the intention of gifting specific books to individuals. It was at Greenfield Books here in Winnipeg that Matthew saw Types of Canadian Women and acquired it, somehow remembering that I, a writer he’d never met, had wanted it. It never occurred to him that I was also living in Winnipeg, until he noticed that I was a colleague at Red River College, where he’s only recently arrived.

Matthew styled the gift as a present from his father. I never met Richard Handscombe, and Matthew had never met me when he picked up this book and put it aside. I ran back to my office to get Matthew a copy of my little Volume 2, as an inadequate thank-you.

This post has gone on too long, and there is much I still want to research and write about: how books end up in rare book collections (my books are all in the Fisher, I can only assume by virtue of being Canadian small press books); more about Matthew’s father and his collection; how all this talk of book collecting reminds me of my father-in-law, Martin Levin, and his house filled with books; how Morgan’s Volume 1 will read to me now, years after I left my project behind on the poetry circuit; and how none of this would happen in a world where books are infinitely reproducible.

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is so terribly written and full of cliches that it makes my brain drip out my ear as I read it. AND YET I CAN’T STOP. I might even start the next book. That’s why I’m settling on three stars. I can see why it would make good TV: that’s just like what so much TV is like–compelling, addictive, offensive, and insulting to one’s intelligence.

Maybe even more to the point, it makes perfect sense that Martin was a TV writer before he settled down to this big honking set of two-dimensional characters being manhandled by a plot written in magic marker in between pointless lengthy action sequences, in a world full of sexist, racist, and classist cliches so obvious that there’s not really any point in dissecting them. Everything’s floating on the surface.

I can only attribute my enjoyment of it to my growing intellectual laziness as I get old, tired, addled, overworked, mommy-brained, addicted to the new media, and unable concentrate for very long on actual good books. It’s sad, really. I really shouldn’t read any more. But I probably will. I kind of want to see if he’s going to get the dragons to burn up the zombies. But we probably don’t get to that level get until after a several more mini-bosses. Right? Wait, don’t tell me.

For the record, I have nothing against fantasy. Not a dedicated fantasy reader or anything, but I adore Pullman, for instance, enjoy Guy Gavriel Kay, and actually found it worthwhile to suffer through all the appendices of LOR.

But man, this book.

View all my reviews

Okay, so, finally, some more thoughts on iPad, because we all know the world needs more blog posts about that.

If I were to write a post about the apps I most frequently use, it would be embarrassingly full of simulation games and a creaky progression of inadequate Facebook apps and notetaking apps used and discarded one by one for Just Not Quite Being the Thing, Yet.

Back to the notetaking apps in a minute. First, allow me to stop strategizing about SimCity or Civilization long enough to write a brief list of writerly apps I consider noteworthy and have actually used.

1. Really Cool in a Totally Nerdly Way: Ampersands. Ampersands is the baby of a designer who always wanted to do a book of just beautiful ampersands, but there isn’t really a big enough ampersand market to justify the beautiful printing costs. That’s exactly what the beautiful iPad screen is for. I love to gaze at those fancy ands.
2. Dictionaries! Let’s start with the Oxford Dictionary of English and Oxford Canadian Dictionary. These weren’t cheap, but I use them all the time. I now always have a proper dictionary with me. (Theoretically, you don’t need to buy apps of Oxford reference books if you have a library card—Winnipeg Public Library, for one, offers on-line access to the Oxford reference library, as likely do many other libraries. But I find these apps much easier to use and more convenient.) They each have a different use – the COD for verifying Canadian spelling, yes, but the OED app has recorded pronunciations. In other massive reference books, I’ve also made some use of Larousse when confronted with a translation question. Now will someone please make a Chicago Manual of Style app?
3. For That Inky Experience:  I love using the iPad to write with my finger or a stylus; I’m awful at two-finger typing. So far the best inky response from notebook apps has been from Bamboo and from Penultimate.  But for ink good enough for doodling, try Zen Brush –made to mimic an ink brush. Nice “paper” backgrounds too.
4. No More Random Purse Paper: One of the things iPad is good for is eliminating all the random scraps of paper  with notes to myself on them. (Well, theoretically. I’m getting there.) But finding the perfect notebook app is tough. I’ve tried a zillion, and there are a zillion more waiting. I’m looking for…

•  simplicity, so I’m not bogged down with functions I don’t need;
• automatic date stamping, so I know when I wrote each page/note;
• a visual way of finding different notes and notebooks/folders (cause I just am that way);
• both ink AND typing functions;
• good ink response;
• search feature;
• iCloud integration or other automatic backup;
• both landscape and portrait orientations.

If anyone knows the app that does all that, please tell me. The newest update of Noteshelf is getting there – they’ve just added typing, but still no iCloud backup.

5. And yes, I do use Pages, but it makes me angry when working with long documents.

A kind of random assortment there, yes, but all writing related. Now how about things I thought I’d use, but don’t. Until next time…. go check out my Tumblr, where I actually post short stuff regularly.

A very literary week is coming up for CreComm Section 2. Lauren Parsons will hear part of her early oeuvre come to life at the reading/launch of Scirocco/MAP [Manitoba Association of Playwrights] Manitoba High School Playwriting Competition anthology I Was a Teenage Playwright on Monday night at McNally Robinson.

On Wednesday night (Nov. 30), the last installment of the CreComm reading series at Aqua Books (274 Garry) runs with Jamie McKay, Ryan Kessler and Mark McAvoy opening for visiting (but Winnipeg-educated) Montreal writer Saleema Nawaz, 7:30 p.m.

Saleema will also be reading to CreComm Section 3 the next day on Dec. 1. Saleema’s Winnipeg visit is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

It turns out that the narrator of Richard Brautigan’s prescient 1968 masterpiece In Watermelon Sugar was Steve Jobs. To whit:

iDEATH

It was about dark when I arrived at iDEATH. The two evening stars were now shining side by side. The smaller one had moved over to the big one. They were very close now, almost touching, and then they went together and became one very large star.

I don’t know if things like that are fair or not.

Too soon? You should have seen the Jack Layton/Yoda joke I stopped myself from posting a while back.

I found a few people online who’ve mused about iDEATH’s connection to Apple, but I’ve always been surprised it hasn’t been commented on more. Maybe Apple-devotee nerdiness and Brautigan-reading nerdiness do not often go hand-in-hand.

Prairie Fire Press & McNally Robinson Booksellers present:

Bliss Carman Poetry Award – Judge: Sylvia Legris
Short Fiction – Judge: Marilyn Bowering
Creative Non-Fiction – Judge: Lawrence Scanlan.

$6,000 in prizes. 1st prize in each category $1,250, 2nd prize $500, 3rd prize $250.

Deadline: Postmarked November 30, 2011. Entry fee $32.

For full contest rules check out www.prairiefire.ca, or contact: Prairie Fire Press, 423-100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 1H3. Phone (204) 943-9066, E-mail: prfire@prairiefire.ca.