I am now officially a liability for my publishers
September 22, 2009
A good mail day today, which brought me not one, but two advance cheques (very, very modest ones), for the poetry books I have under contract at BookThug and Coach House. So I am now officially a liability for my publishers. Hooray for me!
So now I feel obligated to begin the slow crawl out of their red and into their black. In that spirit, I feel compelled to notify you that my BookThug book, Ex Machina, is available for pre-order. I know that I have sold at least one already, to Clive Holden. Now, Clive is a smart guy, and if he jumps off a cliff, you might want to consider jumping off as well. If Clive Holden is doing it, so should you!
(Since I have implicitly compared buying my book to committing suicide, I think I will end this blog entry while there is still time.)
The 95 Challenge … is over.
September 19, 2009
Earlier this year, I read an article in which Karl Rove claimed that George W. Bush read 95 books in 2006. I felt it safe to say that I hadn’t read 95 books in 2006. Now, we all know that Bush isn’t as dumb as people like to think. And we all know that the photo where Bush holds the book upside-down was a hoax. But still, I felt lame for not being as well-read as a man with a reputation as an idiot, even if that reputation isn’t deserved.
So I resolved to read 95 books in 2009. My friend Ryan Fitzpatrick decided to do the same, and we began referring to this dorky decision as “The 95 Challenge.” You know, to make it even less cool. (Although he’s hasn’t officially joined in, my friend Peter Norman e-mailed the other day to say he was on book #47 — no slouch!)
Today, I finished book #95, and therefore proclaim myself the victor over Mr. Fitzpatrick. If only some spoils had been agreed upon in advance. I’ll keep counting just to see what my annual tally turns out to be, but here is the complete list of readings. Some of these were re-read books, but most of them were new reads. A few are unpublished books read in manuscript. It’s a good mix of poetry, fiction, non-fiction/criticism/theory, and graphic fiction. Also one or two audiobooks.
Huzzah!
1 – Looking Awry (Slavoj Zizek)
2 – circuitry of Veins (Sylvia Legris)
3 – Iridium Seeds (Sylvia Legris)
4 – I, Tania (Brian Joseph Davis)
5 – Powers of Horror (Julia Kristeva)
6 – The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Vols. I & II (Alan Moore)
7 – Nerve Squall (Sylvia Legris)
8 – This is Not a Pipe (Michel Foucault)
9 – The Sublime Object of Ideology (Slavoj Zizek)
10 – Thinking Like Your Editor (Susan Rabiner & Alfred Fortunato)
11 – Doomsday Patrol: The Painting That Ate Paris (Grant Morrisson)
12 – Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan
13 – The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature
14 – Forget Foucault (Jean Baudrillard)
15 – Neuromancer (William Gibson)
16 – Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (Slavoj Zizek)
17 – The Spirit of Terrorism (Jean Baudrillard)
18 – Emergency Hallelujah (Jason Heroux)
19 – The Book Collector (Tim Bowling)
20 – Civilization and Its Discontents (Sigmund Freud)
21 – Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord)
22 – Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
23 – The Humbugs Diet (Robert Majzels)
24 – Rebels on the Backlot (Sharon Waxman)
25 – Air Pressure (David Fujino)
26 – Kingdom, Phylum (Adam Dickinson)
27 – Thanks and Have Fun Running the Country (McSweeney’s)
28 – The Golden Age of Paraphernalia (Kevin Davies)
29 – Accrete or Crumble (Natalie Simpson)
30 – Pause Button (Kevin Davies)
31 – The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy (Tim Burton)
32 – American Whiskey Bar (Michael Turner)
33 – Une Semaine de Bonte (Max Ernst)
34 – Do Books Matter? (ed. Brian Havelock Baumfield)
35 – Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing (Stephen King)
36 – Road Rage (Richard Matheson, Joe Hill, Stephen King)
37 – The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
38 – The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan)
39 – I Cut My Finger (Stuart Ross)
40 – Bone 9: Crown of Horns (Jeff Smith)
41 – Mother Superior (Saleema Nawaz)
42 – Swim (Marianne Apostolides)
43 – Book of Clouds (Chloe Aridjis)
44 – The Curtain (Milan Kundera)
45 – Shortcomings (Adrian Tomine)
46 – The Art of the Novel (Milan Kundera)
47 – Getting Things Done (David Allen)
48 – Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Cory Doctorow)
49 – Violence (Slavoj Zizek)
50 – Farenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
51 – Interrogating the Real (Slavoj Zizek)
52 – What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Haruki Murakami)
53 – I Begin By Counting (Wilfred Watson)
54 – Fond (Kate Eichhorn)
55 – Coraline (Neil Gaiman)
56 – Notes on Conceptualisms (Vanessa Place / Robert Fitterman)
57 – Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (Stuart Ross)
58 – Venous Hum (Suzette Mayr)
59 – No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy)
60 – The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon)
61 – Transversals for Orpheus (Garry Thomas Morse)
62 – Basilisk (Futaro Yamada & Masaki Segawa)
63 – Stripmalling (Jon Paul Fiorentino)
64 – Expressway (Sina Queyras)
65 – The Last Novel (David Markson)
66 – Zombie Haiku (Ryan Mecum)
67 – The Benjamin Sonnets (Clint Burnham)
68 – Magenta Soul Whip (Lisa Robertson)
69 – Testaments Betrayed (Milan Kundera)
70 – Anatomy of Keys (Steven Price)
71 – The Zombie Survival Guide (Max Brooks)
72 – The Castle of Otranto (Horace Walpole)
73 – Beyond the Pale (Lars Palm – unpublished)
74 – Tax-Free Savings Accounts (Gordon Pape)
75 – Protracted Type (Nico Vassilakis)
76 – The Fragile Absolute (Slavoj Zizek)
77 – Crabwise to the Hounds (Jeremy Dodds)
78 – Revolver (Kevin Connolley)
79 – Fortified Castles (Ryan Fitzpatrick)
80 – How to Write (derek beaulieu)
81 – Day Shift Werewolf (Jan Underwood)
82 – Double Game (Sophie Calle)
83 – Einstein’s Dreams (Alan Lightman)
84 – The Haunted Wilderness: The Gothic and Grotesque in Canadian Literature (Margot Northey)
85 – Free Culture (Lawrence Lessig)
86 – Automatic World (Struan Sinclair)
87 – Je Nathanael (Nathalie Stephens)
88 – Bad Night (Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips)
89 – Fences in Breathing (Nicole Brossard)
90 – The Sorrow and the Fast of It (Nathalie Stephens)
91 – The War of the Worlds (H. G. Wells)
92 – Wolf Tree (Alison Calder)
93 – Imagination Manifesto Book 1 (GMB Chomichuk et al)
94 – The Laundromat Essay (Kyle Buckley)
95 – Walter Benjamin’s Archive (Walter Benjamin)
8-Ball: Maurice Mierau
September 16, 2009
Maurice Mierau was born in the US and votes in both Kansas (by mail) and Winnipeg, where he works as an editor. His latest book of poems, Fear Not (Turnstone Press, 2008) is a finalist for the ReLit Award. His first book was Ending with Music (Brick, 2002). Maurice is writer-in-residence at the Winnipeg Public Library for 2009-10. His web site is at www.mauricemierau.com.
1. What do you want to talk about—which question do you wish interviewers would ask, and what is your answer?
This seems distinctly like talking to myself, something that, as a Canadian poet, I’m used to.
I wish that interviewers would ask me about my formal concerns and the influences on my work. For a long time I’ve been reading American poets. One of them is John Berryman. American writers in his generation (born before WWI) tended to move very easily between writing in meter, using rhyme or partial rhyme, and then adopting freer forms which still often echo the centuries of English verse that existed before modernism. Of course they were all Poundlings at least if you exclude the ideogram. It seems to me that a similar thing happened with the so-called new formalists in the US in the 1980s. I’m thinking of people like Gjertrud Schnackenberg and Mark Jarman.
You can see that kind of stylistic promiscuity in my last book, Fear Not, where I use—often parodically—a wide variety of technical devices that have their roots in the work of numerous Dead White Guys. At the same time the content can be about reality TV, or some other junky form of pop culture, and I’m also quite willing to ransack techniques from pomo stuff too.
In Canada, where we are still a colony in literary terms, poets have been earnestly rediscovering Black Mountain open form for more than 4 decades. What I think is vastly more interesting are the younger writers who actually read poetry within the mainstream English canon and beyond, and let that influence them. I’d mention David O’Meara, Barbara Nickel, Elise Partridge, Elizabeth Bachinsky, and Karen Solie as impressive examples.
Right now I’m obsessed with the sestina, and am doing a whole book of them. I’m working with some of Auden’s and other variations on the 12th century form, because of how the restrictions get dull. But I like the challenge of playing within a tight set of rules, even while pushing those rules right to the edge, both in terms of content and form.
2. What advice do you wish you’d received, but didn’t, when you first started to take your writing seriously?
I wish someone had told me to worry more about craft and prosody, and less about publishing. It’s like being an athlete. You have to be in shape and at the cliché peak of your game. Otherwise the big event (book publication) is just an embarrassment.
3. What is wrong with the publishing industry, and what are they getting right?
My response here will sound reactionary. I think the literary publishing industry in Canada is producing too many books, poetry in particular. Does anyone believe that the roughly 200 poetry titles published in 2008 are all worth a reader’s time? Probably not, but publishers keep trotting out the books because their block grants depend on quantity and not quality. I’d like to see the same resources or more concentrated among a smaller number of publishers. For granting agencies, measuring quality is contentious but necessary; we may even need jurors from outside the country to reduce the nepotism and log-rolling.
The best Canadian presses these days are producing really attractive books. Design standards have for the most part gone up considerably with the mass adoption of computerized book design. The technology has also lowered the cost of producing and marketing books. There are now many very creative marketing vehicles produced for books that are based on social media and other new tech. How effective they’ll be is yet to be determined.
4. How will technology change writing?
It already has in terms of both writing and dissemination. But I don’t think that writing is really about technology. An e-book or a web site is a medium, not the message. If it’s a novel, the reader will still want some kind of narrative. If it’s a poem, the reader wants craft and emotional connection among other things.
5. What is your process for a typical piece of writing, from idea to publication? (Give a specific example.)
I tend to be both chaotic and programmatic. In other words I flounder around for a while, then create a structure, and then plug some of the chaos into that structure, as well as making new material for the structure. For example with my last book, Fear Not, I had some of the poems kicking around for a while. Then I got on a roll where I realized that I could layer texts and forms over top of each other, always riffing off the Biblical source in the Gideon self-help material at the beginning of their Bible. This created an ironic context for all kinds of disparate content, and so it was really fun to write the book once the structure became clear to me. The editing process is largely about achieving clarity and eliminating junk.
6. What are your daily habits as a writer, and as a reader?
I try to work on a schedule. Right now it’s two poems drafted per week. Next year it will be a certain number of pages of prose every week. As a reader, I am constantly immersed in books, especially poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—often the nonfiction is research for my own writing. I also am big on taking notes on my reading either in diary form or on the computer with long quotes and commentary.
7. What is your ambition as a writer—what do you want to accomplish, personally and professionally?
I would only admit this under torture—it seems foolish to say how ambitious you are, in case you don’t live up to your own standards. I do want to have a new book of poems drafted by the end of this year. I’m also working on a memoir I started in 2003 that has been rejected by several good publishers because it’s a mess. It needs restructuring and new material, so that’s my 2010 project.
8. Why don’t you quit?
A good question, especially for poets. The average book of poems in this country sells two or three hundred copies. Even successful novelists in Canada nearly always have to teach.
I keep writing for two main reasons: one is the pleasure of doing the work. This includes competing with writers I enjoy, many of whom are dead. The other source of enjoyment is the connection with people who read my work, which I usually experience at readings. I’m an extroverted reader, and when people laugh or say they were affected by something at a reading, that is rewarding.
Of Mice and Minotaurs
September 13, 2009
In the words of Adam Serwer, “The Onion wins the Internet.”
Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?
Ph.D. . . . check!
September 8, 2009
At the end of last month I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis, a novel called The Crow Murders, and so aside from some paperwork that I should finish up this week, I have completed my Ph.D. in English.
I just moved to Winnipeg and am in the middle of unpacking/organizing and doing all the things you have to do in order to move between provinces. Also preparing to start working as a Sessional Instructor at both the U of Manitoba and the U of Winnipeg.
I will also have a bit more time to devote to actually finishing this website, which is not near what I have envisioned. So keep your eyes peeled (I never understood that expression, and I still don’t) for updates. I will try to get some more writings and interviews up here for you as well.
Once I sign off on this I am going to read through the proofs for Ex Machina, my book out this fall with BookThug. If you want to click on the link, you can pre-order the book.
8-Ball: Gregory Betts
September 6, 2009
Gregory Betts is the author of If Language and Haikube, and has edited books of poetry by Lawren Harris, W.W.E. Ross, and Raymond Knister. He has been publishing since ’99, when his first poems appeared in a small housepress anthology of translations of translations of bpNichol’s translations of Apollinaire’s translations. He has published a half-dozen chapbooks, a string of broadsides, and various one-off projects, including sound poetry, visual art, web/digital art, and more. His stories, critical writing, and reviews have appeared in journals across Canada and beyond.
1. What do you want to talk about—which question do you wish interviewers would ask, and what is your answer?
I’d have to say that the text itself is already what I want to talk about, and interviews are a great opportunity to encounter somebody else’s engagement and interaction with my work. It is kind of a shocking experience to hear people interacting with your own writing in ways totally beyond your control, and I’m fascinated in the way the texts perform out there in the real world — what lines make people yawn or laugh or transcribe into an email signature. I was raised in the postmodern era which means that I’ve long had instilled in me the po-mo mantra that ‘no reading of a text is wrong’ (something I have come to disagree with, but that’s another issue), but at the same time dialogue always helps me discover the limits of what I already know. In other words, when I talk with someone, I’m learning; much less so when I talk to someone, although learning can happen there too. I’ve never believed in the solitary genius theory of literature, or at least never invested anything in that kind of romance, and it follows that my writing puts dialogue and influence in the foreground. Kristeva uses the term “symplegmatic” which I enjoy for its suggestion of a mixture of wrestling and subtle erotic embrace. This is one of the things I am always interested in with regards to interviews; a symplegmatic dialogue in response to work that I am heavily invested in. Unfortunately, I am also too neurotically postmodern to have any faith in finding my answer.
2. What advice do you wish you’d received, but didn’t, when you first started to take your writing seriously?
When I was in high school, one of my teachers collected my poetry produced in various classes and for the school newsletter. He made me wait after class one day and showed me the file he had amassed. He didn’t have much to say in particular about my writing, but he gave me a copy of George Bowering’s Selected Poems (by Talon Books) and said “you are ready for this.” That’s about as good advice for a young reader as I can imagine: real writers read.
3. What is wrong with the publishing industry, and what are they getting right?
Canada has reached the point where anybody in this country with something to say can get published. It’s a phenomenal and unprecedented moment. Its effects can be felt in the explosion of literatures in all directions. It can also be felt in the confidence and lack of interaction between literary communities. It has led to ridiculous flare-ups of turf protection, but luckily (in my experience) these kind of obnoxious aesthetic battles are rare. Instead, we have a lot of activity a lot of which is operating at a fairly high intensity. I would love to see more intensity. I would love to see more interaction; and by interaction, I don’t mean formalist poets talking to confessional poets or even conventional prose writers, I mean interacting with the intensities at play in Canada’s literary communities and coming up with new avenues for exploration. We have some real cutting edge writers in this country, and I don’t want their work to get cut off and isolated as an oddity, but rather be the impetus for the creation of new edges.
4. How will technology change writing?
Writing is technology. How will sweetness change sugar? After the Singularity, when cyborgs desert the wasteland of earth for better colonies and energy sources, humans will regroup and discover a stash of forgotten books or scrolls in the wreckage called planet Earth. These will train them, civilize them, and rekindle fantasies of agriculture and cities. Writing will shape and then warp their minds, leading inevitably to the second and subsequent Singularities.
5. What is your process for a typical piece of writing, from idea to publication? (Give a specific example.)
Please let me know if I’ve been publishing pieces that have become typical! Projects, such as Haikube which was a collaboration with Hallie Siegel and Matt Donovan, begin over dinners, discussions, coffee, tea, emails, phone calls, and then drafts, and then discussions, and then more dinners, and then letters, phonecalls, interaction with owners of CNC engraving machines and the final selection of wood type (ebony) which determines the limits of character spacing which shapes the overall limitation of the text, which leads to rewrites, more discussions, a bottle of wine, the production of prototypes which allows us to see the poems in the world, which allows us to immediately identify huge weaknesses, fundamental flaws, in our original ideas, which crises leads to new drafts, more dinners, more emails (a positive flurry of them at this stage), which leads to a second prototype, which leads to procurement of financing (or at least the solicitation of the same), production, and the creation of the first real draft of the object on borrowed money, forcing us to commit to the finality of the words and design on the cube, the occasion of which leads to an evening spent rotating the cube and jotting down favourite poems created by the movable sides of the cube, the resultant poems of which are consequently sent to Filling Station, GEIST magazine, and a couple other places who publish the poems (in full and accurate typographic splendour) which leads to a chapbook by BookThug of the original six plus other favoured poems produced by the aleatoric rotation of the cube, which sells out before the actual launch date of the art objects at the Olga Korper Gallery, creating a pressing need for a second edition of the chapbook, which Jay MillAr redesigns in response to a book he saw in New York, and which I take to Ottawa to launch, about a month before the actual exhibition in Toronto. Projects such as other projects are different.
6. What are your daily habits as a writer, and as a reader?
I try to read or write something every day, to try to eat better, get fit, and try to take long and indulgent breaks with music and movies or meet someone for drinks or food. Too much of everything is barely enough. I can handle a day without a new poem, but am crushed by one without laughter.
7. What is your ambition as a writer—what do you want to accomplish, personally and professionally?
I would very much like to think that each project that I have worked on opens up new doors for subsequent work by me and others and can be felt as the trace in each text. It’s not necessarily a linear process, for one can write the trace. I’m not trying to get anywhere with my writing, but I am definitely trying to evoke and provoke myself into new ways of being.
8. Why don’t you quit?
Because I still have a lot to learn.
