On The Road (Again)

To Manitoba via the North Superior route. Then back again, probably via the States (more hotels with pools on their side of the border). I've got our digital camera and internet access throughout, so I'll be sure to post. Just brace yourself for "vacation kwality" posting.

Cheers!

Three Books

It's been some years since I last read Leigh Brackett; in fact I was 21 or so when I finished The Reavers of Skaith and decided I was getting too old for fun fiction and should concentrate instead on writers I might work into my honors thesis — and, more appropriately, attempt to emulate in my own efforts at serious fiction.

A cover that demands to be taken seriously.

My loss. Brackett was a writer who jumped with apparent ease from one pulp genre to the next, creating clean lean stories that hewed to convention but bore enough subtle distinctions to deliver a surprising and satisfying conclusion. The Sword of Rhiannon is a first-class example of Brackett’s facility: anyone with a passing knowledge of Celtic mythology — or the Martian books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, or the Sword & Sorcery tales of Robert E. Howard — will recognise the stock characters and general direction of the story. Like Howard and Burroughs, Brackett is intent on delivering a muscular narrative, but while she’s not afraid of bold-strokes description, her choice of words never gets quite so florid as her male progenitors. Brackett seemed to assume that “Brawny arms” “heaving bosoms” and other generic clichés didn't just distract her, but her readers as well.

It’s been suggested — well, it’s actually been said outright — that Brackett's script contributions are what made The Empire Strikes Back the best of the Star Wars lot. After reading TSOR, which delivered a quick Martian Sword & Sorcery punch within 150 pages — I'm pretty much persuaded. When I finished the novel, I wondered why she and her pulp creations weren’t household names the way John Carter or Conan are. It could be Brackett’s gifts were best suited to tuning up or fixing what was already there. If so, that’s no small thing. Hollywood (and I) have been missing her for decades.

Housekeeping vs. The Dirt is Nick Hornby’s follow up to his previous collection of literary reviews for The Believer: The Polysyllabic Spree. Said Spree (a variously numbered cult of young men and women in charge of the magazine) may censor his lightest attempts at snarkiness, but Hornby’s good-natured observations still cut to some critical truths. Just prior to declaring, “It goes without saying that [Ian McEwan’s] Saturday is a very good novel,” Hornby writes:

[T]he world of books seems to be getting more bookish. Anita Brookner’s new novel is about a novelist. David Lodge and Colm Tóibín wrote novels about Henry James. In The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst wrote about a guy writing a thesis on Henry James. And in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, the central character’s father-in-law and daughter are both serious published poets and past winners of Oxford University’s Newdigate Prize for undergraduate poetry. And though nobody should ever tell a writer what to write about....Actually, forget that. Maybe somebody should. Sort it out, guys! You can’t all write literature about literature! One book a year, maybe, between you — but all of the above titles were published in the last six months. Taken as a group, these novels seem to raise the white flag: we give in! It’s hopeless! We don’t know what those people out there want! Pull up the drawbridge! 

I loved it. I read it out loud to my wife as she made the Sunday night pizza, and she loved it, too. The book is worth whatever The Believer or Amazon is charging for it, so buy, take and read. Hornby is clearly having fun, and so will you.

When I first read this creative essay by Josip Novakovich, I was reminded (not to put too fine a point to it) of essays I’d written as a very young, creative type guy. I won’t pretend to have attained the same insight, prosaic quality or emotional punch as Novakovich, but that ability to just dump the brain’s filing cabinet onto the floor and choose seemingly random bits that wind up generating their own electromagnetic fields of significance ... God, I miss that capacity! I bought Novakovich’s Writing Fiction Step By Step hoping the exercises therein would pull me out of the deeper ruts I’d carved for myself as a writer, and possibly get me thinking (and working) more productively on my current novel.

Novakovich does not disappoint. In fact, he delivers with a vengeance. I’ve no doubt Novakovich has performed every one of these exercises. He cheerfully describes writing as “a strenuous sport and a demanding art,” adding, “You must be mentally fit to do it well.” In other words, this is an exercise program for writers willing to build up the mental muscles with the dedication of a would-be Charles Atlas.

This book works well as a companion piece to Madison Smartt Bell’s Narrative Design. For a fiction writer, both books are helpful in their own distinctive way: while Bell examines the choices made by accomplished short story writers, Novakovich’s exercises offer an entry point for the writer to discover and make those choices via experience. I began the book with the intention of doing every last exercise suggested, but quickly found that just reading the exercises and Novakovich's short meditations of their possibilities was often enough to get me up and writing — often in a very different direction than the one suggested. An excellent resource for anyone (including bloggers) experiencing creative freeze.

Walking Away From Faith by Ruth A. Tucker, and a Calvinist-inspired bunny-trail of some significance

I dreamed I had a fever
I was pushin one-oh-three
My mom’s all upset - cryin’ by my bedside
Everybody’s prayin’ for me
I hear a scratchin at the window
I somehow twist myself around
I realize I’m eyes to eyes
With the fella in the Brite Nitegown

Brite Nitegown
Brite Nitegown
You can’t fight with the fella
In the Brite Nitegown

Donald Fagen (mp3 here)

“One-oh-three,” you say? That's kid stuff. The “scratchin at the window,” however, was tangible enough to put me in a metaphysical frame of mind, so among the curiosities I pulled from my laden bookshelves while I was sick was Walking Away From Faith, by Ruth A. Tucker. I'm not sure who clued me in to this book (probably JT) but I was completely taken with it. I found Tucker to be plain-spoken, and forthright about her own doubts and insecurities — a religious academic attempting to explore without guile or defensiveness the issue of apostasy. Intellectually she was both perceptive and receptive in fairly equal measure. A quick Google search reveals that this book receives glowing recommendations from both evangelical atheists (here is one such) and evangelical Christians — surely the most unique distinction for a religious book you could hope to find.

As I scanned the Google links, I was surprised to see how few of them pertained to the book. It's received precious little attention from the commercially-funded religious rags, and after investigating a little further I began to see why: the book and its subject matter have been eclipsed by the treatment Tucker has received at the hands of her former employers, Calvin College and Theological Seminary.

I would dearly love to comment on this specific case, but the only account on record is Tucker's (here). It's as surely biased as all first-person accounts must be, but she's attentive to pertinent details and the fact that Calvin remains mute in response to her objections is more than a little damning of them. Certainly church-funded academia is no stranger to immoral administration. I have a professor friend who has been the recipient of shabby treatment from both public universities and religious colleges: he asserts in no uncertain terms that Christian colleges will screw-over an exiting staff-member more thoroughly than any public institution, because a) there are fewer accountability hoops for the administrations of religious institutions to jump through, and b) the administration, whose chief concern is public perception among the school's donor base, will invoke without censure the self-serving “godliness clause” (JT unpacks it all here).

Instead I'll do the usual: speak from personal experience and make a few scandalous generalizations in an effort to provoke.

So far as I'm concerned, nothing sucks the air out of a room faster than a man intent on selling a Calvinist Benefits Package. Thanks to prolonged manifold exposure (I skulked in the hallways of the ICS and as an MCC hack did some work with CPJ in the mid-90s) on this issue my knee-jerk has been finely-tuned to a hair-trigger response. Recently, however, I've been surprised to discover two spokesmen on behalf of John Calvin (The Man) who snuck past my defences and forced me to reconsider my deeply-entrenched predjudices — and they weren't men at all. I'm speaking of Marilynne Robinson and, of course, Tucker. (Actually, Seerveld has slipped through on occasion as well, but he's a dude and I'm trying not to complicate my invective.)

It's head-slappingly obvious where I'm going with this: if today's self-styled Calvinistas want their public voice to be anything more trenchant than a nostalgic echo of post-war glory days, the fellas running the academies and churches are going to have to roll up their sleeves and work bloody hard to address gender representation, gender discrepancies and public accountability.

On all three issues George W. Bush and his administration are holding to a higher standard than Calvin College does. If that doesn't cause consternation among my neo-Cal friends, I truly fear for the soul of their religion.

****

Getting back to Tucker's book: it's well-written, well-considered and she never condescends. This is the first I've encountered anything like it on the market, so I highly recommend the book to anyone with a vested interest in the subject matter (particularly those readers who aren't as taken with Annie Dillard as I am). Quibbles: the last chapter felt a bit rushed (possibly written while her position was being terminated?), and the font used should, I think, be avoided by all publishers everywhere. I hope once Ms. Tucker has regained her footing she'll publish other books. She's someone I don't mind listening to.

Searching for the latest Book of Secrets

Yesterday evening my older daughter was fidgeting at the dinner table. "What's up?" asked my wife.

"No! I don't want to talk about it!" was our daughter's uncharacteristic response.

We asked a few friendly questions, and she quickly revealed that while she was visiting a friend they'd spent some time exploring one of those "Oh, The Changes You're About To Go Through" books. I was grateful for my wife's presence; I've handled some of those questions in the past, but the girls take greater comfort from her answers than they do mine. And so they should.

My daughter was duly freaked out by the spectre of the menstrual cycle and the various apparatuses associated with its accommodation. She was less than thrilled to be facing this change from little girl to young woman. And after she and her friend had looked at the book, she said, "We wrapped it in a blanket and threw it in a corner of the room!"

I can certainly sympathize. Hell, I can empathize: I'm reluctant to see her change, too. I remember holding her just a few days after her birth, staring at this new creature and thinking, "She's already changed! This is all happening too fast!!"

This is all happening too fast. Even the changes occurring in my own body are taking place at a faster rate than I care to acknowledge. And where can we turn for a little perspective? People my age don't get reading material that's as revolutionary as what our children are reading; we get pre-digested bulletins. You're body is changing, but you can slow it down a bit if you go for a daily walk and maintain a high-fibre diet, buttressed by fish-oil and green tea. Hardly the sort of clarion call my daughter is hearing: Get Ready For Puberty!

I can remember reading those books at roughly her age. I felt some of that same mixture of fear and anticipation, but mostly I remained confused. Forewarned is forearmed, but information is a far cry from actual experience and the latter eventually brings some degree of ability if not actual comfort.

But when it comes to adulthood, can experience alone generate this familiarity and comfort? I'm not so sure. This year, aside from receiving the usual updates about the Disappearing Generation (now almost gone) I experienced the loss of two friends. I've watched my daughters grow silent as they grow up, cultivating their inner life and acquiring the necessary secrets. I want to believe I'm not growing strange myself, but of course I am changing, too. As I've hobbled around this house and yard, occasionally putting a hand to my bowing gut or disappearing chin, I've been forced to admit that acquiring a sense of humour about this particular phase in life is proving to be more elusive than I'd anticipated. You'd think spending my birthday ingesting antibiotics while sick in bed might help me get some perspective. Indeed I'd say I received, to quote David St. Hubbins, "Too much!! Too much @*%#ing perspective!"

So what's my next Book of Secrets — the book I don't just push away, but actually try to hide from myself? Does it even exist, or is it up to me to write it?

Do I even want to write such a thing? Or is that even a choice that any of us faces? Our lives are bracketed by circumstances and events. We write what we can in the spaces between. We write with fear and laughter ... or we don't write at all.

Is that it? Or is there some element lurking here that I'm deliberately avoiding because I've already wrapped it up in a blanket and stowed it away?

"Ah, the bucolic summers of small-town Canada!"

It's been a lovely summer by Ontario standards — warm and breezy, rather than the humid and hot suffocation we're used to. Still, so long as heating and food are not an issue, I generally prefer winter to summer because winter is quiet. Small towns don't have quiet summers. Their youths are too busy walking up and down the streets deep into the night, getting angrier and angrier because "there's nothing to do." Tempers get especially tetchy if the kids have indulged in the latest chemical concoction. Now that marijuana is being laced with crank, the only way a kid's going to get mellow is through clean living. Fie on that! Let's do something nasty! Break a window, steal something! Start a fight! Start a fire!!

I'll never forget our meeting with the lawyer when we bought the house here. He had this beatific smile on his face as we signed the papers. "So, small town living, eh?" said he. "The great thing about small towns is they have so much less crime."

He went on to expound the hoary theory that because everyone knew everyone, the parents of would-be offenders were shamed into tightening the leash on their kids. Clearly this was not a criminal lawyer. We were looking forward to the move from city to small town, but harbored no illusions about the crime rate. My in-laws were already living here, and gave us updates on who'd been arrested for what. Besides, I'd spent half my childhood in a small town, half in the city, and could attest that the number of times I'd been offered "a thumping" (or worse) by townies greatly exceeded any such threats I'd received from cityfolk — and I'd been an urban cyclist.

In the eight years we've lived here, I've only called the police twice (last night being the second time, which is what gets me musing). Mind you, there again I'm faced with a disparity: my previous decade in the city only required one such summons, and that was over a case of double-parking. Out here I made both calls out of concern for my family's safety.

Last night's episode didn't amount to much. Some kids appeared to be interested in our shed, and a pickup truck was parked nearby. This was at 2:00 in the morning, so I made the call. Had it been daylight, I would have walked over and introduced myself but given the hour I figured the police were better equipped for that sort of thing. Three cruisers and a lot of high-beam searchlighting later, the kids were gone while the pickup truck remained. The owner of the truck couldn't be found, but this morning he got in and drove off as if nothing had happened.

In the end, I guess nothing did. All in all a quiet night, really. Just not as quiet as it gets in winter.

Defending Culture vs. Defending Your Job

I thought I'd riff off of some other bloggers, chiefly Prairie Mary (here and here) and Michael Blowhard (here). It's curious, I think, to note where the dividing line has been drawn in the supposed conflict between arts-talk on blogs vs. arts-talk in newspapers and magazines. Lately the chattering classes have devoted their verbiage to resuscitating the dying "Book Reviews" of various large-distribution newspapers. The tactic of choice, it seems, is to denigrate bloggers as merely "opinionated" while upholding critics as "learned" (would-be generals in this "fight" include Richard Schickel and Lindsay Waters).

My question is, who, exactly, are these arguments directed toward? Perhaps Schickel wrote in the hope he might spur the declining readership of the LA Times to champion the restoration of its Book Review. If that was indeed the case, I'd suggest his supercilious tone was a grievous misstep: anyone who could be bothered to read his jeremiad was likely a) a literate blogger and/or b) an employee of the publishing industry. Schickel and his fellow culture vultures would do well to attend Sunday morning church or Shabbat synagogue. In our circles it's common knowledge that a pastor/rabbi can only do so much finger-wagging at the congregation before attendance — and the offering envelope — take a hit.

It's also disingenuous to attack people who consider, promote or flame particular aspects of "arts culture" in their spare time for free (especially after praising Orwell for writing on the cheap). Culture is not what's being defended, here. Culture is simply humanity-dependent, and ebbs and flows in whatever direction humanity is pointed. Take what comfort you can from that observation and move on.

I'm guessing Schickel's target audience was his boss. If that's the case, his strategy was, on the face of it, quite brilliant. By now the number of people linking to his piece probably exceeds the number of people who subscribe to the Times. "Hey Boss, dig this: two months later and people are still linking to me! Now, uhm, could we talk about my contract?" It's a clever gimmick, but its novelty dooms it (and possibly RS) to the status of one-hit wonder. How does public consumption of this piece rate next to, say, any of his glowing reviews of Clint Eastwood?

Critics are right to be concerned — whenever my job is on the line I do some hustling, too. But if, as is commonly claimed, the web is killing the newspaper (and publishing, and music, etc.) is it really such a good idea to berate its most active participants?

"Today's posting brought to you by Quisp and Quake!"

It's Cowtown Pattie's fault: she located this TV ad from her youth. Now here is one from mine: New & Improved Quake Cereal, with a guest appearance by Quisp. I would have been about four years old when I saw this.

I'd be curious to find out how people get footage of stuff like this. What events does a collector of Jay Ward animation need to attend to complete his or her collection of cereal commercials?

Here is the Wikipedia entry for Quisp. I, like others of my generation, preferred it to Quake. Obviously there was no difference in taste or texture — both were a softer concoction of Cap'n Crunch, as the entry points out — but staring at this cheerful googly-eyed propeller-head was a happier prospect than staring at a) a skull-thumping miner or b) a barrel-chested galoot. Ward must have known this.

And since I'm already YouTubing, here is a perfect example of how the White Stripes get under my skin in the most unpleasant way (Here is the rest of the story. Both via Boing Boing. ).