Guardian article on shift from reading culture to writing culture

A lively day on social medja with the publication of my article in the Guardian (or maybe it’s in Saturday’s paper — anyway it went online today) bouncing about. Thank you to all who shared it and responded. Thank you to The Guardian who afforded me space and embraced my critique.

You can read it here

The critical point in it is perhaps lost by the headline and the summary (and the way it’s being framed on social medja): I am trying to talk about my concerns about the shift from a reading culture to a writing culture and the general devaluing of labour, including the labour of reading. There was a minor mutter that I was complaining, to which I respond: critical thinking is not complaining it’s interrogating. Interrogation is the tool of writers. Writers should be critical thinkers, they should not be consumed with pandering to the market, nor should they only talk in the language of the market and the creative writing workshop.

Ultimately I want to talk about writing/literature through reading, through literature and acknowledge the continuum of literature rather than provide entry points to my work with personal ditties, confessional essays or redundant tips on how to write. (Read.) I want us to talk about reading. I want to read and I want to be read. I am passionate about what the novel can become. That’s where I want to contribute. The most important thing I can become is a better reader. (obviously in tandem with being a decent human being). One of the great joys of publishing Malarky was discovering so much new work in translation I’d never heard of. I discovered this work through some of the blogs, publications and critics who reviewed my book.

Finally I remain committed to being obsessed with the weather: although my weather watching is severely curtailed these days. Right now the weather is consistently hot, hot, hot. (Had a great chat to someone who has to deal with forest fires near her home the other night)

On listening to Fred

I have had the good fortune now to attend two writers festivals with Fred Wah and I vow in future to make better notes when listening to him, however I am generally so captivated listening to him I suspend that activity. During his recent solo reading event at the Denman Island Writers Festival he talked about writing out of some kind of ethics and how his practice moves through a variety of themes. He also discussed ideas as a way of solving practice, according to my notes, but I wonder if I was in error with my pen and in fact he talked of ideas as a way of solving problems. Poets seem to be forced to explain to audiences why it’s useful to engage with poetry. They seem required to provide explanations and to have to broach with audiences that they need to be prepared to be challenged. I think it indicates where we are at and where we need to move along the river bank to or even back down the river to. Some of the more ambitious and compelling work in this country is being done through poetic forms.

Fred read from several works including his poetry collection Is A Door. Several of the poems referenced Hurricane Isadora when she hit Mexico. Being a weather fanatic I appreciate weather in poetry and it brings Gerry Gilbert to mind and Lisa Robertson. Fred also read from Diamond Grill which he calls bio-fictions or bio-prose-poetry. Again I recall the words bio-fictions being used. He’s a lively fella is Fred. I insisted my teenager attend one reading throughout the entire festival and it was Fred’s.

We had a conversation outside in the sunshine or rather I quizzed Fred on some of the historic groupings in BC poetry movements and who was who with which work and which poets occupied which places and spaces ensemble.

I wish my notes were not so sparse on listening to Fred. Next time I shall scribble. I shall say to myself no Fred I am scribbling and listening not listening and failing to scribble incase afterwards I may fail to recall.

I did ask what he was reading and it was a collection of essays by Lucy Lippard called The Lure of the Local. I am very happy to have learned about Lucy Lippard’s work and shall trot off and buy it and read it.

*

I have just discovered that November 2013 will see another collection of correspondence between Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff published. After Completion: The Later Letters is edited by Sharon Thesen. I appreciated the first collection, mostly for the extraordinary Ms Boldereff. Must reread the latter half of that collection again before November comes. I salute Sharon Thesen for her labour in putting these two collections together.

Denman Island Readers & Writers Festival

Thank you to the very warm audiences at the Denman Island Readers & Writers Festival on Friday and Saturday. I am sorry for reversing into a tree and walking into one the following day. Fortunately I had sunglasses on, so still have my eyesight.

Thank you especially to Leslie Dunsmore who billeted us in her hand-built beauty of a rustic cabin. She was exceptionally kind to my teenage son. It was great to meet people who had moved to the Island 30 years ago. As I drove to the ferry yesterday I imagined them excavating these patches and carrying 2x4s up and around the hilly roads. A woman in the ferry line called them “shrubbies” I suppose because of them parting the shrubs and pitching their lives in amongst them.

At night from Leslie’s cabin outside on the deck we could hear the sea and see the stars. The sea is a very pleasant thing to listen to.

The panels at the festival were varied and curious. It struck me that we need to return to a time where poets and novelists were in (were able to be?) in conversation with each other. I also appreciated the opportunity to talk about reading with audiences.  I feel we need to be talking about literature through the reading of literature and creating platforms where we address different ways of reading rather than being reduced to say discussing or explaining poetry as “too difficult” or form challenging novels in the same way. (Questions perhaps instead might be: how can you read your way into this work? What might be read beside it? ) There’s an unnerving over abundance of discussion around the writing of literature and how to write.  More on that coming in a piece I have written for a major newspaper.

*

I am reading the glorious Mary Robison.

The weather appears to be in some world-wide agreement around heat. Everybody is sweating. The international hose needs to come out. The global ice bath all round.

Indian Summer

It was a busy week at the Indian Summer Festival and what a festival it was and is! The launch was hosted by none other than my favourite weather forecaster Johanna Wagstaffe. All festivals should be launched by a weather forecaster, since that means they also commence with a weather forecast.

The launch took place in the Sun Yat Sen Gardens in Chinatown and introduced us all to Rajasthan Josh and Chugge Khan who played a musical set. I hope you can hear their music in this lifetime. Youtube them in the meantime. On Saturday they played for several hours at SFU and improvised with local musicians. My favourite was the beat box number with the rapping and the wailing Sufi influenced medley in the background. I was kinda fascinated by how the younger drummers manage to sit with their legs all folded up for so long without getting cramps or severe pins and needles. The position of their knees and feet relates to supporting the instrument. There are a couple of variations, but beyond their superb musicality, I’m also taken with their cooperative muscularity.

The audience at our Urban Underbelly panel on Thursday were lively and committed. Thank you so much to everyone who came out, (what a great crowd) for your questions, comments and kind words. It’s a topic we shall revisit and expand. One of the great things about Indian Summer is the platform it offers for thinking and discussion about where we live: this city and it’s clues, blues, views and calamities.

I loved meeting and exchanging ideas and discussion with writers/thinkers like Sudeep Chakravarti and Jeet Thayil. Jeet also played a red guitar, wore red shoes and raised some raving performance poems like a Rolling Stone at the final cabaret on Saturday. While Sudeep has conveniently written a book called Red Sun. Now imagine a guitar solo in the middle of that.

Before the Hendrix solo was a storyteller and singer from Toronto Sharada Eswar — her voice was extraordinarily beautiful.

I had to miss some terrific events like the Deepa Metha one because my workload swamped me.

*

I have not seen daylight for the past 3 days. Morning to night I wrote articles for editors, who have been generous enough to show faith in me. Each night I went out for exercise late and socializing very late on Saturday. Today though I popped to water the community garden and noticed a single tiny Mr Potato poking out of the soil. He was very small and had a green patch where he’d been sunbathing. But he is delightful. The first this year. I think I may have a grand total of 7, but nothing quite matches the first potato you unveil each year. (If you are organized enough to plant them). No other plant is so mysterious. You have some idea of what it’s doing, you can watch it’s growth, but Monsieur potato keeps a low profile. If I ever get rich I might have a whole garden full with potatoes because of that chance to uncover them each day. Carrots in contrast never satisfy possibly because I am unsuccessful at growing them.

I had a great moment of joy aside from the moment described above. I stood and stared at my little patch and felt a joyful calm. I was looking intensely at something when it came over me and then I realized I was staring, not at the abundant zucchini plant, but at the single Brussel sprout plant who refuses to grow. There’s joy in resistance clearly.

*

I am rereading Michele Bernstein’s The Night. (without walking) More on the walking and reading shortly.

Photo credits: Indian Summer Festival.

Thalia Field: Bird Lovers, Backyard

I have been reading Thalia Field’s book Bird Lovers, Backyard and find its form most compelling. I appreciate how in this interview with the Seneca Review Thalia Field describes the role of, and her approach to, questions/questioning, form and thinking. For a long while I’ve thought about how new forms might emerge for non-fiction, essay and memoir. It’s exciting to see this happen in Field’s approach. I like the idea of essay through fragments. And how Field arranges the individual fragments or pieces and allows them to speak to each other rather than insisting they trenchantly  follow each other. Accumulation is the approach I suppose, a kind of folding in and out, and even within a fragment she has this technique of folding something in subtly, that as you catch its ding … you marvel at.

Thalia Field: “I would say that I am among those writers who say
“I think through writing” and in the practice of keeping an open
mind, the writing comprises an essai. Sometimes the thinking is
more argumentative than other times, sometimes more playful and
without purpose. Sometimes the questions I’m thinking through
require a lot of outside voices, languages, testimony imported from
other ways of asking. Sometimes I think through a question simply
to explore it, lose myself around it. When a question is particularly
full of “actors”, the polyvocality can feel unresolvable but offers fresh
hearing. Thinking through things can require a lot of approaches to
form, a lot of associative logic, and that’s where genres come and
go. To me, theater, fiction, essay, it’s all essentially a matter of what
helps watch the question, play with the contradictions, wonder at
connections and dissolutions. I’m interested in how minds change,
but not necessarily in changing them. I think that’s the essence
of essai, as Montaigne saw it, to find connections and wander in
questions, to watch thinking as it works.”

You can read the entire interview here

Summer memories

I was just remembering my youthful summers. I spent much of summer upside down standing on my hands like Pippi Longstocking. I wonder if spending a great deal of time upside down and air borne makes any discernible difference to one’s brain. That is a question for the neurologists and neuro-scientists out there. I wonder if I’d spent less time upside down, would I be any taller or anymore proficient at cookery? I do not think so.
In other profound summer news, we ate the first summer courgettes this week. My peas have barely broken the soil, but those courgettes are exploding. It’s remarkably hot, so hot we look like gouty Victorian era types — supine with a bank of fans. You cannot rise or stand up because the fan breeze is not powerful nor extensive. There’s something quite wonderful about endeavouring only to occupy a vague triangle of air. It finally gives algebra a purpose.