July 7, 2010
What is not improving by the hour is the piffle flying from the literary male who really must once and for all get over himself. God is this ever a week of bellyaching from them? We began at station creepo. It’s hardly Tuesday and I am stiffened with fury that these males, who cannot get beyond the gurgle of each other, continue to insist that there are no women in the world writing literary criticism, let alone Canada.
No one would deny the critical culture in this country could raise the blinds further up the window and allow for the circulation of oxygen, but Andre Alexis recent Walrus piece, that seemed to derail itself as it went along, insists that the critic is, and criticism begins and ends at the squabbling male, in the much reduced blast of newspaper that no longer even pretends to be interested in literature.
All the examples of possible critics to be heralded or dismissed are men, the same old names because we no longer read for what’s there, we read for those we understand to matter. It is the criticism and thinking of many women writers on literature that inspired me to take up my pen, that have rattled my brain. My critical reading does not begin and end at James Wood and John Metcalf.
Personally I put considerable thought and mad amounts of hours into every review I wrote for The Globe. Any review I wrote I hoped readers and writers would further the ideas or questions raised. The particular geography of books I wrote about should not have any bearing on the questions and considerations raised since they’re relevant to any locale. I wrote my contributions towards a literary criticism in Canada, their phrasing reflects that, they may not be tattooed in the flag, but that should not dismiss them.
I spent 3 months writing a piece on DM Fraser’s Ignorant Armies to, as yet, no publishing avail.
I actively contributed (and the rates paid are beyond the beyond poor) to the local newspaper because the quality of it frustrated me and I’d rather contribute than sit around sniffing and dismissing in coffee shops while clutching the New York Times. This is my point, to completely dismiss nearly all contributions is disingenuous to that effort. That act of attempting to put something into the bowl whether it floats or sinks.
I’m not interested in being deemed a good critic, a poor critic or a middling one. I am concerned about being a thinking individual and I happen to think it’s vital that writers, working writers, think and write about literature. That very ambition is becoming increasingly impossible. Efforts are continually thwarted. And it seems irregardless women remain bloody invisible.
And for the record one of the best reviews I’ve read in Canada was actually published in The Vancouver Sun written by Annabel Lyon. For years I read The London Review of Books solely for the work of writers such as Jenny Diski. Plus some of the more interesting blogs about Canadian literature are actually written by women poets. And does critical culture begin and end at the newspaper section and the published word, what of the gatherings and talks all over the place (some drive me up the wall, but it is rather energizing to go up) organized by KSW etc, what of the volunteer labour that goes into creating these spaces for people to gather? Again: invisible. Destination: disregarded.
July 7, 2010
On critical males bellyaching
What is not improving by the hour is the piffle flying from the literary male who really must once and for all get over himself. God is this ever a week of bellyaching from them? We began at station creepo. It’s hardly Tuesday and I am stiffened with fury that these males, who cannot get beyond the gurgle of each other, continue to insist that there are no women in the world writing literary criticism, let alone Canada.
No one would deny the critical culture in this country could raise the blinds further up the window and allow for the circulation of oxygen, but Andre Alexis recent Walrus piece, that seemed to derail itself as it went along, insists that the critic and criticism begins and ends at the squabbling male, in the much reduced blast of newspaper that no longer even pretends to be interested in literature.
All the examples of possible critics to be heralded or dismissed are men, the same old names because we no longer read for what’s there, we read for those we understand to matter. It is the criticism and thinking of many women writers on literature that inspired me to take up my pen, that have rattled my brain. My critical reading does not begin and end at James Wood and John Metcalf.
Personally I put considerable thought and mad amounts of hours into every review I wrote for The Globe. Any review I wrote I hoped readers and writers would further the ideas or questions raised. The particular geography of books I wrote about should not have any bearing on the questions and considerations raised, since they’re relevant to any locale. I wrote my contributions towards a literary criticism in Canada, their phrasing reflects that, they may not be tattooed in the flag, but that should not dismiss them.
I spent 3 months writing a piece on DM Fraser’s Ignorant Armies to, as yet, no publishing avail.
I actively contributed (and the rates paid are beyond the beyond poor) to the local newspaper because the quality of it frustrated me and I’d rather contribute than sit around sniffing and dismissing in coffee shops while clutching the New York Times. This is my point, to completely dismiss nearly all contributions is disingenuous to that effort. That act of attempting to put something into the bowl whether it floats or sinks.
I’m not interested in being deemed a good critic, a poor critic or a middling one. I am concerned about being a thinking individual and I happen to think it’s vital that writers, working writers, think and write about literature. That very ambition is becoming increasingly impossible. Efforts are continually thwarted. And it seems irregardless women remain bloody invisible.
And for the record one of the best reviews I’ve read in Canada was actually published in The Vancouver Sun written by Annabel Lyon. For years I read The London Review of Books solely for the work of writers such as Jenny Diski. Plus some of the more interesting blogs about Canadian literature are actually written by women poets. And does critical culture begin and end at the newspaper section and the published word? What of the gatherings and talks all over the place (some drive me up the wall, but it is rather energizing to go up) organized by KSW etc, what of the volunteer labour that goes into creating these spaces for people to gather? Again: invisible. Destination: disregarded.
July 6, 2010
The Acorn squash has fallen to the slug.Lifespan 24 hours. So too have Marie’s entire bean planting in plot beside me. Marie is a master gardener who knows what she’s doing. I am a hapless gardener whose essentially completely hopeless at gardening, but Marie seems happy to be beside me because I have good jokes. This demon slug has mowed his way through the known and the not known and filled his belly with every bean I planted. Marie has the compensation of an incredible pea wall that’s so abundant it may topple and crush that blighter of a slug.
I am now in fresh pursuit of a Sooke rocket plant (arugula) from the same gardener who gave me the incredible Sellafield strawberry plant. My major red mission in the clay domain. Rocket was in every garden I saw in Ireland. The phrase oh my God your rocket is doing so well was regularly invoked and we ate tons of it. Beans are so yesterday. Rocket is where it’s at. I bet Iggy Pop eats Rocket.
July 5, 2010
That should have been factory extension into home, since the houses would have sprung up around the factory.
Since the boom we’ve seen housing push housing away from jobs into commuter belts and now with jobs disappeared … the commuter belt becomes what? The Terrain Vague of the burst bubble?
***
In Walter Benjamin’s essay he talked of the time of Louis Phillipe and the following shift for the bourgeoisie:
“For the private individual the place of dwelling is for the first time opposed to the place of work…
…The private individual, who in the office has to deal with reality, needs the domestic interior to sustain him in his illusions. This necessity is all more pressing since he has no intention of allowing his commercial considerations to impinge on social ones. In the formation of his private environment, both are kept out. From this arise the phantasmagorias of the interior-which, for the private man, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together the far away and the long ago. His living room is a box in the theater of the world.” (PARIS. THE CAPITAL OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY)
***
Last night I had the strangest dream of a council flat or house in a place I’ve never been that accommodated generations of my family who are dead. There they were enclosed and co-habiting in an unremarkable, minimal yet somehow adequate space. I just walked about amazed and they were terribly animated but only in their corner. The ones who are still living were their actual age and the ones who are dead were just how they look in pictures, stalled at that pictorial age. They drank tea, all of them, sans exception. It was kinda like a museum exhibit.
July 5, 2010
Speaking of the inside/outside and habitation I recall something in the “Colony” video piece about the crumbling Bata shoe factory where a woman interviewed in Scotland (was it?) about another of the Bata shoe factories described how the factory would have an alarm, a bell (?) that would ring to wake everyone in their houses up to tell them to come to work.
I talked at length to my 80 year old Aunt about her experiences in the mills in Lancashire and she described something similar: in my notes I found this:
“The knockerup would come with a high pole tapped on bedroom windows to wake the workers up.”
and another reference:
“She would hear clogs clattering as women went to the factory.”
It fascinated me when I first watched the Bata piece how the factory extended into the home. So much so that I returned to watch the piece a second time when it showed at Western Front to ensure I had heard right.
July 5, 2010
There’s been some words in the medja about sexual harassment in Canadian publishing. Now the talk has turned a strange bend, on the one hand a self-congratulatory not me says the Duck, on the other an alarming portrait of young women tolerating creepy male writers they’ve no need to and so why do they?
It’s clear the male writers concerned target these women because they’re impressionable, which is a reflection of how weak such men are. We all experience people enamoured to an idea of us, rather than who we are, but why the need to actively proceed and profit off this when it is clear you’re trading on power and a sense of entitlement? How about having some middle-aged cop on?
Also if it is endemic in publishing culture, well the culture is not very old in this country, so when did it start? In the early years it appeared to run on a fiver and hand printing press, so did the onset of this kind of exploitative behaviour correlate with the 90’s spate of pillow case sized advances?
July 5, 2010
While I was shifting two tonne of shite with my ma in rural Ireland last week I found myself humbled by her extraordinary physical strength and resilience. A mere 5 feet nothing she dug and lifted and broke apart the huge pile and I sweated profusely trying to keep pace, opting instead to tackle the wheelbarrowing and removal of the manure away from the barns before we scored two barrows and there was no escape from the digging! That was only the start of it.
After hours of back breaking work on the Bog one of the days, we arrived back (I went into a collapsed state and could only cook sausages) and straight into the barn and out down the fields she went to bring up the cows for milking and so, 4 hours later her chores were finally done. This after the identical morning chores, working on the turf and then back for more. Jesus wept !
As I watched and listened to her navigate her world I was reminded of the practical feminism she represents and lives. This isn’t no book bound theory and comfortable verbal advocacy it’s hands into the muck and hold your own as well as any man. Her sister, younger, who we also spent time with, is similar, possessed of a practical and pragmatism that gets on with things. My Granny was the same and they’d be the first to say she was mightier.
There’s an interdependence between the women, and for that matter the men and women in this environment.
***