Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Fall Books (Top o' the Season: Atwood, Bock, Gray, Little, MacKinnon, McGill)

   August... a word with Latin roots, apparently, for 2100 pages of reading and follow-up review writing during relentless hot dry windless weather.
  

Short Fiction Installment (Humour Division): Sim/phor Lab™ #1: Sheila Heti's "How Should a Person Be?"

 
    The burgeoning process of near-infinite textual production—including but not limited to Post-It note reminders, manually-typed telecommunication (so-called 'texting'), poetry, one-act plays performed at Fringe Festival venues, short stories, novels of varying girth and merit, and 'creative non-fiction'—fosters ambiguous imprecision in an already disturbingly uncertain world. 
   Here at TextLab Inc. our motto is "Clarity Through Exactitude." One of our important new undertakings, Sim/phor Lab™, is intended to be a useful and necessary beacon of exacting empiricism. Its mandate? The scientific scrutiny* of the literary producer's stock-in-trade—the simile and metaphor—under controlled laboratory conditions.

   (*Because of its dedication to pure research findings, the Lab™ receives neither corporate sponsorship nor government funding. As a result, while testing conditions strive for the industry standard methodology of stringent objectivity in a sterile environment, budgetary considerations cannot be waved away as inconsequential.)

 ∞

   Test subject #1: How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti (House of Anansi 2012), page 41:

   "For most of my life, one thing led to the next. Each step bore its expected fruit. Every coincidence felt preordained. It was like innocence, like floating in syrup." 

∞

   Transcript (excerpt) of initial informal queries raised by qualified Lab personnel:

   Emily P.:  "What kind of syrup?"
   Crystal C.:  "I mean, wouldn't floating in Benylin be an entirely different experience than sinking into a vat of blackstrap molasses? C'mon, get real. The TVV [Table of Viscosity Values] ranks distilled water as 1 and quicksand as 10, so where exactly in that wide spectrum is this Ms. Heti's 'syrup'?"
   Dmitri T.:  "Floating in what sense? As in your bathtub is filled with Mrs. Butterworth's and you slip into the goo? Or more like it's late in the 20th century and you're seeking peace and quiet, and so you go to one of those New Age places with a sensory deprivation tank, but it's filled with corn syrup instead. I think the container and context make significant differences, don't you?"
  Horst M.:  "I guess at room temperature, right? Heated? Um, with or without clothing?"
  Crystal P.: "How can a step bear fruit? Yes, thank you, I realize that hasn't been tabled today, but still. I just don't get that." 

∞

   Syrup types investigated: 

   "Delicious ripe pear halves packed in their own delicious syrup," agave nectar, brown rice, corn, maple, strawberry/butter pecan/boysenberry/traditional (sourced at the IHOP off I-5 in Marysville WA), golden, treacle, honey, simple, molasses, medicinal (Syrup of Ipecac, Nin Jiom; Nyquil; Buckley's Cough and Cold).  

 ∞

   Methodology:

   Extensive scrutiny of How Should a Person Be? revealed the narrator, Sheila, to conform to Statistics Canada's 55% "Normal" weight category for females aged 18-39. 
   Falling into that same category, Research Assistant Crystal C. volunteered to submerse herself without clothing into a bathtub of room temperature Simple Syrup (Medium, with a water:sugar ratio of 2:1).

∞

    
   Results (verbatim):

    Crystal C.:  "Christ on a cross, that was totally gross. I'm still picking crystalized sugar from my scalp. And my pubes too. And even after a couple of long showers, little nooks and crannies felt sticky for days. Thank God for ear plugs.
   I did not float in the tub; maybe a leaf could float but there's no way any human will. Not even close. While heated water feels refreshing and can soak away your worries, simple syrup at 22.22 Celsius made me feel like I was being suffocated—it's heavy and thick, not a buoyant air pillow. I imagined I could die at any instant. 
   What was it like? It was like losing hope. Like being enclosed by a superior and deadly force, or like being stuck inside a damp latex balloon—a used condom?—that's rapidly deflating. 
   Did the experience relate at all to blessed innocence, or to life running smoothly and where everything's A-Ok? No, hell no." 
 

∞

   Comment:

    A hasty judgement would conclude that the metaphor was dysfunctional and ill-advised (ie, obfuscatory writing), or that thinking it through for a longer time would have been advisable. 
   However, in light of the narrator's overall lack of direction, complete inability to write a play for which she accepted a paid commission, and subsequent binge-and-regret approach to cocaine, alcoholic beverages, and sexual promiscuity, the conclusion of Sim/phor Lab™ points to the dissolute character's flaws. The simile's very vagueness and inaccuracy, in other words, reinforces the text's construction of the narrator as flawed, fallible, and, to be colloquial, a hot mess. 

  


 

Non-Fiction Sidebar: Possible Cures for the Royalty Cheque / Royalty Statement Blues

  One week (let's say early June in 2013) your friend receives a royalty cheque for sales of her university press hardcover, a study that in one sense represents the most tangible result of years pursuing a PhD from Oxford. 
   The amount? $2.30. (Yes, as in the price of a double espresso.) 
   That same week a university press accountant sends you a Statement of Royalties for $13 (plus change) along with the announcement that the press will not issue a cheque until the royalty total reaches $25.00. 


  Your friend emails to tell you her news and you reply, feeling both empathy and sympathy, and understanding that you're swapping a fishing tale of a grimly funny kind, the humour deriving from the switch of emphasis: not "the fish I caught was this big [your hands at least 15 inches apart]" but "the fish I caught was this small [your thumb and index finger almost touching]." 
   The self-deprecating laughing tone of the exchange brings to mind related ideas: gallow's humour, whistling in a graveyard, Cathy cartoons. Beneath that? A gray landscape of metaphoric figures—The Swamp of Sadness, The Road to Regret, The Bedrock of Bitterness, The Slough of Despond. Also, there's that galling, depressing sense of futility embodied by the daily routine of Sisyphus.


   Desperate to avoid that figurative terrain, you take heart in aphorisms and clichés—"It's the journey that counts, not the destination," "Money's besides the pint, I do it becaise I love it," and "It's an honour just to be nominated." 
   As always, you recall, ol' Oscar W. had something witty and pertinent to say: "Genius is born—not paid."
   Further apothegms related to money are especially reassuring—"A good name is better than riches" and "Money is the root of all evil." (You ignore the wisdom of Twain: "The lack of money is the root of all evil." His smart-ass tone is impossible to take seriously.)
   That biblical one provides lovely comfort too: "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, 'Who then can be saved?' Jesus looked at them and said, 'With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.'" 
   So does Dorothy Parker—"If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to"—particularly because you do precisely as she asks, quickly surveying the field of obnoxious Americana: Kim K., Kanye W., Donald T., Paris H., that fatuous army of North American Real Housewives in Vancouver, Atlanta, New York, Orange County, Miami, Beverly Hills, and so on. 
   For a full five minutes you understand with wondrous clarity that a life of conspicuous consumption and crude staged arguments at nightclubs in front of a film crew doesn't appeal to you. Not in the least. 
  With those sayings digested, wealth begins to look unpleasant, no better than a burden or a curse.

   Persistent, you also take to heart the long-ago strategy of your parents (and to your knowledge, the strategy of all parents since history began): perspective. 
   In place of the dinner Mom served you / the lecture about people starving in Africa she delivered when you pushed aside that perfectly healthy serving of broccoli, you think about relative privilege and relative affluence, and that, for instance, there are "775 million people in the world who are illiterate, with another 152 million children set to follow in their footsteps because they aren't attending school." The numbers for poverty are more sobering yet. 
   You realize that you're lucky and entitled and supremely well-heeled, relatively speaking. 
   Less far-fetched, you think about the hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts publishers receive (which represent thousands and thousands of hours of labour on the part of unpaid authors) that are glanced over before being rejected and thrown into teeming recycling bins. "At least...," you begin, and trail off. There's so much for which to be thankful. After all, you're Published, you're Reviewed, you're an Author.
   A petty, never admired fold of dimwit neurons also notices that your paltry royalty-to-be is six times higher that of your friend. Guiltily, you file away that awesome fact. 
 

   Whew! You / your writing / your career as a writer has been granted an extension. You're ready to write again, free of worry about money—that vile and distracting insect.
   And you're full of insights, realizations. You think of lotteries and the feverish media reportage about winners that so mesmerizes society. Practically everyone pictures themselves winning the jackpot, all the while knowing that the usual winning of a dollar or two is just enough to buy another lottery ticket... 
   You see with sudden clarity that J.K. Rowling's billions and Yann Martel's $3 million advance are media-circulated stories of literary jackpot winners and that chances are remote (at best) that you will be a jackpot winner too. You vow to write for the sake of Art. You know too that you'll think "Africa, Africa, Africa" while steering clear of successful writer acquaintances, industry news, bookstores, review sections in papers, and literary culture in any form. 
   And you'll strive to forget the remaining $11 (and change) required to receive your precious royalty cheque. 
   That way, its eventual arrival will be a wonderful surprise.

 

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Lisa Moore's "Caught"

   In last year's notorious—harsh, mean-spirited, reductive, wrist-slapping—review of Alix Ohlin's story collection (Signs and Wonders) and novel (Open) in the weekend New York Times, William Giraldi dedicated some 1,387 words to condemnation of the sort that inspires visions of print runs being hurriedly gathered up and thrown into a gargantuan pile and then torched after being doused with gallons of gasoline. 
   From Ohlin's "cliché-­strangled" sentences and the "insufferable schmaltz" of her sentiments to "language [that] betrays an appalling lack of register," Giraldi could find nothing except serial flaws of conception and execution.
   (Asked by a Boston Globe reporter to defend his criticism, Giraldi framed the review as a mode of literary activism—and by extension as a valiant act in the service of civilization: "It was an attack on laziness, on the ubiquity of indolence that is currently polluting our literary culture.... Some people want to say the review was over the top. Let’s keep in mind, over the top is the only way to conquer a mountain, and I was confronted with an Everest of awfulness.") 

∞

   Giraldi also complained that Olin "has a baffling fondness for the most worthless word in English: 'weird.'" Regrettably, he set aside no paragraph to explain his empirical findings re: weird. 
   How he determined word value, for example, or what methodology of quantification he relied on to arrive at "the most worthless word in English" will remain undisclosed, perhaps a mystery for the ages.
   I bring this up because his ferocity for a short time made me wary of dropping "the most worthless word in English" into daily conversations or, even more egregiously, into my own writing. I'd long used and liked the word, and found places for its inclusion often, from "We had a really weird conversation on the bus" to "That scene in Blue Velvet where Dean Stockwell lip-synchs to 'Candy Colored Clown' is really weird." (Okay, the second example is total fabrication. I've never spoken those words in my life, even though I do believe them.) Yes, I could have used "awkward and uncomfortable" in the former instance and "surreal" in the latter, but weird suffices too, right?
   While reading Lisa Moore's Caught I thought, "What a weird scene" in several chapters. Writing the review I considered using "the most worthless word in English," but opted for "trippy," "oddball," "Twin Peaks," "touching-on-surreal," "stoner," and "Pineapple Express." Still, I could have easily inserted compound words: "funny-weird," "strange-weird," "eerie-weird," and, of course "delightfully weird." They're all apt.

The actual  review appears in The Vancouver Sun.

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—D.W. Wilson's "Ballistics"

  The last time I was in Seattle, I passed by a gun buyback hosted by the police and sheltered under an I-5 overpass downtown. 
   For this unusual, but very American-seeming event the plan was for gun owners to retire their firearms in exchange for gift cards.  Even though the buyback was open to everyone, no women were visible.
   The police soon faced a problem, however: commercial buyers showed up too, pacing outside the territory the police had claimed and holding up signs proclaiming "Cash for Guns," and so on—a big obstacle, in other words, to permanently removing firearms from circulation.
   Besides the novelty of the event itself, the other noteworthy visual was the carnivalesque atmosphere. Outside the police zone, guys dressed specially for the occasion in camo, canvas vests, hunting colours, and sniper black (I'm talking about downtown Seattle here, where dyed hair, visible tattoos, and/or head to toe preppy are the usual indicators of belonging), and traded back slapping moments of camaraderie while handling one another's rifles. (Yes, the homosocial aspects caught my attention.)

   Watching them from within the car, I was reminded of the set up in Johan Renck's music video for The Knife's "Pass This On": a drag performer sings before an audience in what looks like a footballer clubhouse. The empty space between the watchful and potentially hostile audience and the delicate lone singer—the dance floor, technically, but also symbolic of the divide between two worldviews, two genders, and two sexualities—seems both menacing and vast. While Renck's video collapses that divide in a utopian fiction of scenes with euphoric dancing, in the reality of an overcast Seattle afternoon in January, I didn't feel so hopeful.


  Anyhow, this posting is all digression that began with me thinking about the gun-happy guys in Ballistics. Oops.

   My review appears in The National Post.

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Dede Crane's "Every Happy Family"

  Just as some professions seem to be overrepresented in literature (artists and writers and professors, for instance), others are underrepresented (garbage collectors, managers of fast food franchises, bus drivers). 
   Ditto for cities, with the Greater Toronto Area commanding a hefty proportion of the Canadian literary imaginary. Nice and pretty and reputedly boring Victoria, meanwhile, barely registers. 
   Set in Fairfield, one of the prettiest neighbourhoods anywhere, Dede Crane's Every Happy Family offers a glimpse of tumultuous middle-class life in BC's capital city.

My review appears in The Winnipeg Review.

Digression: Books I'm Reviewing—Spring Books (End o' the Season)

   Night class begins tomorrow, and that also brings to a close my book reading and reviewing for Spring 2013. 
   The last of the fiction I'll be writing about (listed accorded to personal enjoyment factors, high to low) includes Lisa Moore's Caught, Dede Crane's Every Happy Family, and D.W. Wilson's Ballistics; the reviews will appear in The Vancouver Sun, The Winnipeg Review and The National Post in the next few weeks (I imagine...I submit reviews, but have no control when they're actually published).