NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Act of God.

Hot Docs has just announced its 2009 line-up. Festival is slated for April 30-May 10. Another good reason to go to Toronto. Here’s who they are:

Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival is North America’s largest documentary festival, conference and market. Each year, the Festival presents a selection of more than 150 cutting-edge documentaries from Canada and around the globe. Through its industry programs, Hot Docs also provides a full range of professional development, market and networking opportunities for documentary professionals.

Hot Docs was founded in 1993 by the Documentary Organization of Canada (formerly the Canadian Independent Film Caucus), a national association of independent documentary filmmakers. In 1996, Hot Docs became a separately incorporated organization with a mandate to showcase and support the work of Canadian and international documentary filmmakers and to promote excellence in documentary production.

Big screen documentaries strike me as similar to what Matthew Arnold (not Tom Wolfe) called ‘new journalism’ in 1887, describing the style of Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette: brash, vivid, personal, reform-minded…occasionally featherbrained. As Kevin Karrane put it in ‘Making Facts Dance’ an essay at the front end of The Art of Fact, an anthology of literary journalism:

 " The Victorian social reporters, and the American muckrakers who followed them, aimed at a factual literature of modern industrial life. Their literary touches came less from artistic design than from the writers’ sense of moral or political urgency: a determination to dramatize the reality of poverty, prostitution and prejudice."

  Pretty good definition of propaganda.

I’ve recently read Carmine Starnino’s A Lover’s Quarrel. Anyone with an interest in Canadian poetry should do so too. Not that objections to lauding non-derivative native (small n) poetry solely for its successful voicing of what it means to be authentically Canadian haven’t been yelled out before, or that dismay over a lack of connection with traditional technique, hasn’t been expressed, though this book flattens both of these old garrisons with impressive force. No. It should be read for the skilled manner in which it details and discusses the role and responsibilities of the critic.

It is with Starnino, and his concern ‘that so few readers abroad detect any poetry in [Canadian] verse,’ in mind, along with, as indicated in a previous post, pure chance and the mention of sunsets and sunrises, that I compare Hardy’s The Love-Letters, perhaps unfairly, to this poem by Peter Van Toorn:

Mountain Nurse

Hey, Denise, soon as you’re in the room, I feel jumpy in my head. Why hide it?
Next to you, even sunrise looks like gloom.
As long as you’re in that crisp, white outfit,
I’ll never be able to get my fill of you, except in ink.
Cheat on my chart: fix it so I can leave this hospital.
My fever’s gone; I feel sharp as a dart.
Check him out, over there by the fountain,
bending down for a drink: that hothead sun,
staring at you over the mountains,
he’s so red in the face, the horizon is on fire.
Must be jealous of you. Why?
You’re warmer, and can always make time fly.

from Marino

I find little of merit in this poem. Little emotional depth. A complete lack of creative diction/syntax.

David Solway, a considerable poet in his own right, and a critic whose erudition and facility with words I admire, has written in praise of Van Toorn, as have others. Mine has only been a cursory reading. If the interest is there, I may return to and engage with Solway’s essay (in Director’s Cut, another worthwhile read).

I bought a First Edition of Thomas Hardy’s Winter Words several summers ago from a used book store in rural Ontario. Near Guelph I think it was. Most of the pages remain uncut.

In addition to a poignant introductory lament about ‘licensed tasters’ mis-labeling his previous work as ‘gloomy and pessimistic,’ it contains a poem, the emotional power of which, if comparison counts in these matters as I think it does, dents claims to greatness made by critics on behalf of Canadian poet Peter Van Toorn, whose obviously erudite ‘Mountain’ series I read yesterday, just prior, quite by accident, to re-reading this:

As soon as I can find my misplaced copy of Mountain Tea, I’ll add a poem in which Van Toorn uses the word ’sunset’, or ’sunrise’ (this, in addition to serendipity, is what got me into comparison mode). The point here, I think, is that great poetry, like physical attraction, packs an almost ‘felt’ punch; an impact, that when experienced, renders others comparatively limp, innocuous, weak.

Also re art: so much regarding reviewing and consuming has to do with the moment: what you’ve just read or seen; your mood, what you’ve had to eat; your expectations…all of which make ‘objective’/consistent reception difficult, if not impossible.

Chris Cleave was born in London and spent his early years in Cameroon. He studied Experimental Psychology at Balliol College, Oxford, and now writes a column for the Guardian newspaper. His debut novel Incendiary won a 2006 Somerset Maugham Award, was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and is now a feature film. Chris lives in London with his wife and two children.

We met recently to talk about his engaging, important new novel Little Bee. Topics discussed include masks, truth-telling, trauma, trust, happiness, the struggle to survive, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and its deficiencies, asylum seekers as true heroes, engaging with the developing world, people in transition, life-changing events, sexual adventurousness, making sense of life retrospectively, inane reality TV shows and the need for refugees to tell their heroic stories convincingly.

Please listen here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

So I’m nursing this whopper hunger, the size and shape of a homemade hamburger.  We roll into Fredricton, NB. There’s a food court across the street from Read’s newsstand (Reid’s on the awning, Read’s on the window…?). Not wanting to settle for chain product, I look for local. And find it. Hannah’s kitchen, or place, or corner, or whatever, has a counter right next to MacDonald’s believe it or not. And they serve hamburgers. What luck. Plus, bonus, a lovely elderly woman, Hannah perhaps? takes our order. How charmingly authentic.

5 minutes later: The hamburger tastes like compressed cardboard after its been in a blender with a cup of olive oil for half an hour. Those cheap patties you can buy at the supermarket…

How annoying. What a missed opportunity. Here you have, right next door, a gift…a gift horse…a foil for your real, delicious, quality, made- from-scratch product…and this is what you serve?

Oh, and Hannah? No such person. Just a name the ‘boss’ liked.

The 40th anniversary issue of Canadian Notes & Queries contains a good selection of worthwhile reading on the future of Canadian culture. For the bibliophile there are essays on small presses, blogs, ‘the book,’ poetry and fiction, along with the regular roundup of book reviews.

Amanda Jernigan ponders tradition and technique in her considered piece on poetry:

"I’m guessing that the best readers in 2033 will be as well educated as they have always been. But I worry that a bright undergraduate English student in 2033 wll lack the grammatical framework within which to understand the innovation of say, Crispin Elsted’s "Sonnet with Grammar Lookng over the Weald of Kent from Boughton Church," or Greorge Johnston’s "Firefly Evening."

Why does this matter? Because I believe the future of poetry is the future of humanity. To be more specific, I feel there is a relationship – not necessarily causative, but correlative – between our careless disregard for the language and our careless disregard for the planet."

To put this in perspective Jernigan quotes Ernst Krenek:

"At a time when one was generally decrying the bombardment of Shanghai by the Japanese, I met [Austrian writer/editor] Karl Kraus struggling over one of his famous comma problems. He said something like: I know that everything is futile when the house is burning. But I have to do this, as long as it is possible; for if those who are obliged to look after commas had always made sure they were in the right place, then Shanghai would not be burning."

I gather that this is a commentary on, more than anything else, the short comings of our education system, or at least where its future priorities will lie.

Books editor Zachariah Wells displays clever back and forehand technique in his lead review ‘Nailing down the Hard Parts, The Challenge of First Books’ by simultaneously praising the ‘remarkable’ debuts of an extensive (if not, as he claims, exhaustive) list of (sixteen) Canadian poets whose poems though ‘outstandingly authentic’ will nonetheless  mostly, if not all, ‘be forgotten.’ Nice silk purse presentation of a sow’s ear truth.

I got my copy of CNQ at Read’s in Fredericton, NB. Pick yours up before they all disappear.

The press release announcing that UCLA Library has acquired Aldous Huxley’s literary archive makes mention of quite a number of titles, First Editions of

which

I

just

happen

to have

in my collection. 

A friend of mine, a very good photographer, once told me that it was all about how one uses natural light.

In Quebec City above, and in Moncton, on my new nephew

Much as I enjoyed Carmine Starnino’s essay ‘a Lover’s Quarrel’ and in it, the call for Canada to recognize poets ‘who don’t see foreign influence as pernicious, who have no time to be ‘Canadian,’ who don’t want to want their poems abbreviated to a common cultural denominator, who don’t believe that certain things are impossible or undesirable in the range of effects available to [them]…’ (evidently the view held by Margaret Atwood and Denis Lee)…

Much as I think this position…and the one that calls for contemporary poetry to anchor itself in tradition and technique…much as I think this message has value, and needs to be broadcast and embraced…it isn’t exactly…new…

Goethe made it new in the 1820s:

"…but each must say to himself that the gift of poetry is by no means so very rare, and that nobody need think very much of himself because he has written a good poem.

But, really we Germans [Canadians] are very likely to fall too easily into this pedantic conceit, when we do not look beyond the narrow circle which surrounds us. I therefore like to look about me in foreign nations, and advise every one to do the same. National literature is now rather an unmeaning term; the epoch of World Literature is at hand, and every one must strive to hasten its approach. But, while we thus value what is foreign, we must not bind ourselves to anything in particular, and regard it as a model…but if we really want a pattern, we must always retrn to the ancient Greeks, in whose works the beauty of mankind is constantly represented. All the rest we must look at only historically, appropriating to ourselves what is good, so far as it goes."

This is not, however, to say that Starnino doesn’t revive the old to make it newly Canadian without charm. Quite the contrary, he does so with verve and panache. Read this winning thrust:

"I don’t mean to be seen rubbing the bloom from the Canadianist enterprise, but our resistance to the sense-shaping strategies of rhyme, syntax and stanza has been brutal. Take a look at what’s on permanent display in our anthorlogies and you’ll see a body of verse staring back at you with all the boredom that comes from having bee coddled in captivity rather than reared in the wild; what you’ll see is that, in our effort to clear an imaginatvie sapce for ourselves, we’ve resisted the very afflatus poetry depends on for its legitimacy and authority; and most importantly, what you’ll see is that our practice of infantilizing ourselves, of shunning the very poets whose talent and seriousness sustain peotry-writing as an adult endeavour in this country, has hampered the proper international appreciation of our real achievements. In short, we’ve turned out a picture of Canadian poetry – vacuous, jejune, synthetic, bloodless, second-rate – at odds with the thrilling ambitious species actually stalking our shelves."

First these shots from the eighth floor of the Chateau Frontenac

Then

off

to

the

stores

More where these came from here.