httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etruk67Fg4k

You need to be in the right mood for this. I was. Its glorious use of light, sound, music, and lily ponds, recreated and made me fiercely home-sick for the English countryside. Granted, the film’s story-line stretches out well beyond the several short real life sentences (in a letter) that it is based upon. Mostly conjecture, much like Shaffer’s Amadeus. But it does so sweetly and elegantly summate what and why Austen wrote. And it’s elegant, beautiful, well acted, plus, if you allow for it, moving. Perhaps because they were low to start with, Becoming Jane far exceeded my expectations. Doesn’t hurt that I have a crush on Ann Hathaway ( her name can’t have hindered the landing of this role) either. Time now to re-read, and re-watch Tom Jones.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbH96NJ_VIQ

This from Dan Wells:

Terry Griggs’s new comic-noir biblio-mystery Thought You Were Dead begins with a literary critic found under a hedge with a knife in his head. Literary revenge is the culprit. The literary world, especially the Canadian literary world, can be a small, spiteful – and occasionally murderous – place. Character assassinations abound, books are regularly murdered in the (shrinking) book pages across our fair land, while others are smothered with damningly faint praise.

Do you bear the scars of CanLit’s internecine wars? Have you spent a small fortune on postage with only a drawerful of rejection slips to show for it? Has the world been slow to recognize your talent? Then, dear reader, this contest is for you.

To celebrate the launch of Terry Griggs’s new novel, Biblioasis and Seen Reading are teaming up to help you unleash the murder we know is in your heart, with a Revenge-Lit contest. Pen a flash fiction of 250 words or so (though, in truth, no one is likely to count them) on the (fictional) literary critic whose body once filled the chalk outline, and what he did to get there, and send it by June 12th to revengelit@gmail.com. The best of the entries will be published as they are received at RevengeLit.blogspot.com. The winning entry will:

1) Receive a one hundred dollar cash prize

2) Be published in a forthcoming issue of CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries

3) A Biblioasis press catalogue of in-print trade titles (approx. 40 books, retail value approx. $1000.00)

Entries to be judged by Dan Wells, Julie Wilson and Terry Griggs.

Incoming search terms:

• literary criticism character assignation

I recently interviewed Canadian critic, editor, writer John Metcalf on his love of Books and Book Collecting. The same afternoon we talked also about the process of book reviewing,  whether or not the use of insult and/or invective is ever justified and if so, when. John is known as a ‘blunt’ critic; one who tells his unsugared truths directly, who is not reticent to attack ‘with savagery’ books he feels insult him. The conversation refers, among other things, to the Salon des Refuses exercise undertaken by Canadian Notes and Queries and The New Quarterly magazines, personal slights, the problem of awarding the same prizes to authors of widely varying talents, and the importance to healthy literary culture of truth-telling critics.

Lengthy sentence alert: There are familiar attacks on M.G. Vassanji, Ann Marie MacDonald, and Robertson Davies here, and there is praise too for many young Canadian short story writers, but perhaps the most evident feature of this discussion is Metcalf’s anger, precipitated, I’d say, primarily by a combative dedication to serving a cause larger than himself – excellence in literature – aggravated in small part both by the perceived inability of Canadians to recognize literary greatness, and personal rejection at the hands of  this country’s ‘literary establishment’  – bolstered by a natural taste for confrontation and a glee in the fighting of a good fight.

Please listen here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

That bleak house described in the last post was not, I should say, built to in any way dissuade the artistic endeavour. Great work

bookdepository

continues

Anansi

to be produced – the role of the critic should be to at once, recognizing the difficulty of its achievement, point out and champion those aspects and examples

Coach House.

of current production which merit attention and encouragement.

Consider that every novel,

short story, play

or book of poetry

written today is in competition not only with everything that is currently published, but also with all that has ever been published. Consider too that  ‘great’ work is produced perhaps once a decade; that of all the the stories and poems that have been written, the most heralded writers can lay claim during a lifetime to having written perhaps only a handful of them.

Then assume that you read most of what is left after all of this sifting, boiling-down, chafe removing has taken place. Once you’ve red them, experienced lifetime rarities, tasted the most delicious, gorged on the most sensual, cried over the saddest, happiest, funniest, supped on the profoundest…consider then how very difficult it is to honestly say virtually anything good about 99 per cent of what is produced today?

Incoming search terms:

• literary schools of criticism perspective/perspectives

Flickr

A choice piece in the Globe and Mail by Fraser Sutherland on novelist-politician Michael Ignatieff which reaches back 150 odd years to find a similar hybrid in Benjamin Disraeli: 

"…who published 15 novels before he became British prime minister. The parallel ends there. As far as I know, Ignatieff has not sired children out of wedlock, or gone bust as a mining speculator and newspaper publisher."

Of Ignatieff’s three novels, Sutherland finds Scar Tissue the most ‘creditable’. In it:

"…a philosophy professor records his mother’s deterioration and death, the breakdown of his marriage, and conflict and accommodation with his physician brother. Bookish and introspective, the unnamed narrator is not so much preachy as teachy. The pedagogic impulse makes him quote from his own writings on Willem de Kooning and Leo Tolstoy, and even from a talk, Illness and Stoicism, that he gives to a small-town Rotary Club.

Meditating on grief and loss, he works though despair to baffled resignation: “It takes courage to surrender, to know the difference between giving up and giving in.” Later, he adds, “We tell stories as if to refuse the truth, as if we say that we make our fate, rather than simply endure it. But in truth we make nothing. We live, but we cannot shape life.”

This may hold true for individuals, but surely novelists, and more directly, politicians can and do shape, or at least dramatically affect, many lives.

Sutherland then treats us to several impressive examples of Ignatieff the writer with these metaphors/similies: 

“The disease was thorough. It tracked down her memory, room by room, snuffing out each synaptic spark.” Watching a tennis player in a tournament on TV, the narrator envies “her selfless state of pure predation.” He observes a lightning storm “moving across the valley like a procession of Chinese dragons.”

And closes felicitiously with:

"Michael Ignatieff has published 15 books. Since he is a public figure, it’s tempting to read politics and autobiography into the three novels. The instinct should be resisted: Fiction is, or ought to be, fiction. Still, one may wonder whether he would echo the main character in Scar Tissue when he says about the books he has written, “I know why they’re no better than they are, whereas I can’t begin to explain why I myself am no better than I am.”

No doubt Canada’s vaunted Forth Estate will, if Ignatieff becomes prime minister, take it upon themselves, after the honeymoon,  to persistently hound him for such an explanation.  

Great Village Elementary School, taken in August 2007

By gobsmacking coincidence Colm Toibin has an article on Elizabeth Bishop in the May 14, 2009 edition of the London Review of Books which contains this telling passage:

"Bishop’s grandparents’ house is modest and has an air, even now, of comfort and ease and warmth. Bishop was brought here after her father died, when she was eight months old. Then, when her mother became mentally ill and was incarcerated, she remained under the care of her mother’s family until she was six, when she was taken to live with her father’s much wealthier family in Worcester, Massachusetts. This wrench between what was cosy and familiar and what was alien and cold would stay with her all her life. The village in Nova Scotia and the landscape around it became a place for her of longing, of dreams. Bishop wrote directly about what happened to her in those years in two prose pieces, ‘In the Village’ and ‘The Country Mouse’. In ‘The Country Mouse’ she wrote of her move to Worcester:

I had been brought back unconsulted and against my wishes to the house my father had been born in, to be saved from a life of poverty and provincialism, bare feet, suet puddings, unsanitary school slates, perhaps even from the inverted r’s of my mother’s family. With this surprising set of grandparents, until a few weeks ago no more than names, a new life was to begin . . . I felt as if I were being kidnapped even if I wasn’t.

‘In the Village’ describes the time just preceding the move, and is haunted by the idea that her mother’s scream will not stop echoing in the landscape and in her memory. ‘The scream hangs there like that, unheard, in memory – in the past, in the present, and those years between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just came there to live, for ever – not loud, just alive for ever. Its pitch would be the pitch of my village.’

Out of the damage done to her in childhood, Bishop produced a body of work filled with meticulous observing."

Without the damage done by Canada – poverty, provincialism, puddings and pronounciation – Bishop would surely not have been half the poet she turned out to be.

One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

From The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel.

Click here for critical responses to the poem

Should One Act qualify for our on-again-off-again quest to find the ‘best’ Canadian poem?

Zach Wells thinks so: 

"Ms. Bishop, as I’m sure you know, spent significant portions of her childhood in Nova Scotia–often returning as an adult–and those experiences are rendered movingly and memorably in much of her finest work in verse and prose. Her mother was a Nova Scotian and her father’s family was from Prince Edward Island."

So does Jonathan Ellis, according to this found at readysteadybook:

"Although Elizabeth Bishop was born and died in Massachusetts, she lived a life more bohemian and varied than that of almost all of her contemporaries, a fact masked by the tendency of biographers and critics to focus on Bishop’s life in the United States. Drawing on published works and unpublished material overlooked by many critics, Ellis gives equal attention to the influence of Bishop’s Canadian upbringing on her art and to the shifts in her aesthetic and personal tastes that took place during Bishop’s residence in Brazil during the 1950s and 1960s."

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911, Father died when she was eight months old. Mother became mentally ill and was institutionalized when Elizabeth was five years old. The two were never reunited. Mother died in 1934. This from The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States: " From ages three to six, Bishop lived in Great Village, Nova Scotia, with her mother’s parents, and was then taken in by her father’s family in Worcester and Boston."

Three years living in Canada as a little girl, and some summer holidays…?

Fine. Works for me. We’ll claim her.