November 4, 2007
The Canadian Experience: A Northwest Passages editorial
In 1995, my best friend Rob Stocks and I co-founded Northwest Passages, the only bookstore in the world to specialize exclusively in Canadian fiction, poetry, drama, and literary criticism. Since then, Rob's partner Sarah Bagshaw has taken over all the day-to-day operations of the store, while Rob and I stay involved on many fronts. One of my jobs that I don't do as well as I would like is to look after the Northwest Passages newsletter which goes out to nearly 1000 readers. It's supposed to be monthly, but recently semi-annually might be closer to the truth. At any rate, here's my editorial for this month's issue:
The Canadian Experience
10/17/2007, somewhere just south of the NY/Quebec border
I’m writing to you today from the front seat of a 54 passenger bus that is taking me, two colleagues, and twenty-nine American students from Burlington, Vermont to Ottawa. In a few hours, our group and the group from the packed bus driving just ahead of us will be sitting in Question Period in Canada’s House of Commons. Our goal in this three-day field trip, run by the University of Vermont Canadian Studies program for more than 50 consecutive years, will be to learn something about Canada, its political institutions, its art and culture, and its national identity.
As I sit on the bus watching the gorgeous fall foliage roll by as we wind our way through Northern New York state, I can’t help but wonder, as I do on this bus trip every October, just what kind of understanding of Canada my students will gain from their time at the National Gallery, the Museum of Civilization, Rideau Hall, and, of course, an Ottawa 67s hockey game. All of the eighty or so students on this trip are taking courses on Canada this fall; some are taking our larger lecture courses on Canadian history, politics, and literature while others are taking one of two first-year seminars on Canadian history and Canadian culture. As few have ever spent time in Canada before, their main knowledge of the country so far comes from what they have learned in class. Will this practical experience complement or contradict the theoretical? Will Ottawa live up to or radically differ from their expectations? How will the sights and sounds of these three days work their way into the students’ overall understanding of Canada?
Questions such as these have preoccupied Canadians for as long as the country has existed; our understanding of ourselves seems all too often to be inextricably tied to how others see us – or, more precisely, to how we believe others see us (or don’t). Think of the popular Molson Canadian advertising campaign in which “Joe Canadian” rants that “I have a Prime Minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American. And I pronounce it 'about', not 'a boot'” before concluding with the exclamation “I am Canadian!”
Although witnessing Question Period in action – something I recommend all Canadians do in person whenever possible – usually reminds me that our Members of Parliament are too busy with what’s happening within Canada to concern themselves a great deal with how Canada is perceived internationally, in every one of the Question Periods I’ve attended with my students we have heard at least one angry exchange between the government and opposition parties about how Canada sets its own agenda and “will not be taking direction from George Bush!” This predictable attempt to make the government look bad in the eyes of Canadians always elicits surprised looks from my students. Although I don’t think my students ever perceive this to be “Anti-Americanism,” they are nevertheless surprised to see the degree to which the relationship between the two countries is never far from the surface of any political debate.
One thing that always strikes me during our class visits to Ottawa is that, for the most part, the entirety of my students’ knowledge about Canada has come from a single course on Canada and, for some, the three-day trip to Ottawa. If one’s goal is to give one’s students a solid grounding in Canadian history, politics, or literature, then, the stakes when planning a course or a class trip are significantly higher than when one engages in similar activities back in Canada. If one doesn’t get a chance, for instance, to spend much time with the paintings of Tom Thomson or Emily Carr at The National Gallery, or to include Margaret Laurence or David Adams Richards in one’s Canadian literature course, someone in Canada can hope that his or her students will be exposed to this content at another point in their lives, if they haven’t been already. When working outside of Canada, where the works of Margaret Laurence aren’t even available and most art history professors have never heard of The Group of Seven, one can’t help but think that if one doesn’t include something in one’s course that there is virtually no chance that the students will ever encounter that idea, historical event, or work of art anywhere else.
The design of my curriculum (and field trip itinerary) is something that weighs heavily on me, but then again it always has, long before I ever imagined I’d be teaching in the US. It’s clear to me, and is to many of my colleagues back home in Canada that, even if students may encounter other books, paintings, or arguments in other contexts, the weight that one places on something by including it in a course is hard to overcome. Regardless of how many other works one encounters outside the classroom the content we have been taught (and teach) in the classroom will almost always seem to be more “important” than what we find on our own. Even though I regularly attempt to disabuse students of this notion by suggesting alternate choices I could have made, by having the students themselves help design the curriculum of my contemporary Canadian literature course, and by requiring them to do research and report on things that I’ve left out of the picture of Canada I’ve created for them, the impact of the “official” curriculum is hard to match.
One can apply this same argument to the effect that shortlists for literary awards like the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award have on the literary landscape of Canada. As much as we might try to argue that any shortlist is simply one jury’s take on the books from that particular year, the choices that jury makes have an an impact on the recognized books and authors that can last for years to come. For many people outside of Canada especially these lists serve as a snapshot of the Canadian literary scene for that particular year, whether or not these books are truly representative of what was published in Canada during that time. Take a look at the shortlists included below. What picture of the literatures of Canada do these lists paint?
Unless you’ve read all of these shortlisted books and the many books that didn’t make the cut, it’s hard to pass much judgement on the merits or shortcomings of these lists. Awards season, though, never fails to excite readers, booksellers, and publishers (me included). And for that alone, I find it impossible to find much wrong with the whole process of literary awards or, for that matter, an intensive field trip focusing on the “most important” sites in our nation’s capital. If these create an enthusiasm that the intended audience will continue to explore in the future, then that alone makes the exercise well worthwhile.
Postscript 10/30
The trip was a huge success and since our return I’ve also hosted the Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Crees, Matthew Mukash, at UVM where he spoke to an audience of over 200 students, many of whom were with us in Ottawa. This great opportunity to have the Grand Chief here provided a valuable supplement to our Ottawa experience and, I hope, will mark the beginning of a long-term relationship between UVM and the Quebec Cree.
The students came back from Ottawa deeply impressed by what they saw and experienced; everyone who met them along the way, I’m equally happy to report, was just as taken by the group of American students who could tell them things like which four provinces were the first to join confederation or converse about everything from the Throne Speech to Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.
At the same time as this experience gave us all hope that these students will go on to become goodwill ambassadors for Canada as they go about their lives in the USA, we were also met with a sober reminder not only of the ongoing tensions between the two countries, but of the challenges these students will face in a world not currently enamored with the policies of the US administration. As we boarded our bus to head back to Vermont, we noticed that someone had taken a marker and written “America sucks” over the small American flag beside the bus door.
Perhaps more than all the other class trips I’ve been on, the students headed home with a different perspective of Canada, but also of the United States.
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September 21, 2007
Jacques Poulin comes to the USA...
One of my favourite writers in the world is Jacques Poulin. I teach his works here frequently and he is an important part of the online course here I teach every summer on three Canadian writers: Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, and Jacques Poulin.
For that reason, I was excited to see that Archipelago Books, a wonderful not-for-profit press out of Brooklyn has purchased the US rights to Poulin's novel Spring Tides (Les Grandes Marées). I am thinking I may well teach that book next semester or in 2008/09.
The first US review I've seen of that new book has just come out in the New York Sun. It would be great to see Poulin start to garner the attention outside of Québec that I've always believed he deserves.
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September 6, 2007
On the Road en français
My colleague Greg Bottoms and his class on travel narratives are currently reading On the Road, published 50 years ago this month. Despite the fact that it's a key intertext in one of my favourite novels, Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues, On the Road is a book I've still never gotten around to reading. Perhaps this year I will finally have a chance.
After reading yesterday that Kerouac in fact began writing On the Road in French in 1951, I happened across this 1967 interview from Radio-Canada. Born to French-Canadian parents in Lowell, Mass, Kerouac spoke French reasonably well, as you can see from this interview, to which someone added subtitles to an excerpt and posted it on YouTube. The interview is less interesting for the content of the questions and answers than it is for seeing Kerouac shortly before his death and talking about his French-Canadian roots (that's left out of this shorter clip on YouTube).
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August 21, 2007
Some good advice for the first day of school....
Michael Leddy has some great words of wisdom today for students about how to read:
My advice: slow down. Here’s what the poet Ezra Pound says about reading literature: “no reader ever read anything the first time he saw it.” Or consider this exchange between Oprah Winfrey and the novelist Toni Morrison: “Do people tell you they have to keep going over the words sometimes?” “That, my dear, is called reading.”
[. . .] Taking the time to slow down — marking a passage, pondering a detail, looking up a word, writing down a question, changing your mind, looking at the page in a way that allows you to begin to notice what’s there — might change, for keeps, your idea of what it means to read literature. Slowing down will also help you begin to understand how it is that some people seem to see so much in what they’re reading. They know that reading well sometimes means taking your time.
I say much the same thing on the first day of class every year, but I don't think one can reiterate this enough. I love the quote from Pound, and I think I'll be using that one for years to come.
(Here's something interesting, too: when I looked at this article on lifehack.org, a google ad appeared saying "Take an English class: Learn about English and literature at the University of Vermont." The link took me here to Continuing Ed's list of fall English courses.)
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August 20, 2007
The future of the book....
Wow, so much to say about this topic with the prospect of Espresso Book Machines, higher quality e-book readers, and new models of publishing headed our way. Unfortunately, pending deadlines leave me no time to say it! (how's that for a cop out?)
In the meantime (and please don't hold your breath -- I would hate for anyone to harm themselves while reading my blog), read this interesting article by Jon Evans from this month's Walrus Magazine, one of the finest Canadian magazines we've seen in a long time.
Both e-books and sheaves of paper have pros and cons. Sheaves never lose battery power; you can flip through them quickly, use them as bricks, or take them to the bath; and they are still relatively cheap. On the other hand, digital readers can store hundreds of e-books, including those available for free, and their contents can be updated, searched, and annotated. In the near future, the number of digital readers will skyrocket, and making copies for friends will be simple. All things being equal, you’d expect e-books to have grabbed a significant share of the book market by now. So why haven’t they?
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August 13, 2007
Canadian literature in the news
A few things I've been meaning to blog about over the last few days as I settle back into work after a week off.
I was saddened a few days back to hear of the death of Margaret Avison, one of Canada's great poets of the 20th century, I think. You can find a few of her poems online here.
One of the books I'm looking forward to reading is William Gibson's Spook Country. There have been a number of articles about him and the new book over the last few weeks, but here's a link to one of the best and to an audio interview with him.
Toronto's Michael Redhill is one of thirteen writers on the long list for this year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction. He was nominated for his novel Consolation.
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August 2, 2007
More on the Espresso Book Machine
From an article in today's NY Times:
Mr. Neller’s firm is pitching the book machine, which may eventually sell for $20,000 or more, principally toward the nation’s 16,000 public libraries and 25,000 bookstores. A 300-page book costs about $3 to produce with the machine. A bookstore or library could then sell it to customers or library members at cost or at a markup.
Why bother? The machine, Mr. Neller said, is for the “far end of the back list,” those books that are out of print or for which there is so little demand that it would be too costly to print a few hundred copies, let alone one.
With the machine, Mr. Neller said, anything available in a portable document format, or PDF, including Grandfather’s memoirs and Ph.D. dissertations, can be printed in minutes as long as a computer can read it.
Books that are copyrighted and require royalties would need a negotiated fee before they could be published, he said.
“But think what this means,” Mr. Neller said in an interview yesterday. “It’s not just bookstores and libraries. This is small. It could go into a Kinko’s, or a coffee shop, or a hotel or a hospital or a cruise ship.
“A rare book available only to scholars, let’s say, would now be available to anyone,” Mr. Neller said. “Let’s say you want a book in Tagalog, a book in French or a book in Spanish. Think of the implications for universal knowledge!”
I'm dying to see this machine in action! This could be a really cool solution for professors who typically use course packs etc. The thought of creating one's own anthology just for a particular course is something that really appeals to me. Not to mention being able to print off copies of long out-of-print books.
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June 25, 2007
Richard Harrison
A nice post on rob mclennan's fab blog reprinting a piece by Richard Harrison about the late Canadian poet Riley Tench, who Richard mentioned to me in a Northwest Passages interview with him a few years back. Rob's blog is fascinating reading, and I'm always amazed at how much he's able to write on a regular basis. Happy to see, too, that he'll be Writer-in-Residence later this year at the University of Alberta, in my own home and native land. He's even started a blog on Alberta writing and has published a pretty impressive piece on the topic that I think might well become required reading for a grad seminar on prairie writing that I've got in the works .
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June 24, 2007
Espresso book machine
It's not often that you hear the New York Public Library, The University of Alberta Bookstore, and The Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont mentioned in the same breath. What they all have in common, though, is that they're all purchasers of the first few Espresso Book Machines to roll off the assembly line. Personally, I can't wait to try this thing out, and I think I'll be making a pilgrimage to the Northshire Bookstore as soon as they have it in place (the U of A bookstore would normally be the top of my list but I won't be getting back home to Edmonton anytime soon).
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May 29, 2007
Divisadero reviews
Lots of Divisadero reviews in the media over the past few days, as the book is released today in the US. I've still not had a chance to start the book yet, so I'm ignoring these reviews. I'm posting links to them here though in case anyone else is interested... :)
Speaking of Canadian literature, nice to hear a review of Karen Connolly's The Lizard Cage on NPR the other day. It's getting some good buzz south of the border these days.
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May 27, 2007
Leonard Cohen in words and pictures
Thie weekend's Globe and Mail has a great feature on Leonard Cohen, which is accompanied online by a great multimedia portrait of Cohen and his artwork. (interesting to see him working on a black MacBook, too!)
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April 27, 2007
Ondaatje and Atwood in the news
First off, I've been eagerly awaiting Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero (currently in stock and ready to ship from Northwest Passages, by the way) since the moment I heard it was coming out. I now have a copy of the Canadian edition in my hands (it doesn't get released in the US for another month) and just need a bit of free time to get started. I can hardly wait!
There's been lots of press and reviews in the last few weeks about the new book, and I expect we'll see a lot more in the US in the coming months. As usual, Aritha Van Herk's review is as much a pleasure to read as the books she discusses:
A lesser writer might strive to unite these characters, but Ondaatje refuses such obvious resolutions, and instead simply presents the lamellate of their lives. The method of this segmented novel is archeological, revealing itself in fragments and between the lines. The multiple strands of the story are never insistent or chronological; any causal tyranny is stifled. Nor is this a tripartite story, but a slow fanning through the shale of memory and connection, the characters encountering other lovers and lives. "With memory, with the reflection of an echo, a gate opens both ways. We can circle time."
Collage is the novel's central metaphor. Anna ventures, "Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross."
Such poetic measure is one reason why the reader is content to pace these pages slowly. Ondaatje's imagistic prowess flavours every line. Yet -- and here is his true power -- the style is modest rather than flamboyant. Wonderfully, its purity means that the narrative explains little, simply shows the characters living through their moments and within their own skins. Although the attentive reader will delight in every sentence, will revel in the vividly original language and narrative approach, Divisadero refuses the aggrandizement of pyrotechnics. By virtue of that reserve, the novel accomplishes an intimacy that is extraordinary, nakedly beautiful.
There's a nice audio interview with Michael up at the M&S site here.
If I had more time, money, and childcare, I'd be in Montreal this weekend hearing him read as part of the incredible Blue Metropolis writing festival.
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Margaret Atwood has also been in the news a lot of late and some of this attention is due to her upcoming appearance at the Blue Met festival where she will be receiving the festival's Grand Prix this year.
She's also been quite outspoken about the lack of support for the arts coming from the current Tory government in Canada, saying that the feds are out to 'squash the arts.' I really like that about Ms. Atwood, as she knows that these statements have more of an impact coming from someone of her international stature.
She's also been talking about Oryx and Crake a bit recently in The Guardian. Like The Handmaid's Tale, it's a book that's seeming all the more prescient every day. There's a good podcast of her discussion of the book here.
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