That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
—Wallace Stevens, “Gubbinal”

Three hundred times as heavy as our sun.
The Bubble Observer scientists report
buzzing and whizzing and gesturing in a ball
of swollen crimson gas burning standingl
ike a braintrust of firebrands and cake batter.

See the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
for updates, they say. This gubbinal—R136a1—sits around the house,
a rich tanned coot at the corner of Magellanic Cloud
and Shalimar’s Dowry, 165,000 light years in mystery
beyond the Milky Way.

The CN Tower casts its ex-cathedra shadow by day,
recently suited with LED lights, red and purple.
With the moxy of a junior vampire,
they stroke the shaft with abandon;
that is, aggregating the infrared of the city

and taking possession even as markets drain
the sweet sad drainage of abandoned wives.
A motive pure as sunrise, sure as sunset.
Watch the flick of green and greedy gold on a deerfly:
a glittering buzz we still don’t understand.

Don Draper

—after Lavinia Greenlaw

Moths feather your far gazebo
like young sailors on first leave.
You know something, and keep reminding me

of my own needs. You see an audience
of blooming heads and sugared bank notes,
and act accordingly. The swallows see it at five o’clock,

a Wolfman’s tragedy.
They hang themselves upside down,
handsome sienna prizes in the semaphore of bats.

Swayed by a summer night, I swing out
to your silk pocket square standing at attention,
a bird about-face. You’re the dark dew on the green grass of home.

Poseurs

The walking stick insect was a late childhood horror.
That July night, a squib on me from the natural world
scaled the wall as a vampire under the porch light,
ugly as an umbrella’s disrobing.
Moths, with brown wings the prize of
Asian fan-makers, pestered it like paparazzi.

Hoping to forget its awful likeness and presence,
I gave night-deep chase:
all twelve or so flirting shutterbugsre
grouped at the ha-ha,
honoured their lives were spared by a virtue of brevity.

That Peruvian familiar, a race almost entirely female,
had come down from the Morello cherry long after sunset;
after the plums turned the humid blue they want to be,
after trees sighed and inhaled the nearby jasmine, blooming
them nightly to dream-lives as smooth-complected date palms
for some caliph’s odalisque
or the low-stress Oregonian monkey puzzles,
a species whose softly-prickled, rounded shoehorn limbs
propose new varietals of orgasm.

Those giants, waving in their best Isadore Duncans,
know the poseurs well, the little stand-ups
fashioned after their mutineered twigs. Given half a chance,
the clowns would not walk at all, nor meander,
perambulate or otherwise imitate
Wordsworth or Nietzsche. Like the wives of 17th century
men of garden science, they loiter and loll
between vivarium and cabinet of curiosity,
dividing their time between joy and sloth.

The danger in happiness: Now everything I touch turns out to be wonderful. Now I love any fate that comes along. Who feels like being my fate?

Neitzche’s fate, of course, was to go mad and grow an absurd moustache.

In the evenings I loved Tyger the best. I would often set him upon the piano’s keys to serenade me. Tyger was a fine minimalist. His paws selected notes precisely, though within a small range. He would play nervous tone poems – very Oriental-sounding. I often recited in time with his tinkerings. You had to watch him, though, or he’d go over. One evening after an interminable book launch for two of my former students, I returned to my dark home full of darker spirits. I brought a glass of wine into the moonlit living room and sat brooding. My African-primitive paintings screamed at me. It seemed all of my small creatures were sleeping, but then I heard Tyger’s squeaking and scratching start up in the dining room, where his cage was kept. He seemed eager to play, so I brought him downstairs to the Steinway. He began a slow, rodent blues that immediately splashed joy and sorrow on my smouldering anomie. I moved around the room, dripping wine down the front of my chemise, and began incanting, sans gêne, some of my older poems. I had not thought of them in years: Trudeau’s speeches, as written by Milton; tanks in downtown Montréal; explosive rhythms and exploding mailboxes; muffled cries from a cabinet minister in the trunk. My youth expanded in my chest, filling my lungs.

What is a poet? Kierkegaard asked. An unhappy [woman] who in [her] heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music.

I grew lost in the remembered lines and did not notice that the piano was silent. Tyger had slipped from the keys and was lying on the floor before the pedals. He was stunned for a moment, and I held him and wept and apologized and explained to him, as I have to you many times, that I am the daughter of Milton’s Eve, full of demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, and moon-struck madness. I began to intone the poem again, but more softly, stroking the back of his broad, furry head. He bit into my knuckle and I dropped him angrily. Scrambling on the wood floor, he disappeared under the couch and did not emerge for the rest of the evening. I locked myself in my office.

Iwish that Tyger had scarred me with that bite. The smell of him is still there in that cage in the kitchen. Guinea pee and woodchips. I sometimes ask Ross to smell the cage, after he has taken off his shoes and come glumly into the kitchen in his ludicrous, red socks. Ross is the young man who comes each week to type my poems and journals into the old computer the university bought for me after I told them it was impossible for me to come downtown two days a week just to sit in a hot office. Ross looks to me like a clean-shaven Edgar Allen Poe, or a sober John A. MacDonald. A disarmingly bright young man with a weakness for Jean-Louis Kerouac (he denies it, but I can smell it in the work shirts he wears, the state of his running shoes, his occasional grumpiness). When I am in London or Trieste, I leave Ross with the keys to the house. No matter how detailed the instructions I leave for the care of flora and fauna alike, there is yet always one plant and one animal drooping upon my return. He is at least more dependable than that thirteen-year-old girl, Jocelyn, the niece of a friend, who was reduced to shuddering tears when presented with the evidence of her own incompetence. Again, I had left pages of instructions, and yet I returned to a home littered with dried-out leaves and dyspeptic rodents.

I once again unhook the wire structure and lift the plastic base to my nose: Tyger is there, plastic cannot defeat his lingering odour. The smell is long-since lost to the car seat from which he made his farewell tour. It is lost to the hands that held him in the fading light of his final afternoon. It is lost to the hard wood of the floor on which pooled my tears. But it is still in that cage, still in that small home that was Tyger’s sleeping quarters for two years.

Sabba dukkha, sabba anatta, sabba anikka, said the Bhudda. Sorrow is everywhere, in man is no abiding entity, in things no abiding entity. But perhaps there is a sorrow that abides in a plastic cage?

Tyger and the others had the run of the house during the day. They all got along, most of the time. If I was working at home, I would often hear a scramble and some angry squeaking – one of the others had tread too close to Tyger, once again forgot the bare fact of his dominance. Perhaps it was Gwendolyn, the rabbit with ears like soft wings, and a kick that could silence Alberto the cat. Or perhaps Tiff, my poor, ailing puppy, who is yet with me, though he is blind, and his bark is incomprehensible. Every few months I must have Gabriella clip the matted, foul fur away from his anus. Poor Tiff took the longest to accept Tyger’s rule. “He’s so small,” his eyes would say to me, after being routed yet again. “He is only a rodent. I am a dog. I was bred to lead.” He would then find a warm spot in the kitchen and lay there, head on his paws, sighing like an old queen.

Gabriella scrubbed the cage of the dead with harsh chemicals, poisons that came too late. Gabriella, the cleaning lady whom a wicked friend once said had the soul of poetry but the body of a limerick. She wore buttercup-yellow gloves, slightly nubby along the palms and the fingers for grip. As she prepared to make sterile what was once infected with Tyger’s life, with his contagious squeak, Gabriella let me stroke the thin, textured rubber of the gloves before she dipped her fingers into the bleach. They reminded me of the French condoms my architect friend once threatened to bring me on his next visit to Canada. He used to announce his visits only a day or two before his arrival. Or he would call from the airport, looking for a ride.

My days after his visits were post-colonial. I had to learn to govern myself amid the wreck he left behind. I rebuilt the ruined infrastructure. I expunged his memory from the schools, pulled down his statues, emptied the ministries of his allies.

I must forget how the curved tusk of his cock gored me.

Yet still, says Flaubert, as soon as one abandons one’s chimera, one dies of sadness. One must cling to it tight and hope that it carries one off.

This past week I have had Ross searching through my dream journals, seeking references to ‘blood’, ‘horses,’ and ‘porcelain’. This is for a new song cycle I am preparing for Hibernacula Press. I feel the familiar joy and dread that comes with publishing a new book, with passing the world a cup of hot blood. I am readying myself for this new book with yoga and meditation. Tiff whimpers at my feet. How mad, that his mummy is a poetess! Sometimes she stays like this for a very long time, without talking or eating; then she wakes up – and comes out with marvellous things. (Flaubert again, the fat genius.) Each book is a mad spell I must cast, though the spellbound profess not to feel it. When I am in the grip of creation, the stairs of my old house slope before me. My father’s clock sends out futile ticks – time cannot touch me. Light does not enter through the clear glass windows of my hallowed rooms. Sun does not catch the clumsy smears left by Gabriella (I must speak with her again).

Tyger will not be with me when my book enters the world and recreates it. She was destroyed, like Icarus, by the sun, but the hubris was all mine.

Before Ross, it was Liam who typed out my pages. My architect friend carried his charm, even when stone sober, like a crown worn at an angle. In every situation, he gave off Mozartian insouciance. Liam, on the other hand, entered a room as if he had just been unshackelled and brought up from the cellar. He often struck me as an overgrown child. His clothes never quite fit him. That absurd knapsack. The toes of his socks drifted ahead of his actual toes like deflated balloons. He loved hockey and hated wine. I’d urge him outside into the sun, and he’d only talk about burning, like some clichéd Southern priest.

I hope to never see Liam again. I still sometimes see him and his daughter in the market, but I refuse to speak to him or look at him. Occasionally, he attempts a quiet, ‘Hi, June,’ then looks away and does not dare stop walking. If I am walking with someone, they will ask me why I do not respond.

Liam was there on Tyger’s last day, but he has never said anything. Never said one word, except to call the next day and leave a cruel message saying he would not be able to help me any longer. His hasty, fumbled apology before the final click was a dismissal of my grief, my despair.

I had listened to his message as it was being left, while I sat on the floor of the living room. I could not answer the phone all that day, and for the next day, too. The sun sent light through the house, attempting to find me, then gave up and passed the search to the moon. I did not stir. I did not sleep. The new world without Tyger would not allow me to sleep. For hours I was dumb, insensible. Then I would moan and weep, imploring the ceiling above to drop down and crush me. Scratching at the floor to open a seam and send myself into the basement. And from every corner of the room, the new knowledge, the new truth, propped open my ears and eyes. Scattered notes and chords coalesced into a searing dirge. The awfulness of it. Pain after pain, and woe succeeding woe. I finally fell asleep in the afternoon of the second day and awoke in the dark, my legs stiff. I went to the bathroom in the dark. I could not bear to face my face. Loss must have surely torn the flesh from my skull. Nothing would darken my hair now, it must be as white as a hag’s. Vultures sat on my shoulder throughout the night, chattering and clicking their beaks. A murder of crows sat quietly in the garden. When I did at last allow the bathroom mirror to show me to myself, my face was streaked black with mascara. My tears had become ashes, pouring out from my burnt spirit. Flames still licked at the back of my mouth, and I gagged on my grief.

Though it tasted like wet sand, I forced myself to eat some food. Small strength was gained, and I prepared to do what I knew must be done. I emptied a shoebox of clippings from the Globe and Mail (dark forebodings of war, ancient bones found in ice, a pumpkin parade), then lined it with thin, blue paper I had left over from Christmas. Tyger’s tinkling ball went in, too, and some food pellets. One earring from the pair I was wearing. And then, into the living room to retrieve Tyger’s small corpse. I thought of seeking out gloves from Gabriella’s cleaning supplies, but that would have been an insult. I put him in the box, closed and kissed the lid. Morning had come. In the garden I could hear neighbourhood children playing in the alleyway. A Portuguese voice in the yard next door, behind the tall fence – an older Vasco da Gama, weary of the world and exploration, settled in the lower Annex. There were no more crows, but a solitary seagull slid overhead, making its uncharacteristically quiet way back to the lakeshore. This would have to serve as albatross to my mariner, though the animal I had killed was not fowl. With my garden spade I dug a small grave in the shade of the maple, placed the box inside, and covered it over. And so there lies Tyger: while the Loves all in a ring/ softly stroke the stiffen’d wing – or “paw.” Coleridge again, anyway. I returned to the house. A hot bath.

On my answering machine there were three messages. One was Liam, I knew. I forwarded past it. The next was only a click. The third was Antonia, to whose house I had been travelling with Tyger, on his final trip. Her voice thanked me for the bread and the flowers. She and Sam had just moved into a new house in Riverdale and she had invited me over to christen it with wine. She had offered to take copies of my books to London with her, to pass on to her UK editor, so I had packed a small box and put it in the back seat of my car. My plan had been to bring Tiff, my usual travelling companion, but he was feeling low with worms and would not leave the bedroom, so I chose to bring Tyger instead. The worms had already begun to turn for all of us! I looped the front seat seatbelt through the bars of his cage and was off. It was a hot, sunny Friday. The lunchtime traffic on Dundas was thick and irritable – office troops escaping the city early. Eliot’s crowds of the dead, out looking for life. I was stuck for the moment. I had loaned my cottage in the Kawarthas to an Italian translator with a club foot and a Québecois mistress, and would therefore have to endure summer’s worst in the dead palaces of the city. The sun wrapped its heat tight on me like a wet sari. I thought of Tyger, but he was still adjusting to the novelty of the car. When we finally crossed over the Don Valley, he had fallen asleep under a covering of woodchips. O folly, that I did not turn around immediately and return to our dark, cool home. But it did not seem then like a killing heat. I was blind to the sun’s evil intent. When fate summons, monarchs must obey.

I knew I could not carry the cage and the flowers and the bread, so I left Tyger in the car as I ran into the shops. It was damp and close in the flower shop; I felt none of the usual temptation to ogle pistils and stems. Stout tulips, and I was off. In the bakery, a moustachioed baker offered me samples of cakes and pastries, and tucked a dense marble rye under my arm. The car was dreadful and hot. Tyger had not moved – I had my first pang of worry. I could see the wood chips moving with his breath, but I felt I should hurry.

The sloping, sleeping streets of Riverdale tangled my course, and when I at last fitted the number Antonia had given me to a house, it was almost three o’clock. My architect would have steered me there in half the time, I know. He can barely drive a car, yet, when it is needed, he can master whatever the task at hand. He mastered and massacred my heart with ease. I still send him poems and letters, but the honesty of his replies have become blurred by disinterest. Dying love is a nursing home of the soul. He asks casual questions I have frequently answered. He mentions trips not made with me, memories not shared, gifts bought for another. Once in a while, a small spark of life, a promise of a visit. Then the transmission clouds over, and I am left in my Arctic outpost, left with my polar bears and floating peaks of ice.

Said the fly to the spider, “If you spare me, I will grant you one wish.”

Said the spider to the fly, “If I kill and eat you, then my only wish is granted.”

Antonia’s house was a marvel, a poem of glass and stone. Sam was bringing tiles in from the car, and came over to meet me. Antonia came out the front door wearing a man’s shirt and holding a paint brush. The tree-cooled air was refreshing after the car.

“‘This castle hath a pleasant seat.’”

“Is that from one of your new ones?” Sam asked.

“I’m not sure whether to be flattered or appalled. It’s from Macbeth, darling!”

What terrible luck: I named the play. I was as cursed as any powdered actor.

“You brought us a guinea pig?” Sam asked, looking at the cage in my hands.

“No, I brought you bread and flowers. Sam, meet Tyger. Tyger, meet Sam. Tyger, dear?”

“He’s probably boiling hot. Do you want to bring him inside? You can put him in the basement where it’s cool. I’ll lock Jammy out so she won’t try to stick her nose in the cage. Is he still breathing okay?”

“Of course he is. I can’t wait to see your garden.”

“There’s not much to it yet, June. It certainly will never rival yours. It’s actually cooler in June’s garden, Sam. You forget where you are.”

“I do that here, sometimes,” Sam said, and gave his wife a lascvicious look. The two were like fauns.

“I have been trying to grow a maple tree in the south corner to block out the view of the CN Tower,” I told them. “Then my neighbours’ voices can convince me I’m in Lisbon. Sam, there is a box of my books in the back seat. Could you bring it in?”

“I think we have most of those, don’t we June?”

“It’s for Antonia’s editor, Sam.”

“Does he even publish poetry?”

“Sam.”

“These streets and trees. Oh, I cannot live away from Kensington Market. But if I could . . . I must say hello to Jammy. Oh, Jammy! You fat dog!”

I floated through Antonia’s rooms like a spirit. Each door and hallway was a vision, a mirage. I quietly blessed each room with the words of as many creeds as I could recall. We sat in the garden while Sam piled tiles by the back door. Jammy gave chase to squirrels. Stray clouds wandered the neighbourhood’s skies. Antonia’s hair was held back by an elastic and there was paint on her face and arms, but she was as alluring as Sheba. I felt like sleeping on their mattress of grass, and I did lay down on my back in the shade for a few minutes. At last, I passed Antonia my glass. Liam would be at my house soon. Sam retrieved Tyger from the basement.

“Are you okay to drive, June? I don’t mind driving you.”

“Of course, Sam. Antonia and I were only drinking white wine. I’m fine.”

Tyger had not awoken, but for some cursed reason, this pleased me. As if he would awake when we got back, refreshed. Perhaps he would be a little disappointed at having slept through the entire trip. What sickening foolishness! But I did not pause. Back down through the winding streets and across the Don Valley, back into the grey haze of Toronto. The traffic was even thicker than earlier, and I worried I would not get home before Liam arrived. I felt part of a mass exodus. A flight from the twisted structures we ourselves had built. I longed for Trieste. For Provence. For the Mediterranean. For the Atlantic shore. For the Rockies. I felt I had bound myself to a malevolent machine, blurting black smoke and cutting into flesh and muscle. My architect says that Toronto, from above, looks like a bomb site, with a jagged crater and scattered debris. We are our own terrorists, with slower methods of destruction. The buildings fall of their own accord. And so hot in the summer. A dungeon horrible, on all sides round/ as one great furnace. (Milton.) My skin was slick, the air was hotter than melted glass.

The architect once told me to leave this place. Toronto is no city for a poetess! I told him he was wrong, that he could not see the humming symbols, the radical rhythms that surround me. Here was my darkest loam of meaning. Now I am not so sure – those rhythms may be the rattle of skeletons. Perhaps my poems are merely graveyard whistles.

The car moved along the alleyway behind my street like a dying rhino. Two sets of hockey goal posts were moved aside for this mournful procession. Kids stared in at me as if at a phantom. I had left the garage door open as usual, and its darkness cloaked me with welcome. For a moment, I could not move. It felt as though the garage were a ferry, transporting me back safely across Styx to the world of the living. I dozed for a moment – only a moment: the string quartet on the radio had not even changed movements! – but the lapse let the ferry-driver lose his grip on the tiller, and we drifted back to the netherworld in a red fog.

I went inside and drank a glass of mineral water, then, remembering Tyger, dashed back to the car. The seatbelt snapped like a live wire, catching my forearm. Panic froze my hands. I could not unlatch the cage. I tore at it and lifted Tyger from the damp woodchips. My fingers knew what my mind took a minute to accept. Tyger was lifeless. He sat inert in my hands. No thumping heart stirred his fur. I brought his body to my cheek. Carrying him like a baby brought out from a well, I ran to the living room and placed him gently on the floor and rolled him on his back. I knelt and bowed my face to his. My tears dropped into his fur. I would be the Prince who returned Snow White’s beauty to the world. I would be Christ, who bade Lazarus walk again. I would escort Tyger from the Inferno. I laid my mouth upon his and gave a soft breath. I could feel his teeth on my lips. His whisker brushed my nose. I gave another breath. His form expanded slightly, but refused the life I offered. Death had him in a stubborn grip.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

I was blind with tears. Each breath I gave him came back out, unprocessed. His lungs slept, his life was null. Death blew my breath back into my face with a sneer. But I would not stop. I would blow and lay my ear between his forepaws, listening for an echo of my own throbbing heart.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

I tore the compact from my purse and placed the mirror under his nose, hoping that my panic was making me oblivious to his struggling life. The mirror stayed cruelly clear. Tyger’s reflected eye had the look of taxidermy.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

I thought for a moment of dropping a tiny amount of water down his throat. Perhaps life refused to return to a desert. I attempted to moisten my lips.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

Silence.

Breath.

“Holy shit.”

“Liam! Help me! Help poor Tyger! Oh help him!”

“Did you have him in the car? I came around back and your car door was open. The cage was . . . holy shit.”

“Liam! Please! My Tyger!”

I collapsed against the couch as Liam kneeled over Tyger. His placed the flat of his palm on Tyger’s chest. He gave me a quick look, then put his ear to Tyger’s fur. Then slowly, he sat back on his heels and, with vicious sadism, wiped his hand on his jeans, as if poor Tyger’s death were a contagion.

“I’m sorry, I think he’s dead. June? I think he’s dead.”

I could only stare ahead of me. I thought of Orpheus, bringing Eurydice back from Hades, then losing her again in a moment of thoughtlessness. I though of his body torn asunder by the women of Thrace, his lyre silenced. I am both Orpheus and the killer of Orpheus.

Liam stayed for a while. Left a glass of water by the couch that I refused to touch and later discarded, allowing it to shatter in the blue recycling bin on my front step. I did not move Tyger but instead lay beside him, drawing his body against my chest. The taste of his mouth was still upon mine. I savoured our last contact.

For There! Have I drawn or no

Life to that lip?

Do my fingers dip

In a flame which again they throw

On the cheek that break a-glow?

My architect may never read this, may never know what happened. Perhaps he wouldn’t even care, but would only laugh. Maybe it was never for him, anyway. Maybe it’s all been for Tyger, my lost guinea pig. The soul of my bestiary, the spirit of my garden. Maybe, with this creation, he will forgive me for his own destruction, though I will never forgive myself.

Sabba dukkha, sabba anatta, sabba anikka.

It’s the same for the arts and literature, even among those of us involved in the enterprise. Do we pay attention to the threats to the artistic environment? Are we aware that vital habitats, the environments which make literature and reading possible, are eroding at an alarming rate? Are we willing to do anything about it?

For writers and publishers, there is only one thing that matters: an audience. And the truth is the audience for literary writing in Canada is so small it cannot enable CanLit to survive in its current state, let alone thrive. It never has. Those who write, edit and publish books know this. The reading public, insofar as it cares, has been insulated from this truth for decades, for generations, by the appearance of a viable literature: an appearance, a facade, largely bought and paid for by the various layers of arts funding in our federal and provincial governments. Without this funding, the vast majority of Canadian literary publishers would not exist, nor the books they publish. Government funds support our libraries, our universities, our magazines, our literary festivals, even our writers. These features of our literary environment do not exist because significant numbers of Canadians demand it. They exist because our governments believe arts funding is a good investment, financially and politically. And because if the government doesn’t pay for them, no one else will. And because not to have them would make us seem a rather puny and underdeveloped country.

So, casting aside the government-funded illusion, we are left with authors in need of readers and publishers in need of customers. And while the writers keep typing up manuscripts, and the publishers keep printing them, and the libraries dutifully put them on the shelves, we pay scant attention to the decline of what little habitat for readers still exists. The unexamined assumption underlying all this government-funded activity is the fanciful notion that so long as we keep churning out books, the audience, by sheer force of our efforts, will, like the surprising rebound of the sandhill crane, eventually emerge. But it has not. And it will not.

The simple fact is, after innumerable launches, readings, publicity campaigns, hundreds of author interviews with Peter Gzowski and Shelagh Rogers, the publication of thousands of books, and millions upon millions of dollars in government subsidy, the environment in this country for Canadian literature has not changed perceptibly since the onset of official CanLit and the proliferation of small, state-funded literary presses some forty years ago. The best which might be said is that CanLit, in the midst of the technological onslaught from the Internet and the digital revolution, is holding its own. Sort of like swift foxes in Alberta, or the five-lined skink in Ontario – the populations are not robust, but a steep decline has yet to be observed. Though this statement, I have no doubt, could be easily challenged; in certain respects, things are inarguably worse. Perused your newspaper’s book review section lately?

There are two basic forms of environmental degradation: pollution, putting garbage and toxins into the air, land and water, and habitat loss, razing forests or draining wetlands to “develop” the land or extract resources. Similarly, there are two basic “habitats” of crucial interest to Canadian writers and publishers: schools and bookstores. After all, where do readers come from? And where might they go to buy Canadian books?

Let’s consider education first. Our schools, it is safe to say, are not keenly interested in literature, let alone Canadian literature, which is troubling enough. What is worse, our schools no longer place an urgent emphasis on the written word. There no longer exists an unquestioned dictum that the early acquisition of the solitary skills of reading and writing are crucial for unlocking a child’s potential and ability to learn. Instead, the focus in our primary and junior classrooms is on group activities and shared experiences, what is called in teacher-speak “cooperative learning.” Precision of written expression is not valued. The necessary attention span and ability to concentrate for meaningful reading are not encouraged. Basic grammar, spelling, punctuation and sentence structure are not taught with any urgency or conviction. Composing sound, logical, error-free prose is no longer regarded as a crucial skill.

I know these things to be true because I happened to teach English in Ontario schools for several years. In my advanced level high school classes I had many perfectly capable, intelligent students who simply did not understand what a sentence was, did not recognize the logic underlying sentence construction, and thus did not understand how to utilize basic punctuation. They possessed no clear understanding of the function of a paragraph and thus possessed little skill in terms of the simplest methods of organizing ideas. Worse, most had yet to obtain an innate sense of the rhythms of written English (something only acquired through regular reading, which one might assume they had done to reach this level of their education), and therefore had difficulty reading grade level prose at merely a phonetic and denotative level. Having breezed through primary and junior grades, suddenly in high school students find themselves expected to apprehend the nuances of composition and the basic strategies of rhetoric, when in fact many have yet to master the building blocks of simple written English. And spare a thought for the harried teacher, struggling to inspire thematic interest and stylistic appreciation for serious fiction and poetry, while in truth, the majority of his or her students find it arduous to simply read the texts on the level of linguistic comprehension. And this is prior to attempting to teach these same students Shakespeare, because my discussion here refers only to the “advanced” or “academic” stream students. I lack the space or stomach to detail the shameful reality of how we “educate” those in the “general,” “applied,” or “essential” streams.

Simply put, our schools are not producing avid readers. We all know this. Young people keenly interested in reading, writing, books and literature, now emerge in spite of our educational system, not because of its efforts to inculcate literary appreciation, rigorous standards, or academic values. We know the vast majority of recent high-school graduates have not received anything close to a worthy introduction to fiction and poetry. We know even those lucky few who have – graduates from special arts schools or enriched programs for gifted students – likely have not been exposed to more than a few Canadian authors. Where I taught, Canadian writers did not exist. The novels assigned to my classes were To Kill a Mockingbird, Call of the Wild, Animal Farm, The Outsiders, Night, The Hobbit, and Lord of the Flies. The lone Canadian book I had an opportunity to teach was Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens, this for an “essential” level class where every page of the book had to be read out loud, most of it by me, since several of the students, in fact, could not read. If I had not illegally photocopied short stories by Alice Munro and Guy Vanderhaeghe for my advanced classes, many of my students may never have encountered Canadian writing in the course of their secondary education. I am aware there are schools which teach Canadian books, but I also doubt my experience to be anything other than typical. The norm, after all these years, is still Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird; Sinclair Ross and Mordecai Richler, sadly, remain exotic.

All this should be cause for alarm. The fact it is not says something disheartening about the larger culture. But more to the point, despite the indifference of the larger culture, those of us invested in the field of CanLit should have been, for our own good, angrily sounding the alarm a long, long time ago.

“But wait,” you say. “What about all these bright young people enrolled in English programs at our universities? What about all those arts schools, and writing workshops, all these degrees and diplomas in creative writing? Are these not the writers and readers of the future?”

I am a graduate of such programs and I’ve attended more than my share of literary workshops; their existence shouldn’t convince anyone of a vibrant literary culture thriving in our halls of higher learning. Our academic standards are not so stringent that any university English faculty or MFA program is going to voluntarily cut enrolment due to a lack of qualified candidates. Whatever the secondary schools pump out is what the universities take in. And in turn, churn out, failure being a foreign concept within the halls of liberal arts academe. Students enrolled in the last graduate program I attended received grades for their course work within a strict range of B- to A+. When pressed, instructors admitted, privately, that it was almost impossible to fail one’s thesis defence.

But in regard to low levels of literary ability and understanding at the university level, don’t take my word for it. I’ve only taught public school and the odd undergrad composition or ESL class. A few years ago, in CNQ 74, Adrian Michael Kelly had this to say about the preparedness of his undergraduate English-Lit students:

Take a random sampling of Canadian students from a senior seminar in Romantic or Modern poetry: they may be able to parrot what they’ve been told about the male gaze in “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” or about Pragmatism in the poems of Wallace Stevens, but few if any could explain the difference between an iamb and a trochee, never mind scan a phrase such as “rammed with life in every line.” Asked to read a poem aloud, many would pause at the end of an enjambed line, and pronounce each word like a disconnected unit. . . . I am not saying that teachers should loom over students as they sweat their way through memorized Virgil. I am saying, however, that few students can hold a poem – or the best prose – in their hearts. They cannot do so because they are deaf to its cadences and rhythms and euphonies.

Kelly does not assert that something is innately deficient with the younger generation; neither do I. Instead, his observations echo my argument, that our schools are failing – not only our children – but literature. His students, who, bear in mind, have chosen to study English literature, are oblivious to the “cadences and rhythms and euphonies” of the best poetry and prose, to the aesthetic power of charged language, because they were educated in schools which failed to instil an understanding of basic prosody or communicate veneration for the written word. Why then do these same schools not feel the sting of our collective scorn? Why instead, through their silence, have Canadian writers and publishers expressed only indifference?

No doubt there are studies and statistics to refute all of these observations and assertions and their disturbing implications. I would be surprised if there were not. Ministries of Education, school boards, teachers’ unions and universities all have interests to protect and the money to produce evidence to support their claims. (This, for example, is what standardized testing is all about.) But the point I’m trying to highlight is that literary writers and publishers also have interests to protect, also have reasons to speak out on what is happening in our classrooms, and also have ample evidence at hand to support their concerns. As the saying goes, the silence is deafening. Not to mention, lethal.

If the educational environment is compromised such that it no longer encourages serious reading, the bookstore habitat is equally threatened. In fact, it may be beyond saving. But the damage has not happened overnight. The bulldozers and cement mixers of Chapters/ Indigo have been paving over northern spotted owl habitat in broad daylight for fifteen years or more. The warning signs from south of the border go back further, to at least 1991 when the Borders chain was bought out by Kmart, or even to the 1980s when Barnes & Noble became the first bookseller to aggressively discount new books.

In terms of recruiting readers and making available Canadian books, independent booksellers were second only to libraries in their importance because they actually cared about books. The people who opened now-vanished establishments such as The Double Hook or Duthie Books got into the business not because it was so profitable, but because they had a passion for the printed page. They chose titles for their shelves not just on the basis of fast turnaround, but because they valued certain authors and had regard for certain publishers. Their employees were readers and knew something about books, could actually recommend titles or converse about a given writer’s strengths and weaknesses. Small, independent bookstores which promote Canadian books still exist of course, much like Bengal tigers or right whales still exist, but for the most part they have been replaced by the corporate outlets whose employees remind one of order-takers at McDonald’s, outlets which in recent years stock fewer books and more toys, candles and jars of Lovefresh Pomegranate Body Scrub.

This is old news and no one can be surprised. And yet, many of us were. In 1996, just after the huge, oversized Chapters outlets began opening their doors across the country, author and critic Philip Marchand speculated in an interview on the upside of their emergence:

A couple of days ago I went to the new Chapters superstore on Bloor Street here in Toronto and I went up to the mystery section and there was my novel Deadly Spirits, displayed quite prominently . . . I had assumed it was out of print and of no interest to any bookseller but there it was, prominently displayed. And naturally this very kindly disposed me to that store and this is not an isolated thing. A lot of writers [will] be very pleased that their books are going to be on the shelves longer and get more exposure . . . these superstores are a tremendous marketing force for books and they’ve been by no means harmful . . . to the interests of writers.

Marchand was not alone in feeling “kindly disposed” towards Chapters in the late 90s. During the first years, few of us were not. There was something exhilarating about the sight of those vast floors devoted to nothing but new books – all those long, uninterrupted aisles; the silent escalators transporting one to even more aisles; the sheer quantity of volumes; the sense that virtually any book in print was there, within reach. Everyone loved the fat, comfy chairs and their silent invitation to relax and read as long as one liked (an invitation homeless people soon found irresistible), not to mention the tolerant attitude towards snacks and refreshments. Chapters appeared to be doing all it could to make everyone, including that small percentage of people serious about literature, feel welcome and accommodated. They were even stocking small press backlist titles as if it were the normal thing to do, and hosting readings and book launches with nary a votive candle, cheeseboard, or bar of beauty soap in sight.

If it took a few years, a few bankrupt publishers, and the disappearance of scores of independent bookstores for us to acknowledge the awful truth, maybe it shouldn’t have. As early as 1997 the true motives of the corporate enterprise, not to mention its total disregard for anything resembling literary interests, were spelled out for everyone at a high-profile symposium on the publishing industry in New York City. At one point in the evening, Cynthia Ozick spoke of the need for bookstores to actually care about books as something other than units of sale, to maintain their traditional role of helping to uphold such virtues as sophistication, taste, intellect, excellence. As John Seabrook later reported in his book Nobrow, her “eloquent argument for the value of good books . . . drew applause from the sympathetic audience.” What followed revealed in no uncertain terms the true interests of the corporate bookseller:

After Ozick had finished talking, another panelist, Leonard Riggio, head of the Barnes & Noble chain of megastores, said, “Well, Cynthia, I happen to have your sales figures right here,” and, reading from a computer printout, proceeded to inform the audience that the recently published Cynthia Ozick Reader, a collection of the author’s favourite writings, had sold only a few hundred copies. He then asked, “So why should the publishing industry support a midlist book that readers clearly don’t want?”

Ten years later, after the worst of the destruction levelled by the Chapters/Indigo monolith (the market not being large enough in Canada to support two mega-bookstore chains) and long after the chain stopped stocking small press backlist titles or hosting literary readings, its mercenary book display and shelving policies were exposed by author and editor John Metcalf in his sui generis volume, Shut Up He Explained:

To have a book displayed face-out at the end of an aisle in Chapters [or Indigo] costs $5000 a month. To have a book displayed on a “power table” . . . costs a publisher $10,000 a month. It is even rumoured that “Heather’s Picks” are not favours freely bestowed. . . . books displayed spine-out are granted an existence of 90 days and are then automatically returned. Chapters does not stock “backlist,” a writer’s earlier titles; Chapters places “product.”

The above passage was published in 2007. Not a word in response, let alone a public cry of protest, escaped the lips of any author, critic or publisher I know of.

Less temperate and level-headed people than myself might attach certain words to this type of business practice, though “payola” and “extortion” are not the ones you will hear uttered by any Indigo sales rep or see printed in Quill & Quire. “Co-op advertising” is the preferred term, as cheerful a euphemism as you could find to describe a monopoly’s tactics to squeeze even more profit out of publishers who, with few exceptions, can barely survive.

But the terms Metcalf outlined are now defunct. It seems the number-crunchers at Indigo have come up with a better scheme. Why level specific costs for specific titles which actually have to be put on display, when you can simply charge a base percentage on every book that finds its way past an Indigo loading dock? Starting this past January, Chapters/Indigo mandated an extra 4 per cent fee for all books they stock, regardless of where they are displayed. The change makes sense if in fact less shelf space is going to be given in future to books, and more to things like lamps, gourmet coffee, and baby toys. Besides, states Stuart Woods, editor of Quill & Quire in the July/August 2011 issue, “there’s a strong argument that the new terms are a reasonable cost of doing business.” He concludes: “My guess is having a national bookstore chain to gripe about is preferable to the alternatives.”

Really? Well, one alternative could be hundreds more independent book stores promoting books not just because they happen to sell in large numbers, but because they happen to be good books, and thus making it potentially possible for more literary presses and Canadian authors to reach an audience. But Woods, like pretty much everyone directly involved in the publishing industry, has his hands tied when it comes to publicly telling it like it is. In many respects, Indigo is the only game in town and casts a long and dark shadow over the entire publishing industry. But don’t worry; it isn’t a huge corporate monopoly causing untold damage and making the business of writing and publishing in this country more difficult than it already was. As Woods says, Chapters/Indigo is our very own Canadian bookstore chain, a national treasure. With 30% off the latest by Stephanie Meyer and Danielle Steele.

When one takes a good hard look at the reality of our current book-selling business, one understands better why the government had to step in to encourage the enterprise of Canadian literature. How else were Canadian publishers and writers ever going to get a piece of the action? Under the protective wing of state funding via the Canada Council and sundry government programs, Canadian literature has been able to function safe from the consequences of that most basic of economic laws: supply and demand. There is a correspondingly high price to be paid for this protection of course, namely the “facade” I referred to earlier, the government-created illusion and all its necessary critical distortions. (Distortions, because when you attempt to manufacture a literature, you have to manufacture the myths and reputations that go with it.)

Not to mention all the time and effort devoted to the tasks of completing grant application forms, as well as working to stay in the good graces of those looming, powerful figures – people, mind you, of exquisite literary taste and judgement – the arts council bureaucrats. During my brief tenure as a managing editor at a small literary press, no assignment was more pressure-laden or time consuming than the completion of our applications to the federal and provincial arts councils for grant moneys. Naturally the procedure is slightly less arduous for the individual writer and I know of authors who, far from finding the application process hazardous to their integrity, actually appear to enjoy it. If successful, there is satisfaction to be taken from being approved of by a jury of one’s peers. And it is comforting to embrace the idea that the state will always play a role in encouraging and making viable the enterprise of Canadian literature. But in truth, the government has little sympathy for what we do, and in many ways is our active enemy.

By way of illustration, consider the plight of the National Library of Canada. The one institution charged with the task of archiving the substance of our intellectual heritage – the letters, documents, rare books and collections which provide the literary links to our history – has also been the one government building left to contend, for decades, with ongoing water problems, problems so pervasive that by the government’s own admission, entire collections of Canadiana have been severely damaged. A 2001 report admitted that just since 1993 (the building was opened in 1967) over 25,000 items in National Library collections had been damaged by water. This is of course prior to the flood in 2008 when a burst pipe resulted in water leaking onto three separate floors of the library. While the construction in 1997 of the LAC Preservation Centre went a long way to improve this absurd situation, the original, leak-ridden building remains in service.

But in the last few years, something more insidious than rusted-out pipes, crumbling plaster or even subterranean mould growths has recently invaded the safe house of our collective history, this being the mandate of Library and Archives Canada to “modernize” the institution. As a result of this new directive, starting in 2009, the National Library no longer acquires books and rare documents from Canadian dealers, a practise fundamental to the library’s relevance and the maintenance of its holdings. According to Liam McGahern, president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, the library has, for more than two years, “effectively stopped acquiring and preserving Canada’s historic print materials.” In a statement released last fall, McGahern went on to say that “important artifacts of Canada’s history and heritage . . . have likely been lost, many leaving Canada never to return.”

As part of its ongoing “modernization initiative,” Library and Archives Canada and the National Library are questioning the very nature of what they do. According to LAC’s own website, the “face of information has substantially changed” due to the onset of “overwhelming digital production.” Further, “considerations of sufficiency can introduce pragmatism to collecting efforts.” In government terms, LAC is “working to draft proposed orientation instruments and practices that will encompass a manageable and results-driven approach.” In real terms, this likely means the National Library will suffer diminished influence and an ever decreasing budget. By way of comparison, can anyone imagine the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian being undermined and abused in similar fashion?

Ultimately, our governments, while useful in the short term for grants of much-needed cash, are not the reliable allies of writers and publishers. The arts council funding which keeps things going is always uncertain from year to year, and increasingly under threat as Canadians elect right-wing governments which have about as much commitment to literary values as they do for preserving the habitat of the endangered northern cricket frog. Probably less. Witness the unfolding debacle in Toronto, Canada’s Mecca of literary publishing, where Mayor Rob Ford and his retinue of deep thinkers have taken over. No doubt Ford’s promised “gravy train” assault will hit funding for public libraries, the Toronto Arts Council, and the International Festival of Authors. If it hasn’t already.

According to a diverse panel of scientists who gathered at Oxford University this past April, humanity has roughly twenty years to take decisive action in order to avoid a wholesale collapse of the world’s oceans. A diverse range of threats, including rampant overfishing, rising sea temperatures, increasing ocean acidification due to air pollution (most carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans), and reduced oxygen content in the seas, are combining to make it increasingly likely the oceans will soon be incapable of supporting the diverse range of life which has thrived there and formed the basis of the food chain for millions of years.

The comparison is absurd of course, but we might also take a guess as to how long CanLit has to reverse the anti-literary trend in our schools and bookstores and protect other elements of our literary habitat before it finally loses all relevance to Canadian life. My bet would be something less than twenty years. In both situations, swift and bold action is required. And yet when talking to other writers, teachers, and editors, I rarely encounter a sense of urgency about the current situation. I find it difficult to think of another industry where the people involved display such indifference towards its sustainability. If the schools are not going to foster reading, and the bookstores are not going to encourage literary taste, and the state is not going to protect vital cultural institutions, just how do literary publishers and writers expect their enterprise to survive?

I have used the metaphor of environmental degradation and endangered species less to mirror the decline in the numbers of literary readers in Canada, and more to highlight the steep price to be paid for inaction, for doing nothing to address what, despite appearances and the general indifference of most, is a crisis of monumental proportions unfolding before us. Serious readers may soon be an endangered species, but unlike the black rhino or the blue whale, those of us with a passion for literature in this country, can, if we choose, take action to protect ourselves and our enterprise. At the very least, there is nothing preventing literary publishers from organizing campaigns to lobby governments, raise awareness, pressure our schools and universities, and, dare I say it, organize boycotts of our corporate enemies. There is nothing preventing us from finally getting angry and choosing to fight for our future.

Insofar as we don’t, insofar as our complacency allows us to tolerate anti-literary education, the takeover of the book trade by corporate hucksters, and the continuing erosion of the fundamental pillars of literary culture, how can anyone say we do not – unlike the disappearing aurora trout or the poor Vancouver Island marmot – deserve our fate?

As is the case with most science-fiction, the world Snowman describes is in many essential and uncomfortable respects our own. But other SF writers who have imagined the post-literate dark age ahead have come up with more likely scenarios for how this cultural watershed will be brought about. For Aldous Huxley and Ray Bradbury the future is bookless due to aliteracy. Huxley sensibly turned Orwell on his head, envisioning a brave new world where “feelies” and other trivial entertainments would be more popular than reading, making the thought police redundant. In much the same way, state censorship isn’t the real villain in Fahrenheit 451. The firemen who burn books are dystopian props. The public, we are told, “itself stopped reading of its own accord,” preferring immersive and interactive social networking and “three-dimensional sex magazines” to books and newspapers (the latter “dying like huge moths . . . no one wanted them back”). This is not a police state. There is no surveillance apparatus spying on closet readers. Indeed there doesn’t seem to be any police presence at all aside from the Mechanical Hound. Subversive book people are turned in by concerned members of the community who freely volunteer to inform on them. Contrasting Orwell to Huxley, Neil Postman remarks how the latter describes a world where people “adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” This is what coming to love Big Brother (the face of dictatorship and the TV show) really means.

In much the same fashion, aliteracy today is a consumer choice driven by new technologies. Blaming the tube and the screen may seem like an old story, but it’s not. It’s worth remembering that many of Canada’s senior literary figures grew up in a world without television. Meanwhile, the digital revolution is only a generation old, and e-books still in their infancy (can we say incunabula?). These e-books are, in turn, read on tablets or other devices also designed to play games on, send or receive e-mail, or used to browse the web. The book is now a multimedia platform, a shift in functionality that comes at the expense of the word. “I’m not against e-books in principle,” writes Johann Hari in the Independent, “I’m tempted by the Kindle – but the more they become interactive and linked, the more they multitask and offer a hundred different functions, the less they will be able to preserve the aspects of the book that we actually need. An e-book reader that does a lot will not, in the end, be a book. The object needs to remain dull so the words – offering you the most electric sensation of all: insight into another person’s internal life – can sing.”

Well, you can bet the “object,” in a highly competitive marketplace of electronic devices, is not going to “remain dull.” Kate Pullinger, winner of the 2009 Governor-General’s Award for Fiction, puts it bluntly: “If you are going to put a work of fiction on a computer, why would you not use the multimedia components a computer has to offer you – image and sound and interactive games?” Indeed. And make no mistake: this will lead to an unfair fight for the reader’s attention. The videogame industry is a big business, and these guys aren’t messing around. Game testing involves “galvanic skin response” measurements that detect increases in heart rate and the amount of sweat on one’s palms. Arousal levels are also measured, positive and negative emotions, and the level of cognitive engagement. Researchers watch and record players from behind one-way mirrors, making transcripts of everything they say, how frequently they save their games, how many times they blink and wet their lips, all so that game designers can then adjust their narratives to optimum responses, making the experience more compelling. Compare this to publishing, where it’s getting harder and harder just to find good editors and layout people. In George Borrow’s classic Lavengro (1851) the narrator is told by a London publisher that the business is “a losing trade . . . literature is a drug.” That’s still true, and today there are many more powerful, more addictive, and cheaper fixes on the market.

It is useless to say that literature is just different – more intellectual, appealing to different tastes – and so doesn’t have to directly compete with these newer forms of entertainment and distraction. Nonsense. All of the arts have to evolve in order to survive. Poets don’t compose narrative epics and sculptors don’t carve heroic nude forms out of marble any more. Publishing is a business like any other and an audience with a finite amount of time and money will naturally look to where it can get the most bang for its buck. Simon Meek, for example, is a game designer who wants to see classics like Wuthering Heights and Crime and Punishment take the next step in their “digital evolution” toward a medium that blends text, film and videogames. This is thinking beyond e-books even. Meek “doesn’t like that electronic books still have people reading printed words on white pages that need to be turned. . . These electronic books are still too rooted in the form that gave them birth, the physical side of the media.” “We are not turning the books into games,” Meek further explains, “but rather we are turning the stories in these books into experiences on gaming platforms.” Such books will not be read so much as (the preferred word) “consumed” by way of an interactive, immersive, visual experience. The words of “the stories in these books” will, in turn, become ghostly, disembodied, fragmented ur-texts. “Words pulled directly from the book float into view at the appropriate times,” for consumers of Meek’s version of Wuthering Heights.

None of this, however, constitutes the major challenge literature faces from the digital revolution. Nor does that prize go to the devastation of the retail environment by online booksellers, or the possibility that Google is making us stupid (an argument popularized by Nicholas Carr in an essay that first appeared in The Atlantic and was then expanded in his book The Shallows). While I agree that Amazon is, in the long run, bad for publishing, and that digital forms of entertainment train our brains to respond to ever faster forms of stimulation, reducing our attention spans and making it harder and harder for us to re-enter, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, the exacting silence of a book, I have other concerns.

The digital revolution poses two existential threats. The first of these is economic: how, in this new environment, is publishing going to pay its bills? This is a fundamental point. As Ewan Morrison recently put it, “The economic framework that supports artists is as important as the art itself; if you remove one from the other then things fall apart.”

Are things falling apart? Rocker John Mellencamp was only stating the obvious when he called the Internet “the most dangerous thing invented since the atomic bomb.” We have already seen the digital fallout in other industries, notably music and film. But books were thought to be different, a perfect technology that could not be improved upon. There is, however, no immunity from what Nicholas Carr lays down as the iron law of the Internet Age: “As the Net expands, other media contract.” Looking about the current landscape, I don’t see any reason to be hopeful.

The bet being made – it is in fact the only bet on the table – is that e-books will somehow “grow the game.” It will have to grow significantly. In the early days (that is, a couple of years ago) the announcement that Amazon would be setting a benchmark price of $9.99 on e-books was met by many with horror. This response was not, however, universal, as Finn Harvor of the website Conversations in the Book Trade found out when interviewing ECW publisher Jack David in 2009:

CBT: How much potential do you think e-ink and e-book technologies have? Do you see e-books catching on with the public? And do they provide a reasonable business model?
JD: Of course they do. We are publishers of intellectual content, and it doesn’t matter to us how that content gets read by the public as long as our margins exist. Take away the cost of printing, and shipping, but not selling, and you have cut out a big chunk of your costs. We typically get about 30-35% of the list price back in our hands, after bookstore discount, distribution and selling costs. For a $20 book, that’s $6 or $7. And from that we pay all our other costs, including royalties. If we get $10 from an ebook purchase, we’re laughing.

Unfortunately, $10 for an e-book is a price point that has, predictably, already passed. Names like Amanda Hocking and John Locke (not that John Locke, but a writer of thrillers) are the great success stories of the e-book revolution. You may not have heard of them, but they are self-published genre writers who sell their books for 99 cents a pop, and do a good business, with royalties reported to be in the six figures. (When Locke became the first self-published author to join Amazon’s “million Kindle club” he remarked of his success: “When I saw that highly successful authors were charging $9.99 for an e-book, I thought that if I can make a profit at 99 cents, I no longer have to prove I’m as good as them . . . Rather, they have to prove they are ten times better than me.”) At one point in 2011 a full 20 per cent of the top 100 Kindle sellers were 99-cent e-books. In general, $2.99 seems to be the new sweet spot though I wouldn’t bet on our having reached bottom. Digital prophet Chris Anderson even subtitled his book on the Internet economy “Why $0.00 is the Future of Business.” Things may not get to that point, but I suspect what is coming is a “bundling” of content offering 100, or even 10,000 books for $9.99. Or perhaps something more along the lines of NetFlix, where a monthly fee will provide you with unlimited downloads. For a publisher this means there is no more margin – they will effectively be paying to give their books away. Jack David will not be laughing.

I said this slide in price was predictable. In fact, it was inevitable. How could publishers hope to hold the line after they’d already ceded control over price to deep-discounting online booksellers? How are new books to compete in a market where all titles in the public domain are free? How is intellectual property going to be protected when it takes the form of what is basically just a text file (that is, something far less sophisticated than, say, movies, which are already easily copied and shared online)? How much are people going to be willing to pay for what is in effect only a license to view a file for a limited time on a specific reader? Media companies from newspapers to record labels, and brand-names from Stephen King to Radiohead, have been trying for years now to figure out some way of turning the Internet’s “culture of free” into a sustainable business model for the primary producers of that culture. They haven’t been successful. The only winners in the new digital economy have been the platform builders, those anonymous types who quietly file away all of your personal information and sell it to advertisers. The people who actually make things are the zeroes in this binary. Anthony De Rosa pulls no punches in describing how the system works: “We are being played for suckers to feed the beast, to create content that ends up creating value for others. . . . . We live in a world of Digital Feudalism. The land many live on is owned by someone else, be it Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, or some other service that offers up free land and the content provided by the renter of that land essentially becomes owned by the platform that owns the land.” This is Web 2.0: the game that plays you.

The chief result of the digital revolution, then, has been to downgrade all art and personal expression to the level of ephemeral, quickly-consumed and discarded content. In terms of writing this means genre filler: romance (or its seedier cousin porn), suspense thrillers, and supernatural twaddle. What we’re talking about here is the kind of stuff people purchase by the bale, but that nobody wants to have on their bookshelf at home. Not, I might add, out of shame but simply because they don’t think such books are worth keeping. In Britain, for the last three years in a row the novels of Dan Brown have been the “most donated” to the charity Oxfam. Meanwhile, though sales of printed books are in decline across the board it is the sales of genre fiction that are in freefall.

Content, on the Internet, is crap. Everybody freely produces it; nobody thinks it’s worth very much. And so in his manifesto of the new age, You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier sees the open culture of the Internet as ultimately relegating creativity to slums outside the economic mainstream where it then becomes a cannibal subculture feeding off itself (or, in a metaphor provided by David Carr, “the equivalent of a refrigerator that manufactures and consumes its own food”). The culture itself is dead, of interest only to the odd collector and antiquarian. In this neo-feudal media landscape advertising is the only real content, with everything else just a way of snagging eyeballs for a few seconds: “At the end of the rainbow of open culture lies an eternal spring of advertisements,” writes Lanier. “Advertising is elevated by open culture from its previous role as an accelerant and placed at the center of the human universe.”

The usual response to such complaints is to champion the Internet’s promotion of individual self-expression, the way it allows for a new literary culture free of middle-men and mainstream corporate elites. Unfortunately, what has happened is that by giving more power to the people we have only empowered a disposable culture. It’s a good system for discovering and promoting James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer wannabes, but that’s about it. E-books reduce literature to the status of Tetris, and, what’s more to my point here, they’re not sustainable as a business (unless your business is making dedicated reading devices, and even then I have my doubts). Chad Post, a small press publisher of books in translation had a piece that recently appeared online, “Why Selling E-books at 99 Cents Destroys Minds,” that talks about his own experience with pricing e-books and the lessons he learned:

. . . more than three million books were published last year [2010]: 300,000 from “traditional” publishers, and 2.9 million from nontraditional publishing outlets, such as self-publishing.
So, you have an e-reader, you’re bored with TV and all your video games, ain’t feeling the Facebook, and want a book. Why pay $12.99 for “entertainment” when you could buy a John Locke thriller for $0.99? I have no answer to that question. Seriously. And this has always been my problem with e-books: they emphasize immediate entertainment – and gratification – over real “reading,” which takes more commitment, patience, attention and time.
Now, you pay what you would pay for an app and dump it after you’re done. And why not? Those “expensive” books are a lot of work.
As someone devoted to literary culture, this scares the crap out of me. Sure, John O’Brien and a few others will claim that this has “always been the case,” that there has always been only 10,000 “serious readers” in the U.S., and that’s the same today as it was 50 years ago, but I don’t know if these people are actually in touch with the world around us. It’s all $0.99 e-books and instant movies and Angry Birds.

You can call this snobbishness (and a flood of angry commenters on Post’s article quickly did just that), but the economic point Post makes is valid. It was also addressed by Boyd Tonkin in the Independent:

This feels like a tough case to defend. We all want cheaper entertainment and enlightenment. But look at tasteless supermarket fare. Ruthlessly enforced economies can kill diversity. Rather, they favour uniformity and predictability. Contra the pub wisdom you often hear, e-books do have significant production costs even if they don’t need trucks and sheds. Those costs include keeping professional authors alive.
Dirt-cheap e-books benefit the very rich – and the very dead. They might also help new authors to find a foothold and win an audience – although, on that logic, newcomers should think about showcasing their work for nothing. Many do. But the almost-free digital novel hammers another nail into the coffin of a long-term literary career. Who cares? Readers should, if they cherish full-time authors who craft not safe genre pieces but distinctive book after distinctive book that build into a unique body of work.

I, too, dislike it, but getting rid of the publishing industry – especially in a country like Canada where its role in fostering homegrown talent is so essential – leaves us with nothing but the Internet, producing a form of writing that isn’t supposed to last: eye candy meant to be consumed quickly and then discarded, literature as app. What will be the consequences, not just for us but for our cultural inheritance? What will happen when people come to see Pride and Prejudice no longer as a novel, or even a book, but only as a worthless file to be diced, sliced, mashed-up, manipulated, and (mostly) ignored? Where, Mark Bauerlein asks, if “students grow up thinking that texts are for interactivity – to add, to delete, to cut and paste – do they acquire the patience to assimilate complex texts on their own terms, to read The Iliad without assuming that the epic exists to serve their purposes?” How will such texts be “read” when they appear on a digital page framed by a toolbar and links, with embedded videos, pop-ups and banner ads?

That is a rhetorical question. The studies have been done: we don’t read from a screen, but only scan in an F-pattern for information.

There is something more to this transformation than the shedding of a Benjaminian “aura.” Not just the integrity of the text, but our sense that text can have any value or meaning at all is being lost. But why? Why are we in such a rush to throw so much away? Why are so many of us volunteering to be exploited as digital serfs in the new economy, while at the same time brazenly boasting of our aliteracy?

In the concerned conclusion to his book Reading the 21st Century Stan Persky flags an important point: “we find ourselves in a paradoxical dilemma in which writing flourishes, which is just cause for celebration, but book reading is in decline, especially among younger people. That situtation ought to set off alarms.” How to interpret this paradox? Colin Robinson, writing in the London Review of Books, suggests one answer by introducing the second threat I see being posed by the digital revolution:

Electronic communication has generally made life easier for writers and harder for readers. Text is simpler to produce on computers, easier to amend and spell-check, and a breeze to distribute. No one can be more conscious of this than editors, who are now deluged with manuscripts, attached with consummate ease to letters explaining that if this particular book is not of interest, several others, perhaps more appealing, await on the author’s hard drive. But how does this technology serve the reader? For all the claims of their optical friendliness and handiness, e-books still strain the eyes and are challenging to carry around. Worse, the dizzying range of easily accessible material on the Internet conspires with a lack of editorial guidance to make web reading a disjointed experience that works against the sustained concentration required for serious reading.
This privileging of the writer at the expense of the reader is borne out by statistics showing the annual output of new titles in the US soaring towards half a million. At the same time a recent survey revealed that one in four Americans didn’t read a single book last year. Books have become detached from meaningful readerships. Writing itself is the victim in this shift. If anyone can publish, and the number of critical readers is diminishing, is it any wonder that non-writers – pop stars, chefs, sports personalities – are increasingly dominating the bestseller lists?
Perhaps the problem has to do with more than just the way in which words are transmitted. People bowl alone, shop online, abandon cinemas for DVDs, and chat to each other electronically rather than go to a bar. In an increasingly self-centred society a premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and on being read rather than reading.

Take that last sentence and inscribe it on the grave of the book: In an increasingly self-centred society a premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and on being read rather than reading. The Internet is a mirror not of our society but of our private selves. Or rather “isolated,” since privacy no longer exists. The first thing to keep in mind about social networking is that there is in fact nothing social about it. The Internet has become a seamless web of self, a standing pool of Narcissus that we are now drowning in.

Specifically, we are drowning in an ocean of our own words. Near the end of Douglas Glover’s Elle, the heroine recalls her lover F. (code for Rabelais) saying “that as soon as everyone can read whatever they want, they’ll all decide to be writers as well.” With regard to the present discussion, Denis G. Pelli describes how this works:

By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
As readers, we consume. As authors, we create. Our society is changing from consumers to creators.

Barthes has been neatly inverted: in order for the author to live, the reader must die.

This is by now a common complaint. We are familiar with the observation that there are far more people today writing poetry than reading it, and that the only growth sector in university literature departments is their creative writing programs. Even the field of literary criticism and reviewing has suffered from this atomic blast, with book reviews and journals falling before the flood of Amazon reviewers (in fact, a small team of professional Amazon reviewers were the first to be made redundant, hoist with their own petard).

Nor is there anything new about invoking the spectre of narcissism in this context. Christopher Lasch saw it as defining the culture of the 1970s, and in the 1980s Allan Bloom blamed its inherent moral relativism for the closing of the American mind. The Internet, however, has both enabled and amplified the condition, as numerous studies now attest (in The Narcissism Epidemic the authors see in the web “a giant narcissism multiplier”). Online, we can all become as gods. Or at least, as Glover’s F. predicted, as authors. “If there were authors, how could I bear to be no author? Consequently there are no authors.” Thus spake Zarathustra.

Perhaps this is our revenge on art, tearing it down from its pedestal and making it finally as disposable and ephemeral, as mortal, as the rest of mere humanity. If so, I fear it will be a root-and-branch job, as the lasting nature of art has long been a myth necessary for its creation. Writers have to believe in some kind of posterity for their work: that their “Kilroy was here” will remain on the wall, that what they lovest well will remain, that they may enter the pantheon and be counted among the English poets, that so long as this (my immortal sonnet) lives, it will give life to me.

The Internet, however, has put an end to all that. No writer today can seriously believe that their words will long outlive them, even if they do manage to attract contemporary notice. But, as Snowman understands, to come to the conclusion that any reader one can possibly have is in the past is self-defeating. Why even bother, then? I have long thought that such feelings lie behind the appeal of historical novels, and in particular our literary fetish for the nineteenth century. For the Victorian Era was, manifestly, a time when (in the words of Jean-Christophe Valtat, defending the setting of his “steampunk” novel Aurorama in an alternative nineteenth century) literature was “regarded as able to educate, elevate, delight and even change life”: “Perhaps that is what we are missing, too. . . . Perhaps it’s a certain idea of literature as a power that we are nostalgic about.” If so, that nostalgia is something both producers and consumers of the written word can identify with.

It is a narcotizing cliché to speak of every crisis containing opportunity. This may be true, but crisis can just as easily lead to total collapse. And while some kind of contraction in the scope and extent of print culture is now inevitable, my concern is that the collapse will in fact be sudden and catastrophic, hastened by the forces I’ve been talking about. As Bauerlein puts it, “Knowledge is never more than one generation from oblivion.” That’s a maxim we are going to put to the test. “How long have we got?” Ewan Morrison asks. “A generation. After that, writers, like musicians, filmmakers, critics, porn stars, journalists and photographers, will have to find other ways of making a living in a short-term world that will not pay them for their labour.”

In Double Fold Nicholson Baker made a passionate plea for saving our cultural heritage of old newspapers from having their archives purged and replaced by microfilm copies (and don’t ask where all that microfilm is now). The Internet has improved on this. Today the talk is all about “the cloud,” a.k.a. “the end of tactile media.” Somewhere out there, in the electronic ether, after all the books are gone, our culture will continue to enjoy an immaterial afterlife. I take it this is part of the ambiguous meaning of the apocalyptic conclusion to Don DeLillo’s Underworld, where the world is transformed by the nuclear desolation of cyberspace, to be made new or somehow preserved in a binary form that will no longer be a part of the world but a container for it: either the holy grail, or final reductio, of information theory.

We can’t say we were never warned.

As for the (mushroom) cloud itself, the image says it all. A piece that recently appeared in the Guardian (May 2011) caught my eye with the headline “Google can’t be trusted to look after our books.” Before I could mutter “No shit” I was into the lede:

Google announced last month that it would be deleting the content of the Google Videos archive. After a public outcry, it said it would work on saving all the video content and making it available elsewhere. But the situation raised concerns about data under Google’s control, including the archive of Google Books.

That concern is justified. Google is in the business of making money, and it can, any time the content of the cloud becomes unprofitable, just get rid of it. Much as Amazon can delete, at its own pleasure, the contents of your Kindle with the click of a button. Clouds are not forever. If this is the future of literature then we truly are writing on water. What will survive the coming Great Erasure? How much will dissolve, and, like an insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind?

The existence of literature, not the words on the page but the whole system of production and consumption, writing and reading, rests on a paradox. Literature is a leisure activity, a private, pleasurable pursuit of instruction and delight, but it also involves effort, intellectual labour, money, time, and public commitment. We cannot take its continued role in our culture for granted. I’ve said before that the arts need to evolve in order to survive, but we should remember that evolution does not mean progress, or even adaptation of ever more complex and sophisticated forms and functions. Evolution just as easily follows the path of least resistance and leads to degeneration and decline. And what we lose will not easily be regained. You can call this a slippery slope argument, but it’s really just facing hard facts. Sentences aren’t going to start getting longer any time soon, nor vocabularies expand. Every year enrollment in university English programs goes down, and students in those programs read less and less. In tough economic times and the changing media environment we face does anyone think this is a course that is going to be reversed? Given hard times, does anyone believe for a minute that public funding for the arts is going to become a priority at any level of government? Who wants to bet that bookstores are going to start making a comeback, or that e-books will turn out to be a short-lived fad? Who can imagine a twenty-first century like the nineteenth, when literature, with its power to “to educate, elevate, delight and even change life” actually mattered?

On a couple of occasions in this essay I’ve mentioned the analogy that has been drawn by others between the Internet and an atomic bomb. What I find interesting about this is the historical fact that the Internet was first developed to be a communication system that would, due to its dispersion of nodes, still be operational in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Of course humanity might not survive such a disaster, but by that point we would be expendable. The sole necessary survivor would be the Internet itself, a force we should be able to recognize now as the true destroyer of worlds.

This is rather like declaring that the major musical milestone of the 1960s was “Yummy Yummy Yummy, I’ve Got Love in my Tummy.”

How did it come to this?

It begins with an online poll. Online polls run by their own strange rules. Consider the disparity between editors’ and readers’ selections for the Modern Library’s top 100 novels of the twentieth century. Editors selected James Joyce; “readers,” Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard, two writers who more resemble cult leaders than novelists. Their cult members, of course, had stuffed the ballot boxes.

And, as might have been expected, partisans of various stripes stuffed the ballot boxes of Canada Reads. Three of the novels on the resulting list were typical Canada Reads fare: Amy McKay’s The Birth House, Carol Shields’s Unless, and Angie Abdou’s The Bone Cage. But the others were unexpected. The Best Laid Plans was the self-publisher’s Cinderella champion. And an organized campaign to get out the graphic-novel vote gave us The Complete Essex County to round out the list.

Two of these things, to borrow shamelessly from Sesame Street, are not like the others. Setting aside any tendency towards evaluation, three of these novels can claim to be “literary” in intent. One – The Best Laid Plans – makes no pretense of joining that company. And another, The Complete Essex County, should have been excluded on the grounds that it is not even a novel – which criterion, I hasten to add, came from the show’s producers.

The loudest fuss kicked up by the latest iteration of Canada Reads was not provoked by the move to an online vote, nor even by its unaccountable outcome, but by that single, innocuous word: “novel.” In calling for readers to vote on the essential Canadian novels of the past decade, the CBC had excluded short stories and poetry – and Canada’s poets and short story writers, struggling under the weight of the chips on their shoulders, were quick to object.

The wording was no accident. As Ann Jansen, senior producer of Canada Reads (and a “self-identified poetry lover who adores short stories”) explained, it was all about a level playing field:

Canada Reads is about five people debating their favourite books and somehow agreeing on one to recommend to a country. It’s kind of like comparing apples and oranges and pomegranates and gooseberries, or some such fruity comparison. And that’s just the novels. When you think of adding poetry and short stories, it’s probably the equivalent of comparing a variety of fresh fruit with a set of bottles of icewine (that’d be the poetry) and maybe my favourite apricot-raisin buns from Cobb’s Bakery (short stories, anyone?). More distilled language in poetry, different intentions, more characters to get to know in short stories, different numbers of journeys, a variety of locations, etc., etc.

The producers repeatedly stressed their affection for poetry and short stories – so Canadian, so determined not to give offence – but they made it clear that short stories and poetry just didn’t belong. It would be too difficult to compare such diverse forms.

But when graphic novel fans asked if a graphic novel was a “novel,” and therefore eligible, the producers found themselves equally unwilling to give offence. Of course a graphic novel is a novel! And the graphic novel was in.

Narration carries the novel. Turn that novel into a movie, and lens and lighting become our narrator. Have an artist draw the scenes as storyboard, and you have a graphic novel. Instead of a narrator, we have drawings. Sara Quin, who defended The Complete Essex County on Canada Reads, pointed out this distinction and said, in fact, that reading a graphic novel requires a different set of skills – a different form of literacy.

A Globe and Mail review of Ben Katchor’s The Cardboard Valise by the cartoonist Seth – no stranger to readers of CNQ – puts that different form of literacy on full display:

The powerful diagonal graphic thrust of this panel leads you in.
Your eye starts in the top left at the word balloon (“Come in,” he says). Now, follow that dramatic tail from the balloon to the figure and then follow the figure’s widespread hands, which lead you right into the store.
Observe how the lighting leads you in as well. Note the bleached solar lighting of the street compared with the inviting dimness of the store’s interior. Even the passerby’s shadow points into the store.

Seth is not speaking the critical language of prose narrative. No one will ever discuss the bleached, solar lighting of The Best Laid Plans, the dramatic tails of Angie Abdou’s word balloons, the inviting dimness of The Birth House, or Carol Shields’s powerful diagonal graphic thrust. Yet the producers of Canada Reads felt that The Complete Essex County – which, to split a hair, is not even a graphic novel, but a collection of graphic novellas – was not icewine, nor baked goods, but fruit. A pineapple, perhaps.

Yet if the graphic novel is a pineapple, how is the short story a muffin? It works through the same narrative machinery as the novel. Indeed, people usually find themselves unable to explain the difference between the short story and the novel, and lapse into generalities. The difference may be as small as Jim Harrison has explained: “Short things are short all over, and long things are long all over.”

Yet graphic novels were permitted, when the same rationale the producers used to exclude poetry and short stories argues strongly for their exclusion. The explanation is obvious: audience.

Whatever interpretation is placed on Ann Jansen’s grocery-related explanations, there is no denying another significant difference between the forms Canada Reads included and those it chose to exclude: sales. No one will ever get rich writing poems in Canada, and your risk of pulling off the same feat by writing short stories declines if your name does not happen to be Alice Munro. Novels – preferably those aimed squarely at book clubs – have the sales.

But the plain old novel is so, like, yesterday; it’s the kind of thing your mom reads with her lame book club friends and they’re all drinking, like, Chardonnay and munching on, you know, hors d’oeuvres and stuff like that, and listening to Canada Reads. Because who listens to Canada Reads? Certainly not the members of (in Sara Quin’s somewhat less than unequivocal words) “a generation that has sort of given up a little bit on reading.”

When Jeff Lemire’s book was the program’s first casualty, howls of dismay were heard from supporters of the graphic novel: there, they proclaimed, goes all your audience under forty. Including a graphic novel allowed Canada Reads to hook in a new audience and, in keeping with CanLit orthodoxy, the graphic novel was held to be important because of its useful social function, specifically as a gateway drug to the heady pleasures of reading. And apparently it worked, however briefly: one commenter on the CBC Books website, singing the praises of The Complete Essex County, noted that she had read only fourteen books in her adult life (the word “adult” enclosed, quaintly, in quotation marks).

What nobody has yet explained is why Canada Reads should appeal to an audience that doesn’t.

It is difficult to decide which was the greater travesty: that one of the Canada Reads panelists, Debbie Travis, could not muster the mental resources to finish one of the books, or that the winning book, The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis, was so outrageously bad that her failure to finish it vindicates her.

The story is a cliché, the writing turgid, the chapters padded with filler, the dialogue clumsy. I cannot comprehend Fallis’s notion of the paragraph, which seems entirely arbitrary. But worst of all, this comic novel is not funny. Fallis does not grasp that the art of humour is the art of surprise; he overreaches, bludgeoning us with joke after joke, and when in doubt, has Angus McClintock fart. This book has all the subtlety of a drunk armed with a ball-peen hammer.

It is popular these days to excuse a book like The Best Laid Plans by arguing that writers come in two forms. There are the writers, those people who form wonderful sentences and write books of high seriousness with which educated people are gosh-awfully impressed. And then there are the storytellers, who are successful because they tell good stories that people actually want to read.

There may be some truth to this, but that superficial truth conceals a terrible fallacy.

All storytelling derives from an oral tradition. The oral storyteller, who relies on memory, builds his story from recycled bricks, a set of oft-repeated phrases and ideas rather like the floating couplets of traditional folk music. And as in traditional folk music, the art of oral storytelling lies entirely in performance. A vast gulf separates the earnest and respectful rehash made by a thousand college folkies, circa 1962, from the early recordings of Bob Dylan.

Writing freed the storyteller from the recycled bricks of the oral tradition, creating a new emphasis on originality. But writing did not put paid to the storyteller’s obligation to perform. It simply moved the performance from the present to the page. A new medium demands a new way of surprising and delighting the audience. Those who excuse poor writers as “good storytellers” forget that “story” is a mere noun, and “tell,” the verb. And if the art of storytelling is in the telling, then The Best Laid Plans is an abject failure.

Except that it won Canada Reads and, thanks to the CBC’s rather silly claims for Canada Reads’ mandate, is now considered the essential Canadian novel of the past decade.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Canada Reads, in its search for “essential” Canadian books, arbitrarily excluded some of Canada’s best writing, using a dishonest explanation involving fruit and baked goods to gloss over the fact that the producers wanted popular books. The producers included graphic novels in an attempt to appeal to an audience that doesn’t care about books. And through the dubious mechanism of an online poll, they labeled as “essential” a novel completely lacking in literary ambition or merit. Clearly, Canada Reads had sort of given up a little bit on reading.

It is time to face facts. The CBC does not care about books: not one iota, not one whit, not to the extent, even, of a rat’s patoot. The CBC is not in the book business. The CBC is in the business of audience. And in the business of audience, all that matters is the number of earlobes turned to the radio.

You can’t be a snob in the business of audience. If your aim is to engage a group of people, you must inevitably seek the lowest common denominator, and the larger the group, the lower that common denominator becomes. And so the online CBC Books portal became the “CBC Book Club,” where the emphasis is decidedly populist, and Canada Reads began with an online poll.

But in its rush to build a new audience around an online community, the CBC is also destroying any credibility its book coverage had. Set aside the complaint that CBC books coverage is relentlessly “middlebrow”; The Best Laid Plans does not rise to that level. And The Best Laid Plans appeared on Canada Reads only because the CBC threw out a perfectly good model – find interesting panelists, and ask them to champion interesting books – in favor of asking the audience to stuff the ballot boxes.

At one time, you could hear short stories read aloud on the CBC. You could wipe the sweat of a day’s honest toil from your brow, sit down in your easy chair, smile indulgently at the happy children playing quietly on the carpet, and hear a story called “The Peace of Utrecht,” by an unknown writer named Alice Munro. In all likelihood, you owned a pipe and a spaniel, or your husband did. It was, presumably, a stodgier time, even for spaniels. But then progress happened, and we became a nation of pygmies rapt in the glow of Dancing With The Stars.

If CBC radio still aired readings of short stories, Alice Munro might now be followed by something pulled from True Confessions, all in the name of audience. It is not the CBC’s fault that times have changed. If the CBC were to return to broadcasting readings of short stories, surely our nation would just tune out. We have Twitter to keep us occupied. No, we can’t blame the CBC for the decline of the national attention span – but we can fault the CBC, as a public broadcaster, for its happy embrace of that decline.

The modern viewer was the new boss: no more uncomfortable seats, unwanted audience participation, travelling inconvenience and expense, and (short of leaving the premises) lack of options during the film. Investment, in the deeper sense of the word, was tenuous. Parallels can be drawn with opera, sporting events, and cooking lessons.

Another association parallel can be made with literary readings at book launches, festivals, regional promotions, and ongoing venue series. The crystallizing idea of a literary event as truncated amusement – whether capriccio, metalinguistics, or willed hypergolic category mistake – has become a self-fulfilling intellectual accelerant. Like the info-beset VHS purchaser (now a key-clicker on Netflix, or downloader of nebulous legality), the audience may sign up to be haunted by supraliminal wonder, but, if event orchestration is any indicator, may also attend out of half-baked desire or (reversing Fellini’s contrasts here) social communion.

The poet, short story writer, or novelist now intervenes. “Some of this may be true, but I can’t compete with the fireworks of hockey playoffs, rock concerts, movies, TV, and the Internet.” Quite right, though you can compete with other poets, short story writers, and novelists. But the fatalistic shrug, this time from the audience, persists. “Artists who read from their own work are boring.” At times, yes. But does the fault lie with the work or with the reader?

Let’s investigate the reader’s complaint first. Most are aware of the familiar opposition: plugged-in, overloaded basement-brow Goliath versus page-turning, crafty Luddite David. Most also know who gets voted off the island these days. The outcome doesn’t resemble the Biblical dust-up. It’s the Fellini lament multiplied. We want the pre-digested, but now we want it cheap (or free), without delay, and in micro bites (or bite). But literary readers/authors aren’t competing with optically challenged philistines mistaking the Art Bar for the Dart Bar. Once the clean-cuticle bank dividend checkers conclude that the place is devoid of darts and loud rock, therefrom and therefore promptly departing, the reader is still confronted by the only audience that has ever mattered – those who have at least a passing interest in the highlighted genre.

Those convened on both sides of the microphone frequently bemoan the large number of vacant seats at literary events, the readers (obviously) the most disheartened. Michael Carbert, in an otherwise perceptive September 2008 Maisonneuve essay in September of 2008 for Maisonneuve, offered prescriptions to boost the roll call audience from thirteen to thirty. But everyone knows that most readings, outside of the yearly mega-events with a hundred participating readers or the few readings featuring name brand stars in (usually) well-established festivals, garner few attendees and even fewer neophytes. The focus should always be on quality over quantity, yet the latter is increasingly targeted. Hence the proliferation of gimcrack industries like the (now) international Literary Death Match, the organizational fribblers encouraging similarly produced spinoffs in (to list only two of many) the Vancouver Writers’ Series and the Guelph Spoken Word.

The caffeinated inanity of Literary Death Match enforces a seven minute time limit per actor (sorry, author). If the unfortunate reader actually dares a transformational eight minutes, he or she is body-puckered by a nerf dart. (Perhaps our hypothetic, optically challenged philistine would sign on for that.) The Vancouver Writers’ Series readers were are manacled by a six minute count, and the authors in the Guelph Spoken Word (admittedly more influenced by the Slam line) have to make do with three minutes. Next up: voting on a lone yelp.

The more common time constraints seem to hover around the fifteen minutes mark. That this is standard only emphasizes the conforming timidity of organizers in capitulating to a supposedly fidgety audience. I’ve never been able to understand this attitude. We’re repeatedly told by current practitioners that to go beyond a quarter-hour is to somehow invoke a Dantean sentence of purgatory, if not hell. Lynn Coady sets the familiar tone well: no imposing podium, softish lighting, comfortable seating, and most importantly, easily accessible alcohol and fifteen minutes of fortune if not fame. The sad part about Coady’s ideal literary reading? She’s right. But only if the reader is inept. And in that case, why show up at all? No, it falls on authors to demand (with exceptions stemming from various practical scenarios) lengthier reading periods. The aim of every reading (at least from where I balance on my wobbly plastic seat) should be wonder, if not transcendence, otherwise what the hell’s the poet or novelist really doing up there? Solidifying a career? If the reader cares to take the time to enunciate, project, pace (vocally), change dynamics, create effects with pitch and tone, use pauses wisely, engage with genuine gestures, and, most important, slow down, (along with reading from a worthy piece in the first place, of course), then the audience members who aren’t there just to socialize between and after sets have a chance at a transformative experience in a single, extended reading.

Now it’s time to flip the mirror. What about that (often true) whine, “the readers are boring”? Poets, novelists, and short story writers don’t get enough credit for their vocal capabilities. The failures outlined in the last paragraph are obvious to any audience member who’s attended more than a few readings, but many do a decent, if not exquisite, job in letting the glory of their creations do the work for them. After all, the author more than most, knows what sonic effect she wants to strike when stressing delayed consonantal twins, for example. Similarly, the tone a listener may have thought ironic upon first acquaintance with the page may turn out to be genuine when hearing the poet read the now dramatically altered passage. But the most important quality the audience member needs to bring to a reading is attention.

Awareness and attention. Everyone agrees on their importance, but how many pull a Todd Zuniga (founder of that Literary Death Match) and text a buddy after a desert of jokes at minute three, then awake to the proceedings at minute five when catching a multiple dessert of scatalogical clichés? And less obviously, how many intellectualize the small epiphanies, snapshot the deep images, and turn up the internal chatter, thereby drowning many subtle aural surprises line to line?

There’s no need to assign romance, nobility, or charm to the rhetorical effusions of mid-eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards competitors, nor to their stoically receptive parishioners under stark joists trying to ward off chilblains on ass-punishing pews. There’s also no need to follow the pendulum to the opposite and extreme arc, though that’s where the arrow is currently frozen. We live in distaste, if not terror, of being bored, and want our epiphanies paradoxically pre-ordered and familiar. We also want to like and admire the author, as if the reading is on a horizontal plane of easy reciprocity. Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of performing, largely, for a coterie of sympathetic fellow pracitioners, made even more clubby by regional repetition. There are ways of avoiding the churchly mutuality, though: organizing events at non-traditional milieus (halls over libraries; parks over pubs) and in alien quarters (while on holidays, overseas). This is still market tweaking, however.

A poem on the page is not the same as a musical score. The squiggly type of the former can be voiced by a lone reader effectively; the latter usually needs a professional with ready instrument, if not a coordinated assembly and skilled direction. But to voice a poem, short story, or novel extract with a view to “entertain,” or to “enlarge” the words, perverts the original, just as altering the stage directions of a play or the staff markings of a sonata effectively contravenes the composer’s wishes, and usually makes a farce and travesty of the performance. Samuel Beckett and Dmitri Shostakovich weren’t shy regarding their crass interpreters. The playwright took some of them to court; the composer received LPs of his own work, then turned them into coasters. Wanting the author to perform her or his work in the spirit in which it was written, then, is likely going to mean a lot of unsensational voicing. This is a problem if one is only happy with tone-knockoffs of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf or “Howl.”

It’s not only OK-okay, but inevitable and historically par for the course that the receiver of art must often work to plumb a few depths – hidden metaphor, traded phrase-making, image hierarchy, voice tone, allusion, meta-punning, lyrical subtlety, narrative reverie – and that he or she must have the patience, good will, and love for literature to maintain energy and focus during the inevitable dull patches, wrong turns, and misunderstandings. Why? How else know when the tide has turned, and out of nowhere enters the startling phrase, the contextual epigram, the emotional shift? In sublime art, the author sometimes has such confidence in his own procedure that he purposely injects tedious prose into the fabric just to tease out a tear in order to make the contrast more amazing and worthy. Yes, authors at times botch their own works by ineffective presence and voice projection. Yes, at other times the acoustics and ambiance of the specific site are unredeemable. More often, though, patrons are guilty of receiving the words out of benign sociability or a “greatest hits” wishthe problem is really the audience’s, and their expectation to be both entertained and enlightened, when these are not always the same thing. It’s often easy to blame organizers, but it seems the argument here, again, hinges on comfort levels, both physical and literary.

It’s interesting that the six-to-fifteen minute monitors don’t have much of a problem with extended post-reading Q-and-A sessions, interminable pre-reading poetic statements, or lengthy set-ups to each individual poem. This reinforces another dynamic: the fact that we’re here to learn about the poet’s processes. The poems? Not so much. Unless and until the CanLit readership – other authors, those authors’ friends, lifestyle commentators, biographers, students pressed by profs who are friends of the author, and the occasional book lover mildly curious about the event – approaches readings with intense focus on the poems, stories, and novel passages being read, we’d at times be better off to attend these events by scrapping the usual event itinerary. Hang out, talk shop, buy or swap books, and drink.

That view – the total vocal white-out (pardon the anachronistic typewriter term) – certainly has antecedent traction in other artistic worlds. Robert Schumann, donning his critic’s hat in 1838, opined that an unspectacular contemporary’s latest quartet was “for the entertainment of good dilettantes who are kept fully occupied by things that an expert artist can grasp with one glance at the page, a quartet to be heard by bright candlelight and in the company of beautiful women; whereas true Beethovenians lock the doors, savoring and reveling in every single measure [of the late quartets].” Like many provocative statements, this is true, but it also has its limitations. His comments were prescient and against the grain. But poetry and prose, no less than the Great Fugue, needs an audience, a live interpretation, to introduce or revivify a silent page read or cloistered CD play.

Fellini thought technology knocked him out. He was wise to be concerned, but he was wrong. So was Marshall McLuhan. People still line up at movie houses, and others still attend hour-long poetry readings performed by a single author. The medium only changes the message in that it amplifies defects already entrenched in reader and listener. That kind of awareness is invaluable. Sometimes progress is a boon.

Cheap shoes aren’t good for your feet. They screw up your posture, wear out quickly, and hurt your toes.

I buy expensive shoes, not due to any kind of extravagance, but rather because, on the contrary, they’re a better deal. They last longer, look better, and feel better. And they give your feet more support.

I do however buy cheap books, because cheap  – like the dead canary in the mine shaft – can indicate something very important.

Many cheap books are of course cheap for a reason. Their covers may be torn to rat shit, or their texts smeared with florescent pink highlighter ink. They may also be outdated. Fax machine manuals, for example, or 1970s computer language textbooks won’t cost you much. Nor will they serve a practical purpose, save perhaps for stopping a door or two.

Some cheap books though are worth more than you pay for them, their very cheapness a flag for as yet unseen value; an opportunity awaiting those smart enough to conceive of new collecting ideas.

In fact, cheap is precisely what you want if you collect books: untilled ground deep with grain nobody else has thought to harvest.  Unmatched is the joy of scoping out used book store shelves and church bazaar sales in search of value that others have yet to comprehend.

Identifying what you deem important and making the case for its importance, this is how great collectors cement their reputations.

With enough money, anyone can buy a great Hemingway collection, but what an utterly uninspired and unoriginal pursuit.  Yes, perhaps when he was in his twenties, and few had recognized his talent, then maybe collecting him would have been daring; but certainly not now.

Incunabula for example, or Modern First Editions – these were once cheap; once, nobody paid them mind. It took Duff Gordon and Thomas J. Wise respectively to see, expound upon and convince others of the merits of these items; to elucidate their value. In just such a way much of the history of book collecting consists of smart collectors bringing attention to books previously overlooked.

**

Canadian books are cheap; in some cases dirt cheap.

This is probably due to what writer, editor and collector John Metcalf identifies as the small pond syndrome. Hardly anyone collects Canadian. With demand light and supply relatively heavy, prices naturally are low.

Still, a case can be made for collecting a surprising number of Canadian books. Many are undervalued I think, and, in some cases, extremely so.  During the past year I have conducted a series of interviews with publishers for a podcast I host called The Biblio File. Each features a specific publishing house. Focus is placed on books and series, designers and authors who have produced work that can be rewarding to collect.

From these interviews, and various related bibliographies and histories, here is an annotated list of Canadian book collecting ideas. I’ve broken ‘Canadian’ down into the following two main categories, Design and Content, under which I discuss designers, authors, series, publishers, and lists.

DESIGN

I start here because I think that the concept of ‘book as object’, though important in the past, will – now that ebooks have cemented a grip on the market – assume even more currency in the future, and also because in the 20^th century Canadian publishing’s greatest strength was in design.

DESIGNERS

Frank Newfeld has been called ‘the most productive and creative of all Canadian book designers.’  He has designed over 650 books. His creativity, if awards prove anything, is unparalleled.

He is perhaps best known for what he calls his ‘extended preliminaries’:  pages designed to introduce, welcome or acclimatize the reader to what the writer is about to say in the book. Newfeld took this concept from the movies. Two in particular were important: Around the World in Eighty Days and The Man with the Golden Arm - the former for the way in which it incorporated names of cast members into a ‘superb’ flow along with artwork,  the latter for how it built mood.

There is tremendous fun, and frivolity, in Newfeld’s prelims; they remind one of Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi’s buildings. I love these buildings as much for their sheer fantastical impracticality as anything else.  Looking at Gaudi’s weird shaped windows and convoluted arched ceilings you just know that anyone with cost-savings on the mind would, had they seen them, have headed immediately in the opposite direction. They are so beautifully anti-efficient, so different from your typical functional downtown building, that they leap out in ways that are supremely joyful.

Executed in a time and a place (McClelland & Stewart in the late 1950s) where the bottom line didn’t rule, Newfeld’s preliminary pages graphically introduce the reader to the writer by means of clever word and image play,  repeating motifs and differing weights, colours and textures of paper.  One of the first examples was in a book entitled Dynamic Decade: The Evolution and Effects of the Oil Industry in Alberta. It features a series of repeating oil rig images growing from small to large as the pages are turned. Another plays with Irving Layton’s balls – Balls of a One Armed Juggler.  Bold and brassy like the author, the book’s cover replicates Layton’s devilish image in shades of red, black and gold. These colours play prominently in two other prelim’ed Layton books, Red Carpet for the Sun and The Swinging Flesh. These three titles represent a high point in Newfeld’s career, marrying as they do great design with outstanding content (Carpet won the GG for poetry in 1960).

In fact the whole period between 1958 and 1963 sees a truly extraordinary explosion of colour and creativity from Newfeld.  Poetry gets special treatment.  The Design for Poetry series (Rivers Among Rocks by Ralph Gustafson,  The Spice Box of Earth by Leonard Cohen, 1961; The Chequered Shade: Poems by Roy Daniells, 1963, and With the Zodiak, by Phyllis Gotlieb, 1964), for example,  had a huge impact on Canadian book design, one that hasn’t been replicated since according to Tim Inkster, a great book designer and publisher in his own right.  Sheila Watson’s Double Hook (Newfeld’s favourite cover), and Mad Shadows and Tete Blanche by Marie-Claire Blais, all came from this period; all wear powerful, striking covers, and contain memorable, distinctive imagery.  All are worth owning.

Newfeld’s prodigious output bleeds over into many genres. For organization’s sake, we’ll save mention of them for when the appropriate collecting category comes up. But before leaving, it’s worth mentioning  Newfeld’s favourite book. The Grasshopper, Games Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits, (University of Toronto Press, 1978) is filled with illustrations exhibiting his familiar use of dots and insecty lines. There’s even full frontal male nudity to admire on one page.  The book itself was designed by Will Reuter (owner of the Aliquando press ).

Alan Fleming, famed for his flow-on CN Rail logo, was another accomplished book designer;  in fact his Economic Atlas of Ontario won the grand prize at the Leipzig International Bookfair in 1970. Other designers whose work I admire and think worth collecting include Glenn Goluska (I particularly like his Ten Poems by Norm Sibum), Gordon Robertson (for the way he plays with type sizes and geometric shapes: see D.G. Jones’s Balthazar and Other Poems), and Dean Allen. But the point here is that there are many great book and type designers in Canada, past and present. Robert Ried, Carl Dair, Peter Cocking, Alan Brownoff, Scott Richardson: it’s just a question of finding one who excites you.

Look through Robert Bringhurst’s The Surface of Meaning, Books and Book Design in Canada for a start. Not only is it, in itself, a beautifully designed book, it contains hundreds of book images, plus, at the back, a comprehensive listing of Alcuin Book Design Award winners.  Bringhust incidentally, is himself an accomplished poet and book designer. He wrote the authoritative Elements of Typographic Style.  I would also recommend that all “collectors of Canadian” subscribe to, and collect, The Devil’s Artisan, `A Journal of the Printing Arts’ published twice annually by Tim Inkster at the Porcupine’s Quill. Over the years it has published stories and interviews featuring many of the designers I’ve been referring to. And finally the Canadian Design Resource website at www.canadiandesignresource.ca is full of helpful book and magazine graphics.

If you love older books, Thoreau Macdonald and his father, group of seven member J.E.H. , might be of interest. They designed many Canadian books during the 1920s and 1930s. Thoreau was colour blind and so drew mainly in black and white. His work, according to Joan Murray in the Canadian Encyclopedia, typifies this whole period of Canadian illustration. As she puts it “Certain technical mannerisms characterized his work: skies are always a series of parallel horizontal lines; clouds are simplified amoeboid shapes; trees look like the skeletons of conch shells; and his animals recall the art of the ancient Near East, appearing full face or, more usually, in profile. In general his subjects recalled his father’s, but he favoured Ontario farmland.”  One Thoreau high point is the 1938 illustrated edition of Maria Chapdelaine, published by MacMillan.

SERIES

Indian File Series

Last summer I trucked down to Hamilton, Ontario to interview Dr. Carl Spadoni at McMaster University, where he is the Research Collections Librarian in Archives and Research Collections. Carl co-has compiled a bibliography of McClelland & Stewart Imprints (published by ECW in 1994). I talked to him as part of the aforementioned Biblio File series on publisher histories. During our conversation he mentioned the Indian File books that M&S published during the 1940s and 1950s. Damned if I didn’t find one the day after I met him, in Kitchener at A Second Look Books: Robert Finch’s The Strength of the Hills (1948). Unable to stop myself, I have since bought four more of the nine books that make up the series, including the first, Roy Daniells’s, Deeper into the Forest, published in 1948, the last, John Glassco’s The Deficit Made Flesh (1958), and one of the three in the series that won the GG Award for poetry, James Wreford Watson’s Of Time and the Lover (1950). According to the Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing website that Carl runs:

The series title is a description of the publishing process; the books were released one at a time or single file, over the decade. Perhaps taking a cue from the marketing strategy contained in the title, typographer and designer Paul Arthur (1924-2001) adapted Northwest Coast and Plains indigenous motifs for the cover designs. Four separate designs were created and these were repeated, using different colours, for the entire series. Published in print runs of 400 copies, the texts were initially printed in Bodoni type, a design created by Giambattista Bodoni in 1788.

Penguin Extraordinary Canadians

Several years ago, at the Blue Metropolis writers festival in Montreal,  I was introduced to a new series put out by Penguin Canada called Extraordinary Canadians; 18 biographies that reinterpret important Canadian figures for a contemporary audience by pairing well-known Canadian writers with significant historical, political and artistic figures from 1850 onwards. At the time I interviewed Nino Ricci on Pierre Trudeau, M.G. Vassanji on Mordecai Richler and Margret MacMillan on Stephen Leacock. Needless to say an obsession to own , read all of the books, and interview all of the authors, quickly took hold.

Last year it was Jane Urquhart, on her response to Lucy Maud Montgomery. On the cover Lucy sports a quite stunning looking lid. In fact, all books in the series wear spiffy looking jackets. Lush oil portraits mostly, of the people portrayed within.  These volumes are smartly produced. Solid black cloth boards decorated with orange and white lettering and a cute little circled penguin on the front cover, complemented by regal red and other coloured paste down end papers. Anita Kuntz designed the Montgomery headgear. I’m quite partial to the Carl Shinkeruk’s illustration of Norman Bethune too.  The series’s look was designed by a firm called Soapbox.

New Canadian Library

The idea of placing illustrations of authors on the front covers of their books isn’t new. McClelland and Stewart’s New Canadian Library paperback series started off this way in 1957. Our friend Frank Newfeld played an important role here. Despite their differing styles, he drew most of the first 50-100 portraits. First editions of these books go for a meager $3-5. One way to identify them quickly is by their $1 list price on the front covers. They’re cheap and they contain much of what many consider to be the ‘best’ Canadian fiction ever written. What more could you want?

Centennial Library

Speaking of Newfeld, M&S, and cheap, there is the Canadian Centennial Library, a series of nine medium quarto sized books published in 1965-66. I see them as a sort of Canadian Britain in Pictures. BIP was designed both to boost morale in the face of a menacing Adolf Hitler during the early 1940s, and to record the British way of life. The Centennial Library served both as celebration to mark an important time in the history of Canada, and to capture a slice of what it meant to be Canadian. The books are colourful, written by some of the country’s best known authors, including Pierre Burton and Peter Gzowski, well designed, and in one case in particular, exquisitely printed ( in Italy by Arnoldo Mondadori: Great Canadian Printing).

LISTS

I’ve already mentioned the Alcuin Awards for Canadian Book Design.  A grouping of first prize winners over the years (the awards were inaugurated in 1981), across all of the various award categories,  would constitute a stunning collection; as would all winners  in any one of these vertical classes:  Limited Editions, Poetry, Prose Fiction, Prose Non-Fiction, Prose Non-Fiction Illustrated, Pictorial Books, or Children’s Books.

PUBLISHERS

A less common enterprise involves collecting by publisher.  If the idea is to acquire everything published, then a “small’ publisher is probably the way to go. Based on their performances over the years at the Alcuins, and elsewhere, plus the fact that they consistently produce desirable books, I’d recommend four houses. Tim and Elke Inkster’s Porcupine’s Quill, Coach House, Andrew Steeve’s Gaspereau Press and the Barbarian Press.  Gaspereau has only been in business since 1997, so it might be the easiest for the ‘completionist’ to tackle. The others were established in the 1960s and 1970s. Regardless, it would be wise to put in a standing order for everything that comes off your press of choice.

Unlike the others, Barbarian is not so much a commercial as it is a fine press. Its offerings are less frequent and, for good reason, significantly more expensive.  Before leaving publishers, I should also mention Lock’s Press in Kingston. Margaret Lock has a reputation as a great printer and teacher.  Canada’s own Clare Van Vliet if you will. For the amount of time, thinking, effort, love, expertise and attention that go into her books and pamphlets, they are well worth the money.  If fine press printing appeals to you, I should finally mention the Grimsby Wayzgoose Anthologies.  Here, for about $100 you get representative samples, bound together in hardcover, from all printer/participants at these annual fine press gatherings.

CONTENT

I’ve spent more time on design than I’m going to on content simply because I think that design is where Canadian books stand out, and that this is where book collecting is headed.  It’s not a sweeping dismissal of what Canadian authors may or may not have written, rather a collector’s judgment. That said, any Canadian author with a sizeable following, particularly an international one, is, I’d say, from a strictly monetary perspective, a decent collecting bet. Translation: it may take a hundred years instead of two to three hundred to break even or see a small profit from your investments in their books.

AUTHORS

In fiction, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje fit this bill; no real news here. Short story writers Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and on the speculative side, perhaps David Bezmozgis. Poets are a tougher sell. Leonard Cohen, yes (his contribution to the aforementioned Poetry in Design series goes for five to six times what the others do). Other than that, even Irving Layton who many (myself included) consider to be Canada’s best poet, still doesn’t fetch much (yes, there is value here, so yes  this is a buy recommendation).  Just for fun, I like two penny stock poets: because they’re good and young.  Michael Lista’s first collection is Bloom; and Zach Wells’s is Track and Trace.

Neither of the two Canadian authors I find most interesting wrote fiction. Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye. But both marked their respective fields of study in ways few others, Canadian or not, can match; as a result both bear attention. In fact, now that we’re on him, Frye once identified a handful of what he considered to be true central, ‘mythical’ Canadian poems, among them

D.C. Scott’s “Piper of Arll”

Leo Kennedy’s “Words for a Resurrection”

Margaret Avisons’s “Neverness”

Irving Layton’s “Cold Green Element”

Douglas LePan’s “Idyll”

Wilfred Watson’s “Canticle of Darkness”

P.K. Page’s “Metal and Flower”

Acquiring first editions of the books these poems first appeared in would prove rewarding, I think. In any event, first, early, prize-winning and signed books by any of these authors should be a fairly safe investment, i.e., again, they shouldn’t go down in price.  As always, the cardinal rule remains: buy what you love, and then spend the rest of your life building the case.

PUBLISHERS

Though the production values of books published by this no-frills house weren’t terribly high, the quality of their content, and the role its principals played in fostering a ‘made in Canada’ form of poetry, makes Contact Press (1952-67) a worthy target for collectors.

Founded by Louis Dudek, Raymond Souster and Irving Layton, Contact served as a kind of bridge between commercial and experimental poetry in Canada. According to Michael Gnarowski who wrote a brief history and checklist of the Press in 1970, it gave modernism an outlet here. After time teaching in New York, Dudek brought poetry by Charles Olson and Cid Corman, and a handful of little magazines back with him to Montreal. These provided the impetus to move forward; the goal of the new press would be to publish a new kind of poetry that at the time wasn’t getting ink this side of the border.

Throughout its first five years of existence Contact primarily published the work of its founders. But it went on, during the course of its final ten years, to become the most important Canadian small press of its time. It published most major Canadian poets of the period, and transformed literary life in Canada through its promotion of many different poetic styles. As Gnarowski puts it, ‘Contact was a self-financed act of faith on the part of its founders. While its main thrust was in publishing the new work of individual poets, it produced a milestone anthology, Canadian Poems 1850-1952, co-edited by Dudek and Layton, in 1952, and an avant-garde manifesto of young poets published as New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry (1966).’ These and other Contact books aren’t necessarily inexpensive, ( a good copy, meaning very good +, of the press’s first book, Cerberus, goes for about $150) but, given their influence, and our focus on value, well worth the investment.

Contact writers included F.R. Scott, an important early ‘modern,’ Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, and George Bowering.

LISTS

Throughout this article I’ve referenced the Governor General ‘s Awards. Despite what you may think of them  – that they’re simply marketing exercises, reflective of the preferences or tastes of biased juries-de-jour – prizes do typically, at least in their short lists, isolate much of what is good in any given year’s output.  “The rest,” as Giller Prize founder Jack Rabinovich once put it to me, “is a crap shoot.”

I know someone who has for decades bought signed copies of the Booker short list. As a result he now has a very valuable collection. The same thing could, without too much struggle, be done with the Giller or the Griffin Prizes, they being relatively newcomers. If you’d bought the Giller short list last year, for instance, you’d have a first of Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, already one of the most storied tomes in Canadian book history. It now sells north of $500.

The GGs, on the other hand, have been going since 1936, which renders the short-list exercise a tad onerous.  But collecting only the winners is do-able. I’ve spent the past several years going at it, with considerable success.  I can’t say I’ve read all, or even half of them, but I can attest to the pleasure of owning these books, and concur with John Meier when he says in his gorgeously designed (Alan Brownoff) catalogue Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction Collection that the collection “…represents most of the great Canadian authors of the twentieth century…and thus gives a fascinating perspective on the history of printing and publishing in Canada.” It is particularly pleasing when great or important writing meets outstanding design, which I think is resolutely the case with Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman (winner of the GG Award for English Fiction in 1971).

Finally , and not just because he’s connected with this magazine, John Metcalf’s Century List strikes me as a smart one to chase down.  Metcalf is one of the few men of letters in Canada who puts his money where his mouth is. Not only has he edited most every Canadian short story writer of note, he has probably read more Canadian short stories than anyone else on the planet.  So, too, has he collected more Canadian books than most of us will even see in their lifetimes. Few are as well qualified then to pick a list of short story collections better suited for collection.  I’m just sorry I won’t be around 50 years hence to see how all of his picks pan out. For now, though, they’re cheap. And if they don’t appreciate, who cares? There are enough good stories represented to appeal to just about everyone.

***

I started off this piece writing about the importance of paying more to buy good shoes, suggesting that, in the long run, they’re a bargain. I’d like to finish by suggesting that buying and collecting good books can be just as functional. Not only does it send a message to the publishing world that beautiful objects matter, it also helps keep alive the legacies and lessons provided by some great twentieth-century Canadians who contributed much to the art, craft and discipline of book design. By valuing the efforts of their labours we both help to preserve and personally benefit from an important part of Canadian culture. We also support a struggling species: the used antiquarian bookstore, one whose demise, if it ever happened, would diminish community life all across the country.

Most of the passengers, once they have found their spot, plug in their Walkmans and iPods and begin bobbing heads, snapping fingers and gyrating torsos to some fantastic private rap/disco/hiphop revery. There is, of course, nothing to be heard, and for the spectator the effect is ludicrous and discomposing – hundreds of people moving languidly or spasmodically to the ghostly, autistic rhythms of an inaudible music. I observed one plainly fruitful flirtation that evinced the new mode of conversation, intimacy and seduction among this travelling generation. A man of about thirty and a woman maybe five or six years younger strike up a beautiful friendship. Within an hour they are busy fondling, exchanging compliments and meaningful glances, only they never unhook their respective headphones. Whatever they say to one another has to be shouted at the top of their lungs across nigh-impenetrable walls of interior heavy metal – the contemporary Pyramus and Thisbe. Even the tenderest endearments require megaphonic bellowing and frequent repetition.

“I think you’re really beautiful.”

“What?”

“I SAID I THINK YOU’RE REALLY BEAUTIFUL.”

“WHO?”

“YOU. YOU. I THINK YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL.”

“OH.”

“WHAT?”

It never occurs to these barking lovers to remove the tongs from their ears and talk to one another. But at least they are assured of almost complete privacy as practically everyone else is also plugged into the mysterious current of centripetal, encysted sound. They are like creatures from another world, equipped with alien sensors for transmitting and receiving encoded signals indecipherable by humankind. It seems that speech is rapidly becoming the phantom limb of modern communication.

*

Naoussa is a pleasant town, a smaller and more gemütlich version of Mykonos, with its whitewashed houses and labyrinth of cobbled streets. It is not as developed as the capital of the island, Parikia, but there is no doubt that it has arrived. Tourist shops proliferate and the hills around the town are pocked and scarred by an epidemic of new building sites in the gaps not already filled with hotels and bungalows. Yet there is a gentleness that still clings residually about the place, in the tame sparrows that bustle around the cafe tables inquiring for crumbs, and as usual in the elderly people like the retired capetanios who introduced me to his eighteen-year-old cat Bobbis, affirming that cats are man’s best friend, or the grey-haired cigarette lady who actually remembered me from one day to the next. It is also in the local dialect – my landlady, Kyria Maria, referring to the village (or chorio) as a choriotissa, “little village.” Maria has just opened a new pension but refuses to meet the buses to tout her rooms and is very diffident about prices. Would there were more like her.

Paros is an extremely cultivated island – in both senses of the term – and one of the major tourist depots in the Cyclades. It is at least partially self-subsistent, being comparatively watered and fertile, and enjoying a thriving fishing industry. It is thus unlike the majority of popular islands which are essentially dollar sponges and would simply dry up with the decline or collapse of tourism. I assume that Paros is the “mystery island” that figures in the initial pages of Kevin Andrews’ The Flight of Ikaros. The island which he describes at the time of the Civil War was a hot, inclement, impoverished place, the houses built partly out of calamus poles and the people scraping at the earth for a precarious living. But from the internal evidence – the name Naoussa, calamus, viticulture – it appears to be the same island which is now so flourishing and industrious.

Naoussa sits in a crescent nook formed by two long pincer-like promontories that project northward for several kilometres on either side of the town. The left or western salient is difficult of access, at least on foot, the hiker having to cut back inland for some distance and then circle the inner bay before reaching the root of the peninsula itself. Accordingly, I choose the eastern tang for my morning walk. The road follows the contours of the coastline pretty faithfully and leads past several comfortable but dull beaches. But the view is varied with myriads of brimming and tumbling flowers by the roadside and a scatter of small, humped islets in the bay, like so many sunbathing dolphins. I pass fields thick and gold with unharvested rye, chunky with grazing cows and Pavarotti donkeys, and the usual traffic of barnyard fowl. Another turn in the road and there looms up the Typhonic electric plant giving off billows of black smoke and a low, unbroken, mechanical hum that obliterates every other sound and is itself milled out only a kilometer further on by the grind and crush of the surf. Then the island is restored to itself.

*

There are three Canadian girls in the next room. Their names are Liz, Sherry and Linda, though I am unable to match names to faces even after frequent meetings. I noticed them on the boat, met them on the bus, and once again at Maria’s pension where I provided my customary translation services in making arrangements. A few days have passed and I wish them speedily gone. They are polite, well brought up, friendly, but like so many travellers in their early or mid-twenties, they operate on the assumption of privilege, as if they had a right to whatever advantages and favours might accrue to their mere presence. And so curiously incurious about the country, the island, the village they happen to be visiting. They carry about with them, if not quite an air of flagrant superiority, an attitude of natal pre-eminence and perfect immunity to the complexity and fascination of the world around them.

It is an elusive thing to catch in words. It is as if their world-picture is already complete and there is no space or need for new additions, as if they are not missing anything, are unaware that anything more needs to be “done” apart from slathering on the sunblock. They are cheerful and good-natured and entirely at ease in the cramped, invisible bubbles in which they live. But they have no lateral perception and certainly never look behind them, as is evident from the fecal deposits they leave in the communal toilet, although the cleaning brush stands poised like a moon rocket beside the toilet bowl. I scrub it to spare Maria and to restore my country’s honour. It never occurs to these girls that water is a precious commodity on a Greek island – even on Paros – so they take long, leisurely showers which empty the cistern. When I see them in the port they are generally absorbed in the intricacies of their cameras, spending much of their time photographing one another. Liz is pretty and quiet. Linda is smiling and gregarious. Sherry is tall and independent. Or perhaps Linda is tall and Sherry is gregarious and Liz is independent. It’s hard to tell. But this much seems true: they are part of a generation of which it may be said that repeated exposure to it progressively blurs the difference between individuals.

*

First real swim of the season. About an hour’s walk east of Naoussa a small island reposes in the bay between a forked elbow of land that forms a partial enclosure several kilometres across. This island is joined to one of the land segments by a wide sandbar, thus making it a kind of outcropping, depending on the tide. The semi-bay that results from this formation is broad, shallow and warm. You wade out for a hundred meters or more in knee-deep water, then the bed plunges as you swim around the edge of the island toward the principal bay of the town. It reminds me of Lakka on Paxos, much the same coquillage – sea urchins, cockles, whelks – and the same underwater scape of saffron corrugations. Swimming back I suddenly felt at home, the salt taste on my lips and tingle on the skin, the sense of primal well-being that floods the whole body, the prospect of a grilled supper and a bottle of dopyo krasi or local wine. Where else would one wish to live if only one could?

*

Wanting only to trim away the bushiness above my ears, I trusted what’s left of my locks to the village barber, a grim reaper if ever there was one. Kyrios Dimitrios paid no attention to my request, instantly lopping off everything on one side with one fell swoop of his scissors, forcing him to even up on the other side. Before I knew it my ears were sticking out in that earnest Puritan way that exposed ears have. This was followed by oddly geometrical incisions around the sideburns, so that they resembled two small rectangular windows with the shades drawn. All the while Dimitri, stocky, white-haired, obsessive, after asking my nationality, kept chanting, “You are Canadian. Yes. Yes. You are Canadian.” “And you are Greek,” I countered. “Yes. I am Greek. Yes. And you are Canadian.” I emerged looking like a seven-year-old Greek boy in the shape of a middle-aged Canadian adolescent.

*

Tried to track down the Irish poet Desmond O’Grady, who has lived off and on in a house on the west peninsula for fifteen or twenty years. I have no knowledge of his work as yet, but grew interested when I read in the Paros guidebook that he is one of the “old hands” among the foreign population and that the kafeneion he frequents has been dubbed “the university.” The clerk at the tourist office assured me that “he is not only a wonderful poet but a wonderful person,” and hailed an Irish friend of his who, judging from his fluent Greek, is also a fixture. This friend informed me that Desy was expected in a couple of days, that he is published by Oxford and has appeared in the Norton, and is indeed a fine poet. “One day,” he assured me, “he will find his rightful place in the Guinness Book of Records. I am referring, of course, to his heroic bibulations.” He promised to leave a book for me at the tourist office. Apparently, O’Grady is no longer a Parianos, having moved his library back to Ireland, the surest sign of repatriation.

*

Walked to Koloumbithris on the west peninsula to the beach that is considered remarkable for its Cubist-like rock formations. The character of the west peninsula is very different from that of the east: lusher, denser, greener, almost tropical, watered by irrigation ditches, all calamus, palm and pine. The beach itself, which consists of several little rock-enclosed pockets of sand, sprouts an even thicker vegetation of pubic hair than natural foliage. The bathers are laid out haunch to haunch and everwhere rippling dunes of breasts and penises like stranded sea-cucumbers. Took the caique back across the bay.

*

Finally succeeded in getting hold of O’Grady’s work and learning a bit more about him. His house is just across the bay on Mount Vigla and is something of a local shrine. He is famous all over the island for his exuberance, his exclamatory presence and moonlight recitations, his drunken hijinks, and of course for the fact that he is a poet. Richard Winch, an English writer who was also one of the foreign pioneers on Paros, regaled me this morning with anecdotes from the pristine history of Naoussa before the advent of the rented Suzuki. His eyes shimmered as he spoke of the all-night parties, the women, the attempted murders. And he dwelt with relishing attention on the fiasco of O’Grady’s absent first wife, whom the poet had described as a sinuous and elegant Persian princess, unexpectedly stepping off the boat one day, weighing 300 pounds. “She’s gone a tad over the top,” O’Grady said, sheepishly. I spent the afternoon reading through his verse, some of it published in Egypt, of all places, and the Selected put out by Gallery Press, an Irish house.

O’Grady has many faults. For one thing, he is too wordy, even redundant: “like the dorsal fin out of the back of the shark” or “prematurely grey at twenty.” He is also overfond of the construction Northrop Frye called “the adjective noun of noun.” For example: “out of the raised eyebrow line of the wave.” And he can be embarrassingly gushy and sentimental in the “O my country” or “O my friends” manner, an excessive tendency to the vocative justified only by deep drinking.

He certainly can manage the occasional apt expression – “We loot the seafloor’s fleamarket/of small treasures for you” – and is able to run a poem over the long distance, not merely sprint for a couple of lines. The big barrel-chested breath is obviously no problem for him and his poems can huff and puff over pages without pausing for refreshment. He reminds me of Melville’s Yoomi plying the Mardian archipelago. But when he’s good he’s not so bad. Here is one stanza I particularly like from an early piece entitled The Island, even though his editor, deaf to the ambiguity in the grammatical construction of the last line, has dismissed it as chauvinistic:

For I have grown tired of cultivating the soul,
Controlling the flesh, perfecting the mind;
Of working at words through the night
Till the eye’s and the mind’s sight
Give up – it’s all no good, no good at all
When there’s no woman to break and to bind.

Still, on the whole too prosy for my taste and perhaps a touch too derivative of Dylan Thomas. One more thing I find objectionable. The poems are insistently and at times bathetically autobiographical. His subject is, to put it mildly, not Life but His Life. For example, the major theme of a poem called At the Dark Edge of Europe has nothing much to do with Europe or European history and everything to do with the four women he has loved in his lifetime. Or a poem on the Greek dictatorship which is really a litany of personal frustrations and private reminiscences. It’s probably unfair to invoke the gigantic figure of Yeats, but the comparison is instructive because Yeats started in the resolutely personal, the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, and even if he ended there he nevertheless expanded his themes toward universal significance, precisely what O’Grady is too rhetorically and vocationally Gaelic to do. There is a touch of Eastern diffusiveness as well, as if he were trading in Sweet Vjestika Aphrodisia Drops or intent, as a meditationist might say, on prolificating molecular concord. As a result the poems are on the whole neither Irish nor ecumenical, merely confused.

*

Decided to walk rather than caique out to Lageri beach, which is on the further inside lip of the east peninsula. Here the land is pancaked or gently undulating, still reedy in places with blotter-smudges of marsh and mudflat. Overshot the mark and plodded past Santa Maria to the end of the peninsula itself facing the open sea and Naxos hovering blueish and strangely disembodied in the distance. Retraced my steps and branched off onto a small road that eventually dribbled into rubble and thorn. It began to rain and I took shelter in the boat-annex of an empty house, a white, Cycladic cube softened in the Parian manner by arched embrasures and chamfered corners, accompanied by two meditative mountain goats who had somehow found their way down from the craggy interior. A half hour of silent communion until the rain tapered off. Walked back to the main road and then up another cut-off, over a fence marked Private Property, along the top of a low ridge and then down to the bay and the wide sickle of sand which is Lageri. Sea fauna of the standard type: cockles in abundance, a few turkey-wings and cones, crabs, periwinkles. What is more interesting is the seafloor absolutely printed with small starfish, like asterisks on a sepia-coloured page. One has the impression that one is reading as one swims.

*

I am fascinated by the nature and ubiquity of the yawn. Fully half the tourists in Naoussa are couples or quartets in their mid-twenties, and the girls especially are given to frequent and prodigious yawning. I have been observing this manifestation for several days and am truly impressed. It’s not that they’re bored or listless but rather that they form part of a generation that is magnificently unself-conscious. On only two occasions out of the several hundred which I have counted has the yawner covered her mouth. This is the case even at table: attractive young women, in the midst of earnest or bantering conversation over their food, suddenly open their mouths wide, wide, revealing teeth, uvula, gullet, morsels of half-chewed mash, then slowly bring their lips together and continue with the meal and the talk, sublimely unaware that they have committed a breach of table etiquette. It is an expression of supreme physical content, the body taking precedence over the centres of awareness or the simple consciousness of other people. The yawn has become the sign of our modern hedonism – or maybe shedonism would be a better word. It’s true the men yawn as well, but the women clearly out-yawn them by a considerable margin. At supper last night, like Sesame Street’s manic Count, I tallied 38 female yawns and 11 male; at breakfast this morning, 17 female and no male yawns. It seems to have the same significance on the human plane that stretching does in the cat world – a supple, purring narcissism and the mind in conspicuous abeyance.

*

It’s truly mesmerizing to contemplate the depths and complexities of history with which each tiny region in this country, every microdot island, is imbued. I spent more than a year on Paxos, which is six miles long by fewer than two miles wide, and I think I know a considerable amount about it. I walked the island back and forth innumerable times, got to know the people, asked questions, read the available literature, found the sole classical reference (in Plutarch), and yet I’m quite aware that there are secrets, facts, attitudes, which the inhabitants jealously suppress from the foreigner’s inquisitorial gaze. Now I’m visiting Paros for the fourth or fifth time in the last decade, and the only region I am remotely familiar with is Naoussa and the peninsular north. As for the rest of the island, Parikia, Marmara, Marpissa, Piso Livadhi, Drios with its teeming butterflies, it’s a tightly-bound book. And the history of the island as a whole is infinitely laminated, from the proto-Cycladic civilization which once flourished here right up to the present moment.

The Russian naval presence in the middle of the 18th century, its headquarters on an islet in the bay of Naoussa, is still fresh in people’s minds in light of what they call i katastasi (the “situation” or “occasion”), a particularly juicy bit of local history. A Russian carrier, reputedly the largest in the world, was sailing in the evening for the straits between Naoussa and Naxos. It happened that the lighthouse keeper was in his cups celebrating his name day and had forgotten to illumine the lamp before leaving for the tavern. The waters around this part of the coast are notorious for their sunken rocks – major disasters have been recorded, including the recent foundering of a tourist ferry (the Captain was watching a soccer game on TV) – and an international incident was only just averted when someone remembered that the lighthouse was unattended. The keeper was too drunk to do anything about it, so a replacement was found and dispatched hastily by motorboat. What would the most famous Parian of all, the scurrilous Archilochus, have not epoded of this?

*

Greece never makes it easy and I am the perfect accomplice. Yesterday’s storm has built itself into a six beaufort doozy, with the scale rising. The tourist office says the ship may not sail today, which means I would miss my flight tomorrow morning. One traveller’s cheque stands between me and the cast of mercy. The dilemma I’m now in is clearly my own fault. I should have left yesterday and avoided all this unnecessary drama, but I’ve always been a bit obtuse, busy interpreting omens rather than simply reading signs.

Well, it’s only 8 a.m. Maybe the weather will drop unpredictably in the next couple of hours. Departures from this country have always been accompanied by near-panic, near-misses, near-total destitution (once my entire family lived off tomatoes for three days in Pireaus to save taxi fare to the airport). Something always works out – which is the lesson of modern Greece.

*

I leave this time with deep sadness. For the first time since I began coming to Greece, I don’t feel quite so exposed or vulnerable. The foreigner who plans to live here needs two things apart from an income: a sense of detached amusement and a genuine willingness to respond. A modicum of self-confidence also helps, the ability to demand, to pass judgment, and to remain aloof as well, when circumstances require.

I am once again conscious of how inexpressibly beautiful and rich this land and this sea are. Every island I pass or visit strikes me as a possible home. Even Syros, where the boat is presently in harbour, and which I always considered too commercial, too raw and sun-blasted, would suit very nicely. The metropolis to provide goods and services, a cottage on the south coast, and the lighthouse islets to the northeast for what promises to be remarkable swimming and diving. And the time would be all one’s own, the days free for walking, swimming, reading, writing. This is what Karin and I must work for in the coming years. And later, much later, if we make it that far, when we are too old for this country, which is also difficult and steep and unfurnished – a discrete, controlled departure without the degradation of illness or the humiliation of dependence. A possible scenario and by no means a bad one. Christ, this is such a lonely, lovely, terrifying and magnificent life, sometimes I have no more words to embrace it with.

He seemed like a nice enough guy, but so did Ted Bundy from all accounts. And it wasn’t like Bread Loaf was short on desperadoes. It was a writers’ conference, after all. Charlie Manson could have hidden in plain sight. Still, here I was, following this guy across campus in the middle of the night to see something he just had to show me.

It started after dinner, up at the gathering place they call the Barn. Wine flowed for a buck a cup and jangled enthusiasm a whole lot cheaper. Even people who didn’t know each other seemed to know each other, their shared exuberance as contagious as it was creepy.

I retreated to the sidelines, fell in with the wallflowers. We swapped credentials, chronicled the despair, rejection, hope and colourful brochures that had brought each of us to Bread Loaf. Before you knew it, our exuberance was as contagious and creepy as the best of them.

I was quick to mention how I’d studied with Mordecai Richler and Clark Blaise, but the name-dropping got me nowhere. Screw that. I switched to Plan B: Paraded my short story sales to magazines like Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing Stories and Realms of Fantasy, capping the rundown with consecutive appearances in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Hardcover, yet! My newfound writing pals appeared not unimpressed, especially Lyle, an IT manager from Georgia. No, I may not have been the stuff of Kirkus or Kenyon, but at least I’d been paid for my fiction. Not just in contributors’ copies either, but real bucks. Cheques! Cash you could buy things with. Toaster ovens, iPods, organic bananas. Yup, these eleven days at Bread Loaf were shaping up to be mighty swell. The self-doubt. The loathing. The chronic schadenfreude . . . All would be left behind. Unlike most of these wannabes, I was a published author and way ahead of the game, even if I’d yet to sell a novel. That’s when Lyle patted me on the knee, invited me to step outside. “I gotta show you something,” he said, his words a tad too moist upon my ear. “It’s in my car. Over at the lot.”

“Huh?” The last time a man had patted my knee and invited me into his car had been in the 70s, during my hitchhiking days in Vancouver. It had not gone well.

It was dark, the moon nowhere near as bright as I expected on a summer night among the Green Hills of Vermont. Robert Frost had exaggerated, if not outright lied.

Regrets surfaced. If only I’d listened to my mother, memorized the Reader’s Digest article she had clipped for me: How to Escape from the Trunk of a Car.

Lyle popped the rear of his Civic. A pair of Joe Boxers flopped onto the gravel. Jeez! If this didn’t bear the earmarks of a nut job, what did? Sweatpants, shirts, underwear, socks and assorted flip-flops mushroomed from the trunk, side to side and top to bottom. It was enough to give an FBI profiler a case of the giggles.

“I left in a hurry,” Lyle explained.

He kneeled on the bumper, dove into his wardrobe. Whatever he needed to show me was well buried.

I braced, waffling as to how I might handle the assault, deflect the blade of his combat Bowie, neutralize his TEC-9. Damn! Why hadn’t I listened to David Morrell, not only a professor of English at the University of Iowa, but author of First Blood and creator of Rambo, too. His Lessons From a Lifetime of Writing had stressed the importance of learning stuff outside your comfort zone, the need to make summer vacations meaningful. He’d gone to the G. Gordon Liddy Academy, for God’s sake: “The instructors were ex-CIA, ex-FBI, ex-DEA, and numerous other ex-operatives of various high-level alphabet-soup government agencies.” Had I followed his lead, I wouldn’t be in this fix to begin with, wasting vacation time at some panty-ass writers’ conference, that was for damn sure.

“Yes!” Lyle cried. “Got it!”

His feet hit the gravel.

Could I buy him off? Would my life be worth the ninety bucks in my wallet? Sure, forty of it was Canadian, but . . .

Distant laughter from the Barn. I became nostalgic for my life of ten minutes before.

Lyle surveyed the parking lot. There could be no witnesses.

I shifted position, frantic to identify the object he kept concealed behind him. Suddenly, his fists flew toward my face, rocked me onto my heels. And there, held aloft before me, mere inches from unbelieving eyes, illuminated by the penlight on his keychain, was the September issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Mouth dry, hoarse, he whispered, “I subscribe.”

That was it? “Yeah. Well. Great.”

“You don’t get it, man. Once they know you’re into genre, you’re toast.”

2 The first genre writer I ever met

He turned up one day in the middle of term, asked if he could sit in. As creative writing classes go, I guess we weren’t all that creative. We dubbed him the obvious, Old Guy. Seventy, easy. Maybe seventy-five. Blue suit. Legion pin on lapel. Striped tie, silver clip. Boxcar moustache. Hair slicked straight back like shoestring licorice. It was a seminar class. No shortage of seats. Richler shrugged, circumspect behind his Schimmelpenninck smokescreen. “I guess.”

Old Guy hoisted his briefcase onto the conference table. “You know,” he said, drawing our attention to Richler’s cigarillo, “in The Big One, we called them coffin nails.” Some of us laughed; it was the respectful thing to do. Richler inhaled, exhaled, proceeded to the week’s readings.

Old Guy did not speak again. He listened and observed. Until the end of class.

He raised the lid of his briefcase. “I wonder, Mr. Richler, if you might be so kind as to read mine now?”

We froze, attention riveted to our renowned mentor.

You knew for sure Richler had seen it coming. The moment the old man tapped the door, he’d seen it coming. Hell, he sensed it before the geezer showed his face. So, you figure he might’ve been better prepared. “Um – uh – ”

There’d be no denying him. Not this day. Old Guy served up a slab of manuscripts as thick as a butcher block, Duo-Tang plies of red and yellow, pink and green, brown and blue, black and orange.

Richler shifted his tin of Schimmelpennincks from his right hand to his left. “Not all of them.”

“How many then?”

“I dunno. A couple.”

“But – ”

“Two.”

“But – ”

“Two.”

“Two.” Old Guy shook his head in a manner to suggest the loss would be Richler’s and fanned out the options. “Mystery? Science fiction? Western? South seas adventure? Romance? Erotica? Comedy? War? Horror? Crime – ”

Richler plucked a yellow and a green.

A week went by.

Old Guy showed up early. He didn’t wait for Richler to take his seat, put it right to him: “So, what did you think?” He was pretty much foaming at the mouth, spazzing with joy. This was the moment the Mordecai Richler would forever change his life.

Richler pulled the manuscripts from his satchel, handed them over. “Well, they’re not very good.”

“Wha – ?” It was like Dementia had dropped in for a quickie. He stood uncomprehending, let the critiqued Duo-Tangs fall into his briefcase. “Oh.”

We couldn’t look at him. We couldn’t look at Richler.

Head down, Old Guy gathered up his belongings and crossed to the door, stopped, hesitated, turned. “Well,” he said to Richler, “what do you know, anyways?”

3 Some genre writers are not born

This is the ill-advised part. This is where I blow any chance of winning a Hugo, Nebula or Stoker, never mind a Booker or Giller.

I was the first of my father’s family to graduate university. His pride was short-lived. I let slip I wanted to write. I might as well have told him I’d booked a ticket to Bangkok for sex reassignment surgery. “Gottenyu! A writer? A writer? Who’s going to hire you as a writer? Tell me who, goddammit! Who?”

He worried I’d end up like him. Frustrated. Disappointed. Penniless. Not tired of living so much, just tired of being the subplot of a Jolson movie.

My mother, meanwhile, urged me to give optometry a try. “Look how well your cousin Jerry does.”

Neither knew to ask whether I’d be pursuing literary or genre. Not that I would have had the answer. Despite the formidable influences of Richler and Blaise, I believed writing was writing. Literary or genre did not matter; I’d skip between the two as inspiration dictated. I could be Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon one week, Richard Matheson, Robert Silverberg and Ray Bradbury the next.

And so I begin to write. Short stories. Novels. An apocalyptic SF novel. A porn novel. A coming-of-age novel. Pieces for Mad and Harpoon. All are rejected.

I roll carpets at Eaton’s warehouse. Cut broadloom. Drive a lift truck.

I write gag lines for cartoonists and make my first pro sale to an illustrator in Puerto Rico. He sends me a cheque for $1.50. The bank charges me $10 when it bounces.

I write university term papers for seven bucks a page. Engineering. Law. English. Philosophy. I sell short features to the Montreal Star and Vancouver Sun.

I get married. Have kids. Take a fulltime job as a copywriter at an advertising agency. But it’s temporary, you understand. Only temporary.

Career highlights are many, especially the personalized rejections. A personalized rejection is almost as good as an acceptance.

The editor of Harpoon returns Know Your Asshole Better with an encouraging note: “We’re doing a farting issue next if you’d care to contribute.”

My porn novel, The Mammary Recordings, earns a handwritten reply: “While we found your novel amusing, our readers will not. Please limit the plot of any future submissions to the main character hopping from bedroom to bedroom, sex scene to sex scene. Please, no humour.” Wow! They found it AMUSING – enough to keep me going for months.

Rejection, of course, is not limited to publishers and editors. Life in Henk is my coming-of-age epic. It is about growing up in a Jewish family in Trenton, Ontario in the late 50s, early 60s. I give the manuscript to my older sister to read. She had wanted to be a writer, but eloped at 18 and had babies instead. She is both concise and incisive: “What am I supposed to write about now?” I decide to write a serial killer novel next.

Wait! It gets worse. I’m at my urologist. Yeah, urologist. Cripes! Even he has published a book – Private Parts by Yosh Taguchi, MD. And mid-point of my digital rectal examination I hit rock bottom: I ask if he might put a good word in for me with his agent.

My urologist’s agent does not reply. No Canadian agent does. And I accept, at last, my father was correct. Who would want to hire me as a writer?

Until one Christmas Eve. The phone rings. The caller is Virginia Kidd, an American literary agent, and she loves Life in Henk and she wants to represent me and I’m thinking maybe there’s more to this Baby Jesus thing than I’ve been led to believe. She wants every damn piece of fiction I’ve ever written. And within a month, she sells one story to a UK fantasy anthology, Destination Unknown, and another to Fantasy & Science Fiction. And soon word comes down that Houghton-Mifflin is about to put an offer in on Life in Henk and my wife and I stay up the entire night, excited by the prospect of dream becoming reality . . . Alas, the offer never happens. The editor is apologetic. Virginia is angry. And I proceed to write a short story about a boy who finds a tiny human skeleton in a bug jar. A few months later, it makes the cut for the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror.

The science fiction, fantasy and horror writers I know were passionate readers of the genres before they began to write in the genres. They were fans. Huge fans. And still are. I read a lot of SF growing up, but I never lived and breathed the stuff. I still don’t. That’s not to say I don’t like to write it; I simply didn’t set out to write it.

So, why did I become a writer of genre? Isn’t it clear?

Because nobody else would have me.

4 A painful truth

Ihave a wife and three daughters. All are avid readers. Literary, big name stuff. Ishiguro. Munro. MacLeod. Franzen. Roth. Atwood. Mistry. Shields.

They often discuss the books they read. And love.

The only genre fiction they read is mine.

I have never heard them discuss anything I have written. Never.

I have requested they stop talking about books and authors when I am around. They laugh. They think I am kidding.

5 Stranger in a strange land

Have I gone about this the right way? What does CNQ expect of me? I do not write essays. I am a not a literary deep-thinker. I do not belong in CNQ. This is a prank, right? CanLit Punk’d.

I’ve gone through the short story issue. The erudition intimidates me. Worse, I now find myself using erudition in a sentence. Jeez, two sentences.

I have never read Alexander MacLeod, Guy Vanderhaeghe or Michael Ondaatje. I have never heard of Mark Anthony Jarman, Audrey Thomas or Douglas Glover. Not that I expect they’ve heard of me. Do they read Fantasy & Science Fiction? Occasionally? Ever? Stephen King called the magazine “the gold standard for short fiction in America,” though it’s unlikely he garners much respect in these pages. Kirkus claimed it “eloquent, scintillating, often sublime.” I know Margaret Atwood isn’t a fan, otherwise she’d abandon her crusade to sever speculative fiction from science fiction. Is anyone buying that? She’s a savvy marketer, sure. Still, I resent how her defensiveness puts me on the defensive. Kurt Vonnegut never made me feel this way.

CNQ is wordy. Does literary critique demand no less than fifteen sentences per paragraph? Where is the pacing? The white space? The exclamation marks!!?? Would a larger font kill them?

Nasty, too. Like some high school clique. Mutual admiration society one sec, mutual denigration the next. They rip into their peers like it’s Boxing Day at Walmart. There’s so much nitpicking going down, it’s a wonder the pages don’t scab over. What am I doing here? I fear for myself.

I know it sounds whiny, but if you’ve never gotten a bad review before, you have no idea what a unique kind of heartbreak it is. And I’m not talking about getting constructive criticism from your seventh grade English teacher . . . . I’m talking about a complete stranger telling other complete strangers that something you’ve been carrying inside you for months is stillborn.
—The Escapists (2007)

The Escapists? It’s a graphic novel. Okay, a comic book. Oh, that’s going to go over well around here. The point is, you’d never catch a critic of genre fiction behaving the way your CNQ piranhas do. Is genre, as a group, not more humane, empathetic and respectful of one another’s craft?

Of the three slightly longer, independent short stories, Michael Libling’s ‘Pheromitey Glad’ I found to be a sophomoric, unfocused and ambling attempt at arch cuteness, which failed miserably. It just didn’t make any sense on any real level, and was difficult to read with all of the cUTe spellings . . . Sometimes literary experiments work, sometimes they don’t. This one totally failed for me.
—Dave Truesdale, SF Site
(1998)

Oh, man. Is that what I’ve done? Delivered another “sophomoric, unfocused and ambling attempt at arch cuteness”? Perhaps if I say something nice . . .

With a name like Canadian Notes & Queries, I expect it to be about as action-packed and provocative as Stephen Harper’s sex life. But the irreverence surprises me. The frequent shots at the Giller Prize are fun. So, I’m not the only one who finds CanLit stultifying. “Murder, stillbirth, war, suicide, scalding, genocide, another stillbirth” (as Ryan Bigge sums it up) have a place in genre, too. A big place. But we do not as a matter of course take the angst-ridden poems we wrote as teenagers and expand them into novels. We do not ramble on all mopey-dreary about our pain for 400 frigging pages without throwing a little action into the mix, an appealing character or two and a plot. (Come to think of it, there’s not much difference between literary fiction and porn; plot is secondary to both.) Most of all, we do not measure the quality of our writing by the extent of its inaccessibility.

Still, if I stick around for an issue or two, I might even learn something here. Maybe I have more in common with these CNQ guys than I think. Perhaps I do belong in these pages. Well, once every 42 years, anyhow.

I wonder. Has CNQ done a genre issue before? What’s that about? Are they slumming it? A My Man Godfrey sort of deal? Should I expect to be rolling my eyes?

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have brought up that Margaret Atwood thing. Is it too late to take that part out? I mean, who am I to –