We Do Really Want to Hear About It
The death of J.D. Salinger yesterday at the age of 91 has reignited a cultural conversation that hasn’t really stopped since the famously reclusive author’s last published story appeared in the New Yorker more than 40 years ago. Who was Salinger and why did he stop publishing his work? Why has every generation of post-WWII readers responded so strongly and consistently to his most famous creation, the smartass drop-out Holden Caulfield? And what has Salinger been working on behind the walls of his secluded New Hampshire compound for all these years? Will the unpublished works, should they ever be released, be any good?
One very loud strand of that conversation suggests that the reclusive author’s fame grew in direct proportion to his withdrawal from public – and publishing – life. There’s some truth to this assertion – nothing stimulates the information-addicted public’s imagination like absence, and the stories and novels his millions of fans have imagined Salinger writing dwarf, in number and accomplishment, anything he could have created in a dozen lifetimes. What these speculations tend to ignore is the ultimate cause of Salinger’s fame: the writing, which, especially in the early stories and novellas and Catcher in the Rye, was utterly original. Salinger’s work may not have expanded or challenged the novel or story form, per se, but he brought a particularly modern and very American voice to English-language literature that no one had heard before and has never really heard since (though countless authors have based their careers imitating that voice). But as Chris Wilson writes in the National Post, if Salinger’s last published works, especially Seymour: An Introduction, are any indication, that voice was beginning to strain under the tremendous pressures, both internal and external, of topping his early success. The later published works are at times solipsistic and obsessive to the point of unreadability. Hopefully Salinger wrote his away through those low points, and hopefully he left behind those writings to his devoted public.
There are a ton of touching obituaries out there, including tributes by Rick Moody, Stephen King, Robert Fulford, Charles McGrath and Books@Torontoist favourite Steven Beattie. For a very inclusive list go to Arts & Letters Daily and for more remembrances in the New Yorker go here.
iPadded the iPad News
Unless you live under a rock, you’d know that Apple unveiled their iPad and iBooks store yesterday. While iBooks and the 3G models won’t be available in Canada for a while, everyone’s eagerly anticipating what this oversized iPhone means for publishing. Kobo, Indigo’s ebook branch, is excited; the Globe and Mail is hopeful; The Star thinks the iPad will be a game-changer; the Quill and Quire chatted with Random House about getting in on the action; and New York Times broke down the iPad’s publishing advantages.
Engadget got their hands on one and filmed it for us and wrote up one of the most thorough (albeit, non-bookish) responses thus far. Self-Publishing Review has a video of iBooks in action. Finally, Jezebel rounded up the best iPad jokes because, really, everyone went there. #iTampon was the number three trending topic on Twitter yesterday. Did Jobs really not see that one coming? Or did he just not care?
In semi-unrelated news (you can choose the font of your choice in iBooks), I Love Typography picked their favourite fonts of 2009. The winners include Trilby, Allumi TPF and Calluna.
The Guardian ranked their top 10 rock’n'roll novels, including High Fidelity, Wuthering Heights and Groupie.
Salon.com is not a fan of book trailers, calling them silly, lame and irrelevant. Yes, sometimes book trailers suck. However, Salon‘s sweeping conclusion is very dismissive of a marketing tool that’s still a work in progress. Maybe they’d feel better if they were watching book trailers on an iPad.
Kean Soo and His Jellaby
Kean Soo is a Toronto cartoonist, creator of the award-winning Jellaby series. Dave Howard had a chance to catch up with Kean earlier this week and talk about the comics medium, his history and some of his influences.
Dave Howard: Tell me Kean, when did you start drawing?
Kean Soo: Probably fairly early – like when I was about four or five, maybe earlier. I’ve been drawing poorly for as long as I can remember.
Howard: You’ve always been cartooning?
Soo: I don’t know about cartooning. I remembered recently that I had done something for a school assignment – in Grade Five or something – and the assignment was to do a “choose your own adventure” book. I’d done it in this kind of pseudo-comic format. That might’ve been my first real comic. That was 30 or 40 pages – thinking back about it now I realize that was a pretty big deal for me. But yeah, I didn’t really take it seriously until I guess the early 2000s. I wasn’t actively trying to be a cartoonist until that point.
Howard: How old were you then?
Soo: It was late university. I was actually starting to take comics pretty seriously around the very tail end of high school, the beginning of university. I’d picked up Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and then I started picking up comics that were just slightly off the mainstream track. Dave McKean’s Cages. Sandman at the time was also there. But earlier, in my early teens, I was gorging myself on Dragonball, Asterix and Tintin. You know, sort of a pretty wide range of different comics. I didn’t really get into the North American comics mostly because I’d been raised in Hong Kong, so I had access to all different kinds of comics.
Howard: What kinds of comics did you access in Hong Kong?
Soo: There were some translated manga that I was following. There was Dragonball – Dragonball was huge for me, I still love Dragonball. The first couple of volumes were brilliant, but then it sort of goes downhill around the middle of the series when it becomes non-stop fighting. But I loved that stuff when I was younger. Now I love it much more for the humour from the early books.
Howard: What kind of comics were you reading in university? You went to Queen’s University? Were the comics you were reading then drew you into drawing comics?
Soo: Oh yeah. At that point for me, because it was more accessible, I was reading the indie North American stuff. Cages was one of the key ones. And then there was stuff like Bone.
Howard: You were studying to be an engineer at the time. And you graduated as an engineer.
Soo: During this time a friend and I – we were really big into comics and we would share our comics back and forth and stuff like that – we had heard about this open call for the SPX compilation comic. This was like, 1998, 1999? And so we collaborated on this comic and it was just .. awful (laughs). And we submitted it, and we didn’t hear anything back. But after that, for me, I think because we just had so much fun doing it and it was so far outside of what I was doing at the time that I kept at it. I was doing an engineering degree and there was absolutely no room for humanities courses. I think I was taking one English course, in the entire year, which was absolutely nothing. I was just looking for that outlet.
Howard: Comics seem to fall directly between disciplines – we have philosophers writing about comics, we have linguists writing about comics, literary criticism about comics, we have people like Chris Ware who are coming from the designer world, someone like a Seth is coming from an illustrator world. You were studying to be an engineer, was there any part of the construct of the medium that attracted you? I’m interested in your connection to comics, your interest in the mechanics of how comics work.
Soo: Yeah, I think that stems back to how I’ve been trained to think. Even when I look at stories now – movies, TV or reading books – I’m always analyzing what’s going on, how the story’s being told. I think that goes back to my engineering training – let’s figure out how this thing works.
Howard: Comics work on so many different levels. The artist is controlling the reader’s experience in a different way than with just words. You’re controlling where they look, it’s mechanical in a way.
Soo: It’s really interesting to look at comics that are explicitly technical and then compare them to comics that follow the emotional map of the story they’re telling. Like David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp. You’ve read his adaptation of City of Glass? My connection is very much in the same vein, though I actually felt distanced from the story in Asterios Polyp. But reading it, and looking at it technically, at every little trick he pulls out of his sleeve – it’s really amazing, on that level. Everything has been planned out. There are clues planted all throughout the story that come back and give meaning the next time you read it.
Howard: Mazzucchelli was the one who really drove me to read Batman. I picked up Batman Year One, and then I went to Rubber Blanket.
Soo: With Dark Knight Returns, I really like the conceit. The entire comic is based on the 16-panel grid. As the story progresses, the panels start to mesh together until you get the wider and wider splash pages of action. That’s an element that really interests me, the panel layout. I probably spend the most time on my thumbnails. In fact, I think the part that engages me the most is the layout part. I feel the actual art is sort of a grind for me.
I think one of the reasons I went into engineering was connected with the process of creating something. At the end of the day, you get to hopefully say, I’ve written this piece of code, I’ve created this circuit board, I’ve created this…thing. I get that same satisfaction with comics. You know, here’s what I’ve done. And I think for me that sort of urge to create is there, to make things. It almost doesn’t matter what, as long as it’s something. As long as I’m doing that, I’m happy.
Howard: Is that when you started getting in to the journal comics (a journal in comic-strip form)?
Soo: Largely through Scott McCloud’s website, I came to know Journal comics from Drew Weing and Les McClaine and Neil Babra. I was getting into those and eventually I thought that this might be something I could do. Something grabbed hold of me.
Howard: What was your journal comic called?
Soo: It was a journal comic at keaner.net. I didn’t really have a name for it. And then from there it spun out to be sort of what I call the Exit Music series, where I wanted to expand on some of the ideas that I had been toying with. At that point, I had been doing the journal comic for about a year and I was starting to get a little frustrated with the constraints of the strip format. So I wanted to expand it out into a longer form. It was sort of…a comfort level thing. You know, two different muscle sets, one to write something in a strip format and one to write something in a longer format. I feel the same way about writing short stories now and writing full length graphic novels. If you’re writing a 150-page thing, there’s a lot more to consider than if you’re writing a short story. It’s the reverse with a short story – having to set up the characters quickly and succinctly, you don’t really have the time or space that you might have in a graphic novel. You need to make every moment count in a short story.
Howard: You were a fan of Calvin and Hobbes?
Soo: Yeah, I was – am – really in love with that series. And it really was a conscious influence on Jellaby, starting out at least.
Howard: Can you tell me something of the difference of working on a piece in colour as opposed to black and white? What is the difference as you approach it as a cartoonist?
Soo: I definitely think black and white is a lot harder to make images “read” compared to colour. I think people who can work in straight black and white have much harder time, and so require a lot more talent to do it. Being able to spot blacks is still something I have trouble with. And I feel with colour you have another tool in the toolbox – you can use it to add shading and to add more depth. I feel if you’re working in black and white you really have to be in full control of how to make something look fully formed and rounded. You can take some liberties with colour. They’re two different things, but definitely, people who work in black and white, I have the utmost respect for.
Howard: Can you tell me about the creation of Jellaby and your work on the Secret Friend Society (a joint project with cartoonists Hope Larson).
Soo: I was sort of getting frustrated and I wanted to work on a longer form project. I was looking back at all the doodles I had done in my sketchbook, and there was this one image that had this girl hugging a grub-like monster – and I thought there was an interesting story there. And so I started to develop the characters, and working on the idea more.
Howard: Your connection with that image: was it a conscious idea, or was it an idea you were sort of feeling out at the time? I’m interested in that idea – that concept of an artist connecting to an image and taking something from it that’s not necessarily verbal.
Soo: I think there’s certain images that do stick in my mind. It’s…the mystery of it. Here’s an image, and I’m not sure what this means, but it seems to me there’s something that attracts me to it. I’m asking questions about what this image is. I think that’s what really good illustration does. There are elements that raise questions that start forcing the reader to ask what is going on, what is this saying?
Howard: How did you get hooked up with Hope Larson?
Soo: I think Hope had just moved to Toronto at the time to be with her husband. It was sort of weird, I had known her work on the web, but then we started talking in person, and talking about our ideas in parallel. The story she was working on was about a girl and her imaginary friend, which was basically the story for her first graphic novel, Salamander Dream. I was talking about Jellaby, and then we noticed how similar our two stories were. Hope had her mind set on getting a graphic novel published, and I was starting to think along those tracks, too. I was starting to see other people who were in webcomics starting to get picked up by publishers. I was thinking this could really be a way to go, to take a career down this path. So we basically decided to launch the website to act as a venue to try to sell our books to a publisher. But we had structured it so that it would be a daily updating webcomic. Hope would update every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I would be updating Tuesday and Thursday, so there would be content every week day. The first couple of weeks after we launched the Secret Friend Society website – in the very start of 2005 – Hope got contacted by Chris Pitzer at Adhouse books, and she pretty much got published right out of the gate.
I was toiling away for a good year or so after that, until I finally got an email out of the blue from someone at Disney. At the time it was Disney Press that was interested in publishing Jellaby, but it eventually worked out to be published by Hyperion, the book arm of Disney.
Howard: Jellaby is basically about a young girl and her non-imaginary dinosaur friend who she conceals from others. What kind of themes are you dealing with in Jellaby – consciously, that is?
Soo: Well, consciously, I was interested in talking about my own childhood, moving around a lot, going to different schools. For me it was difficult to lay down roots and make friends, and I think that’s a pretty big running theme through a lot of what I do. I think that was the primary motivation right there.
Howard: I see the connection there to Calvin and Hobbes.
Soo: That was definitely one of the things that attracted me to Calvin and Hobbes as well.
Howard: Imagination, childhood – that’s pretty authentic. I admit I read Jellaby as an adult and I took it home and showed it to my daughter, and she just freaked out. She loved it, and insisted I read it end to end to her.
Soo: That’s really good because I sort of feel like…
Howard: …that you’d really hit on something?
Soo: Yeah, I feel like I really got lucky with Jellaby, because I’m not 100% sure I really knew what I was doing or what I set out to do. I knew I wanted to hit on something about how kids can actually feel terribly lonely – that’s not a mainstream idea of what kid’s entertainment should be about. I feel really lucky that people still respond to it. I think I really could have fallen flat on my face with it, and it totally could have backfired for me. But again, like I say, now that I’m working on this new project, and now that I’ve had a chance to talk to a lot of kids and even work with them in workshops and things like that, I’m much more consciously directing the story at kids. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I do feel it was a bit of a crapshoot with Jellaby.
Howard: You’ve sold lots and lots of books – 18,000 books. That sounds like a lot to me.
Soo: I think if it was an indie comics publisher, I think those would be respectable numbers, but in the book trade world, those numbers aren’t huge. You have to take into consideration the book’s printed in full colour and it’s priced at $10 so kids can buy it. The profit margins are a lot smaller than what they could be. So – it’s tough. I know I am the tiny fish in the big pond.
Howard: A lot more swimming to do! Can you tell me a little bit about your day, your routine?
Soo: AI find that with inking, I’m usually at my best when I first wake up. I literally roll out of bed and I sit down and just have a batch of penciled pages that need inking. I’ll just ink though those, sort of the mechanical part of my routine, and I’ll do either writing or penciling new pages in the afternoons, and usually into the late evenings. Generally I try to keep a regular eight-hour schedule, starting at about 10 or 11 and then working into the evenings.
Howard: When did you realize you wanted to go full time with this? When did you make that commitment?
Soo: Basically it wasn’t until I had that publishing contract with Jellaby.
Howard: How did you make it through? Just saving up?
Soo: There was an advance that came with the book and that helped out a lot. Also from my time in engineering, my old regular job, I had a small cache of money squirreled away. And I also applied for and received a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, which was a huge help. It was definitely a struggle, though.
Howard: Can I ask where you get your art supplies?
Soo: I generally don’t use a lot of fancy art supplies or anything like that. I just hit one of the chains, like Curry’s or whatever’s closest. But Woolfitt’s at Queen West, they have some great technical pens that I’m using now that none of the big chain stores carry. That’s a neat little spot for me.
Howard: Do you connect with other cartoonists around Toronto?
Soo: I mostly just hang out with the webcomics crowd, that’s sort of local.
Howard: So you work at home, and connect over the web?
Soo: Yeah, mostly over the web. I’ll get some face time with people like Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics. Look at me, now I’m just shamelessly name dropping.
Howard: What are the differences you see between comics that are on the web, and those that are in print. What do you think are the chief difference, aesthetically?
Soo: It’s kind of a tough question, actually. It’s not like I’m knocking webcomics, but I do feel the successful webcomics are still predominantly in the strip format. It’s a gag a day, a joke a day. There’s a couple of exceptions, things like Octopus Pie – I think Meredith is starting to shift away from that format. But I still feel webcomics are still predominantly driven by people who come into work, check their email, read webcomics for maybe a couple of minutes to start their day, then go on to the next thing. I feel that the long form graphic novels are a little more of a – I don’t know if specialized is the right word – reading experience. It’s hard to read an actual book for one or two minutes, you’ll want to sit with it at the very least for 10, 15 minutes. I think readers will consciously spend more time reading a book. I think that’s two different mentalities. I don’t think one is any better than the other, that’s just sort of the way it works, the way those formats make people engage them.
Howard: I’m thinking again – I don’t want to harp on this – Calvin and Hobbes is a beautiful work of art, and that it’s a strip doesn’t take away from it at all. It plays to it’s strengths.
Soo: You can pick up a Calvin and Hobbes book, and flip though anywhere – you can flip to the middle – and just jump in and read any strip. I think that’s really special you can do that.
Howard: Do you think Bill Watterson (C&H creator) and his innovations opened the field for other panel cartoonists? Since he was so popular and was able to force changes upon the format, like the expanded Sunday comic, were there other cartoonists who benefited from that?
Soo: I think Calvin and Hobbes at the time was more the exception rather than the rule, and if you look at strips today, it’s incredible what kind of space limitations they have now. And I think it’s understandable why more people are turning to the web, where you don’t have those kinds of constraints. You can go back to doing whatever you want. I don’t know – have you read Cul De Sac? I think that’s now my only favourite – it’s a really great strip. For me it’s sort of up there with Calvin and Hobbes. It’s about a four-year-old girl and her family, and she goes to pre-school. Its in the same vein, almost.
Howard: Like Peanuts, all these comics with kids as the characters.
Soo: And there’s a talking hamster. Well, the way I’m describing it, it sound cliché, but it’s not. It’s fantastic, I love it.
Howard: I find I want to look more towards the collections when I want to read a good strip. I’m enjoying Gasoline Alley and Little Orphan Annie. Are there any cartoonists that really influenced you, as opposed to ones that you really liked and read?
Soo: I’d say Akira Toriyama, who did Dragonball and Dr. Slump. His humour is still something I appreciate. I’ve been rereading a lot of Osamu Tezuka lately, and Phoenix. I really love that series. There’s a lot of amazing things that he does with panel layouts, for some of the science fiction stuff that he did. Some incredible stuff.
Howard: Where do you get your books? This is a book column, I’m interested in your habits, how you get them, where you get them, where you read them.
Soo: With comics it’s mostly from The Beguiling. They’ve always, for the most part, made some really great recommendations, something I may not have heard of. That’s how I first came across Taiyo Matsumoto’s Tekkon Kinkreet (Black & White). And I’ve really loved that. Book-wise, I listen to a lot of audio books while I’m working, especially when I’m inking, since my brain is mostly on auto-pilot for that. I feel like I’m being doubly productive when I do that.
Cooking The Edible City
On Saturday, Coach House Books and Vepo Studios got together to film recipes from Coach House’s latest uTOpia series book, The Edible City. Rea McNamara, Kathryn Borel and Katarina Gligorijevic were the willing chefs in this book-to-film experiment.
“This idea really came together on a whim,” Coach House’s publicist, Evan Munday admits. “Rea suggested that it would be fun for us to film some of the recipes. We got talking, partnered with Open Book Toronto and Vepo, now here we are.”
The original plan was to get down home and dirty by filming the segments in someone’s kitchen, but that didn’t pan out. “Finding a kitchen that fit everyone’s filming needs that we could have access to for a day was difficult,” Evan said. “Thankfully, Dish Studios stepped up and allowed us to use their space for the day.” This change in plans was for the best. Dish Studios is a beautiful, well-equipped space that would make any foodie jealous. Their cutting board collection alone is drool-inducing.
Rea McNamara, whose essay “Never see come see: Toronto’s Trini Roti” explores the history of roti in Toronto, cooked her aunt Althea’s roti recipe with her cousin Kiel Braithwaite. “I brought him along because it’s his mother’s recipe,” Rea said. “And, well, two cooks are better than one!” Rea and Kiel were the first chefs of the day and as competent in the kitchen this pair was, cooking in front a camera is a skill set unto its own. Trying to not chop off your fingers while maintaining a flattering camera angle is surprisingly difficult. Fortunately, no blood was shed and Rea and Kiel mastered this highly technical skill, whipping up a beef roti with ease.
The process of filming in the kitchen was new to the film crew as well. “It’s an interesting process,” director Ian Daffern said. “We haven’t done much filming like this before, so we’re learning as we go.”
Kathryn Borel, author of Corked, made her Apple-Sausage-Cornbread Stuffing Extravaganza. The recipe accompanies her essay “The Chicken and the Egg,” about a hook-up with a chef that turned sour once the conversation turned to trussing a chicken. Kathryn, who proved to be a master at onion chopping and joke telling, was a natural in front of the camera. Stuffing, sausages, cored….the Apple-Sausage-Cornbread Stuffing was a perfect match for Kathryn’s essay. (Insider info: the finished stuffing in the video is fake. Shhh!)
Katarina skipped the meal and went straight for the nightcap by making Toronto’s namesake drink, a spirit that makes use of the Italian bitter Fernet Branca. Her segment was relatively easy to film, as the drink itself takes mere minutes to make. “How many people know Toronto has a namesake drink?” Katarina asked. “Not many. I stumbled upon it by accident myself. It’s fascinating. I’ve tried and tried to research the origins of it and the meaning behind it, but there’s little information about it.” The Toronto’s companion essay, “A Town So Great They Named a Drink After It,” explores the drink’s history and culture in detail.
This shoot taught this Books@Torontoist editor many things about food, film and fornicating. Toronto has it’s own (delicious) cocktail. Sometimes it takes two hours to get three minutes of footage. A publicist makes a great production assistant. Rea’s aunt Althea makes a mean roti. The best way to pick up a chef is to talk about chopped egg salad. Industrial dishwashers are an amazing invention. And, most importantly, Toronto has a lot of great food tales to tell.
The videos should appear on Coach House’s website and Open Book Toronto in the next few weeks.
The Seduction of Self-Publishing, Bookstores & Librarians
Self-publishing takes guts, hard work and innovation. Think you have what it takes? Steve Almond did and shared his self-publishing journey with the Los Angeles Times.
A bookstore is like a lady: it’s what they don’t reveal that makes them so alluring. Emil Sher shares his fascination with bookstore window displays with Open Book Toronto.
The Guardian dissects fictional aliens.
The 10 best songs about librarians and libraries. (And yes, there are more than ten songs about libraries.)
Continue this library love by voting for the best libraries in the world over at Huffington Post.
And finally, because this Books@Torontoist editor can’t let anything Ann M. Martin-related go unlinked, Flavor Wire imagines where the Baby-Sitters Club is now. A more realistic list than McSweeney’s take on the same subject, but a tad less funny.
Editing the Erotica Issue: A Poem and Interview with Susan Holbrook
“A father of four, he is nevertheless kittenish.
Her skirt had a stuffed look, which could only mean she was wearing ruffled panties.
Oh nutritious mound of sprouts.
Richard and Regina had been friends for a long time.”from “Editing the Erotic Issue” (scroll down for the full poem)
Susan Holbrook has a lot of fun writing poetry. Those who caught her earlier collection (1999’s misled) may have detected that fun before most, but her follow-up, Joy is So Exhausting, out last fall on Toronto’s Coach House Press, brings with it irrefutable proof. Holbrook draws from all corners of the language (marketing copy, technical writing, newspaper reports) to create an anarchic poetry of the remixable world. By anarchic, I mean that the sum experience of reading the book is often bafflement and dizziness, even though many individual poems are memorable for the surgical specificity of their creator’s choices. Joy is So Exhausting amounts to one big, 85-page long anticipatory grin on the part of its author. She seems to be saying throughout “I can’t wait, you’re going to love this.” And you will. You probably will.
Susan Holbrook and I talked about Joy is So Exhausting in a series of email messages earlier this year. Here are the highlights.
Jacob McArthur Mooney: What struck me most when reading Joy is So Exhausting was the central role given over to fun, to gamesmanship. So often when a poet is playing, we say they are attempting to write subversively about something (for example, playing around with syntax is said to be about “subverting the language”), but in this book, I never got that same vibe. It always seemed to be play, for the simple act of playing. Did you find yourself trying to play “toward” something or, to borrow from the title, was the joy of the game your only desired pay-off?
Susan Holbrook: Hmm, good question. Perhaps I am the most subversive of the subversives! One of my principal motivations as a writer is to push, undermine, [or] interrogate a language which is freighted with, for example, sexist and homophobic bias. That is my disposition toward composition. There are pieces in the book where the politics are obvious, in the “Stephen Harper Sudoku,” for instance. And in my very inclusion of the long poem about nursing, “Nursery,” I am attempting to begin to rectify what I see as a shocking paucity of poetry about motherhood over the centuries. There is much in the book that IS fun and goofy and playful, but I hope it’s not empty fun; I hope at least it invites the reader to relate to language and the world in more unpredictable, active, interrogative ways.
Mooney: I really like that idea of “interrogation.” I wonder, in the Harper Sudoku or the found-text stuff like the tampon application poem, what’s doing the interrogating? Is it the form and structure of the poem or the words that make it up? Part of what made those pieces so interesting for me was how they felt like conceptual art, like the ideas behind them were as important as the specific texts those ideas generated. Maybe that’s just a fun way of reading them, but of no value when it comes to having to write them, I don’t know. Anyway, were you ever aware, while doing this book, of the tension between the big ideas behind some of the poems and the pressure those ideas might put on the actual texts? I guess what I’m asking is, were you ever afraid of being perceived as writing gimmickry?
Holbrook: I do worry about poems coming off as easy, cheap, gimmicky, but that’s a concern no matter what the formal choice. The epiphanic or overly poignant cadence of some standard lyric poems seems to me very “gimmicky.” We might see the sonnet form as a gimmick – oh, there’s that rhyming couplet again! No matter what the initial concept, or the various compositional strategies contributing to a final work, it’s important to be thoughtful, to make meaningful, challenging choices. I think when I feel a procedure might lead to one-dimensionality, I switch course a bit; the tampon poem was originally an Oulipean S + 7 (replacing all nouns in the source text with nouns 7 entries down in the dictionary), but I wanted to exert a little more influence there, so I decided to select nouns close by in the dictionary. The fun, absurd effect is still there, but I’m able to choose and develop a couple of thematic threads. I have been described as “wearing my compositional methods on my sleeve.” I don’t want the reader to spend undue effort figuring out my methods (that would feel gimmicky); the reader can usually see how I’ve proceeded, and can (I hope) enjoy all the dynamics of form/content that procedure allows.
Mooney: I like that idea of the lyrical epiphany occasionally being, itself, a kind of gimmick, although one excused and somewhat masked by the traditions of its form. I realized while hearing you read from Joy a couple times that the apparentness of your compositional methods becomes a key part of the audience experience. People always seem to fall in love with this book at readings. I wonder if this is in part because the work presented allows us little peeks into how it was created, in a way other kinds of poetry doesn’t do. Do you think your experience as a public reader is unique in any way?
Holbrook: I think I benefit from my tendency to engage humour in my work; that is, comedy elicits an audible response from a live audience, whereas when a listener finds something poignant, or thought provoking, they don’t usually exclaim! It’s important to me to read my more “serious work” too, but the silence can be unnerving – I don’t assume the audience is moved. I assume they’re bored. I wish they would indicate approval by making a humming or popping sound. They say stand-up comedians have the worst self esteem going, and that’s why they need the encouragement of laughter. I may suffer from the same problem. I’ve incorporated humour from the beginning of my writing life, but because of audience response to it, I’m far more conscious of that facet of my style now. That probably spells the end of the good jokes.
Mooney: I sure hope not. Another poet once told me about humour eliciting an autonomic response (laughter) and seriousness eliciting a more fakeable one (opinion, intellectual reaction, argument). Therefore the former is easier to trust than the latter, at least in public. I’d like to bounce back for a second to that talk of choices. The poem POETSMART is more contractual than the others (you’ve replaced all instances of the word “pet” in an original text with the word “poet”), and I know from background reading it’s a poem you and your editor discussed deleting from the book pre-publication. Because you were somewhat less able to influence that text while writing it, does it carry any different intentions?
Holbrook: I didn’t have to intervene in the basic formula of POETSMART, because poets just have so much in common with dirty, unruly, needy pets! You can see that I did, in the latter half, add material, but the essential substitution fell into place easily. That poem is an example of one that IS just silly, though, which is why it almost didn’t make it in. I kept it in because in live performance it makes people laugh (there’s that lure again!). I think in the context of a book-length collection, there’s room for a little pure silliness.
Mooney: Looking at this poem “Editing the Erotica Issue” from Joy is So Exhausting, what is the breakdown between found text and created text? Sentences like “A father of four, he is nevertheless kittenish” are hilarious because they don’t seem out of place in the genre. I wonder, how much of this is written, and how much was discovered, and does it matter to the point of the poem?
Holbrook: I wrote “Editing the Erotica Issue” after working on the Erotica Issue of The Windsor Review a few years back. My co-editor (Suzanne Matheson) and I read through a pile of submissions about three feet high, easily ten times taller than the piles for for any other issue. Clearly there are an awful lot of people who love to write erotica! I needed to “debrief” after reading all that material. I composed all of these lines myself, but you’re right, any one of them could have appeared in the submissions. I focussed on the elements that recurred: throbbing, glistening, outrageous similes, clunky rhymes and, of course, oranges. There were a lot of “kittenish” women, too, so I wanted to attach that quality to a patriarch to set the reader thinking about gender expectations. The poem is presented as “found,” but I don’t think it matters too much whether the lines were actually found or composed, except that in writing them I had more power to intervene linguistically, and pulling directly from earnest submitters would have felt kind of mean.
Mooney: Well, it might be mean, but I’ve done a similar gig before and most of those submitters would have likely taken any form of publication they could get. Another poem I want to discuss (and again, what I’m asking about could loosely be called “structure”) is “Nursery.” The imagining of the pacing, nursing, mother who speaks with those repeated chants of “Right…Left…Right…Left” brings forth a lot of cultural weight, from dancing to military marches. Can you talk us through the structural decisions made in that one?
Holbrook: Many new mothers keep a nursing chart in the first few bleary weeks, recording feedings under “Right” and “Left” so the breasts get equal time. Keeping that chart was the extent of my “writing” in those early days. When I began to wonder if I would ever write poetry again, I decided to work with what I had, rather than fight against it, and compose one line every time I nursed. The column headings were already there. I assumed I would later remove the “Right” and “Left” markers, but the pattern appealed to me, for the reasons you identify. The structure strikes us as so mechanical, so evocative of a military march, and I enjoyed the juxtaposition of that with the fluid, unruly, delirious practise of nursing. Right Left Right Left is understood by new mothers all over the world, and yet the nature of that back-and-forth rhythm has been overwhelmed in our cultural imaginary by soldiers on parade. I like that you hear dancing in there – that’s a start.
Mooney: And lastly, the world sees a lot of new collections of poetry in a given year, and the majority of them are destined for obscurity. Why did you publish this book? And, on the flip side, why should someone read it? What single unique thing has it given to the world?
Holbrook: Are you asking me to blurb myself?! Well, first of all, I have no problem with falling into obscurity (eventually). What has been deemed “universal” or “timeless” often simply suits the worldview of whoever’s been in charge. And poetry that might be deemed “dated” I see as specific, engaged. I published the book because I like making things. The poems are all things I made, but a book is a more concrete made thing, and this one was shaped and designed and printed gorgeously by the folks at Coach House. And people should read it because it’s all at once challenging/fun/serious/funny/ familiar/strange – there’s my single unique thing!
Editing the Erotica Issue, by Susan Holbrook
from Joy is So Exhausting (Coach House Press, 2009)
Crocuses glistened. Sparrows throbbed.
………..Would he approve
………..Of her nipples of mauve?
And that was what had first attracted him, her canvas flaps.
A father of four, he is nevertheless kittenish.
Her skirt had a stuffed look, which could only mean she was wearing ruffled panties.
Oh nutritious mound of sprouts.
Richard and Regina had been friends for a long time.
Dear editors: When I saw you were doing an erotica issue, I thought, woody-licious!
And in the velour pantsuit of evening, even the sandflies laughed to see their joy.
Richard throbbed. Regina glistened.
In the land of Zamore, mailmen had a dual function.
“Oh, excuse me, I thought everyone was gone for the night,” she says, foaming at the
…..ears.
Her heart throbbed, and the surgeon saw that it was glistening in there.
“Quickly! More crumpled wet sheets!”
He carries me upstairs under one arm, like a chicken.
…………Left a hickie as big as a toonie,
…………Monday acted like he never knew me.
Dear editors: I have been waiting years to share my expertise in this very special field
…..of writing.
Are you even glistening? I’m throbbing to you.
Oranges, all over.
From the Mouth: A Week of Literary Events
A busy week of readings and book events kicks off tonight with celebrations of the hipster’s holy trinity: sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll. Dorianne Emmerton, Leanne Cusitar, David Findlay, May Lui provide the sex content with an event entitled “Oral: Adventures in Erotica” at Renegade (1266 Queen Street West, FREE). The readings begin at 7 p.m. and include an open mic session, which may or may not be code for a literary practice we at Books@Torontoist are too square to be in on. Over at This Ain’t the Rosedale Library (86 Nassau Street), aging punks and those who wish they were there can relive those lazy hazy glue-huffin’ days of yore with an in-store launch of Liz Worth’s Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History Of Punk In Toronto And Beyond (1977-1981). The free event begins at 7 p.m. and will include reminiscences of the oral and musical variety.
And speaking of oral pleasure, the Commensal vegetarian restaurant (655 Bay Street) hosts the monthly Toronto Reading Series event on Tuesday night with an evening of food and foodie books. Edible City contributors Kathryn Borel Jr. and Erik Rutherford join Dr. Joey Schulman (Healthy Sin Food) and Rick Gallop (The 2010 Revised G.I. Diet) (7 p.m., $5) for an undoubtedly stimulating reading experience. Eunoia author Christian Bok reads at the weekly Artbar Poetry Series at Clinton’s (693 Bloor Street West), where he’ll be joined by fellow poets Weyman Chan, Sonya Greckol and Patricia Young (8 p.m., FREE), while over at the Tinto cafe (89 Roncesvalles Avenue) Emily Schultz, Shaista Justin and other local authors read from their latest work (7:30 p.m., PWYC).
Pivot Readings continues its Wednesday night reading series at the Press Club (850 Dundas Street West) with authors Chris Eaton, Lynn McClory and Lindsay Zier-Vogel (8 p.m., PWYC) taking the stage. The Park Hyatt (4 Avenue Road) is the site for a fundraising event for World Literacy of Canada with authors Michael Winter, Anthony de Sa and Lauren Kirshner on hand for readings, signings and plenty of book chat (6:30 p.m., $60).
Descant magazine launches its winter issue on Thursday night at the beautiful Arts and Letters Club (14 Elm Street). The event will feature readings from contributors Vickie Fagan and Andrew Smith and plenty of other eclectic authors (7:30 p.m.. FREE). And because we love closure here at the books site, we’d be remiss to overlook an event devoted to an esoteric strain of voyeurism: dinosaur pornography. Indie publishers Ferno House launch the long-awaited fiction and poetry collection, Dinosaur Porn, at Supermarket (268 Augusta Avenue, 7:30 p.m., FREE). Sorry folks, you’ll have to supply your own Jurassic-themed punchlines.
For even more literary events listings, be sure to check out Torontoist’s daily installment of Urban Planner.
Weekend Lit Check List
Tonight you can indulge your literary and TV habits at the Masonic Temple (aka the MTV Building, 888 Yonge Street, 7 p.m., FREE), where CTV personality Seamus O’Reagan will host an on-stage round-table with the four authors shortlisted for this year’s Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction: John English, Daniel Poliquin, Kenneth Whyte and Ian Brown. The segment will be taped and used for an upcoming Bravo special on the award. To attend RSVP to audience@bravo.ca.
Sunday is the day to worship at the holy and apostolic Church of Elvis, conveniently located at the Sweet Tooth Pastry Shop (508 Danforth Avenue). There, in honour of the King’s 75th birthday, Domenico Capilongo will read from I Thought Elvis was Italian and Frank Giorno from Elvis in America, two poetry collections that honour Elvis’s memory. There will also be an open mic segment and attendees are invited to share their own Elvis tributes and try some Kingly pastries (2 p.m., FREE).
Designing Memories
The Casual Optimist interviews Jason Godfrey, author of Bibliographic: 100 Classic Graphic Design Books. Bibliographic is essentially a curation of the one hundred books Godfrey deems essential in graphic design. The book is as beautiful as it is fascinating and this interview explores Godfrey’s thought process behind the book.
OMG! Twilight is getting the graphic novel treatment and Entertainment Weekly got the first look and chatted briefly with Stephenie Meyer about the project. As if young girls didn’t already have enough products telling them that manipulative vampire boyfriends are worth giving up everything for.
OMG! Could these be the cutest bookmarks ever? (Answer: only if they were Twilight themed.)
Books@Torontoist posted our own tribute to Paul Quarrington yesterday, but the National Post’s round-up of memories from the Canadian literary community for the beloved writer is worth a read. There are also obits and memories at the CBC, the Globe, the Star and Maclean’s and loving video tributes from Michael Ondaatje, Peter Lynch, Jim Cuddy and others from the books, film and music communities on Quarrington’s website.
Paul Quarrington, 1953–2010
Canada lost one of its most beloved artists and personalities when author, screenwriter, musician and teacher Paul Quarrington passed away in his Toronto home this morning. Quarrington, 56, was diagnosed with stage four cancer in May but continued to work on a wide range of projects, including laying down tracks for his first solo album and the third Porkbelly Futures CD, and writing a memoir about his illness, Cigar Box Banjo.
A note on Quarrington’s website speaks eloquently of the author’s final hours: “He passed peacefully at home in Toronto in the early hours surrounded by friends and family. It is comforting to know that he didn’t suffer; he was calm and quiet holding hands with those who were closest to him.”
Quarrington was the author of Whale Music, King Leary, Galveston, The Ravine, and several other novels as well as a number of popular fishing and hockey memoirs. He worked on many Canadian television shows and movies, including Due South and Moose TV, and wrote the screenplay for the big-screen adaptation of Whale Music.
Photo by Irene Duma.