Last week’s launches for Scrivener Creative Review at Kafein last Thursday and The Veg at Le Cagibi last Friday were a success. There were many talented readers at both launches.
At Kafein for the Scrivener evening, speakers recited their poems like real hipsters in front of the electronic keyboard in the lounge area of the basement bar. There was Eric Foley, who I met by chance at an evening poetry reading for Summer Literary Seminars. I asked him to write a review and he did. Thankfully, he did not read his take on Curationism by David Balzer, but he did read us a piece he wrote during one of his travels in Europe. Then there was Greg Santos, whose book of poetry Rabbit, Punch!from DC Books is one of the books sitting on my shelf waiting for a reviewer to scoop it up. I might be able to find someone next semester to review it, but I was disappointed we couldn’t have featured a review in this issue. I might just review the book myself, if it comes to it. Greg might have been introduced to Scrivener due to one of my Tweets, or he may have known the magazine before that, but in any case, he got published in Scrivener and showed up at the launch. We were honoured to have him.
During The Veg launch, in the back room of Le Cagibi, I unwound after making a presentation on Leonard Cohen for my final Canadian Modernism seminar. Peach schnapps in hand, I walked up on stage and made a joke about this review that my mom had preserved from the 1980s within her own signed copy of The Book of Mercy. The book review itself isn’t funny, but on the other side of the clipping is a movie poster of Chuck Norris from Code of Silence, looking hell-bent on retribution. “I guess that makes it The Book of NO Mercy,” I said, and the audience laughed.
(This is especially funny for us lit students because Leonard Cohen–and his predecessor A.M. Klein–interrogates the problem of silence, and the codes that go with it, in his poetry: for example, Cohen’s poem aptly titled “Poem” in Let Us Compare Mythologies, in which “silence blossoms like tumors on our lips.” Plus pop culture plays a big part in Beautiful Losers, so its not like Cohen himself wouldn’t find this funny.)
While on stage, I recited some of the same poems I did for CKUT Radio earlier that week–my first time on the airwaves. I don’t know if anyone listened to it, but if you want to hear it in the archives, you can listen here (24 November 2014). I also threw in an old classic that Mark, the MC, was a little obsessed by: “Saint Francis of the Amazon.” The novelty here is in how St. Francis, well known to have preached to wolves and birds, is in this poem preaching to toucans and lumpy, fat capybaras. Actually, the poem is more of an imagining of an abandoned cathedral in the middle of a jungle and the animals that come to re-inhabit it, since the humans are no longer around. I also tried to measure the reactions of some more of my more wartime poems, which blend imagery of Middle-East warfare with mythology. During the intermissions at The Veg launch, we were also serenaded by two fantastic musical groups: Kainé, Fili and the Believing Box and Tiger Lilies.
All in all it was a great week for poetry and a great way to kick back and pat one’s self on the back at the end of the semester for a job well done. Can’t wait until next semester’s launches!
To see more photos, find Scrivener and The Veg’s Facebook albums:
The letters, the opening of Ray Bradbury’s seminal dystopian novel, glimmered flatly on my Kobo screen as I realized the irony of what I was doing. I realized swiftly that the battle of digital media versus print is a central point that burns down in Fahranheit 451. I will present to you my reflections on this question: Do Kobo readers create a real dystopia similar to the one in Fahrenheit 451?
Guy Montag, the protagonist, is a fireman. In Bradbury’s future in which all houses and buildings have been fireproofed, that means he sets fires, instead of putting them out. In effect, the firemen are the ideological police of their world, burning books in great bonfires of literature. Only fragments of the past survive–and Montag’s inner journey will lead him to discover more about that past world than his fellow firemen will dare allow.
Written during the turbulent McCarthy era in which supposed communists were hunted like witches and artists censored for their views, Fahrenheit 451 invokes myriad other historical instances of heresy and censorship. Whether it’s the Inquisition burning books placed on the Vatican’s infamous Index or the Nazis’ burning of tomes written by Jews, socialists, and other voices of opposition, burnings have been notorious throughout history. Though those who burn defend themselves by saying they are protecting “culture,” it is plain to others that burning books is antithetical to the fostering of culture.
Ray Bradbury
I believe it was Neil Gaiman who said, “Libraries are the thin red line between civilization and barbarism.” An apt point when taken in the context of Ray Bradbury. (To read Gaiman’s tribute to Ray Bradbury, which he wrote upon his death in 2012, click here. For the Guardian article, click here.)
But burning is only one example of society’s dystopianism in Bradbury’s novel: there are also Seashells—basically a 1950s conception of what would eventually become earbuds for your iPod/MP3 player—and full-wall television screens. Bradbury never imagined in his novel the numerous computers currently in existence, and certainly not the distracting potential of social media websites, or the Internet in general, but he did get the sense that Western society was being bombarded by visual/auditory stimulation that would only get more intense and distracting. Whether the book burnings or media bombardment are more effective at creating Bradbury’s dystopia is a debatable point. I say the two go hand in hand.
Bradbury saw the transition from print media to the dominance of visual and digital media. In essence, Fahrenheit 451 is about that fundamental change in culture taken to an extreme. So I suppose it must be an ironic book to read on a Kobo, a digital platform. Am I a traitor to Bradbury’s ideals if I read his novel on a Kobo? I certainly hope not. But reading it on a Kobo did influence my experience of this novel in a way that underlines its theme, revealing some subtle effects in my reading experience that may, perhaps, be troubling.
For starters, I read the novel a whole lot faster, I suspect, than if I had had a physical copy on hand. Flipping the pages was easy; I just had to touch the right-hand side of the screen with my thumb. Furthermore, I could change the font and margins to enable faster reading and page turning. Reading it on the bus and metro also made it necessary to read faster in order to finish at a good spot to leave off whenever I would make a transfer. While reading the novel on a bus may appear to be a factor external to the digital experience, it was also the situation in which I feel most natural reading a Kobo.
Secondly, it was harder to browse through Fahrenheit 451 on my Kobo. While with physical book, you can open it randomly in the middle of the book and flip through the pages, you cannot do that on a digital book–at least not until an appropriate “page flipping” interface is designed and put into future models. Though the search function enables a certain amount of ease in finding passages, navigation forces you on a more linear path while flipping through the book beginning-to-end. This makes Kobo great for airport novels that you read through once and don’t bother with again, but less good for nonfiction and novels that you want to examine closely. As a literature student and book reviewer, I have a beef with this limitation.
Lastly, you cannot make comments on a Kobo easily, or write in the margins. Yes, you can make bookmarks. But to label the bookmarks effectively, you must leave the ebook and do a lot of back-and-forthing. If you have installed Calibre on your computer, you can make comments on your computer, but I was not able do this on my Kobo, even though the highlighting function says you can supposedly do this.
While these three points can potentially be fixed by developers, at present my Kobo makes a certain type of reading of Fahrenheit 451 easier rather than other types. And that type of reading says a lot about our society and the society in Fahrenheit 451.
Kobo is good for straight-through reading, for example, while on a bus: a way to quickly read a book that does not take up too much physical space. It is a portable library—a personal “bastion of civilization” that you can bring around with you. However, Kobo makes it difficult to read a book that you dearly love with the attention it deserves. Due to this limitation, “Kobo reading” is a kind of reading that is complicit to an extent with the hasty, media-overwhelmed, lower-attention span world that Bradbury warns us about.
Kobo rushes us along a highway (often when actually travelling on a highway), rather than allowing us to stroll, to stop, and to think.
In a way, this makes Kobo reading analogous the fast cars so prevalent in Bradbury’s utopia. Traditional readers are like pedestrians—people like Clarisse, the strange teenager Montag meets who walks on sidewalks asking “why?” and “how?” about things she sees. But Clarisse is later killed by a fast car, which bear no regard to pedestrians. Whereas Kobos have you rush through a book, traditional reading can be like a stroll through the suburbs—it involves a lot of stopping, smelling of roses, observation, and above all, opinion-forming.
Fahrenheit 451 is all about how media saturation, passive consumption, and a fast-paced society makes it harder to become a dissident of society and its ideology—not just about burning literature, but by ensuring new books are never written. Since we are all kept happy by comsumption and reassured that the world will take care of itself, we find less and less reason to challenge that order. But the “pursuit of happiness” cannot be the be-all-and-end-all of human existence: sometimes it is necessary to become disturbed, in order to make social change.
Outlawing literature and pedestrianism are two ways in which Bradbury’s society silences dissidence; it destroys opinions formed in the past and makes it difficult to develop opinions in the present. It is therefore not always necessary to burn in order to silence a heretic; an Inquisition founded on pleasure instead of torture is far more effective at domination.
And reading about such a dystopia on a Kobo forces you to become aware of the fact that how you read depends on where you read it, and in what format. Our consummerist society has made it harder to read books critically by developing ebook interfaces that do not promote critical and nonlinear reading styles. Physical books represent a freer way of reading. If all books end up going digital, our society will become closer than ever before to Bradbury’s dystopia.
Last Friday I attended a talk given by Bob Stein, who develop the first ebooks in 1992. You read that date right. It was 22 years ago, but the craze only began to catch fire with Kindle in 2007. During his presentation Mr. Stein said that he has always been 15 years ahead of tends in the digital book world. I thought I’d share my impressions of his talk because I believe that the future of the book is a fascinating topic, one of the great technological transitions of this age.
Since Gutenberg’s day (the printin’ 50s, I might coin it–the 1450s that is), the printed codex (or book) has come to be the world’s dominant form of information dissemination. However, since the rise of the silicon chip in the last 30 or so years, ebooks and the Internet have slowly supplanted the codex. They have not conquered print books yet, but given the popularity of ebooks and ereaders, in 5 to15 years the landscape will be different. I do not personally believe that printed books are going extinct–technologies transform more often than they vanish. That transformation may be enough, however, to change how we read forever.
Traditional publishers have a legacy to protect, said Mr. Stein at the Atwater Library in downtown Montreal during the meeting for AELAQ (the Association of English Language Publishers of Quebec). I was under the impression that many of the publishers in attendance were beginning to think about retirement. Those retiring soon have a reluctance to invest too heavily in digital publishing and a desire to defend the printed word. However, for someone like myself at 22 years of age, the world of ebooks, audiobooks, the Internet, and social media is where I will lay down my professional roots. Not that I don’t believe in print–quite the opposite–but I recognize the potentially exciting things that could emerge from digital publishing too. If you are reading this, you are witness to it; this is a blog, after all, and not magazine or private journal (see the irony in my blog title?).
I will have to come to terms with digital publishing if I desire to enter the industry as an editor or publisher–or even as an author. Authors are being asked to have build a platform through their social media presence. We are asked to not only be authors, but bloggers, directors (of YouTube movies), public speakers, and even voice actors (if we give our voice to an audiobook). Moving with this changing current is part of the purpose of The Vinciolo Journal, so I suppose you could say that you are glimpsing the future while reading this.
I myself have an ereader and the first book I’m reading on it is John Crowley’s Aegypt: The Solitudes, which I shall review next week. The ereader is the size of my hand and contains an entire library, including a thousand-page book of the complete short stories of H.P. Lovecraft–which would no doubt make my bag a lot heavier were I carrying it around all day. I find myself more reluctant to buy any physical book, no matter how badly I want it, because the shelf-space in my bedroom is packed and I still need space for school books next semester. Kobos, Kindles, and Nooks may be the only way to keep up a voracious reading habit.
Is this the future of the physical book? Will digital books rise from the ashes?
There are other, more unexpected changes that the digital world could bring with it. Here is a list of some changes which Bob Stein said, or suggested, might come to the publishing industry:
-Printing will become more of an aesthetic choice. Ebooks will become mainstream, the option of utility.
-A new genre of literature may emerge once ereaders are the dominant form. It took 40 years for the novel to emerge as the main genre of print literature (from Gutenberg to Cervantes’ Don Quixote), so by 2054, perhaps we will see literature structured like a video game, where readers form their own narratives.
-A transition from solitary reading back to communal reading may be in store. Social media book clubs may become popular, the twenty-first century equivalent of the dominant mode of reading in medieval universities. Comment Press and Social Book allow you to write comments in the margins, renewing a habit of marginal notation that was popular in medieval manuscripts, incunabula, and early printed works.
–Since public domain books will remain free, it will become popular to buy glosses on a book. For example, if you were reading A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, you could get the book for free, but pay to have a historian’s notes on the text. If this becomes a thing, I suspect people will also pay to have a celebrity’s opinion on their favourite books, even if they have no academic understanding to bring.
-Digital books can be handed down through generations like family bibles. Your (grand)sons/daughters will read what you thought of A Tale of Two Cities if you write comments online. They will respond to notes you made twenty, even fifty years ago–and your comments will eventually outlive you for generations and generations.
-People will pay extra for supplementary material. Mr. Stein was one of the pioneers of including director’s commentary on DVDs. Would you be willing to pay extra to learn the author’s commentary on his/her own book? Something like that might be in store.
-Celebrity editors, like chefs, will be an effective way of increasing the branding of books. I find this last prediction fascinating, since I have yet to start my career as an editor. If I am interested in pursuing such a career, I would probably do well to pay attention to setting up my own brand right from the get-go.
I was so inspired to be thinking about the future of the book that when I came into Place Alexis Nihon, bound for the food court to grab my supper, I saw the bright lights and colours of a sports shoe department and thought to myself: what if we began selling books like Nike sells shoes? So much of consumerist culture is about branding and “the fetish of the commodity.” If we arranged shelf space in bookstores around either editorial or publishing company brands and set up rows of finely crafted hardcover codices of bestselling works, could a publishing company with money to invest arrange for a bookstore to sell titles in a way that emphasizes the premium quality of physical books, as opposed to digital books? Will such a niche market for codices arise after the ebook becomes dominant?
I know for a fact that I would visit such a store regularly. However, I cannot say the general public would take to it, at least not right away. For one, the price of these books would have to be relatively high, a reflection of the finer material qualities used in production. Why buy expensive $75 codices when paperback airplane thrillers come in at $5-10? But once everyone has an ereader and traditional books become rare, could this brand shop idea become a viable business plan? An opportunity to decorate one’s living room with attractive book spines?
Would you enter such a bookstore of the future, or would you not? While you search for an answer, I will give some thought to branding myself as an editor and await the coming of the day when I can sell comments on my favourite book for money. There may be money in being an author yet!
The future of reading? Or just one other stone in the causeway to an unknown future?
Dracula is an aristocratic vampire who lurks in a Transylvanian castle, emerging only at night from his casket in an abandoned chapel to stalk the living with unholy horror. He is suave, seductive, can transform into a bat, but is best know for his penetrating incisors, which he uses to suck the blood out of helpless maidens.
The legend of Dracula has seen myriad incarnations, from Tod Browning’s Dracula in which the iconic Bela Lugosi plays the Count to retellings in cartoon versions such as Looney Tunes and The Simpsons. However, it seems that no one incarnation of the Dracula story is consistent with any of the others. Each adaptation recreates the legend anew, including new plot twists, insights into Dracula’s character, and the victims who fall prey to him. But what, then, was the original horror that inspired these retellings?
Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
You might have first been exposed to this original version—as I was—in Francis Ford Coppola’s movie of the same title. Keanu Reeves plays real estate solicitor Jonathan Harker, who visits Dracula while on a business trip. The Count is seeking to buy a house in London, but entraps Jonathan against his will in his castle, where he gradually comes an awareness that the count is “Un-dead,” a being called nosferatu, or Vampire.
Bram Stoker
In his novel, Bram Stoker opens with the same sequence. Jonathan narrates his story in a personal journal kept in shorthand as he rides on the Orient Express to Transylvania. At first, he does not know why the local peasants give him a crucifix and make warding signs against the evil eye in his presence—as a nineteenth-century man of a scientific age and a member of the Church of England, he has learned to shun superstition. However, the old Catholic rites of Eastern Europe later come in mighty handy, given the power of crucifixes to ward off evil spirits.
The first four chapters are so iconic, that to me they really are the story of Dracula, which we have come to know and love. That is, they show the classic plot that has trickled down to us through the media.
The tale then enters the everyday world of the friendship between two women: Mina Murray and Lucy Westerna. Mina is waiting anxiously to hear back from Jonathan, whose correspondence has stopped. She and Jonathan are planning to be engaged. Meanwhile, three suitors compete for Lucy’s hand in marriage: they are Sir Arthur Holmwood, next in line for the title of his father Lord Godalming, Dr. John Seward, who runs a lunatic asylum, and Mr. Quincey Morris, a Texan gentleman.
After opening like a lightning bolt, the story winds down to the pace of an old movie, slowly rebuilding the suspense. Things get strange when the Demeter, a ship from the Black Sea, crashes into the beach at Whitby without a crew, the captain reduced to a skeletal corpse with his hands tied to the wheel. A bottle containing an addendum to the ship’s log dangles from the corpse’s hands. After reading the captain’s account, we learn that an eerie mist haunted the ship during its passage, various members of the crew disappearing overnight without a trace.
Shortly afterwards, Lucy begins to sleepwalk. When she leaves her bed one night, Mina traces her to a graveyard. There she sees a strange, thin man kissing Lucy’s throat in the darkness. Lucy becomes sick afterwards, growing paler and paler by the day, until Dr. Seward sends a wire to his old Danish professor Abraham Van Helsing, an expert in obscure diseases.
Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing.
Together, Dr. Seward and Van Helsing work together to find the root of Lucy’s illness and protect her from evil. Unable to discover how she keeps losing blood, they finally discover two small bite marks in her throat, which she had been trying to hide. Perhaps they were made by a dog.
As yet, none of the characters have an inkling that a vampire is amongst them, though Van Helsing is suspicious. However, hints appear here and there that Dracula has come to London. Once Jonathan arrives home with his journal around the middle of the book, Van Helsing puts one and two together. The various characters’ journals, telegrams, and letters—which tell their story—become crucial when the original documents are put together, forming a coherent narrative that at last convinces Mina and Dr. Seward that supernatural evil is afoot.
Van Helsing and Lucy’s suitors then team up to defeat the dark forces of the Un-dead, fighting in a chivalrous battle for the sake of the woman they each love. Leonard Wolf likens the Dracula story the legend of St. George and the Dragon. It is an apt analogy. In a quintessentially English manner, the vampire hunters unite in the defense of the women they love, like knights in shining armour. Mina helps out where she can in acquiring information on the Count, while the men assume the duty and active role of hunting the evil spirits. Alas, the female vampire killer is a product of another century.
There are several discoveries awaiting a reader of Dracula. Aside from the main plot, I had many pleasures in uncovering characters who are often skimmed over in retellings, or erased. For example, there is the sane lunatic Mr. Renfield who worships Dracula in Dr. Seward’s asylum, although at first Seward thinks he is merely zoöphagus, in that he likes to eat live animals, such as flies, spiders, and even birds.
Stoker establishes many of the tropes of later vampire tales. For example, the connection between vampirism and female sexuality is strong. Female vampires tend to be associated with “wanton” sexuality and adultery, as opposed to Lucy and Mina’s purer femininity, which inspires Harker and the others to fight.
Also, Stoker establishes many of the visual/sound effects movie producers would use in later years. This includes the enlarging of a vampire’s mouth into a rectangular shape before it bites, the “hissing cat” sound they make when agitated, and the Count’s ability to climb castle walls. It’s somewhat heartening to know these images were conceived in a world before Hollywood.
On my reading experience of Dracula, I would remind readers that is a product of the nineteenth century. This is certainly not Twilight. I, for one, loved the nineteenth-century diction and style, but I am aware that this style might not be for all. If you like Lord Byron, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Charles Dickens, then you will find that Dracula is written with a similar taste. Expect paragraphs of Van Helsing’s expositional dialogue, for example, and characters describing how they feel through speech.
Hugh Jackman as Gabriel (not Abraham) Van Helsing. Same tradition, but different ages spawn different interpretation of character.
Furthermore, do not expect the guts-and-gore style of modern suspense. Van Helsing is an old doctor, not Hugh Jackman with an automatic stake-shooting crossbow. As such, the “action” scenes are sparse. However, in what “action” scenes there are, the prose kept me tethered to the story and fixated on what was happening. The spaces between served to augment the suspense and sense of dread—not diminish it. Dracula is more of a haunting presence throughout the story than a character in himself, as he must be.
In conclusion, I still wonder how Dracula was received in 1897. Did people open its covers expecting the same kind of story we expect today? I doubt so, since there has been more than a century of theatre, movie, and TV adaptations of the story that are floating in our subconscious as we read. It seems so hard to imagine reading Dracula without any prior expectations or biases towards the Count and his legend—a difficulty that attests to how deeply Stoker’s legend has taken root in our culture.
Nonetheless, if you are willing to get as close as possible to the original experience of Dracula, then only Bram Stoker’s novel will be able to satisfy your lust.
Is it even possible to canonize all the things I have learned in my three and a half years studying literature at Canada’s best university to 10 items? I believe my critics will be able to deconstruct the bejesus out of this list. They’d probably base their argument on how I privilege my subjectivity over those of the “other,” namely the other people in my classes. But authors must never write for their critics. Besides, to restate everything I learned would be a heresy of paraphrase.
Lit-crit puns aside, I thought that at this point in my academic career, a retrospective analysis of what I have learned is up to order. Alas, in writing down what I learn, there is so much I must omit. Writing is an erasure as much as an act of creation. An erasure of the blank page. An erasure of infinite possibility–a terrifying possibility we can’t help but whittle down to a finite reality.
Here we go.
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1. Writing is murder.
When I first came across this pronouncement, I thought my Canadian poetry teacher was using a gruesome metaphor for shock value. But ask yourself, “What gets killed when I write?” Aside from the trees that were chopped down to make the paper you’re wasting, you silence voices when you write, even as you create one. Whose voices? Those of the spirits of the dead who call after you from the whiteness of the page.
Every time you write something down, you exclude so much more. This is true even of the structure of language itself: “warm” only means “warm” because it does not mean “cool.” When you write “warm,” you murder “cool.” Still think it’s a funny metaphor? Then think about this: “male” only means “male” because it doesn’t mean “female.” So what happens when you write “male,” or write from a male voice? You murder the female. Patriarchy explained.
2. Cadence comes before meaning.
Two things here. First, what is cadence? Please read Denis Lee’s essay “Cadence, Country, Silence,” a staple essay on Canadian literature and an existential reflection/confession on what it means to be a Canadian poet–and a writer in general. Cadence means the rhythm, the music, the beat that lives inside of you. It is a different sensation for everyone. You feel it in your gut, in the ticks you feel when writing at your desk. It also suffuses place. The cadence on your home street has a particular rhythm to it. In a similar way, words, if spoken in different places, have certain nuances to them that only cadence can describe. For example, “city” means something in the United States, but something quite different in Canada, and even more different in the U.K. or Turkey. Boston, Ottawa, London, or Istanbul? The trick is to write with your proper cadence–the music that is genuine to you.
Editors searching through the slush pile know within thirty seconds or even less whether an author is good. They know before they even understand the meaning of the words they are reading. This is important: cadence comes before meaning. If an editor feels that the cadence of a writer is genuine, then they already know they are good. The content itself is secondary. Being true to yourself comes before what you have to say.
3. Texts are physical and unstable.
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus has two texts: an A-text and a B-text. Any critic might refer to either or both of them, but the play itself never exists absolutely as any one text. This makes Doctor Faustus an unstable text. But Lord Byron’s Don Juan, which is seventeen cantos long, went through infinitely more censorship and revisions over the course of its composition history. Wordsworth kept adding to and editing his Prelude over his lifetime, as he slid into the conservatism of his later years, producing multiple texts that chart the poem’s corresponding change. These poems are unstable. You cannot read one text and expect its absolute authority. Rather, you must read them in the knowledge that they have been chosen by textual editors.
One of the reasons for textual instability is textual materiality. Books are books. They are physical. They have hard covers against which you can hit your head in frustration as you cram for your final exam. They are burnable. They suffer water damage and texts get damaged–which is a real problem when dealing with rare medieval manuscripts. Different books make it easier or harder to read in certain ways. For example, a “perfect bind” airport paperback novel is meant to be read once and even thrown away (if you’re callous), whereas a hardcover, stitch-binding copy of Shakespeare’s collected works is meant to be read over and over again.
4. Form matters.
Poe’s “The Raven” is inspired by a single obsessive image. Also, see his short stories “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Sonnets are not just 14-line poems in iambic pentameter that rhyme ababcdcdefefgg. They contain the whispers of Petrarchan love poetry within their lines, something that can be difficult to escape. For some poets and critics, sonnets symbolize a conservative tradition in poetry that revolves around the almighty iambic line, which must be rebelled against at all costs! Even a short story has a form. It is no accident that Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories–which are among the first examples of the form in literary history–revolve around an obsessive image: short stories, being short, cannot encompass more than one deeply symbolic image. (Not that this is the law today, but for nineteenth-century experimenters, it was true.) Form influences how you read literature. Form is tough. Form is political. Form is unavoidable.
5. Things happen and are done in texts.
Eternal Wanderer: a famous painting of a gentleman hiker in the sublime Alps, often a cover for editions of Frankenstein. An apt name for a literature student.
When working on a paper for my Romantic literature class, I struggled to come up with a thesis about Frankenstein and the sublime. The course lecturer suggested, “It always helps to think in terms of what the sublime is doing in the story.” The way she phrased this sounded strange to my ears. Is there agency in texts apart from the author’s? Can the idea of the sublime itself be doing something in a story? The answer was, “Of course!” I ended up writing a fine paper about how Mary Shelley critiques the sublime as a female Romantic writer who has some distance from male Romantic aesthetic. I might have also said that the sublime was working in the story to critique conventional Romanticism. Ideas play in a text even if the author does not will it…
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6. Authorial intention can be irrelevant.
A common objection in High School English classrooms is, “What if Shakespeare didn’t really mean that?” Exasperated by the complexity of Billy Shakes’ lingo, they throw their hands up in the air and choose not to believe in complexity at all. But ANYONE who has tried to write a piece of creative work, if they have put any thought into writing at all, knows that Shakespeare intended to write what he wrote (censorship, his actors’ poor memory at recollecting the text, and contemporary editing aside). When you take the time to think enough about writing, crafting your language to an advanced level, you better believe you are intending every word that you write.
However, the High School student does hint at an important point. Sometimes, a professor or teacher will create a complex argument to argue something about Shakespeare and it will seem abstract. Even a seasoned English student will doubt that Shakespeare ever really intended his listeners to understand his plays in that way. But the student would be wise not to stumble into the intentional fallacy. The author may have intended one interpretation of his text, or sometimes none in particular. Does that mean a reader can’t make more out of the author’s work than even the author saw in it? Absolutely not! Critics can explore every range of possible meaning in a text.
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7. You can analyze anything.
Don’t just think because courses revolve around the “big names” of literature–the literary canon–that you cannot study the authors you love. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Wordsworth, Byron, Browning, James, Eliot … hopefully a literature class will teach you to appreciate the greats, the saints of the religion of English literature. But why not overturn the canon and speak of an non-canonical author? I wrote my Honours thesis on Guy Gavriel Kay, who I had discovered by accident years ago and began reading for pleasure long before I started at McGill. I have now read his completed works. In literary theory, no novel, short story, poem, or play is off bounds.
Guy Gavriel Kay
8. Topic sentences should be able to read as an independent “phantom” paragraph, or abstract.
I learned this in my first semester.
“I’ll just give you a few statistics,” President Barack Obama said in a speech Wednesday in Washington, D.C. One of the people watching Obama’s speech was Robert Putnam, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who is intimately familiar with such studies. “The part about democracy is relevant,” Putnam said. “The data show that not only is there declining trust in government, there is declining trust in other people”; although it wasn’t exclusive to them, this shift was “concentrated among these poor kids, the kids who have been left out,” Putnam said. These young people […] were becoming “extremely alienated from democratic politics.”
The above paragraph is the first part of a New Yorker article–but it is a phantom. It does not exist as a unity. Rather, it is a composite, formed of the topic sentences of the first few paragraphs of the article “Economic Inequality: a Matter of Trust?” by Amy Davidson. If you are able to write a cohesive-sounding paragraph using the topic sentences of the paragraphs in your essay, then you have a well-structured essay.
9. English teaches you a skill more than knowledge.
When I began at McGill, I wanted to know more about literature. I wanted teachers to lecture on. But towards the later portion of my degree, I had fewer and fewer lectures. Students participated more in class; we all had our different ideas and were prepared to defend them. At a given point in my second or third year, teachers became supervisors and weren’t imparting knowledge of literature onto us so directly. We became independent researchers and thinkers. We learned the rules of the game of English literature and then were able to play that game on our own–even break the rules.
If a professor tells you what a poet means in his or her poem, then be aware that theirs is not the final word. They have a theory and it might be sound and true. But English teaches you how to criticize and think for yourself. In the end, the program taught me to be confident in my ability to read and think independently. That is a skill.
Not to mention, with instant web-based communication so available, errors and misspellings emerge with frequency (some intentional, others not). English degrees can give you a skill much sought-after in the shrinking pool of people who actually know how to spell. There may yet be hope for the lot of us.
10. Reading poetry must affect you.
THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT! Academia can be a vampire. Sucking the joy out of experiencing poetry and literature since the early twentieth century. Just because you exercise your faculty of critical thinking when reading poetry must NEVER prevent you from enjoying it in a visceral, existential, and sensuous way.
Mark Twain said a “classic” is a book we always wanted to have read, but never want to read. Now I actually want to read some of the classics: Byron and Marlowe in particular. Reconnecting to the fundamental experience of reading literature for enjoyment is the task they don’t–and can’t–tell you how to do in school.
Never stop loving it because you studied it. Unfortunately, this happens all too often in High Schools, where students are forced to write essays on books they should, above all, be enjoying. Only through enjoyment and pleasure can you commit a text to real memory, a memory that will follow you the rest of your life, a memory with personal value.
Poetry must affect you and it must continue to affect you. Frustrated with the insufficiency of our learning, we must, as does Goethe’s Faust, turn from the vanity of academia and reconnect to literature through fundamental experience.
This Monday marked the occasion of my second ever poetry reading, where I recited “Ice Breaker” (which is this Friday’s post), “St. Francis of the Amazon,” “Seagull,” and my final, uproarious poem “Anticlimax.” The venue was in the backroom of Le Cagibi (pronounced KAH-jeh-bey, or “KGB” in phonetic Quebecois French), a hipster, student-populated restaurant on St. Laurent. A fine venue as any, with some real character: a coffered tin roof, a wall of shelves holding candles, figurines of cats, and a strange trinitarian painting of the Virgin Mary, as well as a weathered set of metal chairs and tables with stripped paint. There was also a very non-mainstream, postmodern electric violinist with some haunting reverb and a celloist with a similar style. Excellent poets this year, with some excellently cadenced voices, stylistically and auditorially. Here is a recording of some of the voices (not me, alas) from CKUT. Just follow the link to CKUT from The Veg‘s Facebook post (click “Post” to see it). Then on the CKUT page, see the recording for 25 November 2013.
(Current issues seem to be inaccessible at the moment, but I am in the Veg’s Spring 2013 issue as well.)
.I’m looking forward for future events such as this one, but don’t know when the next will be because I’m graduating this semester! It was certainly an honour to read, to see my poetry and artwork in print, and to participate in literary life at McGill University, an institution that has turned out such infamous poets as Leonard Cohen, Irving Layon, A.M. Klein, and William Shatner (each with their own very different styles, to be sure!). Peace out!
Me at Le Cagibi, a hipster Montreal restaurant, reciting one of my poems this Monday for the launch of McGill’s two brilliant student magazines STEPS and The Veg.
