February 2010
95 posts
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10. Maximum Gaga by Lara Glenum
This book brought me to such giddy highs of ecstatic linguistic delight that I nearly creamed. I now desire only to kneel down before the Poseidon’s Trannie Mermaid chorus of Lara Glenum and submit to her brilliant scopophiliac burlesque.
“What is desire?
Language’s cock valve.”
I don’t yet own this book, as a friend lent it to me, but perhaps some sweet little...
January 2010
91 posts
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11. Ex Machina (Jonathan Ball)
This book warrants two reviews.
1.
In Ex Machina, Jonathan Ball circles around the triumvirate of reader, book, and machine, complicating in a real and tangible way our relationship to the book. Ball arranges his matrix of 64 poems into a series of cycling feedback loops, facilitated through footnotes at the end of each line that gesture not to a set of outside explanations where the author (or...
#7 Brief interviews with hideous men by DFW
I was totally blown away by this book! It’s a collection of 23 short stories, several of which are interviews with men, and the others deal largely with men and their relationships with women or with other men. I wish I could write long sentences like DFW and have clever footnotes, too.
-Meghan
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10. Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the...
This is probably the third or fourth time I’ve read this book and I’m still not exactly sure what to say about it. The essays and “walks” in the book make up a kind of textbook of the architectures between architecture, the vanishing and momentary spatial elements we live with. Robertson explores the elegant and terrifying ways we organize (or fail to organize) space. Her...
9. Vancouver Special by Charles Demers
I cannot lie: I am insanely jealous that I did not write this book first, only about Calgary.
That said, comedian/activist Demers’ short essays are an easy-to-read tour through the people, places and politics of Vancouver past and present, illuminated with Demers’ personal history and savvy observations by a number of local stand-up comics. I did find that some of the sentences could...
5. Nightwood by Djuna Barnes
Sometimes you need to be ready to read a particular book. Often I’ve tried to read a book at one time and been completely unable to access it, but then picked it up again months or years later and everything about the book seems different and compelling. I think it was clear when I started reading Nightwood that I just wouldn’t get it, but it’s pretty short and I didn’t really have anything else...
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8. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
This is a heavy book. I can’t believe I haven’t read it before; Beloved is one of the great American novels, a book that everyone should read at some point. The narrative is a fictionalized account of the life of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her child when faced with slave catchers. Beloved illustrates a world where no choice is a good choice: the whip or the noose,...
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9. How Modernity Forgets (Paul Connerton)
I’m not sure how to negotiate this book. Connerton examines the phenomenon of cultural amnesia, looking at everything from the growth of cities to the disappearance of life-long careers to the conquering of the “tyranny of distance” through technological advance. His point seems to be that our forgetting comes from our paradoxical position of having too much memory (or too much...
8. The Wild Sheep Chase (Haruki Murakami)
I read the sequel to this book before I know there was a book to read a sequel of. As it turns out, it didn’t impact the reading much, as both stories stand on their own. They inform each other, sure, but they’re unique experiences. It’s like dreaming, reading Murakami. His novels follow dream logic, where wonderful and occasionally disturbing visuals sidle up next to you all...
Book 12: Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed
Book 11: Alastair Reynolds, House of Suns
In the sci-fi area, Reynolds holds down the genre corner belonging to the “space-opera.” This book is particularly intriguing because of how Reynolds demonstrates the vastness of space and time against the smallness of humanity and human life spans. People in this book are millions of years old because they travel the galaxy frozen for years in their ships. Fundamental, nagging human questions...
Book 10: Man and His Symbols, edited and...
Man and His Symbols is the last book Jung worked on before he died; it’s intended to be an introduction to his system of thought to readers who are not psychologists or psychoanalysts. The first essay by Jung is the most readable and the most interesting because he discusses his general principles as well as making some interesting remarks about how Christians interpret their symbols. I like it...
Book 9: Intimate Distortions (fragments of Sappho)...
This book has tenure in my active reading pile. Intimate Distortions uses the “allusive referential” method to translate Sappho. So many procedural works use interesting procedures to generate boring, unreadable writing. I often don’t finish reading entire procedural works because the generated text is nowhere near as interesting as the procedure. But this book contains such interesting writing...
Book 8: American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th...
This is an anthology of poems addressing the turn of the millennium. There’s an interesting mix of writing from the 20th Century from writers practicing in the “lyric” vein and “experimental” vein of poetics.
-Jonathon
Book 6: Rational Geomancy by bpNichol and Steve...
For me, Rational Geomancy is the definitive book of late 20th Century materialist poetics. I’ve read it several times. It uses techniques of self-referentiality and hyper-referentiality as well as establishing a firm connection between the actual human body and the process of text generation to critique standard/traditional forms of writing. The book is good for when you want to feel sensitive...
Book 7: The Secret of the Golden Flower, with...
The essay by Jung on the ancient Chinese text, “The Secret of the Golden Flower,” is the real draw in this book. Jung’s essay, besides creating commentary on the symbolic structure inherent to this ancient Taoist text, discusses the fact that Western people, when attempting to convert to and practice Eastern religions, mistake the “forest for the trees” by trying to create a literal interpretation...
4. PostSecret by Frank Warren
Frank Warren has been operating postsecret.blogspot.com, a blog with weekly postings of anonymous secrets people send to him on postcards, since 2004. This book, published in 2005, is the first in a series of books featuring postcards that have appeared on the blog along with postcards from his vast archive. It sort of feels like cheating to include this book — it’s mostly pictures —...
3. Twenty Miles by Cara Hedley
Hilarious but also moving look at the subculture of university women’s hockey, and the protagonist’s ambivalence about her coveted spot as rookie on the team, her inherited talent, and her family’s hockey heritage. Hedley’s prose is razor sharp, particularly in the dialogue-heavy scenes, but also lush and lyrical when she describes the lure of the game. Part compelling coming of age story and part...
6. Old Enemy Juice (Phil Hall)
This poetry is 20 years old and I can feel its age — it reminds me of David McFadden’s early 80’s stuff, stuff I was really into in 1998… it prompts me to create a poetic-time-line in my head, with 1989’s Phil Hall going a few steps beyond McFadden, incorporating quirks of diction a little more fearlessly, releasing a calmer sense of humour, but maintaining the...
Book 5: Marianne Apostolides, Swim
New last year from book thug, Apostolides’ book finds several ways to create what McCaffery and Nichol would call in Rational Geomancy “the New Fiction”; Apostolides uses several narrative ordering strategies simultaneously, including numerical ordering, the wandering cat-path of thought, and event time. It’s also interestingly loaded with self-referential theoretical ideas...
Book 4: Fool Moon by Jim Butcher
The second book in Jim Butcher’s “The Dresden Files” series of wizard noir. Representations of magic and the magjical systems in use in various occult-ish tales are really interesting to me lately. Butcher’s description of the properties of magic in his books is consistently scientistic; Dresden is able to blow tires on a moving vehicle, for example, by heating up the air...
Books 1-3: Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo collected...
I’m a big fan of the Vancouver Public Library’s extensive and growing collection of graphic novels. The VPL has provided a way for me to read all of the comics I missed in the 1990’s because I couldn’t afford to buy (or store) them.
-Jonathon Wilcke
6. Spider-man Reign (Kaare Andrews and Jose...
I think I would have liked this better if I knew more about Spider-Man lore and the history of the comic. As it stands, I didn’t understand who most of the villains were, and that’s a problem. Seeing Peter Parker as an old man is interesting though, and how he deals with the grief of having no one left that he loves.
Tara Scott
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8. In Comes I: Performance, Memory and Landscape...
I read this for class, but it’s quite interesting, positing a reading of place based on the traces of memory and the archive. Pearson presents us with a small corner of the English landscape and proceeds to talk about parts of it through photographs, plays, and historical fact proposing possible performance pieces that could be tied to the specific details of the landscape. I keep coming...
7. The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel and 8. Food...
The Value of Nothing: Why do things cost what they do? Using plain speech that even a financial rube like me can understand, Raj Patel demystifies Homo Economicus and discusses the problem of assigned dollar cost vs. value. He starts with the recent global financial crisis and covers widespread misreadings of such thinkers as Adam Smith and Karl Marx; the dangerous reach of Ayn Rand’s ideas;...
#6 Gargoyle - Andrew Davidson
I have a thing about burns.
When I was a very small child, my father owned a motorcycle. He started taking me out when I was ridiculously young, small enough to often fall asleep clinging to his back. He’s often ride one-handed, the other arm reaching back to steady me so I wouldn’t fall if I happened to nod off.
When I was about five or six, I’d fallen asleep yet again, and so...
7. Mackerel Sky (Natalee Caple)
Reading a book written by someone you know is always different than reading a book clean. You see the person in the prose, so to speak. You notice opinions, world views. You hear their voice in the voice of their characters. In some ways this is a bad thing. You’ll never get to read the book as it was intended. But in other, perhaps better ways, knowing the author is a very good thing. It...
5. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Philip K....
I came to this book, like many people, through Blade Runner. I’d heard that they’re not very similar and oh boy, they’re not similar at all.
Neil and I watched Blade Runner a couple of months ago, neither of us having seen it in several years. We didn’t like it. The pacing is very slow, the action not particularly compelling.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? had...
6. The Terror (Dan Simmons)
I first encountered Dan Simmons last year on a trip to Vancouver while I was reading one of his earlier works, the science fiction novel Hyperion. A futuristic Canterbury Tales, Hyperion came out of left field and blew me away with how good it was. Each tale was better than the last and when we got back to Calgary I rushed out to get the sequel and promptly devoured that too.
Dan Simmons is good....
6. Remember to Wave by Kaia Sand
KSW recently had the fortune to have Kaia Sand and her partner Jules Boykoff up from Portland for a reading and workshop in Vancouver, and I had the fortune to purchase each of their most recent books.
Remember to Wave maps dispersal and displacement on a palimpsest of Portland, Oregon, charting the internment of Japanese Americans during the war and a disastrous flood at VanPort (Vancouver,...
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#6 A streetcar named desire by Tennessee Williams
Now I know why they make you read it in high school
—Meghan
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#5 The Magician by Michael Scott
This is the sequel to the Alchemyst. I’m only reading the sequel because I had the misfortune of buying it first, before the first book in the series, so then I had to go out and buy the first book because I can’t read anything out of order. So this series is not that great - I notice that the good guys are rarely in any danger of not winning the whole battle and that the main...
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#4 Birds of America by Lorrie Moore
Birds of America is a short story collection that deals with mostly middle aged women facing tragedy - a dead cat, a dying baby, a dead baby. What I like most about this collection is that although the characters all lug around a great deal of depression and I usually find that tiresome, Moore handles tragedy with such humor that grief becomes actually a little hilarious. Her prose is amazing and...
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4. Exit the King (Eugène Ionesco, Trans. Charles...
I don’t want to say much about this play, which is about more than King Berenger’s fight against dieing and ultimate acquiescence thereto and the simultaneous death of his kingdom and disappearance of the people who surround the king in the last hours of his life. Exit the King reads like an old play — one written in Ancient Greece and not in the twentieth century. It’s not...
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2. The Capilano Review 3.9 (Fall 2009)
Robin Blaser, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan are the main events in this issue, featuring in interviews, reminiscences, and excerpts. As is pointed out at least twice in the issue, the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference changed Canadian poetry, due to the influence of these three poets, among others. On the other hand, that was almost 50 years ago. The Capilano Review is always a good read, but...
5. The Big Empty (Norman & John Buffalo Mailer)
Norman Mailer was quoted a number of times in On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates, and I watched him talk about “Rumble in the Jungle” in When We Were Kings, both of which made me curious about his own writings on the sport.
This book is a collection of conversations between father and son, with John acting mostly as interviewer, with a speech and an essay thrown in for good measure....
4. Moscardino (Enrico Pea)
Translated from the Italian by Ezra Pound, with an introduction by Mary De Rachewiltz, Pound’s daughter, this is, as boxing aficionados might say, pound-for-pound a great little book.
A disorderly collection of tales about the narrator’s grandfather and other relatives. Vibrantly complicated and engaging prose written from a dormouse’s point of view.
-Samuel
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7. The Aerial Letter (Nicole Brossard)
Another book of essays by Nicole Brossard. More poetic than much of Fluid Arguments, Brossard looks at how women (especially lesbian women) confront the problem of a largely patriarchal language. Fave quote: “The book is blank; the preface sets us dreaming.”
-ryan
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6. Fluid Arguments (Nicole Brossard)
A collection of essays spanning from 1979-2001, Brossard looks at everything from feminist and lesbian writing to Quebecois politics to, in my two favorite essays because of the ways they deviate stylistically from much of the rest of the book, an essay on Djuna Barnes and a short autobiography. Brossard’s writing is always sharp and interesting. This book was a pleasure to read, even if I...
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Unnumbered: "Plato's Pharmacy" (Jacques Derrida) &...
Read by a group of us on a recommendation from Stefania Forlini (one of my profs from last semester), Jacques Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” is extremely readable, especially compared to other texts by him. Derrida discusses the role of writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, drawing from Plato a definition of writing as a pharmakon, that is, a cure for society’s ills and a...
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7. Pig Tales (Marie Darrieussecq)
This book left a sour taste in my mouth. For a text widely praised for feminist sensibilities, I often found myself thinking things like “wow, another depiction as female sexuality as animalistic” “Oh, look, images of woman as meat”—10 minutes on Sociological Images would have shown me plenty of that.
The protagonist is a woman who slowly turns into a pig, in a...
4. Death and the King's Horseman (Wole Soyinka)
I’m not going to lie. I want to avoid this write-up because I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of Death and the King’s Horseman in my first reading.
I can see why Wole Soyinka cautions against reducing this to a simple new traditions vs old, white vs black. It could be easily done, but that doesn’t do the story justice. For me, the story was about spirituality and...
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7. The Book of Tea (Kakuzo Okakura)
Okakura wrote this book to introduce the ways of tea-drinking, and Japanese thought in a general sense, to Westerners. I love tea but what I enjoy about this book is the way Okakura writes—his is a fiery, passionate style, a sharp contrast to the measured, restrained mood of the tea ceremony he describes. Here’s a typical passage:
Tell me, gentle flowers, teardrops of the stars, standing...
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5. The Dog Who Rescues Cats: The True Story of...
What?
Yeah, ok, an easy read, and yeah, ok, our esteemed literary friends would take umbrage with the tone of the story, not to mention it’s Oprah-esque “true heartwarming tale” bent, but christ, if you guys can’t find a little joy in a simple tale of love and compassion in the animal world, then you guys can totally go fuck yourselves.
Ginny saved an estimated 900...
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4. Home on the Range (The Night Sky with Stars in...
Tenney Nathanson is an American poet suggested to me by my friend Jen Currin — whom we’ll be bringing up to Vancouver to read in March if we ever get each other on the phone, but that’s another issue.
This book got me thinking about American poetics, and Canadian poetics, and what differences exist between the two, if we can indeed qualify them in that way. And I’m not...
1. Poems for the Millennium, Volume One by Jerome...
I read at least half of this book before the new year and finished it this year. It’s a solid 795 pages of poetry, with some commentary by the anthologers and quotes by the poets included for context. Reading the entire thing straight through, I obviously didn’t linger enough on the poems for any close reading. What I got from this book is a sense of the scope and breadth of...
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3. The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)
I really loved The Graveyard Book, which follows Nobody — Bod — Owens as he grows up (sheltered by a graveyard and its various inhabitants) from the time his family is murdered until he leaves, on the cusp of adulthood. As in Coraline, Gaiman does creepy convincingly, but unlike Coraline, what i took away from The Graveyard Book wasn’t a sense of being creeped out. Rather, i was...
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6. Child of God (Cormac McCarthy)
Cormac McCarthy makes me joyous and angry, inspired and depressed at the same time. His throwaway lines are better than anything I’ve ever written. Even when nothing is happening, the prose engrosses. His style is ornate and sparse at once:
Old woods and deep. At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned and these were like them. He passed a windfelled tulip poplar on the...
#5 Pontypool Changes Everything - Tony Burgess
I saw Bruce MacDonald’s film, Pontypool, in April of last year and it absolutely scared the crap out of me. MacDonald did an amazing job of showing very little while suggesting a lot. Listening to a man describe a dying zombie boy, then holding the phone to the zombie so that his horrified colleagues trapped in a sound booth could listen in on his last gasps was a moment that would not come...
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5. On Love and Death (Patrick Süskind)
On Love and Death is a slim volume consisting of a single essay by Süskind, who is better known as the author of Perfume. The essay is a throwback to the kind of straightforward, reader-friendly criticism that relies on elegance and style more than ideas and argument. The first third of the book, where Süskind discusses love, is banal and awkward, but when Süskind moves to connect love to death...