Please could you point me to an ivory tower near here? The last one I thought I had found turned out to be a white elephant ...
The blurring of those critical boundaries you decry as a qualitative decline seems to me just the levelling of all boundaries by the force of profit, wherein beauty is to be found only and always in the eye of the consumer.
Tant pis.
A lengthy piece, a lot to digest in one (or two) sittings.
Mr. Alexis points a lot of fingers and, for the most part, I think he's on target. Book reviewers in this country are deficient but that goes back many years: too many friends reviewing friends, a reluctance to harshly criticize a work by a major Canadian writer for fear of having a cold glass of wine tossed in your face, should the two of you happen to meet at Harbourfront or some other cultural watering hole. Just a glass, mind you: no Canuck writer I can think of has the guts or balls to actually provoke a fistfight (we're not THAT passionate about our work).
Book sections have been scrapped or reduced in size and prominence AND dummied down—then again, Canadian publishers are releasing so much crap it's hard to sympathize. Readers in this country have, sadly, grown accustomed to the politically correct social engineering handed down on high from the publishing poobahs in Toronto: NO to genre fiction, YES to anything that emphasizes race and place. NO to tales featuring a multi-generational starship, YES to narratives of multi-generational immigrant families struggling to keep their identity in a new land. NO to ground-breaking, innovative prose, YES to imitative, derivative efforts that bring to mind the likes of Atwood, Shields and Munro.
Too many editors in this country are poorly read or, perhaps more to the point, not widely read in anything outside their aesthetic and intellectual comfort zones. They shy away from works that challenge their ironclad preconceptions and wither when confronted by a truly original talent.
Readers in our home and native are clearly BORED by the tepid, uninspiring fare McClelland & Stewart, Penguin Canada et all are churning out. The bestseller lists reveal a dearth of Canadian titles (to the extent that the GLOBE & MAIL was forced to print a separate roster of Canadian books). Readers have voted with their hard-earned dollars and the results are conclusive. Canadian publishers remind me of the dinosaurs who watched a meteor streaking across the sky, exploding with a ground-quaking impact but had no idea what it MEANT...
I agree with everything #2 had to say. Remove the cronyism and nepotism of Canadian media (handfed by a crony-overblown CBC) - and maybe expand the regular points of view beyond, say, the same 20 Canadian authors, and perhaps Canadian readers bother noticing enough to keep these wayward editors up to task.
This may seem to be a petty point, but Stephen Jay Gould never used a middle initial for his books. It was never "Stephen J. Gould". Most readers familiar with his work would know that.
Why is this important? First, it is a courtesy to the writer to print his name as he wishes. Second, in an era of databases with millions of books and authors, many with common names, it is far more efficient to use the name of the author exactly as it is on the book.
The Times Literary Supplement routinely drops middle initials of North American authors. Maybe the Brits don't like middle initials because it looks so American. Also, British book publishers will often drop the middle initial of a North American author when a book is republished in the UK.
You might be thinking, "Picky, picky." But, this should be an important issue as part of a brand management campaign — and an author's name is certainly a brand.
While I am normally loath to comment on an article excerpted from a book, for fear that the editing may have been quick and dirty, I shall risk the venture this time out as Alexis's theme rather duplicates my own "Metcalf: A Counterblaste" from a decade ago. Cast into the netherworld of limited chapbook distribution, it did, however, receive its very own eternity in the form of online notoriety, courtesy Michael Bryson's Danforth Review.
While Metcalf has undoubtedly had a deleterious influence on critical thinking in our literary culture, encouraging a host of young disciples to splurge their passionate but poorly argued opinions onto print as an antidote to the groaning weight of Canlit boosterism and nationalist dogma left over from the seventies, it remains a perilous proposition as the actual lasting effect of his "capering cap and bells" comedic prancing is still in doubt. As an editor he has midwifed some fine work from both David Solway and Terry Rigelhof, neither of which show any signs of collapsing themselves into the kind of vacuous clownish posturing exemplified by our John in books such as 'Volleys' and 'Kicking Against the Pricks'.
Alexis's singling out of James Woods as his whipping boy rather misses the mark I feel. I can think of half a dozen critics, both US and Brit, who are his equal. Sven Birkets anyone? William Gass? Frank Kermode? Not to mention our very own George Bowering, whose innovative critical work, spread over several volumes and decades, is, as yet, criminally underrated in his home country.
And litmags: let us not forget the sterling contribution of The London Review Of Books, where great and witty criticism emerges every fourteen days, from a variety of barely known names, on all manner of subject matter. I vainly attempted to reproduce its high standards in my own Books In Canada essays, an attempt doomed, of course, to the usual Canlit fate of financial collapse. Finally, It would not be amiss to say that every lit mag I've written for has gone out in a blaze of futility.
gordon phinn
...All too accurate, especially for us young folks who are forced to put down our Bigge-riddled Canadian broadsheets and go stateside to find any younger critics with any argumentative chops.
— Whokebe
This is the way with the entire Canadian 'cultural industry', not just literature. Film & TV (which is the bit I know) - it's the same. There is great talent in this country to be certain, and we do see it shine on occasion. But by and large opportunity comes to those with the greatest capacity to write grant applications or be cool and ironic while at the right cocktail parties.
In film, getting a nod to be considered by Telefilm is like gaining entry into a fraternity; except it takes years - not just frosh week - of correct networking. Television broadcasters - some whom have never even produced a program themselves - decide the fates of careers based on whether or not they 'like' an independent producer. Oh but if they don't like you, but like your idea, they might take it though, and give it to their in-house production wing or their husband's production company to produce. Yes, of course it's highly unethical, but don't say anything - because that will shut the tap on your career for good.
The power to create space for talent to blossom and good work to be made is concentrated in the hands of the few in this country. I don't think we ask ourselves enough what the people that make these crucial decisions have done to deserve that amount of power. Critics, publishers, broadcasters, funders can be incredible forces of influence, but they must have intelligence, vision and above all, daring. If there are weak and uninspired people in these roles, the work that is commissioned will be weak and uninspired. If these people can only grasp a passing trend instead of having their eyes set on the horizon, then we will have, as we do, a culture of received ideas.
I am not naively suggesting that nepotism or concentration of power doesn't exist elsewhere, but perhaps in larger arenas where decision makers are only as good as their last decision, daring and fearlessness are qualities that are encouraged. Sadly, in our cultural industry, where bureaucracy and petite-etoile syndrome reign, what we encourage our decision makers to be is fearful, small-minded and ever-wary of those they haven't seen around the cocktail circuit (looking cool and ironic) for years.
This was very engaging - compelling, even - in its glaring inconsistencies, and in what it reveals about this presumably once vibrant critical culture.
For all of the self-professed idealism for some communitarian idyll, this agora that promised a rich dialogue on letters, or at least a "chronicle" from a "community of equals," the tactics of schoolyard one-upmanship remain (the same "pungent" tactics which helped destroy the culture, apparently):
"It’s very, very rare to find a reviewer — whose job, after all, is to convince us that he or she knows whereof he or she speaks — who will even admit the possibility that he or she is the weak member in the community he or she is chronicling."
Whoa. Pardon the close reading, but the choice of the word "weak" is interesting, as is the article "the" (yes, there is a definitively singular person on the bottom rung here).
The one description of a critic aside from the naming names here, the presumably bold j'accuse that those in the know will nod knowingly about (all part of the chronicle of the small community) is rendered this way:
"... a short, pompous man with thick, dark-rimmed glasses (a self-styled “critic”) ..."
Ah. He's short. He wears glasses. You know the type. Bet you he won't admit he's the weakest one in the room either. In caricature veritas, I guess.
The limitations of Wood and Metcalf we're also going to take at a kind of roughly sketched face value here. Wood has his own essay about Flaubert that does more to illuminate what one could argue are blind spots in Metcalf's criticism than anything here, but presumably, as with Solway or Bigge, Alexis would prefer we just put the term critic or criticism between quotation marks just so, you know, that we all know who aren't invited to the next book launch.
Ah, but it's all dying anyway, and though we rage hard against the dying of our lost ideal where equals may frolic, let us also get a few kicks in at those among us who may have also written from idealism. Their ideals just weren't ours. Or mine ... um, two times out of ten.
“No one directs films like Orson Welles anymore, and the films of Judd Apatow are too thinly plotted. Therefore, movies today suck.” The illogic of this parodic statement parallels the illogic of Alexis’s tirade against today’s Canadian criticism: “No one today is Northrop Frye and the Globe and Star book sections have thinned out. Therefore, there is no decent criticism in Canada anymore.” The problem with both arguments is they ignore all the in-betweens and lesser-knows that maintain the quality and integrity of the craft. Welles is gone—Madden is not. Apatow writes thin plots—Joel and Ethan Coen write thick ones. By the same token: Frye is gone but Bruce Meyer and Sina Queyras are not (and Atwood, by the way, has published a hell of a lot of criticism since Survival). And while Metcalfe may have produced cantankerous books dubious in seminal value (so Alexis believes; I find them refreshingly irreverent), Alberto Manguel has produced erudite ones of far greater influence. If the Globe and Star reviews fail to satisfy, subscribe to Geist or Open Letter—or read Lemon Hound online. Canadian criticism is far from all it can or should be, but if one digs below the surface of legend and mines more than just the most obvious names and titles, there remain a lot of solid gems to be found. – Peter Webb
I agree with much of what Andre says, especially the decline in newspaper reviewing, but his point about John Metcalf is what interests me most here. The Metcalf position ultimately states that writing is only writing, and thus perfect sentences are the goal of writing. The obvious metaphor for Metcalf and his ilk is that they cannot see the forest for the trees. Most readers see trees as primarily a way to get to the forest.
(Not very) interesting. Yawn. The only writer/critic of value in English is ...
Drumroll:
André Alexis promoting André Alexis at his autobiographical worst.
Typical (not topical). Someone please provide an example of one original thought in this tantrum or, better, all book editors should simply hire André Alexis to write all of our reviews.
Case closed. Coughin' nailed. Martin Levin must surely give him a raise, now ...
