Summer reading

Seven Rivers of Canada by Hugh MacLennan (Macmillan, 1961)

I found this at our neighbourhood used bookstore early in the summer and was really taken with the design. The cover stripes (seven blue ones for seven rivers) I think are a subtle way of illustrating the subject without being too literal or, alternatively, having to choose one river to stand in for all. Can we please have more of this again in cover design?



The interior is equally simple but well thought out. Each chapter start includes a map of the respective river – running to two pages if the river requires it, one page if it’s more compact. The book’s designer was Leslie (Sam) Smart, one of the founding members of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada, and whose name I know mainly because of Canadian type designer Rod McDonald’s font Smart Sans, created to commemorate Smart after his death in 1998.

In his introduction MacLennan says: “A knowledge of the Canadian rivers will recover this earlier sense of time in Canada. It will bring the old experience of the people out of the subconscious regions where it lies buried.” And by old experience he means not just pre-air travel but pre-railroad, although I have to say that while I’ve travelled more slowly (by bicycle) cross country, it’s mainly been during long train trips that I’ve felt any real inkling of what the whole project of Canada might mean to anyone at a personal level. Maybe I’m just softheaded about trains.

For each river (Mackenzie, St. Lawrence, Ottawa, Red, Saskatchewan, Fraser and St. John) MacLennan combines his own experiences of it with its history, including some of the earlier explorers to navigate it, the settlers who became dependent on it and what it brought, and the gradually changing role of each one in settlement patterns and economics across the country.

Some of the history was fairly engrained in me, some I was a bit rusty on, but to look at it all through the lens of rivers – the ability to travel them and how speedily and carrying what – is fascinating.

I read this back in July, but writing about it on the edge of fall feels appropriate somehow because for reasons I haven’t quite figured out, apart from trains fall always puts me in a slightly patriotic mood. All in one week I’ve found myself signing out a stack of Glenn Gould cds from the library, roping a bunch of people into going to a Massey lecture and being invited to visit a friend up in Yellowknife. Solomon Gursky lurks on the nightstand. It's getting really disgusting.

Books & Bikes

A little later this month I'll be getting together with a bunch of the cyclists from a cross-Canada trip I was part of ten years ago, and to gear up for our reunion ride I wanted some appropriate reading material. I follow a few cycle touring blogs, some of them quite well written, but I find the focus on day-to-day logistics sometimes overwhelms any sense of the landscapes and communities the writers are riding through. This is partly the nature of blogs, I guess, and I know the updates I wrote for our trip are filled with minutiae that no longer seem at all relevant, if they even were back then. In any case, this time I was looking for something a bit different.

Then I discovered one of Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy's books at the library. South from the Limpopo: Travels through South Africa recounts three solo cycling trips Murphy made: the first in 1993, just prior to the country's first multi-racial election, the second in April and May of 1994 to witness the elections, and the third a few months after Mandela took office. Her books are cleaned-up versions of her journal entries, so there's the immediacy of life on the road, but Murphy's central concern is talking to South Africans about their country's politics and history. A rough night has less to do with a flat tire or food and shelter than with finding people who will speak candidly about their lives and opinions. But by and large she finds them, and has an incredible knack for getting them to open up. More importantly, she has the patience to listen long enough to get past the better-rehearsed versions of their stories, getting closer to the source of some deeply ingrained ideas about racial differences. I've started and deleted a couple of paragraphs about these ideas, but the fact is that for ignorant me, Murphy's book was a bit of a crash course on South African history, so I'd rather let it percolate a while longer and not totally embarrass myself here. Still, I think even readers who do know more of the history than I do/did will find some of their assumptions checked in this book.

What I will say is how much I appreciated Murphy's determination to locate her own prejudices. Although she develops friendships with many black South Africans, and lives for a time in the township of Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town, she is honest about her involuntary responses in certain situations, and ponders what these reveal about her. There is a moment when she has finished speaking with the driver of a truck and pedalled off, only to realize that in the back of the truck were three black men whose presence she had entirely failed to acknowledge. She forces herself to question whether she would have done the same thing had it been a crew of white men and concludes that it would have been impossible for her not to have noticed them.

Well worth reading. And there are many more. Murphy's first book, Full Tilt: From Ireland to India with a Bicycle, was published in 1965 and she's written another twenty-odd since then. She's known for being disinterested in publicity, but there's a recent article about her here. She turns eighty this year and is still travelling by bicycle.

Whittling

Underneath that fern, not so convincingly or fetchingly concealed by an old cotton blanket, are four egg boxes full of books that, after a year and half, still don't have a home in this apartment, despite there being shelves in every room but the bathroom. Every few months I attack the boxes looking for something and in the process try to whittle the contents back. Rereading this passage from Lawrence Clark Powell's Islands of Books, I was inspired to take a slightly different approach:

Somewhere in his notebooks Leonardo observed that small rooms are best because they discipline the mind. I have proved for myself the truth of his dictum. My study measures 9 by 9.... When we lived in the canyon my study measured 9 by 12. It was almost completely lined with shelves which held my total private library of 1500 volumes. Now I own twice as many in spite of constant discarding (to my college library), and the smaller room will hold only part of my books. This compels me to discipline my tastes and to choose for roommates only those volumes which I feel that I must see every day. (p. 9)

Roommates. Every day. Okay. Fiction I find fairly easy. If I loved it, I'll keep it. If I think I might get something more from it the next time, I'll keep it. But poetry I find trickier. There are poets I don't take to until a fourth or fifth reading when for whatever reason, they finally get through. They don't do their dishes, they hog the newspaper and then chastise you for not knowing what's going on. But one day they make you the best cup of coffee you've ever had in your life and none of the rest matters. My tastes have also changed somewhat in the last decade or so, and some of the poets I used to blather on about now seem either glib or sentimental. There's a fondness still, but I don't go back to their work anymore. How to choose.

In the process of all the hemming and hawing, I thought I'd share some of the collections that I know I am definitely going to keep for roommates. The first is Dart by Alice Oswald (Faber & Faber, 2002). Concept collections can be deceiving. They sound good on jacket copy, and in grant proposals, but they don't always hold up in the reading. Dart is a great example of how satisfying it is when they do. Alice Oswald spent three years interviewing people who lived and worked along the river Dart, in Devon, England, and transposed it into a long poem that captures the sounds of populations connected by their dependence on the same body of water. There are the voices of fishermen, oyster gatherers, a stone wall builder, a boat builder, swimmers, boaters, a ferryman, a sewage worker, a milk bottler. Parts are recorded more or less verbatim, and others are spun into mythologies almost. By the time I finished it (the first and the second time) I truly did feel as though I'd meandered my way down a river, hovering along the surface and being submerged at times. So, Dart, please stay on. You can steal whatever you want from my closet.

Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum

There has been a lot of talk of sailing at my house in the last couple of years, but so far very little action. We hope to remedy that this summer, and so to get into a suitably, or perhaps overly, ambitious mindset, I've been reading Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World, his account of the journey (24 April 1895 to 27 June 1898) that made him the first to circumnavigate the world single-handedly, by sail.

Slocum's story begins quite near here, actually, as he was born on the Annapolis Valley's North Mountain. The journey itself begins at Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and from there north toward Sable Island and across the Atlantic to Gibraltar. But at this point he was warned that he should avoid the Mediterranean, which was then teeming with pirates, so he crossed back across the Atlantic to South America, through the Strait of Magellan, across the Pacific to Australia, to Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, and then northward, eventually tying up at the same “cedar spile” in Fairhaven again three years later.

Although he does give several lectures along the way, in order to fund his trip, Slocum also seems to have had to do very little to publicize, and his arrival on new continents is generally preceded by newspaper reports of his progress and invitations to visit heads of state, self-appointed and otherwise. Among the people he encounters is President Kruger, of what is now South Africa, a believer in the Flat Earth theory:

Had this good but misguided fanatic been armed with a real weapon, the crew of the Spray would have died a martyr there and then. The next day, seeing him across the street, I bowed and made curves with my hands. He responded with a level, swimming movement of his hands, meaning “the world is flat.” (Chapter XVII)

And in Samoa, Slocum spends time with Robert Louis Stevenson's widow, Fanny, who gives him her husband's sailing directories for the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

But it's Slocum's relationship with himself as crew of one, and with his ship, the Spray, that I found most entertaining. He gets a lot of pleasure out of little references to himself in his different responsibilities as “part” of the crew:

But the turtle-steak was good. I found no fault with the cook, and it was the rule of the voyage that the cook found no fault with me. There was never a ship's crew so well agreed. (Chapter IV)

That said, he also confesses fairly early on to occasionally needing someone outside the crew to talk to:

Then I turned my face eastward, and there, apparently at the very end of the bowsprit, was the smiling full moon rising out of the sea. Neptune himself coming over the bows could not have startled me more. “Good evening, sir,” I cried; “I'm glad to see you.” Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. (Chapter III)

About his trusty ship:

The Spray struggled and tossed for ten days, making only three hundred miles on her course in all that time. I didn't say anything! (Chapter V)

Many of the incidents were ludicrous. When I found myself, for instance, disentangling the sloop's mast from the branches of a tree after she had drifted three times around a small island, against my will, it seemed more than one's nerves could bear, and I had to speak about it, so I thought, or die of lockjaw, and I apostrophized the Spray as an impatient farmer might his horse or his ox. “Didn't you know,” cried I—“didn't you know that you couldn't climb a tree?” But the poor old Spray had essayed, and successfully too, nearly everything else in the Strait of Magellan, and my heart softened toward her when I thought of what she had gone through. (Chapter X)

Reading Slocum has reminded me that most of the travel literature I read is fairly recent in vintage, not more than three or four decades old in most cases, and I'd like to add some more of the ur-travelogues. Here are a few I'd like to track down:

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Amateur Emigrant (In three parts, it details the journey Stevenson made from Scotland to California to reunite with his future wife Fanny–whom Slocum later met in Samoa–once she'd determined to divorce her first husband.)
Basho's The Narrow Road to the Interior and The Narrow Road to the Deep North (These are haibun, part prose and part poetry.)
Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle
Freya Stark's accounts of her travels in the Middle East (There is an interesting article about Stark in The New Yorker's April 18th issue.)
J. Smeaton Chase's California Coast Trails and Yosemite Trails
William Morris's Icelandic Journals

Other recommendations?

PrairyErth

William Least Heat-Moon
Houghton Mifflin (1991)

I bought this on one of my last visits to The Odd Book in Wolfville, N.S., before moving to Halifax almost a year ago. The Odd Book is relatively small, but it's well organized and specific without being snobbish. There are dedicated Classics, archaeology and linguistics sections, for example, but also a wall of mass-market mysteries and a good stash of Archie comics. A friend of mine once said, before coming home for a summer while doing his Master's degree, that the only place in the Valley he wanted to work was The Odd Book and that if he couldn't work there he wasn't really sure what he was going to do. They weren't hiring. I'll have to check and see if he's over that yet.

On this visit I came to the cash with William Least Heat-Moon’s first book, Blue Highways, in my hand, and the store’s owner, Jim Tillotson, steered me toward PrairyErth on the new arrivals shelf. I read the first couple of chapters soon after, but was just too buried in the minutiae of moving into a new place and learning how to be a working person again – lunch-packing, for instance, eluded me for the first few weeks – and so I put the book aside. Then, after finishing The Great Railway Bazaar back before Christmas I found myself still in the mood for non-fiction but wanting something a bit more…stationary, and PrairyErth beamed from the shelf, looking fat and happy and entirely unscathed from its previous rejection.

The book is subtitled (a deep map) and that's exactly what it is. Heat-Moon went to Chase County, Kansas, a place where not much is thought to happen, and just inched his way through it, sometimes walking, sometimes rooting in courthouse records and the journals of those who settled or passed through, and sometimes waiting, in the grass or in a bar or in his van, to see what does happen. Some of his research has to do with particular routes through the county – railroads, secondary highways and paths. In one of my favourite sections he tries to uncover the Orient Line, a railway that was to have connected Kansas City and China, via Mexico, but that he begins to suspect may be no more than rumour.

Kansas is more or less the dead middle of the (contiguous) United States, and it's also where east becomes west, or vice versa. It's got the last large expanse of tallgrass prairie in the country, and one of the recurring elements in PrairyErth is the position of various people Heat-Moon interviews on the proposed Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve (which was successfully established a few years after the book's publication). It's a contentious issue for Kansans who still dream of a return to the days when a viable living could be made working prairie rangeland. In one chapter Heat-Moon recounts a conversation he has with essayist Wes Jackson in which Jackson outlines his vision for a new kind of agricultural community for a post-oil future, a model suited to the current economic reality in Chase County: relying and putting a greater value on human labour and keeping more of the products of that labour in the local area.

PrairyErth is of a piece with some of John McPhee's writing, in terms of the steady, on-the-ground chipping away at history, geology, ecology, economics, and ... I don't know, maybe happenstance, and the implied conviction that these need to be studied together. My one disappointment with it was that the parts I expected to like the most I actually liked least. These are where the author examines the effect of the prairie on his mindset. I travelled across Montana and North Dakota by train a couple of years ago and I guess had secretly hoped to find a closer articulation of my own experience of that landscape. The sentiments seem quite genuine, but the language he used often left me cold. Walking kept wandering into dreaming and into baggy statements about time. Given how much I like the rest of the book I'm tempted to say this is really a matter of vocabulary. Or a cultural divide, and I am just being ignorant.

Or maybe it's all the solitude. In the final chapter Heat-Moon and a friend, a fellow writer the (now) late Clive Scott Chisholm, embark on a multi-day walk to try to find the Kaw Trail, a path through the county, once travelled by the Wind People tribe when they were relegated to territory south of their original lands. Together the pair bounce ideas about the prairie off each other that to me are much more accurate and interesting than much of Heat-Moon's deeper solo musings. With Chisholm Heat-Moon has a sympathetic ear (Chisholm himself wrote a book about a long walk he did following the Mormon route from the Missouri River to the Great Salt Lake Valley) and someone to jog him out of the most earnest of his ruminations. There is a Tent Dwellers-like repartee here, both in terms of the wit and a particular brand of checked intuition. It was a good note to go out on, I thought.

Kay Ryan

One of my resolutions for 2011 is to try to memorize some poems I like. I don’t have a notion yet of whether this will necessarily improve my enjoyment of them, but I’m interested to see what the process will be like.

Although the obvious choices might be old favourites, I decided to make it all new with a new-to-me poet, American Kay Ryan. Like many, many other people, I had not heard of her before she took up her post as poet laureate (2008–2010). She’s stayed out of the mainstream – she lives in Marin County, California, and made a living teaching remedial English at the local college. When she was twenty-nine she took a cross-country cycling trip to try to decide whether or not to continue writing poetry. Somewhere in Colorado she posed herself the question “Do you like it?” and responded yes and then went from there. If you want to know more about her writing life, there’s a good interview with her here, from the Winter 2008 issue of The Paris Review.

Her poems are about asking the right questions, too. What is this? I thought it was this, but instead it’s this. You thought it was this, but I think maybe it’s this. From The Best of It: New & Selected Poems (2010) I bookmarked six I liked best, on first read, and have decided to start the memorizing with "Easter Island." Once I've done that I have the ukulele and Spanish to learn, and more nuts and legumes to eat. Should be a busy year.

Winter Survival

I’ve mentioned before my love of travel literature (on the nightstand right now is Paul Theroux’s first railway saga The Great Railway Bazaar). My other escape genre is the DIY/cheap living/how-I-dropped-out-of-society-and-lived-to-love-it treatise. Although book editing is a pretty good gig, Christmas and winter both make me especially susceptible to the gospel of simple, jobless living. I thought I’d share a few titles that I have not yet read but that will likely be in this winter’s lineup, in case you want to read along.



First is Possum Living by Dolly Freed, which was published in 1978 when the author was in her late teens. Her father quit his job and pulled her out of high school, and the book is her story of how they got by on little to no money and what she did with all the time she had to self-educate. It has experienced a recent resurgence with a new edition released by Tin House Books in Portland, Oregon, last year. Dolly also has a blog, which I see is on hiatus now but has included some interesting reflections on her old life.



Second is Novella Carpenter’s Farm City, published last year. I read a review and then devoured every last post on her blog and have still not got around to buying the book – I intend to remedy that soon. For the past several years Carpenter has squatted an empty lot in Oakland, California, raising goats and chickens, gardening, and hosting classes on such things. She is ambitious but also very frank about her failures. She also makes no bones about enjoying life in the city and is not a purist back-to-the-lander in that regard, which I find quite refreshing. She’s a journalist, too, and has interviewed some like-minded people, including…



...Philip Garlington, whose book Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead (2003) has been out of print for a few years and goes for about $60 on Abe. Garlington was also a journalist who, back in the 1980s, quit his job and moved onto a $300 piece of Nevada desert. He doesn’t actually recommend the lifestyle, but it combines two of my favourites, deserts and dropping out, so I can’t resist.

In the meantime, presents need wrapping and the job needs going to.

Atkinson at last

After almost a month of waiting, my copy of Kate Atkinson's new book, Started Early, Took My Dog, finally arrived at Bookmark. I was in Chapters the week before for David Sedaris's reading and dutifully did not buy it there. The wait was worth it (although I made good use of that time calling them twice, stopping by twice in person and giving them both my home and work phone numbers). I read the first few chapters Sunday night and then did a marathon on Monday night, stopping only to spoon cold leftovers into a bowl around 9 p.m. I missed Louise Monroe, the cranky Scottish detective, conspicuously absent, but Jackson Brodie is in good form. And...has taken up reading poetry, which makes this latest installment a bit more like the early Kate Atkinson. Split the lark!

Emotionally Weird, her third novel, remains my favourite and the one I recommend most to people I've decided need to partake in the Atkinson obsession. It's odd to see an author you've liked since their pre-mass-popularity days become massively popular. But if you're going to be a snob about reading the fun's gone out of it, right?

In an interview I read recently Atkinson said she's ready to move on from Jackson Brodie and I'll be curious to see what she does next. In the meantime, though, I see from her website that a Jackson Brodie BBC mini-series is in the works. To watch or not to watch? I love these characters. I don't know if I'm ready.

Although it's not a thoroughly positive review, this one from the Guardian gives a good overview of the feel of the whole quartet, for the uninitiated.

To Cariboo & Back in 1862

I mentioned a few posts back that I'd found an interesting limited-edition letterpress book on my visit to Powell's in Portland last month. When I pulled it from the shelf and saw the price ($9.95) I was certain I was having my own little "Gutenberg Bible at the garage sale" moment, but when I did a quick Abe search back at the hotel room I discovered that no, in fact, $9.95 was about the most any of the 350 copies in the edition were going for. That I hadn't heard of the book before should probably have been a tip-off, but I can be moronically optimistic at times. However, both the subject and the publisher interest me, so I'm pleased to have it anyway. (And if I ever need ten bucks...)



The book opens with not one but three introductions explaining the source of the narrative and the various people involved in bringing it back into print. Briefly, W. Champness recorded his impressions during a relatively short stint (he leaves England in the spring and is back in Victoria by December) in the Cariboo and had them published serially, along with sketches, in the April 1865 issues of a weekly magazine called The Leisure Hour. In the late 1960s/early 70s Gordon Bowes of the British Columbia Historical Association initiated a project to have Champness's articles reprinted in book format, and approached Glen Adams of Ye Galleon Press in Fairfield, Washington, whose workshop press was in the business of bringing back into print these sorts of things. The book was released in 1972, as far as I can tell in the edition of 350 that I have, and in a slightly less limited edition of 1,000 though I haven't yet been able to determine what the difference between those two might be.



Champness and his nephew travelled from England by boat to the Panama Canal, then by rail, then by steamer ship up to San Francisco, then to Victoria, across to New Westminster, then by boat up the Fraser River, and then on foot with pack horses into the Cariboo. Their guides and supplies for the last part of the trip came from Lillooet (which Champness spells Lilooett), my hometown. He writes a lot about expenses. The further into the interior the party goes, the more expensive everything becomes, which was no doubt part of the reason his time in the Cariboo was so short. Their group spent a total of two weeks at their destination, Antler Creek, and Champness dedicates just one paragraph to it! But the trip back to the coast is quite interesting in terms of his observations about the settlements and his predictions for their growth. And at Lytton they are invited to spend the night in a pit house, which he describes in (for him) quite a bit of detail.

So, not exactly the serendipitous rare find I thought at first, but definitely something I'm glad to have around, and from a printer I'd been curious about.

October's reads and buys

Oh, hi. Oh, hell, more like it. I went home, I came back, things got a bit busy. Here's a little update on some of my readings & buyings since my last dispatch:

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
I was about a hundred pages from the end of Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom (which has been reviewed pretty exhaustively all over the place, so I won't get into it here), when I left for Vancouver and couldn't quite rationalize lugging it along. So I left it in Halifax and bought a very beat-up copy of The Adventures..., which includes the first twelve Holmes stories, from the airport bookstore during my stopover in Toronto. Although I'm sure I appear anything but, I always feel oddly streamlined when I travel alone, and mysteries with aloof, intrepid sleuths seem to fit my mood while skulking around airports. Although the tight turnaround of each case is pretty satisfying, I'm keen now to check out Holmes in novel length.

Stranger Wycott's Place by John Schreiber
I found this in one of my dad's little piles of papers during my visit home. It was published a couple of years ago in New Star Books' Transmontanus series, which consists mainly of short, oddball books on various aspects of BC history and culture. This one is in the Don McKay vein of creative non-fiction, combining archival research with long tromps around the grasslands in the Cariboo region, a little north of where my parents live. There are some frustrating lapses into bland, non-specific niceties about place and connectedness that seemed more borrowed than really lived, but when he's out walking or immersed in the trail of patchy family records, piecing together Wycott's story, Schreiber's writing is quite sharp. He's also provided a good basic Cariboo reading list at the back, which I plan to revisit soonish.

Lost River by James Tate
The September issue of Poetry included an essay by Tony Hoagland recommending Tate as a poet "trafficking in disorientation" but with a strong narrative bent, and so he was on my list when I went to Powell's in Portland, Oregon. Well, actually, first I told myself I wouldn't start in the poetry section because that was where I got stuck for most of my first visit there last summer. Three hours later I realized I done the very same thing. Lost River is a Quarternote chapbook from Sarabande Books in Louisville, Kentucky. I like chapbooks and there aren't that many publishers doing them, so I picked this over the full-length collections nearby. Tate's sensibilities had me from the start. Here are the first few lines from a poem called "Making the Best of the Holidays":

Justine called on Christmas day to say she
was thinking of killing herself. I said, "We're
in the middle of opening presents, Justine...


Before I left Powell's I did squeeze in a quick jog through the North American history section, where I found a very cool letterpress book that will have its own post sometime soon(er than later).

The Anthologist

Whew. What a week. Three book launches, Word on the Street, some recuperative vegging to follow, and now where was I? The Anthologist. Briefly: everything I'd hoped a novel about poetry would be. Paul Chowder is narrator, tour guide, largely washed-up but oddly inspiring New England poet mired in the challenge of writing an introduction to an anthology of rhyming poetry. The book is a fascinating defense of formal poetry and a very apt portrait of a poet writing today. It was an indulgent read for me, full of discussion of poetics and trappings of writing life. And so funny, too, all of which is a tall order.

My copy was borrowed from a friend who teaches a first-year university poetry course and it was fun to try to guess what she might be planning to teach from each of the pages she'd folded over. What she could have taught: meter, a basic who's-who of American poets, how to blast through a bout of writer's block. It's all there.

Because I am feeling rather lazy tonight, in lieu of any more of my less-than-inspired thoughts on the matter, I offer instead this great nine-minute recording of Nicholson Baker talking about the process of writing the book:



*

On Wednesday I head home to BC for an extra-long Thanksgiving and then down to Portland, Oregon. I hope to stop off at some bookstores in my travels. First, the very new Sitka Books & Art in Vancouver, just opened last month by one of the former owners of Duthie's Books which finally, sadly closed its last store earlier this year. Also Powell's City of Books in Portland where I will likely while away most of a day. Can't wait.

Elizabeth Bishop

Work has been occupying all my desk-sitting, typing inclinations for the last little while here, so I thought I'd share a bit of what I've been up to 9 to 5. One of the books I've been editing recently is a short biography of Elizabeth Bishop by Sandra Barry, scheduled for release next spring. Bishop has generally been understood to be an American poet. She was born and died there, served a term as Poet Laureate, and won the Pulitzer Prize. But her mother's family were from Nova Scotia and she spent formative years here, and many of her poems draw on that time. So there's been a growing movement to have her better recognized as a Nova Scotian--hence the book.

When I first started reading Sandra's manuscript, I realized how much I liked Bishop's poetry, and at the same time how little of it I'd actually read. So I've decided to do what Bishop herself advised doing with poets one likes, and read all her published work. I've started not at the beginning, but with what was handiest, the one collection I already own, her last, called Geography III. It contains a few of her best-known poems, including "The Moose" and "In the Waiting Room." I think what I like most about Bishop's work, probably what a lot of people like about it, is the thinking out loud she does toward figuring out her own sense of being, of being a person separate from others, and toward formulating the best descriptions of things. There is some conversational fumbling that happens right on the page, and in the process she manages an intimacy without getting gossipy. Even if you're not a poetry reader, I recommend checking out her work. You might be surprised.

The publication of the biography coincides with the celebrations planned for Bishop's centenary. If you're already a Bishop fan or if you want to know more, the Bishop Society of Nova Scotia has set up a frequently updated blog, with all sorts of interesting reading--musings from some of the artists who have stayed at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, NS, and posts by Sandra and other Society members about Bishop's life and work, with a focus on her Nova Scotia connection: elizabethbishopcentenary.blogspot.com

The Klondike Quest

Toward the end of a Value Village trip a couple of months ago I found a copy of The Klondike Quest, and although the dust jacket and binding were both a bit beaten up, it's a nice collection of photos to have around, so I decided to grab it. The text is by Pierre Berton and the design by Frank Newfeld (former art director and VP at McClelland & Stewart, Alligator Pie illustrator extraordinaire and more recently author of a memoir, Drawing on Type, also on my to-read list). Barbara Sears did the photo research and although I don't know anything else about her, photo research is task I have recently discovered I loathe and it must have been a monster job for this book, so she gets special mention here. I haven't read it all the way through, but it's in my bedside stack and I like paging through the photos when I'm between books or too tired for a proper before-bed read.

The town where I grew up was on the Gold Rush Trail and I was kind of weary of the subject by the time I moved away for university. Or weary, at least, of the various efforts to resuscitate its allure for the tourist market. Efforts which included planting gold-painted boulders and plywood cancan dancers on the town's outskirts. You get the idea. I've more or less made peace with the tackiness but it took me a long while to regain any appetite for books or movies to do with that era. However, in addition to The Klondike Quest, I have also lately begun watching the HBO show Deadwood, which aired a few years ago. Along with the period costumes and grit, which are their own draw I suppose, the show has exceptional dialogue. A far cry from the script used in the reenactments (oh yes, there were those too) put on every summer in our fair village. Printing enthusiasts will also appreciate the scenes that take place in the shop of the town's newspaper publisher and job printer A. W. Merrick (one of the handful of characters based on real people, in case you feel like diving down that rabbit hole).

So things have been right pioneering around here lately. But it's still hot and I do intend to get back to the remainder of the summer book club list before the season's out. Just you wait.

Islands of Books, and the "book book" sub-genre

I am officially playing hooky from book club. It's been two weeks now and although I have technically started Infinite Jest and it does indeed appear to be worth reading, I can't seem to commit to carting its bulk around the apartment for the two or three weeks it will realistically require. Today I turned to the ultimate antidote: a book about reading (Anne Fadiman, Alberto Manguel-style). I've been trying to decide how similar this activity is to, say, a football player watching old game tapes in the off-season, and have decided the player would have to be at least up off the couch occasionally, perhaps rehearsing a throw or two. But there might be beer and chips on hand as well. I like book books for compiling new lists of things to read, for getting my bearings in a particular region's literary output, or as a prompt to finally open a classic I've been sort of vaguely pretending to have a cursory knowledge of. There can, though, I think, be too much of this good thing, and generally by the time I've finished a book book I'm ready to get back into the deep end, take the training wheels off, what have you. I find the worst examples from this sub-genre can occasionally wind up feeling a bit precious, proclaiming a love for books over and over again without really sparking an interest on the part of the reader-once-removed for any of the books apparently loved.

Lawrence Clark Powell's Islands of Books is not one these worst, however. The fifteen essays in it cover Powell's extensive research on the work of D. H. Lawrence, as well as Melville, Whitman, Durrell, and his immersion in the California and Southwest literary landscape. Although I haven't read all of the books he discusses, what I really appreciate is the emphasis he puts on the places he was when he first read each book, and his descriptions of how each location continues to inform his later returns to the work. This is something I've always found fascinating, because your location can have very little to do with the reading material, but it gets so firmly lodged in memories of it that it becomes a second layer of setting. I remember in my last year of university taking a Shakespeare class that turned out to have a fairly ambitious syllabus. One of my housemates wasn't home all that often and I did a lot of the reading in the hammock he had strung up in his room. I'm actually a little surprised still that the hammock was able to support both me and that giant forest-green Norton anthology. Some of those plays--Julius Caesar, Coriolanus--for me will always be set as much in the courtyards and squares Shakespeare supplied as in the diamond pattern of the string at the foot end of Jason's hammock. Powell gets that and he, I think quite rightly, makes something more of it than a passing anecdote.

Islands of Books was one of my Benson, AZ, finds from last fall (I think you can actually see in the photo I've posted where my sweaty paw discoloured a bit of the uncoated cover stock. It was a hot one.) The book is a beauty design-wise. It's a 1991 reprint of the 1951 original, and was published by Dawson's Book Shop in Los Angeles. It was typeset by Ward Ritchie, who I've previously had trouble finding much information about online, but lo, my latest search has just turned up another book published by Dawson's, all about Ritchie's design and print work, available to order from the Oak Knoll website. I'll have to go tell my credit card the bad news. Really, how can I be expected to keep up with a prescribed reading list when stumbling down rabbit holes is so much more exciting?

Intra-curricular reading

After finishing up with The Count last week, I wolfed down a pair of books purchased at the same time (and that were looking pretty tempting by the time old Edmund had finished meting out the last of his many vile plots): Stet: An Editor's Life by Diana Athill and The King's English: Adventures of an Independent Bookseller by Betsy Burton. One is about a job I do and love, and the other about a job I think I'd like and hope to try sometime later in this lifetime.

Stet had been recommended by a fellow editor at a small publishing house and as soon as I started it I understood why he'd recommended it. It was uncanny how similar aspects of Athill's early working experience were to my own and probably to those of many other employees in the small publishing world. The first half is dedicated to her time with Andre Deutsch (British publishers of Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Mordecai Richler, Norman Mailer, and many famous others), the second half to her relationships with several of the authors she worked with over the years. Well worth reading if you've done any editing or if you've ever been curious about the process.

The King's English is a bookstore in Salt Lake City, Utah, established in the late seventies and still going fairly strong, I believe. Burton discusses the conversation that launched the shop, their first orders to publishers, and their more recent struggle to survive the big box and internet onslaught. The book also dovetails neatly with my Southwest fascination because of its location. The shop has hosted readings and signings by Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, Tony Hillerman, among others, and there is a great chapter devoted to the regional scene. Although I found Burton's voice a little punchy in places, on the whole the book was a heartening read for someone like me who will readily admit to possessing very little in the way of business sense but has always fantasized about owning a bookshop. (Then again, I suppose to someone less optimistic about the industry it might just as well read as a treatise on why such a venture should be avoided entirely.)

The Count of Monte Cristo: Report from the halfway point

Book club is underway now, and I've been charging through The Count of Monte Cristo (or The Big M.C., as my sister called it when we last compared notes) as fast as my little eyes can go. Two things: 1. This is a bloody long book, but 2. a much lighter and more engaging read than I was expecting. It's billed as an adventure after all, a story of revenge, and like many novels written at that time (about 1844) it first appeared in serialized form. So there are cliffhangers, and a certain predictability to all the hanging does develop (every new character will, however vague and unlikely seeming their initial proximity to the Count, eventually either run into him personally or be connected to him via his long con. revenge plot), but it's drawn me in. It's all very no holds barred and, well, vengeful. It's refreshing. Cathartic. This is why I studied Classics. Why open your heart and forgive when you can make them pay? Then there are all the peripheral perks: If the hero is going to be rich, why not make him endlessly so? And why settle for some pedestrian, street-level hideaway when you can have a grotto on an island? It's sort of as if Paul Auster or Haruki Murakami were to abandon the very last vestiges of reality and really go for it.

The cast is rather large, and I have had to do some flipping back and forth to remind myself whose stepfather initially did what to the Count. Which in turn has made me glad I didn't rip the first three hundred or so pages off the front of the book when they threatened to detach from their shoddy binding last week. However, if I do have to amputate, I see Wikipedia has a handy diagram connecting all the characters. It does give away a few plot turns, but a sampling of the connections themselves give you a sense of the high stakes involved: wants to marry, kills, sells, poisons, poisons (but doesn't kill), raises with sister-in-law, tries to assassinate, runs away in a scandalous lesbian relationship with. It's heavy. I should really get back.

P. K. Page for tea

When I was about eleven my gran took me with her to hear P. K. Page reading from Brazilian Journal, her memoir of the time she and her husband, a Canadian diplomat, spent in Brazil during his posting there. The reading was in a one-room art gallery in West Vancouver, a few minutes' drive from my gran's house, and almost every time I've seen her since then my gran has mentioned how much she wanted to have Page over for tea after the reading, and how she'll always wish she'd just gone ahead and invited her.

A couple of years ago I finally read Brazilian Journal myself. A lot of it concerns setting up and keeping house in a humid climate and the many social engagements required of a diplomat and his wife, but I think the most interesting passages are Page's reports on her development as a visual artist. The book includes several of her sketches and paintings, and it's quite fascinating to read about her efforts (failed and successful) at capturing various subjects -- plants, animals, rooms, different kinds of daylight.

When she died this past January I realized that with the exception of a few samples from anthologies, I hadn't really read much of her poetry, so I picked up a copy of The Essential P. K. Page, a selection edited by Arlene Lampert and Théa Gray and published by Porcupine's Quill in 2008. The poems included are all very tightly wound and lyrical, and Page seems to have a precise sense of how far to push a series of internal rhymes and associative sounds before it leaves the realm of natural speech and becomes a game played only for its own sake. I have to admit I didn't enjoy all of it. There are pieces I found almost too refined, without an angle into the thought process at work or the tension of getting it down in these lines. But the ones that did strike me will, I think, stay with me for a long time. "A Backwards Journey" describes the childhood experience of finding infinity on a box of Dutch Cleanser that pictures a woman holding a can of Dutch Cleanser and on that can another woman holding another can, and so on. (For me it was the kid in shorts on the Borax box.) Here are the final few lines:

I think I knew that if no one called
and nothing broke the delicate jet
of my attention, that tiny image
could smash the atom of space and time.

(I wish we'd invited her back for tea.)

An Almost Canadian Southwest Writer

(Note the rumpled-bedsheet background. We've had company on our couch the past few days, hence the lack of bloggage.)

Took a trip down to J. W. Doull used bookstore last weekend and although I didn't find any of the summer book club picks, the initial reason for my visit, I did leave with a few other good finds: Wallace Stegner's essay collection Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West; Lawrence Thornton's novel Imagining Argentina, set during the years of the "disappeareds" in the 1970s and 80s; and A Piece of My Heart, some earlier Richard Ford I've had on my list for a while.

While waiting for my book club parcel from Powell's to arrive (I'm feeling awfully conscious of having introduced book club here and not yet begun the reading -- a common book club ailment, I've heard) I got started on the Stegner. It's a combination of natural history, desert politics (water usage, dams, parks), and a scan of the region's literature. I'm starting to feel pretty at home in these cruises through lists of Southwest authors. There's something pretty satisfying in getting your footing in a new territory, particularly when the reading is entirely extra-curricular.

Although I came to Stegner's work via the Southwest route, in reading this collection I've discovered (belatedly) that his family lived in Eastend, Saskatchewan, near the Cypress Hills, for about five years between 1914 and 1920. If they'd had another good year or two farming he might have stayed for good. He's written about the Cypress Hills area in his book Wolf Willow, and I just (just this minute) discovered that a group of writers actually purchased the house his father built and operate it as an artist retreat, much like Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, NS. Huh.

Frye Festival, Richard Ford

It's Tuesday and I always seem to be a little wired when I get home from my letterpress class. Last night was much more sedate, but I did find an excellent interview on Youtube -- Globe and Mail Books editor Martin Levin interviewing fiction writer Richard Ford at the Frye Festival in Moncton, NB, in 2008 -- so while I'm feeling owlish I'll give you the link. This is to part one of seven, each about ten minutes long. If you have the time, it's worth it. I was in the midst of roaring through Ford's Frank Bascombe trilogy (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land) at the time of the festival, and found out a few weeks later. Was I mad when I found out he'd been within about three hours of my house? Um. Yes. I was mad through the first two or three segments of the video over two years later. How much does it cost to hire someone to just keep you from doing (or not doing) things like this?

Clubbing

The titles are all in for the family summer book club. There are two 1,000+ pagers on there, so that should be interesting. I toyed with suggesting Don Quixote. The new-ish Edith Grossman translation has been on the shelf for a few years, but I foolishly thought it would be rejected in favour of shorter reads. Now who feels like the lightweight? I went with The Anthologist, which I’m still keen to read, especially having read a couple of great reviews. Here’s the list, arranged in descending order by weight:

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck
Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker

Shortly after I bullied my way into book club I discovered The Rumpus.net and their summer book club. Clearly I won’t have time, but I like the idea, mainly because I like it when things come in the mail. They almost seem free by the time they arrive, and it’s always a little miraculous that they do arrive.

A couple of years ago I read Al Silverman’s The Time of Their Lives, about the three-martini-lunch days of publishing in the United States. It was a good overview, but an entire book could be (and in some cases has been) written about almost all of the publishers included, and I don’t know that I retained much of the whirlwind tour, in spite of the author’s enthusiastic telling. Silverman was CEO of the Book of the Month Club for several years, so it also overlaps with the club's own heyday. I believe Book of the Month still exists in some form, but I don't think it's the institution it used to be.

I’ve sometimes wondered if a poetry-specific subscription program could fly. I have a handful of publishers (Coach House, Vehicule, Gaspereau, Porcupine’s Quill, Counterpoint, Graywolf, Faber) whose poetry lists I keep an eye on, but only a small fraction of their titles ever make it to my shelf, mainly because in between (often) not finding them at my local seller and trying very hard to give my business to independent bookshops which are becoming increasingly fewer and further between and not keeping a list in my pocket and not actively acquiring the sorts of gadgetry that would allow me to be reminded, say, hourly of the books I want and my ranging proximity to a store that might have them in stock…I simply forget to buy them. What if a third party made a selection of twelve titles a year and offered the package at a small discount (small—I'm forgetful, not cheap)? This requires more thought. Or maybe just the swift and unambiguous kibosh from someone with business sense!