matthewgruman.com

From the back cover:

One night in April, after a Sunday soccer game, Alan Twigg, a writer, couldn’t remember the names of his two sons or his wife—and he couldn’t hold a pen. After a scan at the Emergency, he learned he had a large brain tumour squeezed against the motor cortex. Intensive Care tells the story of why this was a good thing.

This is a really touching collection of poems. Twigg found himself losing the tools that make him who he is (i.e. his ability to write and think); this book follows his journey to once again reach normalcy.

Many of the poems are accompanied by his child-like handwriting; written as he was still relearning that skill. You get to see what he was thinking, pre-edit, and how a few words scrawled on paper can become a truly beautiful piece of art. You get to witness his change in priorities from when he thinks he’s about to die, to a period of extreme self-reflection, and finally dealing with everything that happened and coming out the other side.

Shortstop

I knew for certain
things were going to be okay
when this brown clipboard
slipped from the hospital bed
and I caught it reflexively
before it hit the floor
like the shortstop I used to be.

You can buy Intensive Care directly through Anvil Press.

rob mclennan is nominated for this year’s 2008 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere award; I strongly suggest you vote for him. If you haven’t read his work, there is a wealth of content on his website. Aside from his poetry, I can’t think of another individual Canadian who does so much to help promote his peers. The 12 or 20 interviews are a personal favourite.

• aggressively un-nice person
• curse word synonymous with “unbelievable jerk” that begins with the letter A
• epithet that begins with the first letter of the alphabet
• buttocks personified
• human derrieres
• scatalogical body part
• a-hole
• rectal
• orifice
• disagreeable people
• excretory opening
• scatalogical body part
• posterior portal
• the word we have refrained from printing thus far in this interview
• begins with A, you figure it out

Quill Blog.

I think a lot about the magazine industry. I work for an academic literary journal, which isn’t really the same thing as a magazine, but there is a lot of overlap between the two. An important part of my job is keeping on top of what’s going on in the industry and figuring out ways to apply and develop good ideas into something usable for us. Anyway, a couple blog posts got me thinking more than usual about the way magazines work online.

Masthead Online

Masthead Online is the online extension of Masthead: the Canadian magazine about the Canadian magazine industry. They relaunched yesterday with a ton of new web-friendly features including, finally!, the removal of its pay wall. But I spent some time looking around today, and wow is it cluttered. A four-column web layout! The information, as per usual with Masthead, is the top of the tops but I can’t see myself returning very often. I also don’t read Folio very much because of the clutter (I just noticed it also has a four-column layout! What is going on here?).

One of their big sells is the MastheadOnline Forums, with the Independent Publishing section moderated by “Michael Brooke, member of the Independent Publishers Association of Ontario (IPAO) and publisher of Concrete Wave magazine.” This I don’t get. Michael’s certainly active, even posting what turned into a very awkward (to read) discussion with Masthead’s editor about Adbusters not getting on the 20 Most Influential Mags list, but this is Masthead and I can’t see the relevance. I don’t read Masthead to discus what my magazine would be if it was a song; that’s why I read personal blogs. I read Masthead for industry news.

Paperless Offices

A post by Vaivoda, someone who works in publishing, got me thinking about my office’s effortless to move into a paperless environment. There’s such a push for journals and magazines to have web content right now, but there’s really no good way to do it yet. I’ve been exploring the options that have been made available to the industry and, objectively, they’re awful. In an effort to wrap my head around the system we’ve decided to use, I’ve had to spend a ridiculous amount of time just learning how to parse their documentation. I’ve had to create my own print out training manuals for each individual who will use it because nothing is clear enough. We’ve wasted a lot of time and paper trying to save time and paper.

Confusion

I think the industry’s confused. I don’t think it understands the Internet. I still see magazines who claim to be “online”, but just link to a PDF. I think that Canada has an incredible magazine/journal industry that deserves world-wide recognition. We have online magazines like The Tyee, great magazine blogs like Quill and Quire’s, and print magazines like Geist who seem to understand what it means to publish online better than the rest of us.

What can be done? Lead by example? A couple days ago, I think I thought that was enough. I’ve been talking a lot lately with a friend who is trying to start a literary magazine and its eventual website. There is a lot of misunderstanding between us (probably due to statements of mine like “If you use the WYSIWYG view in Dreamweaver, I won’t be your friend anymore”) about how one should be online, but it’s definitely helped me understand the argument of shitty magazine websites.

Magazines need websites. Tools like Dreamweaver make it really easy to make websites if you know print design. People with magazines tend to know print design, so they make their own sites. The problem is that web design and print design aren’t the same thing and most people don’t know that. When you really enjoy a website, it’s probably not because it looks good, but because it works. You understand what you need from it, and how to get that; same as a magazine (think about the disconnect when you pick up a magazine without a table of contents). Transferring print technique to the web, while hopefully resulting in beautiful typography and white space, usually is a colossal failure.

Beyond immediate problems like poor site searching, unintuitive menus, and inappropriate fonts, there’s also an entire world going on behind the scenes that most people won’t ever (need to) know. Most magazine websites I see are coded horrendously. They’re inaccessible to screen readers, use all kinds of proprietary code, and rarely degrade gracefully. This is equivalent to publishing your magazine at Kinko’s, but people know that you won’t get a good product at Kinko’s.

What To Do?

In general, I don’t know. The people who would be in a position to make a big impact are obviously as confused as everyone else. I’d love to see Magazines Canada learning how, and then creating a series of tutorials on how to make a good magazine website. I want to see more magazines using Wordpress for their online presence. Hire a university student and $500 later you’ll have a site you can administer yourself, submits itself to search engines, and has already worried about accessibility issues. I want to see Masthead Online get a complete redesign by someone who knows what design means on the Internet.

I want to get the same passion from reading online magazines that I do from reading print and it’s just not happening.

It’s possible to (mis)use all seven words in a one-sentence book report: “Mario Puzo’s intriguing novel eschews the lyrical as the author instead crafts a poignant tale of family life and muses on the compelling doings of the Mob.”
[emphasis mine. mg]

From Papercuts, via Quill.

We’re losing our freedom right now and we’re too numb to care.

Douglas Coupland

As a Vancouverite, I feel a strong urge to like Douglas Coupland’s work. I’ve written about this before and have claimed that I won’t read another Coupland novel–this is a stage adaptation of his short story collection, “Life After God”–because I simply don’t enjoy them.

So why bother reading this one at all? Well I really, really like the jPod TV show. A lot. I watched the first episode because I just wanted a valid opinion, but I ended up thoroughly enjoying it and have watched most of them. Michael Lewis MacLellan is a writer on that series, so I figured reading his adaptation would be enlightening and maybe I’d find a greater appreciation of Coupland. Not so.

Inauthenticity

I’ve tried really hard to zero in on what is it I dislike about Coupland’s stories and I think it’s a lack of authenticity. The compliments I hear about his work almost exclusively focus on his use of regionalism–this is true; the city of Vancouver is very accurately represented–but never really touch on the rest. I have a hard time believing in any of his characters, and when it’s a story as “deep” as this one, I think you have to.

jPod (the TV show, I haven’t read the book), on the other hand, revels in its inauthenticity. Everyone knows that they work at EA, everyone knows that Alan Thicke’s character would never get a young girl like that, and everyone knows that the average Vancouver pot grower isn’t like the ridiculously-attractive-for-a-mother Sherry Miller. While quotes from “Life After God” like the one above come off as pithy, when Cowboy’s character in jPod says “there’s now a fear that never leaves and people are starting to realize that no one is in charge anymore” in response to “what’s changed in the last seven years?”, it’s actually jarring enough to make an impact.

jPod

So now I want to read jPod. It feels like self-sabotage, but I still want to do it. I’ve always thought that Coupland’s “Souvenir of Canada” books were the best things he produced, so I guess it makes sense that it takes a different medium to enjoy his books.

Note to self: being cynical and depressed about things has never made them better.

Jacob Wren’s “Familes are Formed Through Copulation” (Pedlar Press, 2007) is a collection of “political parables and they seem like someone’s legitimate plea for something other than inaction” (Dan Bejar, Destroyer). Wary as I am of musician endorsements on books, I was a bit tentative about this one. But I loved the title, the fact that it was a stage production (“La famille se creé en copulant / Families Are Formed Through Copulation by PME in Montreal in co-diffusion with Usine C (Montréal) and in co-production with the Forum Freies Theatre (Düsseldorf), and that it’s beautiful (like a lot of Pedlar Press books — maybe all? — the typography is amazing and the paper is high quality. Congrats to Zab Design & Typography, Winnipeg.); so I picked it up.

I’m glad I did, because Dan Bejar couldn’t be more right. His back cover review continues:

But amidst the sound of all this rational discourse, it really just feels like the noise of someone completely losing it! The paranoia is infectious [...] I felt better after reading this book! Which is only a little weird, because I think like any good book, it demands to be read incorrectly…

A big part of reading the book is making sense out of what you’re reading. There are enough character similarities between the stories to make you think it’s some post-post-modern version of a novel, but there’s a nagging insistence (the paranoia maybe?) constantly screaming “no ,this is not a novel! The characters’ similarities don’t matter! Stop trying so hard and just read!”

The second story, A short parable concerning the state of Israel, prepares the reader:

Daughter breaks curfew again and is grounded. The television is on in the other room. We have seen this all before. It’s familiar. One night father steps into his daughter’s room while she is sleeping and quietly rapes her. She screams and mother pretends not to hear. We have all seen this before. It is extremely unpleasant but sadly it is not shocking. Like goes on. The paper comes in the morning. Coffee is made. One weekend, when father is away on business, his daughter quietly slips in the master bedroom and brutally rapes her own mother. Once again mother remains silent. Pretends not to hear. Pretends.

From this point on, there are honest descriptions of family life, world politics, protest, and even indie rock. Wren manages to approach all these subjects, from the serious to the silly, with a level of familiarity and understanding you don’t see very often in fiction(?). Instead of story-telling, you really get a sense of the writer-as-character slipping into paranoia as he starts realizing that all these mundane events stack up into something real. Something substantial and potentially terrifying.

All told, this is a cry at humanity to start looking at themselves and their surroundings. It’s the kind of book that makes the perpetual thinker feel like maybe their paranoia is warranted. Maybe if enough of the paranoid get together, they can formulate a plan, and all the woes they see in the world will disappear. Highly recommended to anyone who considers themself a thinker.

Photo Source: EYE WEEKLY.

My friend, Grace O’Connell (recently short-listed for the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers) is runner-up in the EYE WEEKLY Short Story Contest for her story, “Annie, You Foolish Girl, I Love You”.

Last night, she took part in the “This Is Not a Reading Series.” In her words:

they did a dramatic reading of each of our stories last night and then asked us some questions on stage
i was extremely funny

In EYE WEEKLY’s words:

Grace O’Connell, 23, is another inveterate contest winner, taking the grand prize in This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt along with finalist status in the BC Bronwen Wallace Prize for Emerging Writers. It’s a favourable turn of events for someone who recently graduated from the publishing program at Humber College, imagining herself as part of the book business more than a professional writer.

Annie, You Foolish Girl, I Love You

“Why do you think you can just come here like this?” she said.

“You invited me.”

She nodded, a convulsion that started jerky and smoothed itself into a rocking motion.

“If you keep saying no, eventually I’ll stop asking.”

“I didn’t say anything,” I said.

I said I loved her, but not out loud. The breath was frozen in my throat.

From “Annie, You Foolish Girl, I Love You”.

Avi Boxer was a Montreal East-end poet who flourished during the 1950’s literary foment alongside A.M. Klein, F.R. Scott, Louis Dudek, Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen.

An email came to me at work about an incredible collection of photos, The Avi Boxer Archives, made available through Véhicule Press. The picture above is Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, and Avi himself. Visit the site for more.

The online content for Canadian Literature’s latest issue is online. You can read the Book Reviews and Poetry, and see the Table of Contents.