Did I mention

that I have a bit of a

sweet tooth?

Taken in a candy store in St. Albans, New York.

"This tour of Arion Press in San Francisco showcases one of the last traditional book-making facilities in the United States where all the processes take place under one roof: the hot metal type foundry, letterpress printing facility, and hand bookbinding studio. Originally featured on the A&E Open Book program, this tour features the Arion Press Folio Bible, probably the last Bible to be printed from metal type in the tradition of Gutenberg."

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc64ycPmSqo

Part 2 of the tour focuses on the Monotype foundry:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4q5C8Kgn4g

"The Grabhorn Institute was formed in 2000 in order to preserve and perpetuate the use of one of the last integrated typefoundry, letterpress printing, and bookbinding facilities and to guide it into the future. A nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, it is the owner of Arion Press and M & H Type." You can contribute here.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-E1J5Espus

From Mr. Wikipedia: "In 2002, McEwan discovered that he had a brother who had been given up for adoption during World War II; the story became public in 2007.^[10] The brother, a bricklayer named David Sharp, was born six years earlier than McEwan, when his mother was married to a different man. Sharp has the same two parents as McEwan but was born from an affair between McEwan’s parents that occurred before their marriage. After her first husband was killed in combat, McEwan’s mother married her lover, and Ian was born a few years later.^[11] The two are in regular contact, and McEwan has written a foreword to Sharp’s memoir."

As is his wont, Andrew Seal succeeds in this post, as in many others, to cloud and complicate clarity. With patented verbosity he takes many paragraphs to make one cheap, misinformed point; only sentences at the beginning to make another.Lodged directly beneath the title of his essay “James Wood’s McEwan Problem,” Seal writes: "the fact that Wood’s name is so totemic that it must be in the title of the essay…rather than in a byline is absolutely ridiculous. Does anyone else get this treatment?"

Countless paragraphs later we get:

"The problem is, Wood is still caught in the idea of manipulation as a head-fake: feint one way, go the other. And this excessively simplistic definition of manipulation holds him up from conceiving of other possible interactions and transactions between the writer and the reader, and the writer and the text. Wood appears to assume that McEwan’s "wanting it both ways" means that there are only two ways to have it—that one can only write thrillerish fiction dedicated to surprise and overdetermined "turning points" or one can write a fiction that is more open to representing "life’s limitless messiness." By being smart enough about the first kind, maybe one can attain the deeper truths of the second, but these are the writer’s options.”

Wood doesn’t give us an ‘excessively simplistic definition of manipulation,’ he merely points out, in his London Review of Books article what McEwan is doing in his novel Black Dogs:  “McEwan exaggerates the dastardliness of fiction’s manipulations, and conflates his kind of storytelling with storytelling in general. A rather extreme binarism is thus established, in which the reader is pushed between an absolute trust in fiction’s form-making power, and an absolute scepticism of it.”

Seal in his ignorance, accuses Wood of what Wood has just identified in McEwan. As Wood puts it: “This arraignment of fiction is problematic.”

Seal then proceeds to sound off against life:

“whether or not it is true, this formulation "life is far more complex, more untidy than fiction can be or wants to be" becomes part of the fiction that we create by imagining what our life is in relation to the lives of others. I think McEwan understands that very well, which is a large part of what he’s doing with the characters who chafe at fiction’s tidiness.”

Ignoring how confused the first sentence is (other people’s lives are simplistic fantasy?), let’s look at what Wood says to the second:

“It is all very well for the narrator of Black Dogs, or for Henry Perowne, to object to the fakery of ‘turning points’ in fiction, but they are themselves embedded in books devoted to such mechanisms.”

If McEwan understands ‘this,’ why then are his ‘irresistible stories,’ though intelligent and well written, so often thick with tidy, overly manicured plots?  

Finally another head scratcher: Seal objects that James Wood’s

“ insistence on "life’s limitless messiness" and its profusion of "loose endings" isn’t so much a reminder of life’s difference from fiction as it is a preference for events small enough to create only loose endings, secrets small enough not to create turning points. Those things too exist, but they aren’t what distinguish fiction from life.”

Who knows what this means?

If it means that fiction can be just as messy as life,  and  that the capturing of minute detail is good, but great and grand when  wedded seamlessly to engrossing,  ‘realistic’ life-changing, life-explaining (to both character and reader) uncontrived plot then, I suppose I agree with him.

But it’s just as likely I don’t, given how his prose, as in life, so often leaves one at loose ends, able only to conjecture at its meaning.

This from contemporary writers: One of South Africa’s most distinguished writers, André Brink was born in 1935. Poet, novelist, essayist and teacher, he began work as a University lecturer in Afrikaans and Dutch Literature in the 1960s. He began writing in Afrikaans, but when censored by the South African government, began to also write in English and became published overseas. He remains a key figure in the modernisation of the Afrikaans language novel.

His book, A Dry White Season (1979), was made into a film starring Marlon Brando while An Instant in the Wind (1976), the story of a relationship between a white woman and a black man, and Rumours of Rain (1978) were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.  Devil’s Valley (1998) explores the life of a community locked away from the rest of the world, and The Other Side of Silence (2002), set in colonial Africa in the early twentieth century, won a Commonwealth Writers regional award for Best Book in 2003. He has also written a collection of essays on literature and politics, Reinventing a Continent (1996), prefaced by Nelson Mandela. 

He is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. His latest novels are Praying Mantis (2005) and The Blue Door (2007). His memoir, A Fork in the Road, has just been published.

I met Andre Brink recently at his home in Cape Town. (His lovely young wife Karina greeted me at the door and led me into his book-lined study. Before entering the house however, I encountered this in the garden:

). Once seated we talked mostly about his life, about his father, about love and duty, justice, Apartheid, inter-racial sex, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer; his love affair with poet Ingrid Jonker, her suicide, her poem ‘Plant me a Tree,’ English as his second language, Picasso, recommended wines and staying in South Africa, despite his nephew having been shot dead by intruders last year at his home just north of Johannesburg.

Please listen here:

Copyright © 2009 by Nigel Beale. www.nigelbeale.com

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I asked Stephanie Rea, Minister James Moore’s press secretary at the Department of Heritage this question recently. Here, via an email from Media Relations Advisor Charles Drouin is the answer:

"No…support to extremely small titles will be limited by a requirement that these titles must sell at least 5 000 copies per annum (not per issue) to be eligible for support under the new Canada Periodical Fund formula. This means the title must sell a grand total of 5 000 copies over the course of the year, through all sources—newsstand as well as subscription. For example, a quarterly magazine (published four times a year) with 1 000 paid subscribers and 251 newsstand sales per issue would still be eligible (4 × 1 251 = 5 004 copies sold during the year, which makes the title eligible). This policy takes into account a recommendation from the 2005 summative evaluation of the Publications Assistance Program that noted that there were significant administrative costs to manage extremely small amounts of funding for extremely small periodicals." (my bolding) 

The reason I bold in the first instance is to emphasize that this 5,000 figure does not refer to circulation, but rather to number of copies sold over the course of a year…certainly a more reasonable figure to work with.  Or, going with the example cited above: is this country of 36 odd million so little concerned with literature that literary journals with paid circulation of over 1000 distributed once a quarter, just aren’t viable? If so, isn’t this a depressing statement on how little Canadians actually care about the literary, and on how inconveniently small – minute – Canada’s literary pond actually is?

Granted, quality not quantity is what should be used as a criteria to determine magazine funding, but at some level popular appeal – any kind of appeal – should also surely be considered. I don’t agree that ‘popularity’ should be the measure of a magazine’s worth, or of eligibility for public funds. Quite the contrary…public money is often most required where the market place fails to adequately meet societal needs, regardless of how “significant” administrative costs might be. And public money should certainly not be dispensed only to those whose world view parallels that of the party in power, or indeed only to profitable publications…but requiring evidence of at least some readership, is, I think justified when it comes to handing over government funds.

And paid circulation of 1000 doesn’t seem too outlandish, especially when you consider that websites, such as this one, dedicated to the discussion of books and literature, enjoy (at least according to Cystats)  in the neighbourhood of 30,000-40,000 unique visits per month (which reminds me: Time to replay this self-serving funding-for-literary-blogs tape).

I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but there is I think a connection between quality, and success in the marketplace, even if we are talking literary products. And a connection too between the low readership of literary magazines and how cheaply, as John Metcalf points out here, Canadians hold the First Editions of books written by their greatest writers.

…from the excellent Helen Gardner:

"Critics are wise to leave alone those works which they feel a crusading itch to attack and writers whose reputations they feel a call to deflate. Only too often it is not the writer who suffers ultimately but the critic

The man recover’d of the bite

The dog it was that died

When the dust and flurry of the argument has subsided, the writer has not been ‘dislodg’d’. He is still there:

Still green with bays each ancient Altar stands

Above the reach of sacriligious hands."

Which is great and poetic and all, however, is silence enough? Is it enough just to praise what is good, and ignore what is bad? Surely, it’s preferable, instead of abdicating responsibility, to tell the truth?  Yes, leave the field if the urge to attack and deflate can’t be held in check, but otherwise, identify both good and bad, compare the two, and to try explain what makes them so and why. Reserve superlatives for the superlative. Use the superlative to improve the improvable.

NLCS

Okay. Let’s try blowing this ‘best’ business back into proportion.

I’m perfectly aware that there is no such thing as ‘best’ when it comes to a work of art. Okay? But I also agree with the brilliant Helen Gardner when she says that the primary act of criticism is judgment: determination of whether or not a work has significance or value. And that the way judgement is exercised is through the rationalization of felt value. What the work says, how it says it, and why what it says is important to us.

This ‘best’ business is simply a way of goading people into describing and defending why they may or may not think a work has value, and in so doing, of getting them to assist others in finding or not finding the same.

As for trying to demonstrate that one work has more value, or is better than another…well, of course…this is…difficult.  As Gardner puts it in The Business of Criticism:

Two persons of excellent taste and judgement may differ strongly on the relative merits of two works; and the attempts to rank writers in a literary hierarchy ignores the obvious fact that certain writers and certain works mean more to some ages and to some persons than to others, and that our responses vary very greatly with our circumstances and our age. Statements about relative values are either unnecessary, elaborate attempts to prove what cannot be proved and can only be accepted as established by the judgement of the ages, or else they are rationalizations of personal temporary tastes and prejudices.

So where does this leave  ‘the importance of agreeing upon a list of evaluative criteria’? For a future post, that’s where. Please stay tuned.

“What the Web 2.0 revolution is really delivering is superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment. The information business is being transformed by the Internet into the sheer noise of a hundred million bloggers all simultaneously talking about themselves.”

Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture

According to The Oxford English Dictionary the word amateur refers to one who loves, is fond of, or has a taste for, anything; one who cultivates anything as a pastime. But there’s also a more derogatory meaning: someone who isn’t a professional; who is unprofessional, who practices an art or science unskillfully; an unpaid dabbler; inexpert.

It is across these axes that much of the debate about information and truth on the Internet occurs.

Some months ago I engaged in a discussion with Ronan MacDonald about his book The Death of the Critic.

While it is primarily about the demise of evaluative criticism, the book does have things to say about the Internet. Thanks to blogs and burgeoning user content platforms, ("the pullulation of commentary," as MacDonald puts it), everyone today is a critic. We can all now vent and emote. Push back, blow off, swoon and fawn in public cyberspace. ‘People power’ dominates the age. This is not necessarily a good thing, according to McDonald. It’s killing off a breed of professional, educated, capital ‘C’ Critic ‘essential to the survival of culture.’

Jurgen Habermass, one of Europe’s most influential social thinkers, would agree. Here he is quoted in Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur:

“The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.”

“Any intellectual,” as Keen follows up, “is just another strident voice in the cacophony.”

Given the number of critical voices now squalling, it’s hardly surprising that intelligent, informed ones are difficult…

Read the rest at Escape Into Life.

University of Arizona Poetry Center

So says Robert Stone. It’s easy to agree with him when you read this opening to Fiskadoro:

" Here and also South of us the beaches have a yellow tint but along the Keys of Florida the sand is like shattered ivory. In the shallows the white of it turns the water such an ideal sea-blue that looking at it you think you must be dead, and the rice paddies, in some seasons, are profoundly emerald. The people who inhabit these colors, thanked be the compassion and mercy of Allah, have nothing much to trouble them. It’s true that starting a little ways north of them the bodies still just go on and on, and the Lord, as foretold, has crushed the mountains; but it’s hard to imagine that such things ever went on in the same universe that holds up the Keys of Florida. It strains all belief to think that these are the places the god Quetzalcoatl, the god Bob Marley, the god Jesus, promised to come back to and build their kingdoms. On island after island, except for the fields of cane popping in the wind, everything seems to be asleep.”