At Work Upstairs

It’s time for me to take Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur back to the library.  (There are a dozen other people on the request list.)  It’s a quick read and web chatter about it is easy to find.  It’s a very loosely argued book with wild swooping analogies that fall apart when prodded slightly.

Keen has a sanguine understanding of the publishing and newspaper business.  These two bits made me giggle.

When an article runs under the banner of a respected newspaper, we know that it has been weighted by a team of seasoned editors with years of training, assigned to a qualified reporter, researched, fact-checked, edited, proofread, and backed by a trusted news organization vouching for its truthfulness and accuracy.

Before the Web 2.0, independent media content and paid advertising existed separately, in parallel, and were easily distinguishable from each other.

Keen posits a golden age of reasonable, authoritative discourse, one that the Internet has destroyed, “flattened”, “corrupted” in its “shameless”, “narcissistic”, “shrill”, “embarrassing”, and “unseemly” antics. The target is different and the terms are less gendered but the rhetoric is near kin to that used in the late eighteenth-century to denounce novel reading, especially women’s novel reading. Novel reading, according to more conservative writers of the period, was dangerous and needed to be carefully regulated since it led to bad, bad things like challenges to paternal authority, diversion of energy, revolution, and, worst of all, sexual knowledge.

Some things, I suppose, never change.

Heather

And he’s walking around the living room in his wellies with a dust pan full of broken glass.

From his point of view, it’s a triumph that the glass was empty.

Heather

December gift giving folly is a long way off I suppose.  But is it really so far away that I can’t hint that this might be a nice addition to the oddly growing pile of crow-related reading material?

(via Bookslut)

I’m still on the look-out  for this one, but I don’t need this one or this one.

Why crows? Probably my father’s fault since he liked to claim he was going off to shoot crows when he and his buddies were headed into the woods to drink beer.  And if it wasn’t crow shooting, it was porcupine shooting. And when porcupines or crows weren’t to hand, there was beer can shooting or floating bleach bottle shooting.  The advantage of beer cans and bleach containers, I suppose, was that people wouldn’t complain that the kids where murdering animals. (Um, yes, lots of target practice. Um, yes, lots of different types of guns. Um, yes, we were all pretty good shots by the time we were 10. And, um, yes, it’s not that hard to make your own ammunition.)

Canada Day weekend we idly wandered around a craft show and flea market. Due to work-weirdness-that-shall-not-be-named, I was pretty much a zombie and forgot to bring money.  I kept bumming cash from Douglas to pick up a couple thing that fell within the Mosow Rules for shopping.

I picked up a bit of needlework that’s in bad shape–water-stained, spotted, and faded–and the condition was reflected in the price.  This was cheap and I’m unlikely to see another one.

Although this was probably intended for a pillow cover, the wear suggest that it hung in a sunny spot for a while and then later lay flat and maybe folded when it was water damaged.  It’s stitched in two types of thread–silk for the flags and cotton for the centre piece–and probably by two hands.

The flags give away the dates–it would have been stitched in Canada between 1914 and early 1917.

Patriotic Pillow - Front

And since I’m always about to get into trouble in museums by trying to look at the underside of things, here’s the back view.

Patriotic Pillow - Back

Heather

Since I’ve been a bad bad blogger, I thought I might be able to dig myself out of this hole by looking at a month’s worth of reading—you know, the stuff I was doing when I could have been blogging.

Let’s see.

There was a clutch of mysteries and I think I’d recommend Mina’s Dead Hour over Rankin’s Naming the Dead. (Wonder if she can do unto Glasgow what Ranking has done unto the literary tourism trade in Edinburgh). Seriously though, Mina’s work is worth the read—they’re character-driven mysteries and the protagonists aren’t cops or detectives or middle class. (And I’m compelled to cheer on anyone who used the money she was supposed to use to complete a doctorate to write novels).

Then there’s a clutch of science fiction.  Well, fantasy. Well Pratchett.  I’m late to Pratchett and now I’m worried that I’ll run out.  His comic punning novels are perfect anecdote to corporate angst—silly but not stupid.  I’ve polished off Thud and Night Watch and Thief of TIme is tempting me from the shelves.

There’s a surprisingly large stack of comics and graphic novels.

The storyline of  The Professor’s Daughter is less compelling than the images but there’s something interesting about a book that merges Holmesian imagery, mummies, and a romance plot.  There’s a failed romance plot or two in Chester Brown’s I Never Liked You and graphically it’s far more spare than Guibert’s work. As an antidote to some I read some of Roberta Gregory’s Life’s a Bitch—well purgative might be a better term for the protagonist’s roiling anger. Daphne Gottlieb and Diane DiMassa’s Jokes and the Unconscious is more subtle and would repay a second reading.  Ormond’s SquareCat was an antidote to the antidote and Osamu Tezuka’s Kapilavastu was puzzling in the way that works just outside your cultural references are. Must read more manga. And a Delisle—my guess is he’s never getting back into North Korea. What else.  A book for work—Made To Stick—a quick read with some straightforward suggestions. 

What else? What else? Oh yeah, a  stack of books from the shelves.  One of the dire things about being a book buyer and a book borrower is that’s wildly common for a book to be bought in the heat of interest and then to languish for months while the borrowed books are read immediately.  I finally read Faith Johnson’s biography of Dorise Nielsen which I bought at a reading several months ago.  Nielsen was the first Communist elected to the Canadian Parliament in 1940.  She ended up living in China from the early 1950s through the Cultural Revolution to her death in 1980. 

Then I tackled a stack of first novels mostly from my shelves.  Martha Gellhorn’s A Stricken Field  was her first novel—she was a short story writer and a journalist to that point—was good even if it occasionally shows Gellhorn’s struggle with a new form.  Heather Doherty’s Goody Bledsoe, blurbed by David Adams Richards, turned out to be less interesting than Ivan Coyote’s Bow Grip.

Bow Grip, like A Stricken Field, is the first novel of a short story writer but it shows less strain.  They’re very different types of books though: Gellhorn was writing in 1940 about the political and moral failure of the 1938 Munich Agreement that lead to Hitler’s rolling over Czechoslovakia. Bow Grip has a much smaller scale as its protagonist struggles with getting a grip after his life has fallen apart (good interview with Coyote here and you can get a sense of her reading style here. )

That’s about it I think except for Linda Little’s Scotch River which I’m still mulling over.  You can read Lynn Coady and ChristyAnn Conlin talk about the difficulties of reading works written about a place by incomers here. McKay’s Birth House has gotten more attention but I suspect Scotch River is the better novel.

Now, off to make supper and read some more.

Heather

Gymn class for me when I was this age was all about trying to avoid field hockey. Handing frustrated adolescents field hockey sticks and letting them have at it was hard on the ankles.

There’s something very appealing about these two forms of weightlessness.

Heather

Gordon, Carol, Donald, the chicken, Barbara

Donald looks very pleased with himself.  The chicken looks calm.  My mother and aunt look solicitous, most likely of the boy since they didn’t like the chickens.

The man taking the picture, I’ve recently learned from my mother, was probably laughing.  Vernon, it turns out, was a bit of a joker.

A three or four weeks ago I read Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006) which I enjoyed.  It’s the type of book you have to take your time with: if you expect great lashings of plot or endearing characters you’ll likely be disappointed.  But it you like steadily-paced social satire you might like it.  (The New York Times review has a good summary of the book’s themes and there’s a roundup of mostly glowing reviews here.)  The novel is drawn to a close by the events of 9/11 as the characters see themselves and the world as permanently changed.  I’m uneasy with the positioning of that one day as life-altering but I can’t quite put my finger on the reason. My reaction has something in common with my negative reaction to Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a novel that takes place in London on the day of the February peace march.  I’ll have to re-read The Emperor’s Children in a couple of years to see if I can figure it out.

Anyhoo. I thought Messud’s writing was interesting and picked up The Hunters (2001), a collection of two novellas. And while they’re technically accomplished, they didn’t quite work for me.  Partly I suppose the problem is that I prefer longer fiction and usually impatient with novellas and short stories.  I can see, though, that there’s a thematic connection between the the two books: In "A Simple Tale" Messud is interested in the ways in which large, historical events like the Holocaust shape (or fail to shape) lives.  It’s the stronger of the two pieces and makes some pleasing gibes at Canadian and Torontonian smugness.  The second story, "The Hunters", seems on first reading to be a technical exercise–can she tell the whole story without revealing the gender of the first person narrator.  A patient person, perhaps someone who liked the Turn of the Screw, could probably go through the text and make a case for first one gender, and then the other.  Me, I’m not so patient.

Heather

So. I’m not doing such a great job at the regular blog posting.

• I’ve decided that one form of hell is called ‘User Acceptance Testing’. It’s a peculiar form of torture in which the “user” (only rarely known as the “customer”) tests the application and gets that special joy of reporting that the written requirements have not been met and knowing that the schedule is so tight that the requirements will never be met.
• This week I learned that a snake is the least effective means of clearing a clogged drain. Boiling water, baking soda, and vinegar can make tiny improvements. The real solution though is an angry woman with a plunger.
• I also learned that disgusting things moulder away in bathroom sink drains. How exactly do toothpaste, hair, and spit turn into such foul gunk?
• Reading has slowed to a crawl. Graphic novels/comics are getting some play (Wimbledon Green and Kabuki Dreams). The dragons in the Napoleonic War series has been finished. The overall effect has diminished by the let’s-make-this-into-a-fat-trilogy phenomenon. Still pecking away at the Communist histories.
• While I haven’t located a copy of Crow Shooting which I wrote about back in November, I did find a copy of Man’s Friend: The Crow at McGahern‘s. It’s a 1937 pamphlet issued by the Emergency Conservation Committee of New York. Its reference section has made me add “You Can’t Duck the Crow Question” (Field and Stream, 1934) to my want list.

Heather