tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-42396573094272025532024-03-16T05:19:36.384-04:00The Véhicule Press Blog Breaking news. Literary exhortation. Entertainments. And occasionally the arcane.Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.comBlogger1355125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-37021757801514029462021-06-07T10:14:00.001-04:002021-06-07T10:14:54.005-04:00Joe Fiorito celebrates his hometown, journalism and poetry<p><span style="font-family: times;">In May, Joe Fiorito was <span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0">the recipient of the 2021 Kouhi Award which recognizes a writer who has contributed significantly to the literature of Northwestern Ontario. </span></span></p><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">JOE'S ACCEPTANCE SPEECH</span></span></span><br /></span></h1><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span> I
am delighted to accept this award named to honour Elizabeth Kouhi, and I’m proud
to stand with those who have accepted it before me. I want to acknowledge a
couple of previous honourees: </span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Dorothy
Colby, whose son Scott was my colleague when I worked at the Toronto Star – we
understood some of the same things – small town, big city, two ways of seeing</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span><span> </span>Charlie Wilkins – I forget where we met
because as soon as I met him, I felt as if I’d known him forever.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>And
of course my friend Joan Baril, who has done more for northern Ontario writing
than anyone I know.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 49.65pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span> But
let me be specific. </span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 49.65pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>I’m
from Fort William.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 49.65pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>And
in Fort William, I’m from Westfort.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span> Westfort
is where I learned to keep my eyes open and my mouth shut; as it happens, those
are the first tools of a writer.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Westfort
is where I learned that nothing is ever what it seems, and that is a tool of
journalism; look - <span> </span>look deep - <span> </span>and then look deeper.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Westfort
is also where I learned not to pick a fight and not to back down from one, and
somehow that is the basis for my poetry.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span> I
learned two quite opposite things on Christina St.: how not to draw attention
to myself, and how to tell a story. Both those things valuable in an Italian
family; know when to duck, and when to entertain.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span> I
learned that art could be made from the matter at hand, and this was an
accidental lesson: the first time I saw the panels painted in the bush by the
group of seven<span> </span>– hey, look, I used to go
fishing there – I realized that the raw material for art is what’s at hand. </span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>The
local is universal if you know what to make of it.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span> I
learned to read early – that is how I learned to write – but a trip down the
block to the Mary J. L. Black <span> </span>Library was
not an escape, it was an entry into the world beyond. When I was growing up, I
needed to know there was a world beyond; still do, during the Covid times.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span> But
everywhere I’ve been over the past 40 years I have been guided by the sound of
the train rocking past our little stucco house on Christina St. at night, the sulphur
smell of the mill on Monday mornings, the sweet smell of the dust from the grain
elevators, and the sharp smell of creosote.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Yeah,
I still crush a cedar frond between my thumb and forefinger whenever I can,
because the fragrance reminds me of home.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Blue
lake, blue mountain, blue sky.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span> Now,
after 35 years of journalism, I have returned to my first love, poetry. <span> </span>I am self-taught in this way of saying – <span> </span>but I was led to poetry by three teachers in
high school: Jeanie Rigato at St. Pat’s, George Spentzos and above all by Al
Jack at Westgate.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>I
don’t receive this without them.</span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span> Journalism
took me away from Northern Ontario. This honour brings me back. </span></span></p><span style="font-size: small;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 56.7pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span>Thank
you.</span></span></p><p><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-poiln3 r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="392" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tmD0x0GV8q8" width="565" youtube-src-id="tmD0x0GV8q8"></iframe></div><br /> <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif;">The author of eight books, Joe
Fiorito won the National Newspaper Award for Columns in 1995; the Brassani
Prize for Short Fiction in 2000; and the City of Toronto Book Award in 2003. <i>City
Poems</i>, his first book of poetry, was published in 2018, and most recently his poetry collection, <i>All I Have Learned is Where I Have Been </i>(2021), was published by Signal Editions. He lives in Toronto.</span></p>
Simon Dardickhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09001447004797247626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-17454809677162142172021-03-06T11:32:00.007-05:002021-03-06T12:47:01.526-05:00Meeting Mortality with Heady Images: Rahat Kurd on Kateri Lanthier <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghW1ETQ6prJqU2Tjscq5bPvPCShN_iciM_3rQuKuDTtGTL8XOYJBHs0QXSAPnzpbiYwrvnU5mqrrubI_KnwOjskXHQW-EJKB9nBkqsMAPRiPX47A__Ex3_YEzKJt-y-sW5RKTdL-3XMUBT/s1659/IMG_3028+Colour+Corrected+%252823%2529+KL.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1659" data-original-width="1659" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghW1ETQ6prJqU2Tjscq5bPvPCShN_iciM_3rQuKuDTtGTL8XOYJBHs0QXSAPnzpbiYwrvnU5mqrrubI_KnwOjskXHQW-EJKB9nBkqsMAPRiPX47A__Ex3_YEzKJt-y-sW5RKTdL-3XMUBT/w640-h640/IMG_3028+Colour+Corrected+%252823%2529+KL.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><a href="https://talonbooks.com/authors/rahat-kurd">Rahat Kurd </a>introducing <a href="https://twitter.com/katerilanthier?lang=en">Kateri Lanthier</a> at the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/TheRhizomaticPoetryDeepDives">The Rhizomatic</a> reading series, Thursday, October 15<br /><p></p><div><blockquote style="background-color: #cccccc; border: 2px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); padding: 10px;"><div><i style="font-style: italic;">I’d like to highlight the personally curated nature of </i><span>T</span><span>he Rhizomatic—</span><i style="font-style: italic;">that it comes out of a shared passion for attentive reading. The goal of our series is to expand an audience for the poetry that we’ve had time to reflect on, draw meaning from, and form a real attachment to. I read Kateri Lanthier’s </i><a href="https://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550654660">Siren</a><span> </span><i style="font-style: italic;">last spring, while adjusting to life under quarantine.</i><br /><br /><i style="font-style: italic;">Before the official public health emergency was declared, I think a deep survival instinct compelled me to order a coffee grinder, a French press, and several recent poetry titles by women in Canada. Having come through a difficult winter, I had really looked forward to being able to make travel plans in the springtime. Instead I had to accept that in the foreseeable future, my feet would not be leaving the ground. Filling my head with the voices of women poets seemed pretty much medically indicated.</i><br /><br /><i style="font-style: italic;">Emergency, necessity, contingency, constraint. Conditions under which women have always made enduring art. </i>Siren<i>, Kateri Lanthier’s second collection of </i><a href="https://www.vehiculepress.com/1-excerpt.php?EAN=9781550654660" style="font-style: italic;">poems</a><i>, insists on meeting the edge of her own mortality with heady images: cracked amethyst, silver and diamonds; crocuses, peonies and magnolias in full bloom—and comes as close to swooning lyricism as the contemporary register of a made-in Toronto English will allow.</i><br /><br /><i>To come to these poems on the page as a solitary reader is to be pulled into a sensibility both cerebral and playful—cerebral, in fact, because playful—making rich use of allusion, internal rhyme, double entendres, among other forms of word play.</i><br /><br /><i>“The Year of La Jetée” was the first poem I read. From the first line—“Three fingers of moon in the glass”—I was struck by the power of mystery. The voice in this poem knows how much to conceal, and how much and when to reveal. The cadence of this mysterious voice pulls the reader in to consider the language more closely (as opposed to deliberate obfuscation, which can repel a reader’s desire to understand). I shared this poem with another friend over the summer, the poet <a href="https://thecapilanoreview.com/author/judithpenner/">Judith Penner</a>, who wrote, “I love the poem as it reveals itself through re-readings, a slow emerging like the photo, surface light suggesting what’s below.”</i><br /><br /><i>Lanthier takes a frank, sensual pleasure in her prerogative as a poet: to structure thought in the marvellous ways that transform the prosaic and the quotidien. </i><br /><br /><i>I’m not sure whether it’s the vivid moments of retrospect in her work—remembering a younger self as a “waif in a snowbank”—or her acute consciousness of how closely life is always breathing next to death—that deepens her evocations of eros with a knowingness which is never weary or cynical—in fact, I would call it a lovely wisdom: </i><br /><br /><i>“our every kiss a power surge that sparked a rolling blackout”</i><br /><br /><i>It’s in both of these moods, particularly in her work with the ghazal form, that Lanthier’s musicality shines in a way that seems to channel the spirit of 19th century Urdu poet, </i><a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/mirza-ghalib-a-scoundrel-who-lives-near-god-5851031/" style="font-style: italic;">Mirza Ghalib.</a><br /><br /><i>I do not say this lightly, or only because Lanthier quotes Ghalib in translation in one of the epigraphs to her collection. In the ten years that I have been reading Ghalib, mostly in Urdu with a very grateful dependence on Urdu-English dictionaries, the help of my mother, and on the learned commentaries that span over 150 years on Frances Pritchett’s encyclopedic Ghalib website at Columbia, I’ve been made constantly aware of the many challenges that translation cannot overcome.</i><br /><br /><i>While only a few incorporate a </i>radif<i> or refrain, several poems in </i><i style="font-style: italic;">Siren embrace two major elements of the ghazal: the stand-alone couplet, and the thematic leap between couplets in a single poem, in a way that expands the lyrical capacities of English. We are living in a rich time of ghazal practitioners in English—<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55929/miscegenation-56d237f78238f">Natasha Trethewey</a> and <a href="http://d7.drunkenboat.com/db15/amit-majmudar.html">Amit Majmudar</a> come to mind, while my personal Ustad is the late <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43279/ghazal-56d221fe8a756">Agha Shahid Ali</a>. But even dispensing with the classical </i>qafia/radif <i style="font-style: italic;">(rhyme/refrain) pattern, I suspect that it’s Lanthier who’s been struck by Ghalib’s particular lightning. <br /><br />I’m going to ask Kateri to tell us, later on, about her experience of reading Ghalib in translation, which she wrote about in a wonderful and moving personal essay, “Lifelines: Of Heart, Lungs, Blood, and Ghazals." You can read it in the anthology </i><a href="https://www.anvilpress.com/books/against-death">Aga<span style="background-color: transparent;">inst Death: 35 Essays On Living</span></a>,<i style="font-style: italic;"> published by Anvil Press in 2019, edited by Vancouver’s own <a href="https://eleekg.com/">Elee Kraljii Gardiner</a>. </i></div><div style="font-style: italic;"><i><br /></i></div><div><i style="font-style: italic;">Kateri, welcome to </i>The Rhizomatic<i style="font-style: italic;">. </i></div></blockquote></div>Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-68565267773631289602020-12-20T14:33:00.003-05:002020-12-20T14:39:55.243-05:00Sunday Poem<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9oMsoKKbm9iL-DJDN96b6pj793cvXm1LxE2lpvjD3eJcUsAtBmERa0NhGDxQGEvfhDZQLloc8wIavRZ-VZ61hRxpU_92cApx1JV-JXTPUyan_2fXz2vA8S1nnUYY5BNfxTXe23LouIvOZ/s632/IvesDontEvenFeelTheCold+copy.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="631" data-original-width="632" height="572" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9oMsoKKbm9iL-DJDN96b6pj793cvXm1LxE2lpvjD3eJcUsAtBmERa0NhGDxQGEvfhDZQLloc8wIavRZ-VZ61hRxpU_92cApx1JV-JXTPUyan_2fXz2vA8S1nnUYY5BNfxTXe23LouIvOZ/w573-h572/IvesDontEvenFeelTheCold+copy.jpg" width="573" /></a></div></blockquote><p> </p><blockquote class="tr_bq"><b>SCHISM</b><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">For David Rothberg<br /></span><br />Ice by chance, by fate or divine grace,<br />Ice as a prayer answered or seasonal necessity… We approve.<br />But ice by any means possible? Ice, a commodity<br />manufactured, apportioned, rented, sold by the hour?<br /><br />No: the end, no matter how smooth and immutable,<br />cannot justify the means: ammonia, compressors, chain-link fences,<br />the whole rotten professional petrochemical sports industry…<br />They just want to make us skate—and drive—round in circles.<br /><br />Hear, hear. But the kids do need to run some drills:<br />We have no power play and a pathetic penalty kill.<br />Can we not just have a practice, like other teams?<br />There’s the rub: we buy into it and the kids will as well.<br /><br />A-ha the purist shows his true colours!<br />Next you’ll want to ban rubber pucks and plastic helmets.<br />How about refusing to consume? I’m coach. I decide.<br />Tomorrow it is. To Dave, my fellow Ottawan, this aside:<br /><br />Seen the pond? I caught a glimpse as I drove by.<br />Minus twenty tonight. Imagine it all sheer and black.<br />Let’s skip practise, grab our skates, rope and sticks,<br />And ride our bikes down there first thing to tiptoe out<br /><br />and test our convictions. Tap-tap. Give us a faith<br />sufficient to withstand, though free to crack,<br />a surface that inspires awe and dread.<br />What love does not tremble at the touch and quake?<br />How can it be ice if it doesn’t break?</blockquote><p> </p><p style="text-align: left;"><i></i></p><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>By Richard Sanger, f</i><i>rom </i><a href="http://vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550655766">Fathers at Hockey</a> <i>(Signal Editions Chapbook, 2020) </i></blockquote><p></p>Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-53005888545571086682020-08-09T16:15:00.004-04:002020-08-09T16:17:06.339-04:00Get Them By Heart<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh80ehyphenhyphenvHjkAs80uE7X82EKYh4AEQzl4KQii_6Lwt0m9t9YEu439tavJ-F3qjqDQtF_C-ZRi-OKb3CEvQfz3RP2FkzlT8h4AVPi3RWji4MiBLfeAmxudJ-nfO1S6fXCEJ5WAp7p4IntDAvd/s610/Untitled.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="610" data-original-width="610" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh80ehyphenhyphenvHjkAs80uE7X82EKYh4AEQzl4KQii_6Lwt0m9t9YEu439tavJ-F3qjqDQtF_C-ZRi-OKb3CEvQfz3RP2FkzlT8h4AVPi3RWji4MiBLfeAmxudJ-nfO1S6fXCEJ5WAp7p4IntDAvd/w640-h640/Untitled.png" width="640" /></a></div>Matthew Schneier <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2020/04/now-is-the-perfect-time-to-memorize-a-poem.html?fbclid=IwAR3Pu6-axVHGr34Y4oWZfLRA015itQdJ8wweoFEqjEwvmEXqg200GFNa99Q">mulls the importance </a>of reciting poetry:<p></p><div><blockquote style="background-color: #cccccc; border: 2px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); padding: 10px;"><i>I have always found the place for the genuine in poetry to be unlocked not by just reading it but by memorizing it. And it’s a good exercise, in the midst of chaos, to give yourself over to a sound and a rhythm that is not your own. It takes time—you probably have plenty—and effort. But you feel poems differently when you get them by heart and say them out loud. You have to chew them, and their rhythms overpower yours. It frees you up, to submit to them: It’s self-abnegation by incantation, your very own ventriloquist’s act.</i></blockquote></div>Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-78638411875742740572020-08-01T11:06:00.003-04:002020-08-01T11:24:44.886-04:00Speaking The Old Dialect<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr6d6_5e4cwuFibkjilB3Q3P-SrYgKQFGnzWSumfru3rwFlWQeJumiiU2U2M4jawVdKF-1c-tSKbKFipzk0Zzf4t5i0BGam8U1itLBHIMbjonQ60u1TY7cLptXnOwdxWzLGN3HP7JTb2Eq/s622/Podcast-Nino-1200x628+copy.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="605" data-original-width="622" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr6d6_5e4cwuFibkjilB3Q3P-SrYgKQFGnzWSumfru3rwFlWQeJumiiU2U2M4jawVdKF-1c-tSKbKFipzk0Zzf4t5i0BGam8U1itLBHIMbjonQ60u1TY7cLptXnOwdxWzLGN3HP7JTb2Eq/s0/Podcast-Nino-1200x628+copy.jpg" /></a></div><div><br /></div>In <a href="https://accenti.ca/in-conversation-with-nino-ricci/">an online interview</a> for the Librissimi Toronto Italian Book Festival, Nino Ricci touches on how immigration can shape identity.<div>
<blockquote style="background-color: #cccccc; border: 2px solid rgb(102, 102, 102); padding: 10px;"><i>Part of what I was exploring in </i><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/153652/lives-of-the-saints-by-nino-ricci/9780771075995">Lives of the Saints</a><i> were the kinds of stories we tell ourselves, how we structure our own imagination as a way of making sense of our lives. People talked about America from the perspective of the old country and, even though they often had access to accurate information—they had relatives who had gone over and were writing back and were telling them what things were like—there was always that kind of mythical side to it of a promised land they were hoping to reach. One of the things that I found in my research and in interviewing immigrants is that often that dynamic ended up getting reversed through immigration. Once they had established themselves, say, in Canada, and been relatively prosperous, they then began to romanticize the land they left behind. It became a sort of lost paradise, the lost place of wholeness: “Yes, we were poor, but we had enough to eat, we were well.” I found it very poignant, that very strong sense I got from speaking with immigrants of that lost wholeness that can never be recaptured. And even when they travelled back, they couldn’t recapture it because they had become Canadianized. Their Italian was now mixed with English words that they weren’t even aware of. People saw them as old-fashioned because they were speaking the old dialect, or they saw them as no longer real residents. There’s a very poignant element to the immigrant experience in that regard that you never really wholly integrate into the new country, but you can never really go back to the old one, and that was part of what I was exploring in that first trilogy. By the time I get to </i><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/235466/sleep-by-nino-ricci/9780385681629">Sleep</a><i>, when I think of identity I think of this very complex thing, that is something we put together haphazardly with whatever materials are given to us over time. For example, I was raised in a small Southern Ontario town where the Catholicism in my head was not the Catholicism in Italy. It was post-Vatican II and it was much more streamlined and demystified. The Latin was gone, we didn’t talk about the Saints, there was no emphasis on the miracles, I lived close to the border, the TV I watched was American, the music I listened to was American. I had all these American influences which informed me, this panoply of different cultural influences that made me what I am. So, my Italianness took shape within the framework of all these other things. So, we need to think of identity in those terms, not as singular, not as defining or even as determined, but something that is shaped from what is available, from the sources that are available. I made a conscious decision to travel to Italy and re-own my culture that my parents never had access to. I spent years studying in Florence. What did my parents know of Florentine culture growing up in the villages that they grew up in? But I had access to it through them. So that’s how I think of identity now, as something that is multi-faceted, something that to a certain extent we can choose and enhance.</i></blockquote></div>Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-44347303281717240032020-07-16T16:09:00.000-04:002020-07-16T16:09:28.763-04:00Open Letters Are A Graveyard of Prose<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimgv-r_znkV7l2Logo-Cp3mQuaA8FCi0L_-PAWxrieMAFIJOmnmW1X6wFAX0eV_rJVSMYIdinTOs6lnCVRMne1OawyetPgMRKy49c-vQUYOg08qBgGAy8qnZPRFCuvrDGyGMTAXzuuVduJ/s1600/7D1B8C99-AD5E-49C5-B088-2487C978462A.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="490" data-original-width="482" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimgv-r_znkV7l2Logo-Cp3mQuaA8FCi0L_-PAWxrieMAFIJOmnmW1X6wFAX0eV_rJVSMYIdinTOs6lnCVRMne1OawyetPgMRKy49c-vQUYOg08qBgGAy8qnZPRFCuvrDGyGMTAXzuuVduJ/s640/7D1B8C99-AD5E-49C5-B088-2487C978462A.jpg" width="628" /></a></div>
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Graeme Wood <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/against-open-letters-all-open-letters/614143/">enumerates</a> the sins of the open letter. My favourite? They are badly written.<br />
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<i>Open letters tend to be composed inclusively, so as many people as possible will sign them. They can bear no traces of their individual authors, and the easiest way to scrub those traces is to write in a numbing, anonymized style, free of idiosyncrasy and wit. (If you seek idiosyncrasy and wit, read the articles </i><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/jonathan-rauch/" style="font-style: italic;">t</a><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/jonathan-rauch/" style="font-style: italic;">hat</a> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/caitlin-flanagan/" style="font-style: italic;">my</a> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/george-packer/">Atlantic</a> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/david-frum/" style="font-style: italic;">colleagues</a> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/anne-applebaum/" style="font-style: italic;">who</a> <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/yascha-mounk/" style="font-style: italic;">signed</a><i> the letter write under their own names.) This process deadens the language, and the result in the case of the Harper’s letter is a graveyard of prose, without a single pungent phrase or sentence worthy of quotation. Humor is especially forbidden. Martin Amis signed the letter, but I have read enough Amis to know he would never have written that letter if he thought that on some literary Judgment Day he would be called before God to answer alone for its style.</i></blockquote>
Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-7639200617563489312020-07-16T15:28:00.003-04:002020-07-16T16:10:33.263-04:00The Hyper-Ambitious Miniaturist<div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSm0o5dbmjMl8YgFW4HRaIpsJj_zxgt3Gcea-T7F-UV4GtHSZe1YqpAXO61yvpryyXZjPgCH7DsIivsqu9netrJ7gFu9PQG6cVNSSQsIkmgQKpnwPSfoBnB2WOjhC0bvnf5p8Kp46xkHEU/s1600/davis-theo-cote+copy.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="920" data-original-width="929" height="632" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSm0o5dbmjMl8YgFW4HRaIpsJj_zxgt3Gcea-T7F-UV4GtHSZe1YqpAXO61yvpryyXZjPgCH7DsIivsqu9netrJ7gFu9PQG6cVNSSQsIkmgQKpnwPSfoBnB2WOjhC0bvnf5p8Kp46xkHEU/s640/davis-theo-cote+copy.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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In <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/lydia-davis-essays/?fbclid=IwAR09rXQBLWWWE-maTzw3YzlOJ3YFl8kbJ0OVbCqgFf1jZV20tpdca1n-13M">a review</a> of Lydia Davis' <i>Essays</i>, James Ley places the U.S. writer's rise inside a period when "hyper-ambitious male novelists" were trapped "in a creative arms race to see who could write the mightiest, brainiest, zeitgeistiest tome." Davis, he argues, went hard in the opposite direction.<br />
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<i>She excels as a miniaturist. Though she has published one novel, </i>The End of the Story <i>(1995), she betrays not the slightest interest in making any kind of grand statement. Her stories rarely extend beyond a few pages. Many consist of a single paragraph. Some are no more than a line or two. There is no striving for cultural definitiveness, no panoramic vision or flaunting of intellectual pretensions. Davis’ fiction is narrow in focus and precise in execution, written with an eye for the unusual angle. She is a major writer who produces almost exclusively ‘minor’ work.</i></div>
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Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-72554011172241311342020-07-08T09:54:00.000-04:002020-07-08T09:54:12.887-04:00Talking to a Portrait—An Excerpt<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtuS8xWQ3uXD21PezVS4Gpz7EZ6tCPZjO6kc5WaWSgnpp3Di3722l5IppNhbDU97VdkVbCP_vEhPn5dRQ8IiYR_QrQ0_FHZ75SNvQCVidzNz1Dd__IZGqiFNH3AUNwT381wqeASwBVi5n5/s1600/Airstream.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="936" data-original-width="1170" height="510" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtuS8xWQ3uXD21PezVS4Gpz7EZ6tCPZjO6kc5WaWSgnpp3Di3722l5IppNhbDU97VdkVbCP_vEhPn5dRQ8IiYR_QrQ0_FHZ75SNvQCVidzNz1Dd__IZGqiFNH3AUNwT381wqeASwBVi5n5/s640/Airstream.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">French world champion cyclist Alfred Letourneur pulling an Airstream Liner
trailer on a runway at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Airport, 1947</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg69A2SGna2sLNNZH6DxKYg5i8qFX7cOwTNQJ6bRsEmtgyl7cbEdq9Etc8_Xv_g6qKtMd7wuB6ALUEdUGKkESrUXgaqUvj4S6WWizFhP_L1RtP1eoZlO5p-ghRKfUOGgWtqbyak93qoTnA0/s1600/609.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1072" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg69A2SGna2sLNNZH6DxKYg5i8qFX7cOwTNQJ6bRsEmtgyl7cbEdq9Etc8_Xv_g6qKtMd7wuB6ALUEdUGKkESrUXgaqUvj4S6WWizFhP_L1RtP1eoZlO5p-ghRKfUOGgWtqbyak93qoTnA0/s200/609.jpg" width="133" /></a><b>For over thirty years, Rosalind Pepall helped plan and organize dozens of major exhibitions at </b><b>the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In <i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550655414">Talking to a Portrait</a></i>—released this week—Pepall distills that experience into fifteen essays that explore the unexpected turns and obsessions of her job as curator. </b><br />
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<b>She writes about artists falling in and out of love, family tragedies, the creation of the Stanley Cup, the secrets of Tiffany, Antiques Roadshow, watercolour sketchbooks of the Canadian north, a beautiful prayer room in Montreal, gondolas flying through windows in Venice. </b><br />
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<b>In the following essay taken from the book—titled "It Rides along the Highway like a Stream of Air, but Will It Fit into the Museum?"—we see how curating isn't always the intellectual, sedate activity we might imagine it to be. Sometimes it’s closer to madcap, adrenaline-filled troubleshooting.</b></div>
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In 1930s America, radical changes in industrial design produced calculators that looked like diesel engines,Top-O-Stove potato bakers that resembled zeppelins, and Zephyr irons that looked like rocket ships ready for takeoff from the ironing board. With their sweeping lines, rounded corners and gleaming metal, these items evoked fast cars, speeding trains and soaring airplanes. Consumers mired in the Depression embraced this streamlined aesthetic wholeheartedly as a sign of an exciting and hopeful future. Blenders, toasters, weighing scales, hair dryers, electric saws—all manner of household appliances were redesigned to suit the new modernist look. Two hundred such items were presented in the travelling exhibition American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow.When the show came to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2007, I was the Canadian curator in charge of its installation.<br />
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There is nothing particularly glamorous about a Thor Silver Line electric saw, a Silvertone Rocket radio, or a Presto Streamlined stapler except their names. In the new millennium, the objects themselves seemed quaint. The exhibition needed a jolt: something big, shiny and eye-catching.<br />
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<i>How about an airplane? </i>I thought.<br />
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I put in a call to the Canadian Aviation Museum—housed in a huge airfield hangar on the outskirts of Ottawa—and arranged a visit. Among the bombers and a bush plane with a canoe attached to its side, I spied a shiny aluminum Lockheed 10a Electra. Lockheed had manufactured the twin-engine plane from 1934 to 1941, and this particular one had seen many years of use by Trans-Canada Airlines, the precursor to Air Canada. The company’s logo, a red-and-green maple leaf with “TCA” in gold letters in the middle, was painted on the plane’s nose. Also, Amelia Earhart had flown a variation of the Electra Model 10 in 1937 on her legendary fatal flight around the world.<br />
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<i>Perfect</i>, I thought. A vintage 1930s airplane with a compelling story and a Canadian connection.<br />
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But would the Aviation Museum lend it to the show, and would the Electra fit inside the museum? The wing tips could be removed and the Ottawa museum was planning to relocate the plane anyway, according to its curator. Armed with the Electra’s exact measurements, I returned to Montreal delighted with my discovery.<br />
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Back at the museum, the news from head of installations Paul Tellier was discouraging. Yes, we could remove two panels of a glass exterior wall, dismantle the Electra’s wingtips, and fit her length into the museum. But the two huge spherical engines on either side of the airplane’s body could not be removed and together were just three feet too wide for the exterior wall. “Pas possible!” said Tellier, shaking his head.<br />
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Disappointed but undaunted, I searched for some other object or vehicle that could make a bold visual impression. Flipping through the exhibit’s catalogue, I came upon a black-and-white photograph of a cyclist, vigorously pedalling—pulling an Airstream trailer behind him. The motorhome glistened in the sun, all smooth sculptural curves and bright aluminum, and typified modern aerodynamic design. Light enough to be pulled by a bicycle as a publicity stunt, its hand-riveted panels were derived from airplane construction. The trailer rode along the highway “like a stream of air” according to the founder of Airstream Trailers, Wallace Byam, when he introduced his first aluminum Clipper model in 1936. The luxury home on wheels was produced in great numbers in the post-war 1940s. Fully equipped for dining and sleeping in a compact functional space, it presented modern travel as fun, adventurous, comfortable and cheap. Designed to be resistant to changes in temperature, the post-war series of Airstream Liners were built with outer and inner aluminum shells (Aero-core fibreglass insulation sandwiched between) over a pipe-frame chassis. No screws or nails were used on the body (they loosened with road wear). The Airstream trailer epitomized supreme craftsmanship in industrial design. It was a work of art fit for a museum.<br />
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But how to lay my hands on a vintage model in pristine condition? Through the North American Vintage Airstream Club, I found myself talking to Fred Coldwell, its Denver-based historian and the proud owner of a 1948Wee Wind, one of the smallest models that Airstream produced. The sixteen-foot trailer had all the typical French world champion cyclist Alfred Letourneur pulling an Airstream Liner trailer on a runway at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Airport, Airstream features: Air-O-Lite windows, curved entrance door, castbronze nameplates. There were no toilet or bathing facilities in this early model but it had a single bed, two chairs, a fold-up Formicatopped table for dining, and a rear double bed/sofa with the original Gruda, California, upholstery. The aluminum and stainless-steel kitchen galley included sink, storage compartments, a three-burner stove and icebox,and even a tiny built-in receptacle for used matches. A wooden closet, a chest of drawers and a butane heater with castiron front grille completed the trailer. Fred had lovingly preserved his Airstream, which he called Ruby after its original owner, and he offered to drive her from Colorado to Montreal for the show.<br />
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<i>Perfect</i>, I thought. But as the months passed, Fred had second thoughts about taking Ruby on the road. Less than two weeks before the show was set to begin, he emailed to say that he was not up to making the four-day trip to Montreal and back. I couldn’t blame him—but he had left me in the lurch.<br />
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I put in a frantic call to Airstream’s vintage-model shop in Jackson Center, Ohio.<br />
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“Would you have a trailer from the 1940s that you could lend to an exhibition in Montreal?” I asked.<br />
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“Hm, when is your show?” said the communications director, Rick March.<br />
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“In two weeks!” I replied.<br />
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“I think we might have one, let me check,” replied Rick.<br />
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Several long minutes later, he returned.<br />
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“Okay, ah… we’ve got a 1948 Airstream Liner, twenty-four feet<br />
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long—”<br />
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“I’ll take it!” I said quickly.<br />
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“—but the interior’s gutted,” he continued, “and I can’t in good conscience let you exhibit an unfurnished shell.”<br />
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“We’ll lock the door,” I said.<br />
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“Well, okay, but there are windows—I don’t want anyone to see the inside.”<br />
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“We’ll make curtains and cover the windows,” I said.<br />
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“Curtains? Hmm… I don’t know…”<br />
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After much coaxing, Rick agreed. Airstream Inc. saved the show. With no time to shop for vintage 1940s printed textiles, museum conservator Estelle Richard began sewing off-white linen curtains to hang inside every window.<br />
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Six days before the <i>vernissage</i>, the 1948 Airstream Liner arrived in Montreal from Ohio. With all hands on deck, the trailer was unloaded from the transport truck to street level. Part of the museum’s side-entrance glass wall had been removed in advance and our carpenters had built a wooden ramp to wheel the trailer inside. But as the museum’s technicians pushed it up the ramp, they stopped and groaned. It was too high for the opening! The culprit was a small chimney sticking out from the top of the roof. The height measurements we received had not included this unassuming appendage. But when I looked back at photographs of the trailer, its top air-vents closing flush with the roofline, there was the chimney, but hardly visible.<br />
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The Airstream representative and the museum’s technicians stood around scratching their heads. Measurements down to the last millimetre were checked. The removal of the chimney was debated. The clock was ticking. Finally, some clever fellow suggested deflating the tires. More measurements were taken and the tires were slightly deflated. Inch by inch, the aluminum shell was guided through the open wall and rolled into the museum galleries.<br />
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“Ça y est!” exclaimed the technicians. “That’s it!”<br />
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On the street, a crowd of passers-by clapped and cheered. When the exhibition opened, the trailer looked spectacular. It filled the space like an outsized modernist sculpture and formed an arresting backdrop to the power tools, electric fans and outboard motors.<br />
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Little did visitors know how bumpy the ride had been—anything but a smooth stream of air.</div>
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Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-41547835696696183982020-07-02T10:10:00.000-04:002020-07-02T10:10:13.993-04:00An Introduction to Salt Cod<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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By Richard Sanger<br /><br />The fashion for beaver hats in 17th century London and Paris was what first led our settler ancestors to explore Canada and establish trading posts on our lakes and rivers. Or so we’re taught in school. But long before that, before even John Cabot and Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence, there was something else that brought Europeans to our shores: cod. In the early accounts, the fish are so plentiful that they can be pulled out of the sea with baskets and boats can hardly cut through the thick shoals. It’s no surprise that the great historian Harold Innes followed up his classic study of the fur trade with a book on the cod fishery. As late as even 1990, my Scottish nephew, then a fish merchant with a gift for hyperbole (and now TV presenter), was assuring me that if they didn’t catch the cod, we’d be able to walk across the Atlantic on their backs. We all know where that idea led.<br /><br />Once the fish was caught, however, it had to be preserved. The way to do this was by drying it in the air and packing it in salt. And to dry it properly, you had to come ashore. In fact, if Mark Kurlansky is to be believed (and he’s only written three books on the topic: A Basque History of the World, Salt and Cod), Basque fisherman were coming ashore in Newfoundland to do exactly this long before Columbus sailed—they just kept their fishing grounds a secret. Starting in the 1500s, the bounty they and others caught would become a staple throughout Europe and the Americas, and a key part of various trade routes. One route took salt cod to Catholic southern Europe, where it became a special Christmas dish in Spain and Portugal, wine and olive oil north to Britain, and then British dry goods and hardware out to Newfoundland. Another route took the fish to the West Indies, as cheap source of protein for the plantations, later becoming the national dish of Jamaica, and sent sugar and rum back to Maritimes. By the 1950s, the cod fishery had expanded into the industrial-scale overfishing that culminated in the 1992 Cod moratorium which threw 30,000 Newfoundlanders out of work. There now exists a small inshore cod fishery that supplies some of the Canadian market; the rest is imported from Norway and elsewhere. <br /><br />Nowadays, the bigger secret seems to be how to cook it. Outside of certain communities (Newfoundland, Portuguese, West Indians, Scandinavians), few Canadians know what to do with salt cod. I discovered it when I lived in Spain in the 1980’s. At first, those grayish salt-encrusted fish fillets in wooden boxes seemed much less inviting than the Spanish hams that hung from the rafters of stores or the Manchego cheese on the counter. Then under the tutelage of my Spanish friends, I learnt how to soak and cook bacalao—and saw how those stiff salty planks could be transmuted by a judicious overnight soaking. The revived salt cod wasn’t the same as fresh fish—it seemed to become a miraculous new substance whose translucent strands that made me think of fibre optic cables or edible fibreglass. You could eat it raw, as the Catalans do in esqueixada, and it didn’t smell the way fresh fish does. Or you could cook it in a myriad other ways—the most impressive of all being the Basque dish bacalao al pil-pil, which my friend Salvador would take me out to taste at a special restaurant in Seville. I have cooked salt cod ever since, often at large family gatherings. <br /><br /><i>Bacalao al pil-pil </i>is difficult to cook—it involves cooking a whole fillet of soaked salt cod with the skin still attached over a low heat in an earthenware dish and jiggling it constantly while adding a steady stream of olive oil. The jiggling at a low heat causes the oil to mix with the fishy liquid and skin and create an emulsion, a kind of warm mayonnaise. Since I tend to buy the deboned salt cod (which is also deskinned), it’s not something I often try—though I order it whenever I can. <br /><br />The last time I visited Spain, we made a trip through the Basque country and just as we got to Santander, I realized I still hadn’t had my <i>pil-pil</i>. At a restaurant near the old port, la Pirula, there was a dish called bacalao three ways (one of which was <i>pil-pil</i>) and, when I demurred, the wonderfully ironic and conspiratorial waiter poured me an unusual Galician red wine and told me “I believe we will be able to rise to the standard you demand." We went outside. When the dish came, two of the cod tapas were delicious but the <i>pil-pil</i> was salty. We ate most of it anyway and just drank more wine. As we were paying, the waiter came out to ask how it was. When I said actually it was a bit too salty, he tasted it the little bit left and said “Oh no, no, no. I can’t possibly charge you for that. I’m so sorry. And you know what? Tomorrow I’m going get hold of the boy who sold me that fish and execute him in the public square. Normally I do it at 8 in the morning but since you’re a tourist, I‘ll do it at 11 so you can come and watch." Like the other culinary cult I belong to—the Seville orange marmalade makers—salt cod has a way of making strangers bond. <br /><br />Here are four of my favourite recipes. There are, of course, many others: the Portuguese have a recipe for every day of the year, the Brazilians cook it with coconut milk, and the Jamaicans prepare it with ackee and callaloo. <br /><br /><b>Buying and soaking the salt cod</b><div>
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Portuguese and Italian fish stores and groceries usually stock it, as do the larger supermarkets. For the deboned, skinless fillets I buy, the whiter and softer the fillet, the better. To soak, cut your fillet into pieces 3 or 4 inches long, rinse well and soak overnight, changing the water 3 or 4 times before you start to cook. (Use plenty of water, say, two litres per pound of salt cod). Once soaked, test the saltiness in the thickest part of the fish— you still want some as the flavour will dissipate with cooking, i.e. it should be mildly salty, edible not overwhelming. (If you ever oversoak the fish, it is possible to resalinate the fish.)<br /><br /><b>Esqueixada</b></div>
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<b><br /></b>Esqueixada (which means “torn apart”) is a kind of Catalan ceviche—the markets in Catalonia sell torn up bits of salt cod especially for this dish. This recipe is adapted from Sam and Sam Clark’s Casa Moro cookbook, the second book of recipes from their great London restaurant. <br /><br />Ingredients<br /><br />450g salt cod soaked 24 hours and water changed 3 times.<br />2 green peppers, thinly sliced<br />1 red pepper, thinly sliced<br />20 or so cherry tomatoes sliced in half<br />big handful of Italian parsley, chopped up.<br />1 small red onion, thinly sliced<br />12-20 oil-cured black olives, pitted and halved<br /><br />Vinaigrette dressing:<br />1-2 garlic cloves, crushed into<br />2 tablespoons red wine and sherry vinegar<br />5-6 tablespoons olive oil<br />Salt and black pepper.<br />Some chili pepper flakes (optional)<br /><br />Method<br /><br />Shred the salt cod with your fingers into little tufts and put in a missing bowl. Add the sliced pepper, tomatoes, onion and parsley. Marinade in the vinaigrette for at least an hour before serving.<br /><br /><b>Brandade</b><br /><br />There are lots of recipes for brandade, the Provençal salt cod spread. This is the simplest and the best I have found. It’s wonderful on crackers or as a filling for baked potatoes. The Venetian version is called <i>baccalà mantecato.</i> This recipe is adapted from the Newfoundlander Edward O. Jones’ <i>Salt Cod Cuisine</i>, a loving compendium of salt cod lore and recipes from all over the world.<br /><br />Ingredients<br /><br />450g salt cod, soaked<br />Half a cup (125ml) olive oil<br />Half a cup (125ml) heavy cream (35%)<br />2-3 garlic cloves, crushed<br />1 teaspoon lemon juice<br />Ground nutmeg<br />6 oil-cured black olives (for decoration)<br /><br />Method<br /><br />Poach the soaked cod: place it in a pot of cold water, bring to a low boil and turn off immediately Let stand for not more than 10 minutes, then remove fish and break up in to small pieces in bowl or blender. Add crushed garlic. Warm oil in one pot and cream in another and add alternately in a steady stream, blending or stirring until you reach a smooth creamy consistency. Season with nutmeg, lemon juice and pepper.<br /><br /><b>Bacalao a la Graciosa</b><br />This is the first salt cod dish I cooked and for many years was the only one. The recipe came originally from the second cookbook I ever owned, Anna Macmiadhachain’s <i>Spanish Regional Cookery</i>, long out of print but beautifully illustrated with line drawings by the author’s husband. My copy of the book disappeared many years ago (along with the girlfriend who gave it to me) but I continued to cook the dish from memory. When I ordered another copy on the internet, I realized that peppercorns were my own addition. The secret of the dish is that there is no water—all the liquid in the broth comes from the vegetables and it's delicious. Graciosa is one of the Canary Islands which Anna and her artist husband visited in the 1970s.<br /><br />Ingredients<br /><br />450g salt cod soaked overnight, and then shredded into large strips<br />2-3 large onions, sliced sideways in rounds<br />4-6 tomatoes, cored and sliced in rounds<br />3-4 green peppers, sliced sideways in rounds<br />4-6 large (russet) potatoes, sliced sideways in thin rounds<br />20-40 black peppercorns<br />2-3 bay leaves<br />Olive oil<br /><br />Method<br /><br />In a large heavy-bottomed pot, pour a bit of olive oil and then layer the ingredients by order of wetness: half the tomatoes, half the onions, half the green peppers, half the soaked cod, half the potatoes; then repeat these layers with the remaining ingredients, scattering the peppercorns and bay leaves in amongst the cod strips. Cook covered for 1-2 hours, starting at medium-low heat and being very careful not to burn the bottom layer. Once the vegetables have given off enough liquid that it bubbles up round the sides and starts to cook the top layer of potatoes (which you may want to push down with a plate), turn the heat down to simmer. When the top layer of potatoes is cooked, the dish is ready.<br /><br /><b>Gratin de morue</b><br />This is the dish I make for special occasions. It’s easy to prepare in advance, and an impressive creation to pull out of your oven and land on the table. It is also a fish dish whose key ingredients do not require refrigeration, can be easily transported and stored almost indefinitely. I once threw a party for a group of visiting francophone playwrights and actors who had spent a week in Toronto living on fast food and this was the dish I cooked (Canadian raw materials, French savoir-faire)—even the actress from the fishing port of St. Pierre praised it. Cookbook author Patricia Wells, whose recipe I’ve adapted, calls it one of her favourite fish dishes in the world. These quantities will make one big lasagna dish (25x35cm or 10x14”) and should feed 8 or more people.<br /><br /><u>Ingredients</u><div>
<u><br /></u>700-1000g salt cod soaked overnight<br />3 cups milk<br />5-6 sprigs fresh thyme (3 teaspoons chopped)<br />3-4 bay leaves<br />2-3kg baking potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced (easiest with a mandoline)<br />2 egg yolks<br />200cl sour cream<br />Salt and freshly ground black pepper<br />3-4 tablespoons butter<br />1 garlic clove halved<br /><br />Method<br /><br />Poach the soaked cod: place it in a pot of cold water at medium heat, bring to a low boil and turn off immediately. Let stand for not more than 10 minutes, drain and then tear up into small pieces. In a large pot, pour the milk, bay leaves and thyme and then add all the sliced potatoes and simmer at medium heat until the potatoes are cooked through. Whisk the egg yolks into the sour cream in a small bowl and then stir this into the potato mixture. Rub the lasagna dish first with the cut sides of the raw garlic and then with 1 tablespoon of butter. Spoon half the potato mixture into the dish, add the poached cod bits and then cover it with the rest of the potato mixture. Dot the remaining two tablespoons of butter and bake at 350F (175C) for 45 minutes until the top is golden. <br /><br /> </div>
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<i>Richard Sanger's poetry collections include </i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550650679">Shadow Cabinet</a> <i>and </i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550651683">Calling Home</a><i>. He lives in Toronto.</i></div>
Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-16288106800797239612020-06-17T15:54:00.001-04:002020-06-17T15:54:46.624-04:00Usurped, Erased, and Taken over<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Hafez is one of Persia's most influential poets. Too bad many of the quotes and poems attributed to him in English are bogus. Omar Safi, director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center, <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/fake-hafez-supreme-persian-poet-love-erased-200601073431603.html?fbclid=IwAR3zplmCkvxDNw88TWxU23WRw9S7cJ7G7gPPLbJXXaWKsWlnyQMyA-NqeUc">tells the story</a> about the booming market in counterfeit Muslim poetry:<br />
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<i>This is the time of the year where every day I get a handful of requests to track down the original, authentic versions of some famed Muslim poet, usually Hafez or Rumi. The requests start off the same way: "I am getting married next month, and my fiance and I wanted to celebrate our Muslim background, and we have always loved this poem by Hafez. Could you send us the original?" Or, "My daughter is graduating this month, and I know she loves this quote from Hafez. Can you send me the original so I can recite it to her at the ceremony we are holding for her?"</i><br />
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<i>It is heartbreaking to have to write back time after time and say the words that bring disappointment: The poems that they have come to love so much and that are ubiquitous on the internet are forgeries. Fake. Made up. No relationship to the original poetry of the beloved and popular Hafez of Shiraz.</i></blockquote>
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For Safi, it's one more example of Western appropriation:<br />
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<i>Part of what is going on here is what we also see, to a lesser extent, with Rumi: the voice and genius of the Persian speaking, Muslim, mystical, sensual sage of Shiraz are usurped and erased, and taken over by a white American with no connection to Hafez's Islam or Persian tradition. This is erasure and spiritual colonialism. Which is a shame, because Hafez's poetry deserves to be read worldwide alongside Shakespeare and Toni Morrison, Tagore and Whitman, Pablo Neruda and the real Rumi, Tao Te Ching and the Gita, Mahmoud Darwish, and the like.</i></blockquote>
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Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-40173087378139863692020-06-11T14:38:00.001-04:002020-06-11T17:52:54.106-04:00Arrows That Strike At The Heart Of Readers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Aphorisms, <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/aphorisms-tell-philosophys-history-as-fragments-not-systems">argues</a> Andrew Hui, not only predate Western philosophy, but "constitute the first efforts at speculative thinking." Thinking aphoristically, he says, remains a foundational part of any intellectual tradition. One member of the "cult of the fragment"? Nietzsche:<br />
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<i>His philology on fragments became a philosophy of fragments when he abandoned his profession as a classicist in the late 1870s. Rather than just studying aphorisms, he started producing them. In the most fertile stretch of his life, from </i>Human, All Too Human<i> (1878) to </i>Ecce Homo<i> (1888), he composed thousands upon thousands of pithy sayings and maxims. The fragmentary form became the preferred style for the rest of his life. The prophet in </i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra <i>(1883-85) speaks in enigmatic dithyrambs reminiscent of the wisdom literature of antiquity.</i><br />
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<i>Nietzsche’s aphoristic form becomes his way of training his readers not to subscribe to a doctrine or a particular Nietzschean view of life, but rather to create and craft their own philosophy of life. He writes that "in books of aphorisms like mine there are plenty of forbidden, long things and chains of thoughts between and behind short aphorisms." What this means is that Nietzsche will not spoon-feed his readers. His method is like Heraclitus’—intense, difficult, aporetic maxims and arrows that strike at the heart of readers, seizing or destabilising their habits of thought. They are required to do much work, to investigate what is "between and behind" his sharp words.</i></blockquote>
Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-12051233290221331642020-06-07T20:17:00.001-04:002020-06-07T21:26:43.783-04:00Black Lives Matter in Montreal<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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While putting together a <a href="http://robynmaynard.com/blacklivesmtlsyllabus/">Black Lives Matter syllabus</a> to celebrate the contribution of Black writers in Montreal, Robyn Maynard <a href="https://mtlreviewofbooks.ca/reviews/black-writing-matters/?highlight=robyn+maynard&fbclid=IwAR2p0Nqd6BZmvUFBFubwDmIQeBquFp4ea9cnKZDSFD3xy83OIpHrPhcw4E8">looks closely </a>at the city's failure to confront it's own history:<br />
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<i>Montreal is often absent from national discussions about race and anti-Blackness, which tend to centre on Toronto and Halifax. This city, home to Black persons for over four hundred years, demonstrates little official recognition of the significant historical and literary contributions of Black writers and scholars. Despite organizing efforts by Black students, including a present-day push at Concordia University, there is no Black Studies program in Montreal, and less than one percent of full-time faculty at the two English universities are Black. Even the basics of Black Montreal history—such as slavery—are still absent or minimized in most school curriculums.</i><br />
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<i>As in other Canadian cities, Black communities in Montreal have been subject to centuries of structural violence, including two centuries of enslavement, ongoing targeting by police, over-incarceration, and over-representation in child apprehensions by welfare agencies. These realities are inextricable from Black visions of past, present, and future Montreal, and continue to inform both non-fiction and creative writing.</i></blockquote>
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Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-20392335389798617082020-06-07T11:51:00.000-04:002020-06-07T21:14:04.132-04:00The Unluckiest Businessman in the World<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Here's a short chapter from Éric Plamondon’s <i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550655421">Apple S</a>, </i>translated from the French by Dimitri Nasrallah. Originally appearing in 2013, the novel completes Véhicule Press' publication of the <i>1984 Trilogy</i> into English<span style="background-color: white; color: #1c1e21; font-family: , , , ".sfnstext-regular" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">.</span> Gabriel Rivages, Plamondon's alter ego, is the the central unifying figure across the trilogy. He performs all the online searches and collects the constellation of facts about Johnny Weissmuller, Richard Brautigan, Steve Jobs—and, this case, Ron Wayne, the little-known Apple co-founder.<br />
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<i>Originally, it’s spelled: iota, khi, theta, upsilon, sigma. In Ancient Greek, ichtus means fish. In Roman, it corresponds to the first letters of the following five words: Iêsos Christos Theou Uios Sôtèr (ictus). It means: Jesus Christ, son of God, Savior. That’s how the fish became the symbol of Christ. For Rivages, this all reminds him of his grandmother. She always had the same bumper sticker on her car. It was a sticker in the shape of a fish with Jesus written across it. His grandmother attended mass every Sunday. She never knew that the fish related back to the Greeks. What does that change anyways? Nothing, but Rivages can’t help but uncover origin stories when he wants to understand.</i><br />
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<i>Not much is known about the origins of the April Fool’s tradition. Why do we tell tall tales on that day? Why do we play tricks? Why do we tape paper fish on people’s backs It could connect back to the Zodiac. This would have come about at the time that the Sun rose from the sign of Pisces. There’s also a story that speaks of the end of Lent. Others say that to celebrate the Annunciation people gave presents on the first day of April. They commemorated the day that the Archangel Gabriel tells Mary she’s pregnant.</i><br />
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<i>Apple is officially founded on April 1, 1976. April Fool’s Day. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak own ninety percent of the business. The remaining ten percent belongs to Ron Wayne. He’s the one who draws the company’s first logo with Newton sitting under an apple tree. But two weeks later, Ron changes his mind. He regrets jumping into this adventure. He doesn’t believe in it. Anyways, he doesn’t like the idea of founding a company on April Fool’s Day.</i><br />
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<i>He sees it as a bad omen. He sells his shares back to the two Steves for eight hundred dollars. Thirty years later, they’re valued at three billion. Ever since April 1, 1976, Ron Wayne has the impression that a permanent paper fish has been pasted to his back.
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Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-44366245736565459602020-06-06T14:45:00.000-04:002020-06-07T21:25:26.730-04:00John Barth Was Astonishingly Boring<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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John Domini <a href="https://lithub.com/john-barth-deserves-a-wider-audience/?fbclid=IwAR3oY9wYC-lMmr8jqEWjd1RWwsAcx7dqHA8YsMLsWDIB42D_e4h4YwcbCnk">does his best</a> to reverse the reputational damage that John Barth, once a towering figure in postmodern American writing, has suffered:<br />
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<i>For the better part of 40 years, applause for this author has gone largely unheard. In the Times Book Review, for instance, the novel [Angela] Carter so admired took a loud thwacking. Gore Vidal, both in print and on TV, insisted that Barth was “astonishingly boring.” Long and short, the man couldn’t catch a break. His work suffered worse than that of any writer who followed his lead. Unlike, say, Donald Barthelme, Barth became one of those “no one reads anymore.” First Raymond Carver made him look prissy, then David Foster Wallace rendered him unhip.</i><br />
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<i>Now, the buffeting of cultural winds is always a risk. Arthur Miller, one of our greatest playwrights, saw all his later plays trashed—a damning indictment, according to Tony Kushner, of the critical establishment. To me the case of later Barth looks awfully similar.</i></blockquote>
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Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-158582205681998622020-05-29T09:29:00.001-04:002020-05-29T09:29:15.843-04:00Rethinking Literary Categories<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Sensing a "deep affinity" between stories by Chekhov and Dickens <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/05/25/a-novel-way-to-think-about-literary-categories/">prompts</a> Tim Park to wonder if there's another way we might classify novels, leading him to a category he dubs "The Belongers":<br />
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<i>All Dickens’s stories, and all Chekhov’s, are about being in or out of groups. About belonging. The desire to belong. The fear of exclusion. The pleasure of inclusion. The fear of not being worthy of the group. The pleasure of being the most worthy. But also the fear of belonging to the wrong group, the wrong company. Or marrying the wrong person. Worst of all, of going to prison. The fear that others in the group are not worthy. Not as worthy as the character who directs our sympathy first thought, that is. They must be expelled. Or the protagonist must leave the group. David Copperfield is ashamed of his wife, Dora. He made a mistake to bring her into his family. “It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home,” says Pip in Great Expectations.</i></blockquote>
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The new category looks to be quite capacious:</div>
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<i>Were there other writers, I wondered, for whom this hierarchy of values held, novelists whose plots, one way or another, hinged around belonging and its attendant emotions, however differently they might come at it—just as Dickens and Chekhov come at it differently, and position themselves differently, though obviously obsessed by the same questions and construing life in the same way?</i><br />
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<i>Over time, reading and rereading carefully, I found these authors who fit the description: Virginia Woolf, Natalia Ginzburg, Elsa Morante, George Eliot, Haruki Murakami, Graham Swift, François-René Chateaubriand. Many other lesser names, too, in genre fiction as well as literary. Many Italians, perhaps because I read a lot of Italian literature, or perhaps because the values of belonging are so powerful in Italian society. Dante, writing in exile, is obsessed with belonging; the deepest circle of hell is reserved for the treacherous, those who betrayed family and community.</i></blockquote>
Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-38549879349223451522020-05-25T08:34:00.001-04:002020-05-25T09:01:57.716-04:00Designing Réjean Ducharme’s SwallowedOne of Canada's top book designers, <a href="http://www.salamanderhill.com/">David Drummond</a> has been helping our poetry and fiction stand out for two decades. We asked him to walk us through his process in designing the cover for <i><a href="http://vehiculepress.blogspot.com/2020/05/rejean-ducharmes-masterpiecenow-in.html">Swallowed</a></i>, a new translation of Réjean Ducharme’s <i>L’avalée des avalés</i>, due out in the Fall.<br />
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"I knew from an early point in the design process that I wanted to show the main character in this novel, Berenice, being trapped or consumed by her life. These are the first two approaches I came up with, which I never showed because they weren’t quite on the mark."
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"Graphically, I found this next treatment more interesting. The response from the press was that it was a fine cover, but too elegant and restrained. They wanted to convey a bit more of the madness of the girl through bright colours—vividness and extremity."</div>
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"This is the cover that was put in the catalogue because the deadline was looming. The press liked aspects of it—'how the eye appears swallowed by the yellow, to indicate the creeping madness of the young girl.' They still had some reservations about it, and wanted to revisit it in the future to see if their concerns could be addressed."</div>
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"Sure enough, the time came when they asked if I could take another crack at it. Sometimes it helps to revisit a cover design with fresh eyes. I tried to synthesize what was missing from the previous sketches and I decided to capture this notion of being swallowed. I printed out a repeating pattern of a face of a young woman with the title underneath it and made it into a cone shape. I didn’t want to distort the image in photoshop, but wanted to create an analog solution by photographing it."<br />
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"I liked the slight roughness in the image quality. You can see lines from the laserwriter printout and decided to leave them in without much retouching. The press loved the result, and felt it was the right cover for this book. They wanted to see a colour exercise before deciding on the final background colour."<br />
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<br />Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-70983199429475029832020-05-25T07:37:00.000-04:002020-05-25T12:11:38.167-04:00How To Write A Blurb<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Blurbs, <a href="https://thewalrus.ca/the-art-of-the-blurb/">argues</a> Jason Guriel, are "a species of micro-criticism worthy of our scrutiny." One indicator of their quality, he says, is proportion:<br />
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<i>It’s not promising when a book’s first few pages are nothing but blurbs—pull-quotes from an endless roll call of major newspapers and magazines, each one ecstatic. (See, for example, </i>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao<i> in paperback.) Few books deserve that much praise (few books deserve praise, period) and it’s a minority of critics who can identify them anyway. The avalanche of good press is often triggered by groupthink: the unconscious, uncoordinated conspiracy that develops when the editors who assign reviews have bought into some book’s advance marketing or are responding to the pressures of the Zeitgeist.</i><br />
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<i>One or two decisive blurbs is a much better look. You can trust the book that carefully curates its praise. My copy of Lolita features a single statement from Vanity Fair: “The only convincing love story of our century.” Blurbs should drop the mic.</i></blockquote>
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Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-26817557997698701882020-05-23T07:38:00.000-04:002020-05-23T07:44:40.663-04:00My Summer with Alice Munro<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi30P3DAFjd24vbYK04FmouwTUDJiPdikw-05gxzLWXcdIkzrLDKU6l8GhoUNUzC4NCjw8wG4FzJNpO8orT4nnk3OLehU9tKkTxK52QBkPUOcyywOxi3LSOSqLu3W_KUAdxpS5Psrk1kh0U/s1600/41ee641a7808bf3ab7b84e9b845f43dd.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi30P3DAFjd24vbYK04FmouwTUDJiPdikw-05gxzLWXcdIkzrLDKU6l8GhoUNUzC4NCjw8wG4FzJNpO8orT4nnk3OLehU9tKkTxK52QBkPUOcyywOxi3LSOSqLu3W_KUAdxpS5Psrk1kh0U/s640/41ee641a7808bf3ab7b84e9b845f43dd.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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An extended period immersed in Alice Munro's stories <a href="https://themanygenderedmothers.blogspot.com/2020/05/kasia-van-schaik-on-alice-munro.html?fbclid=IwAR10SJGh4a8DZHXWmElG07uy_kPz1_SK_ejwzdGm6li0kcDvbvd2nwZk7G4&m=1">transformed</a> Montreal writer Kasia van Schaik:<br />
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<i>One summer, while visiting my hometown, a small mountain-locked settlement in Western Canada, I read an Alice Munro story every day for a month straight. After days spent serving customers and wiping down counters in a local cafe, it felt like a necessity; the only assemblance of an intellectual routine. I read her stories by the lake, on the margin of sand between the shoreline and the industrial train track; I read them on my back, legs crossed, book blocking out the sun like a small square flag. Sometimes a train would rumble past and alert me to my environment, which seemed less real than Munro’s black spruce or her fast-flowing, dark and narrow streams, which coursed through many of her stories, linking them the way rivers connect distant parts of the continent.</i><br />
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<i>It was a lonely summer, my summer with Alice Munro. I was frustrated by the fact that my old friends now had boyfriends and permanent jobs and no longer made time for me, a precocious humanities student back from her studies out east, eager to show off the new words she’d learned. No one cared. I was—and the irony was not lost on me—essentially, an Alice Munro character. Juliet visiting her parents in </i>Runaway<i>—subtly punished for her “odd” life choices. (“Odd choices were simply easier for men,” remarks Juliet, “most of whom would find women glad to marry them.”) Or Del in the </i>Lives of Girls and Women<i>, whose restless ambition, but simultaneous desire for conventionality, disturbs the social equilibrium of her rural community. I read Munro’s stories to find myself in them but also to distance myself from the unhappy women I encountered in them. I would do better. (Secretly, I knew I would not.)</i></blockquote>
Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-38941133628180654452020-05-20T20:38:00.004-04:002020-05-20T20:38:57.891-04:00A Primal Hunger <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Olivia Gatwood <a href="https://lithub.com/defiant-and-unsinkable-the-ethos-of-edna-st-vincent-millay/?fbclid=IwAR0Q7gCmPNtbNTX8IGwkaQzPNY7LUCjwTHCZlRU6ybnOEst8tkPJyu3DmB8">explains</a> her abiding fascination for a poet she describes as "a woman willing to laugh at those who sought to tame her, as much as she was willing to scream."<br />
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<i>Edna St. Vincent Millay took an interest in poetry early in life, publishing her first poem at age fourteen in St. Nicholas Magazine, a publication for young people. She was encouraged by her mother to pursue the craft, eventually publishing several more poems toward the end of her teenage years. “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55993/renascence">Renascence</a>” (1912), the title poem in her breakout collection, brought Millay her first acclaim as a writer. The poem is significantly less carnal than her later work but preludes the feeling that Millay would become famous for articulating—an urgent need to lessen the space between the individual body and everything around it, a primal hunger to grasp it all at once.</i></blockquote>
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Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-23355579752379099312020-05-15T13:51:00.001-04:002020-05-15T22:18:41.163-04:00But Was The Book Any Good?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitJlD2SOqWOraXNXTCSaWm_qFiQvGqruN-UmIxgBU34Mq935sEKrw6CbtxqorYMqOzr6OxbfIWxEV2KNq4wuf0zXSzeSywFCF1tqc09I5_sNUulX1Gs1dfZ0PoZLkqLLJsU1EhbbXSV832/s1600/1_og-6Twzc82Vbg4l5BgNuQw+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1599" data-original-width="1600" height="638" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitJlD2SOqWOraXNXTCSaWm_qFiQvGqruN-UmIxgBU34Mq935sEKrw6CbtxqorYMqOzr6OxbfIWxEV2KNq4wuf0zXSzeSywFCF1tqc09I5_sNUulX1Gs1dfZ0PoZLkqLLJsU1EhbbXSV832/s640/1_og-6Twzc82Vbg4l5BgNuQw+copy.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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Alexander Larman <a href="https://thecritic.co.uk/a-radical-proposal-book-reviews-should-review-books/">asks</a> why it's such a struggle for reviewers to say what they think about a book. It doesn't help, he says, that editors basically have two choices when it comes to handing out assignments.<br />
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<i>The first is to allow a significant literary figure to write a lengthy piece displaying their erudition, and which permits sub-editors to come up with a headline along the lines of ‘Julian Barnes on Jean-Paul Sartre’ or similar. The book itself is secondary, its coverage almost an irritation. And the other is nuts-and-bolts criticism, an engagement with an author’s intentions and aims where the fascinations of the subject are secondary to whether the writer has managed to make them accessible to a general audience. This may be less lofty, but is undeniably of more use to the profession, and probably to the potential purchaser, too.</i></blockquote>
The problem is that the "nuts-and-bolts" approach keeps losing out:<br />
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<i>There is certainly a time and place for long thinkpieces about authors and subjects, but one also hopes that a brave editor will have the courage to say to the fellow of the Royal Society of Literature who has filed their piece, ‘Sir David, this was marvellous, but could you please let us know whether you thought the book was any good?’ There may be a moment of wounded pride, but the extra paragraph of pure criticism appended to the review could make all the difference for the practice’s survival in its current form. And, on behalf of writers and reviewers alike, I can only hope that such a survival takes place, to give us all something good to read.</i></blockquote>
Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-35135084318586990722020-05-13T07:24:00.000-04:002020-05-13T14:00:17.544-04:00Réjean Ducharme’s Masterpiece—Now In English<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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On September 2020, Véhicule Press will be publishing <i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=978155065537">Swallowed</a></i>, a new authoritative translation of <i>L’avalée des avalé</i>s, the late Réjean Ducharme’s 20th century masterpiece. Originally released in France in 1966 by Gallimard, after being rejected by every publishing house in his native Québec, Ducharme’s debut has been unavailable to English readers since 1968. The story of Véhicule Press acquiring the translation rights to <i>Swallowed</i> is a fascinating tale in itself—one that is part ambition, part luck and part fate. You can read Esplanade editor Dimitri Nasrallah’s vivid account of attaining those rights below. (When you're done, you can pre-order the book <a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=978155065537">here</a>.)<br />
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I first discovered that <i>L’avalée des avalés</i> had been out-of-print in English since 1968 when <i>The Walrus</i> magazine asked me to write <a href="https://thewalrus.ca/the-case-for-reading-one-of-quebecs-most-reclusive-authors/">an appraisal</a> in the weeks following Réjean Ducharme’s death. The novel’s absence struck me as a significant cultural omission. An important part of Québec’s literary foundation was missing from Canadian letters. As an editor, I immediately sensed an opportunity, though I wasn’t sure how realistic a pursuit it was.<br />
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On the one hand, times had changed since Barbara Bray’s translation of the novel had first appeared in 1968. Canada now had a publishing industry that was now half a century strong. The oft-tumultuous relationship between English and French Canada had calmed and matured over the past two decades. Generations of legislation in Québec pertaining to the French-language had also groomed a wealth of homegrown translators who were better equipped to tackle Ducharme’s slippery prose, complex wordplay. and multi-layered allusions. But there were other obstacles. Gallimard is half a world away and used to selling English-language rights on a global scale, while Véhicule Press is a boutique independent in a country that is itself a subset of Gallimard's North American territory. Surely a half-century-old book from their back catalogue was a low priority for an organization preoccupied with international book fairs and a raft of contemporary titles to sell. They could consider our market too small for them. Would we approach the venerable institution responsible for publishing many of the twentieth century’s great authors?<br />
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An exchange began with their rights department. They were initially receptive to the idea, but had little background on the linguistic particulars of our region and no prior knowledge of our publishing house. Would we not want to publish the existing 1968 translation by British academic Barbara Bray, they asked. Our ambition was to have the novel re-translated by someone who had a natural understanding of Québécois idiom, and who could communicate the particularities of the original French in a way they had never before been served. Without a track record in international publication deals to bolster our cause, we were concerned our publishing circles were too far apart; Gallimard probably had more pressing activities underway.<br />
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As luck would have it, in March 2018 I was invited to attend the Paris Book Fair to promote my novel Niko, which had just been published in France. With a trans-Atlantic visit in hand, we restarted the conversation with Gallimard, to see if I could meet with their rights director in person and articulate the unique case for bringing Ducharme back to Canada. I am grateful to Camille Cloarec, at the time the Book and Debates Officer at the Consulate General of France in Toronto, for taking up our cause and communicating our desires to Gallimard from a much more reputed vantage point than our own. A few days later, I found myself in Paris, standing outside the unassuming door of the legendary publishing house, with less than two hours’ sleep after an overnight flight.<br />
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Once we were able to sit down in the same room, we were fortunate enough to hit it off and an agreement emerged quickly. It turned out that Anne-Solange Noble, the head of English rights at Gallimard, was born and raised in Montreal. She understood the underlying cultural value of what we were proposing, and saw it as part of the ongoing unique relationship between the French and English languages in Canada. We rhapsodized about the city, its street life, as well as people she remembered from Montreal’s Anglo literary community of the seventies. A new English translation, she agreed, could be useful to Gallimard in brokering rights requests in other markets.<br />
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Two years have passed since that fortuitous meeting. In that time, translator Madeleine Stratford has produced this new translation of <i>L’avalée des avalés</i>. <i>Swallowed</i> differs from Barbara Bray’s <i>The Swallower Swallowed </i>not only in its translator’s proximity to the regional roots of the original French, but also in its rendering to a looser and more figurative, more acrobatic English. Stratford’s translation of Ducharme is, to my ear, playful and lyrical and utterly timeless.<br />
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After more than half a century of languishing out of print, the book that transformed Québécois culture during the Quiet Revolution is finally available for Canadian readers to discover.
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Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-18903286032622431942020-05-09T09:58:00.000-04:002020-05-09T09:58:59.238-04:00Beyond The Pronouncement<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In a 2018 interview, Jericho Brown <a href="http://www.benningtonreview.org/jericho-brown-interview">expresses concern </a>that poets are prioritizing their political message rather using the form to surprise themselves:<br />
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<i>No matter the race of the poet, I’m much more interested in a poem that is like the life we live. I want the poem that is like, “I saw that people got shot at the synagogue today, and I had a sandwich, and I miss my daughter.” And in actuality, that’s what a day in our life looks like, and the poem has to carry the tones of all those emotions. Sometimes I think that poems lately are interested at the outset in settling on an emotion, as opposed to gradually discovering several tones and seeing if those tones might accumulate into a single poem.</i><br />
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<i>But I also think that part of this has to do with the fact that I am directing a creative writing program and that I am teaching and that I am teaching much more intensely than I’ve ever taught before, so I’ve been thinking about pedagogy a lot differently. I think one of the troubles of being a younger writer, of being someone who wants to write poetry, is that you put the cart before the horse. You put the ideas that you want to get to, or that you think you want to get to, before your language. If you put language first, then you can discover your ideas. But if you are thinking about your ideas, then you’re going to be at the mercy of the language you already know instead of one that you can figure out. And so maybe what I’m seeing in the writing of my students I’m ascribing to contemporary poetry at large. But I also do feel like I’ve read a ton of books in the last couple of years, and there’s a lot of knowns that I see coming through in the poetry, as opposed to unknowns that the poems discover.</i></blockquote>
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He continues:</div>
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<i>I do want poets to feel empowered to announce politically, but I also want them to go beyond the pronouncement. What happens at the beginning of your poem has to—because it’s a poem—be transformed by the end of your poem. So if the triggering moment for the beginning of your poem is a known political moment, I am fine with that, that’s great. But as I’m reading, I expect it to change because that was just the trigger. So I’m let down if everything is only some form of outside political thing or even inside political thing. I want the world in the poem to expand. I want the world in the poem to change. At least I want that for my poems. If I start with my mom, then I might end with the police. If I start with the police, then I might end with my lover. But if I start with the police, I don’t imagine I’m done with my poem if I’m still talking about the police. </i></blockquote>
Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-35355747561533711512020-05-09T07:25:00.000-04:002020-05-09T07:33:59.730-04:00How Can He Be Stopped?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Dracula</i> is one of the great monster stories to come out of the 19th century. Olivia Rutigliano <a href="https://crimereads.com/dracula-detective-novel/">thinks</a> Bram Stoker's classic makes a great deal more sense if we think of it as a detective novel:<br />
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<i>The epistolary Dracula itself embodies, and is thematically about, material excess: too many characters, too many documents, too many clues, too many victims, too many possible answers. It is an overstuffed file-cabinet; a massive, multi-colored evidence board of a novel. And it exists in this expansive, immense way, in drastic pursuit of a single explanation—or, really, two: what monster is responsible for the bloodshed in England, and, once he is identified, how can he be stopped?</i></blockquote>
Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-26793557941563238142020-05-06T23:01:00.000-04:002020-05-06T23:01:00.018-04:00CanLit and Vietnam<div>
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A new <a href="https://canlitofthevietnamwar.utoronto.ca/">website</a> promises to be an archive for Canadian writing about the Vietnam war, much of which has never been republished since the conflict. Robert McGill, who developed the site, <a href="https://canlitofthevietnamwar.utoronto.ca/?page_id=743">explains</a> the context behind such work. </div>
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<i>While the war angered Canadian writers, the years of the conflict were very good to Canadian literature. In fact, they were arguably its golden age. In 2006, when the </i>Literary Review of Canada<i> named the 100 “most important” Canadian books, thirty of them were ones published between 1964 and 1975—an astonishing number, given that the list covered over 400 years of history. The Vietnam War decade’s overrepresentation is less surprising if one considers that there was a surging interest in all things Canadian as a result of the country’s 1967 centenary, leading to an unprecedented boom in publishers, books published, and books sold. As it happens, many of those books addressed the war.</i><br />
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<i>Canadian artists of all kinds, from musicians such as Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot to visual artists such as Greg Curnoe and Joyce Wieland, took on the Vietnam War in their work, but it was writers who most pervasively tackled it, not least because there were so many newspapers, magazines, journals, and book publishers to disseminate what they wrote. An indication of Canadian writers’ feelings about the war was offered in the 1968 bestseller </i>The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S<i>., edited by the poet Al Purdy. Purdy claimed that one of his aims in producing the book had been to discover whether Canadian writers thought the American military presence in Vietnam was “just and honourable.” As it turned out, among the fifty contributors—including Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, Michael Ondaatje, Farley Mowat, and Mordecai Richler—nobody suggested it was.</i></blockquote>
Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4239657309427202553.post-22514333542160369642020-05-02T10:38:00.000-04:002020-05-02T23:08:03.023-04:00What To Read During Your Quarantine As we continue to wait out the pandemic, we asked a number of Signal poets for any interesting books they'd been reading during the lockdown. Here's a roundup of what came back.
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><b>James Arthur<br />Author of <i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550655223">The Suicide's Son</a></i></b></td></tr>
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For me, the big discovery of this spring has been <i>May Swenson’s Nature: Poems Old and New</i>. I’d read
Swenson’s individual poems before, but sitting down with this collection, I was amazed by how much
variety there is from page to page. Also, Swenson’s poems are so outward-looking, full of generosity and
interest (check out “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=34694">Saguaros above Tucson</a>”). And I finally read Hannah Sullivan’s <i>Three Poems</i>, which I
loved for its scope and daring. I found the first of the three poems especially moving; it reminded me of
Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That,” except in verse.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiznZszG7rGjoZ8AiAWdK13YRBikGRGsWqSSvql8h9wUAyA2XzKoVVtzm5QoQdYGTrogTie4hR0kaFZ-IZMnkTVW_X9TztPJ3p-IX_f-MSIel7HlEcO6ipGcAOOOC59ZvawZw9emMQ71Sl6/s1600/What+we+carry+publicity+shot+%25282%2529+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="708" data-original-width="708" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiznZszG7rGjoZ8AiAWdK13YRBikGRGsWqSSvql8h9wUAyA2XzKoVVtzm5QoQdYGTrogTie4hR0kaFZ-IZMnkTVW_X9TztPJ3p-IX_f-MSIel7HlEcO6ipGcAOOOC59ZvawZw9emMQ71Sl6/s200/What+we+carry+publicity+shot+%25282%2529+copy.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><b>Susan Glickman</b><br />
<b>Author of <a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550655216"><i>What We Carr</i>y</a></b></td></tr>
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I just finished <i>The Mirror and the Light </i>by Hilary Mantel—the conclusion to her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. Although the books are narrated from his point of view in close third person (hence the occasionally annoying refrain "He, Thomas Cromwell"), her protagonist is oddly reticent, rarely admitting, even to himself, the motivation for his often heartless actions. On the one hand, the blacksmith's son manages to acquire vast wealth and power by disenfranchising both the church and the nobility; on the other hand, he seems to be driven by some unseen force, like a soccer player who in an instant sees the only way to achieve his goal. But in his case the goal—consolidation of absolute authority in King Henry VIII—led to his own death.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY-8MUdaeH_NNBOJhD6FkExDtxjPtFFnkvXWNrdmJza-6ZjCV3r-tJHuW-Te7t1H890QfggMdjink64MSPuY9PZkLjqvP9Q1zcJiIN0KrR2WeMb7CJy6aKOV0gRLwSLarlP2b4cX6Q-KI4/s1600/Sadiqademeijer+copy.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="498" data-original-width="498" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiY-8MUdaeH_NNBOJhD6FkExDtxjPtFFnkvXWNrdmJza-6ZjCV3r-tJHuW-Te7t1H890QfggMdjink64MSPuY9PZkLjqvP9Q1zcJiIN0KrR2WeMb7CJy6aKOV0gRLwSLarlP2b4cX6Q-KI4/s200/Sadiqademeijer+copy.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><b>Sadiqa de Meijer<br />Author of <i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550655452">The Outer Wards</a></i></b></td></tr>
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I’m only halfway through Eternity Martis’ campus memoir <i>They Said This Would be Fun</i> but I can already highly recommend it. Like the author, I attended Western and am of mixed race, but unlike her I do not experience anti-black racism—so I was drawn to the book for the potential common ground, and for the chance to see a familiar place through a new lens. The work has deeply impressed me on both counts. The writing is lucid, funny, suspenseful, and devastating, and combines Martis’ personal experiences with thorough, current research. I am listening to the audio version, read by the author, and it is particularly compelling to hear this account in her voice.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiV95uZEQemrQGbGlzuFjKtewxDRVmUboAU0p71BVUtouesJgD37QInM7RoG6VpwPfGFjEIJPMCOiUI0MgT88rl1wz_LRnUbakbdVkK3dZ8T-0vOPvImGEyHMZusf7INNF_fedY1MExCpC/s1600/winkler+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="343" data-original-width="343" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiV95uZEQemrQGbGlzuFjKtewxDRVmUboAU0p71BVUtouesJgD37QInM7RoG6VpwPfGFjEIJPMCOiUI0MgT88rl1wz_LRnUbakbdVkK3dZ8T-0vOPvImGEyHMZusf7INNF_fedY1MExCpC/s200/winkler+copy.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><b>Donald Winkler</b><br />
<b>Translator of <i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550655094">The Hardness of </a></i></b><br />
<a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550655094"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><i>Matter </i></b><i><b>and Water</b></i></span></a></td></tr>
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What I’ve been reading: Emily St. John Mandel’s <i>The Glass Hotel</i>, her tale of lives altered and entwined in the course of a 1980s Ponzi scheme, not as impressive as <i>Station Eleven</i>, but still very accomplished; Julian Barnes’ <i>The Man in the Red Coat</i>, an elegant romp through the French (and in part English) belle époque, spinning out from John Singer Sargent’s glorious portrait of the pioneering gynaecologist and man about town Samuel-Jean Pozzi; and having loved his <i>Lampedusa</i>, I picked up Steven Price’s previous novel, <i>By Gaslight</i>, a baroque and engrossing adventure shifting back and forth between Victorian London and Civil War America. In French, Paul Kawczak’s <i>Ténèbre</i>, a gloriously written, dense and dark exploration of the evils of colonialism in the late nineteenth century Belgian Congo.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUaR957i_BO-Nr6IWLKFPn8IMpiVsrMyco4Mgm26MWb70iPHw3J-Lw-Z93V9zaPbTWUtY2bDYleT263BTv8dWcrN7EdPe4KZpC_5uqG_fnFGUnV1stT2vEDFwkQfBIyKEDahCUSFD4Kq25/s1600/author+photo+copy.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="415" data-original-width="415" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUaR957i_BO-Nr6IWLKFPn8IMpiVsrMyco4Mgm26MWb70iPHw3J-Lw-Z93V9zaPbTWUtY2bDYleT263BTv8dWcrN7EdPe4KZpC_5uqG_fnFGUnV1stT2vEDFwkQfBIyKEDahCUSFD4Kq25/s200/author+photo+copy.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption"><b>William Vallières<br />Author of <i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550655377">Versus</a></i></b></td></tr>
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I’ve been reading Virginie Despentes' trilogy <i>Vernon Subutex</i>. She’s a 21st century punk Balzac, recording with brutal honesty, derision, and empathy the historical period we’re in. She jumps around from character to character (20 or so in total), reminding us that one of most salient features of our time is a feeling of refraction, of irreconcilable separateness. But Despentes holds those shards together and present us with something resembling a whole.
I’ve also had the time to dive into <i>The Map and the Clock</i>, an anthology of English poetry edited by Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke. The book stretches from the 7th century to today, and does a thorough job of including unfamiliar and forgotten voices. I love how it presents English poetry as the organic evolution of a tradition, rather than a series of compartmentalized, self-contained mini-traditions that don’t speak to each other.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCb24q4TrunbAZsHoB1T3jEJrctPRDucdKpLoE_oCT9lTUDEjI_xXGBJhywXcY_DgqUwOlHyjqm3-9dvnvygexO_OmTy-vrg6i7GWKZez1VuXpOZxczxj9EMWxIWvfhxXpCQtPQuU-Lec2/s1600/_l1a5498_0+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="435" data-original-width="434" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCb24q4TrunbAZsHoB1T3jEJrctPRDucdKpLoE_oCT9lTUDEjI_xXGBJhywXcY_DgqUwOlHyjqm3-9dvnvygexO_OmTy-vrg6i7GWKZez1VuXpOZxczxj9EMWxIWvfhxXpCQtPQuU-Lec2/s200/_l1a5498_0+copy.jpg" width="199" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><b>Nyla Matuk<br />Author of <i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550654547">Stranger</a></i></b></td></tr>
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Here are three showstoppers. <i>The London Review Bookshop Sampler #1: Denise Riley</i> is a chapbook spanning the poet’s output from 1977 to the critically-acclaimed <i>Say Something Back</i> (2016) and a handful of unpublished poems. All are beautiful. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s tome, <i>Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism</i> is an astonishing work of documentary reckoning, personal memoir, and moral imperative that dismantles institutions such as museums, which she argues are sites of imperial control. Evan Jones’ <i>Later Emperors</i> shows it's possible to write with the "sound of sense" while creating an allegory for our time. Jones uses the Roman Empire as a blueprint for learning from history, But his poems are not judgmental. They let readers see venality and decline, drawing from a range of personas steeped in the capricious nature of twin political valences—power and appetite.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2ndxZITAG_92_JIM8UdZSFg18FrN_gVhO2C6r4NhtYfUH2eSc-x5K5_hLvu-zwn_Z1q6iMg_8Jg2u1iWuEugxAjt1UlaaUdw_1F_hXcpmoYGYQ0Ck0THoa5Vay07FyZaa5Lgs9wUN5vrs/s1600/jim-johnstone+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1298" data-original-width="1298" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2ndxZITAG_92_JIM8UdZSFg18FrN_gVhO2C6r4NhtYfUH2eSc-x5K5_hLvu-zwn_Z1q6iMg_8Jg2u1iWuEugxAjt1UlaaUdw_1F_hXcpmoYGYQ0Ck0THoa5Vay07FyZaa5Lgs9wUN5vrs/s200/jim-johnstone+copy.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><b>Jim Johnstone</b><br />
<b>Author of<i> <a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550653748">Dog Ear</a></i></b></td></tr>
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Two new poetry books—Evan Jones' <i>Later Emperors</i> and Leila Chatti's <i>Deluge</i>—have kept me company during my self-isolation. Jones is a real technician, and <i>Later Emperors </i>is full of historical reimaginings on the fleeting nature of power. Particularly poignant is the final long poem, "Plutarch to His Wife," a retelling of "Consolatio Ad Uxorem," wherein the protagonist considers his young daughter's death. An exercise in finding comfort in a time of suffering, the piece takes on new meaning in our virus-stricken moment. The poems in <i>Deluge</i> can be as mysterious as the sheeted figure haunting its cover. They're also visceral, "crouched and cursing" like the Virgin Mary of Chatti's "Confession." Appropriate, then, that a drop of blood is used to section each poem in the book, small drips before the flood of "Awrah," which explores the concept of disease as punishment.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXvZ01pjk2UHT68acBo5lY0TV5SZb4AdbczpixfAE5QgGUGoBpzkexwby5jA_KyEPCwak4gVH2fYgM82ZGpKsfrzUnsmxAFF_jGWTISwtTBz186dK6NOUgsTAaSHfVmRT5u-kEI27Xmy1F/s1600/cid_5F7AA646-93B5-45F2-95C6-90843FF881EA+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="374" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXvZ01pjk2UHT68acBo5lY0TV5SZb4AdbczpixfAE5QgGUGoBpzkexwby5jA_KyEPCwak4gVH2fYgM82ZGpKsfrzUnsmxAFF_jGWTISwtTBz186dK6NOUgsTAaSHfVmRT5u-kEI27Xmy1F/s200/cid_5F7AA646-93B5-45F2-95C6-90843FF881EA+copy.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Joe Fiorito</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Author of </b><span style="text-align: center;"><b><i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550655469">All I Have Learned Is </a></i></b></span></span></div>
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<a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550655469"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="text-align: center;"><b><i>Where I </i></b></span><b style="text-align: center;"><i>Have Been</i></b></span></a></div>
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At the far edge of memory, there was a time when the world was animate; hills breathed; crops flourished or died according to unknown forces; stones pulsed with blood; and all events were either mysterious or banal. I am reading <i>A King Alone</i>, by Jean Giono, the great chronicler of life in the remote hills and valleys of Provence 150 years ago. The book concerns a series of murders, but more than that, it is a social history of ignorance, fear, and wonder; it might as well be about us and our time, because, as the coronavirus shows, we are still not much more than superstitious peasants.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><b>Kateri Lanthier, <br />author of <i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550654660">Siren</a></i></b></td></tr>
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I haven’t wanted calming, gentle poems during the pandemic. My daily actions, following public health guidelines, are compliant and co-operative. So, I want catharsis! My 12-year-old son and I just finished reading Seamus Heaney’s translation of <i>Beowulf</i> aloud. We revelled in the assertive alliteration, the life-and-death grappling, the poetry that’s travelled to us from the distant past. Poetry: what will survive of us. About that echo…I’ve been re-reading Heaney’s book of lectures, <i>The Redress of Poetry.</i> Tempting to tweet passages from his “Joy or Night,” a steely-eyed examination of “last things” in the poems of Yeats and Larkin. On order: fiction by poets! <i>The Baudelaire Fractal</i> by Lisa Robertson, <i>A Ghost in the Throat</i> by Doireann Ní Ghíofa, and <i>How to Pronounce Knife</i> by Souvankham Thammavongsa.<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Robert Moore, </span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Author of <i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550654554">Based on Actual Events</a></i></span></b></div>
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Encouraged by a recent <i>Guardian</i> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/08/eve-babitz-tv-adaptations-la-woman-slow-days-fast-company">review</a> and warmed by the memory of photos of the author playing chess in the nude with Marcel Duchamp, I’m reading Eve Babitz’s <i>Slow Days, Fast Company</i>. It’s like driving a corvette through a moveable feast with the top down; sun, drugs, sex and a vast, peculiarly Californian carelessness. About 3 percent of the book is beautifully written. And what better company in this plague year than William Irvine’s <i>A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy</i>? The ultimate user’s guide to navigating this vale of tears; simple, unadorned and absolutely indispensable. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Derek Webster<br />Author of <i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550654264">Mockingbird</a></i></span></b></td></tr>
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In paper: Chaucer’s <i>The Canterbury Tales</i>, smoothly updated into modern English by translator Burton Raffel; Timothy Donnelly’s <i>The Problem of the Many,</i> poems that seem to refuse all readerly expectations—but then satisfy in surprising, original ways; Wallace Stevens’ ten-part poem “The Auroras of Autumn” is once again working its elegant magic on me, along with Karen Solie’s profound <i>The Caplie Caves</i>. On my phone: Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, whose smoky presence reminds me of early Eliot; Marilynne Robinson’s <i>The Givenness of Things</i>, mind-blowing theo-philosophical essays; physicist Brian Greene’s <i>Until the End of Time</i>; <i>These Truths</i> by historian Jill Lepore is essential reading; and Tim Parks’ entertaining grumble <i>Teach Us to Sit Still.</i></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: left;"><b>Catriona Wright<br />Author of <i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550654677">Table Manners</a></i></b></td></tr>
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<i>Outline</i>, the first novel in Rachel Cusk’s trilogy, frustrated me—the narrator was so remote as to be non-existent. Reading <i>Transit</i> now, I find myself admiring Cusk's technique. The narrator allows other characters to speak, while absorbing their voices into the text, which makes the novel feel like a collection of linked short stories, all centered on the idea of transit or transition, a potent theme for this floating, pandemic-time(less) present. Last summer, in Finland, I bought <i>A Landscape Blossoms Within Me</i> by Eeva Kilpi, one of the country's most famous poets. Since I won’t be travelling anywhere soon, I’ve been re-reading this irreverent, surprising collection. The poems describe a woman’s relationship with her aging body and her carnal urges, in exquisite deadpan: “Love is the most elastic human dimension. / It’s like a vagina. / It adapts to great and small. / Nature never lets us down.”<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Laura Ritland</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Author of <i><a href="http://www.vehiculepress.com/q.php?EAN=9781550655032">East and West</a></i></span></b></td></tr>
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Absurd, difficult, and strange: Virginia Woolf, writing her unfinished memoir on the eve of Nazi invasion (<i>Moments of Being</i>) or proposing a novel on “influenza” (<i>On Being Ill</i>); Samuel R. Delany's tilted, spinning sci-fi worlds of psychically deranged space-travellers and interspecies sex (<i>Aye, and Gomorrah, and other Stories</i>); Lisa Robertson’s female dandy, Hazel Brown, authoring Baudelaire’s poetry and crossing between Vancouver and Paris (<i>The Baudelaire Fractal</i>). At a time when I feel like I’m barely clinging to the bullet-train of history—swerving in equal measure between boredom and crisis—these books are giving me something to hold onto.</div>
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<br />Véhicule Presshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00818162880719157747noreply@blogger.com0