David McGimpsey:  Of course I meet that kind of resistance all the time and, in some ways, it always surprises me. This resistance, of course, never actually comes from a stuffy Julliard professor looking down his or her nose at me as I besmirch the sublimity of Mozart. The resistance more often comes from sheltered MFAs, insecure grad students, and poetasters whose cultural palate, to use a comparison they will appreciate, is as extensive and refined as the menu at Arby’s. I should say, however, that I am not championing “the people” or the wisdom of the streets: rarely do I express knowledge and enthusiasm for products which are as culturally sanctified as the blues. I would rather write about The Karate Kid.

So, this dismissal, to put more of a spin on it, usually comes from good middle class folk who are trying to show off their decent educations and who just want to write their fancy poems about prowling mooncats or how awful that mean old Dick Cheney was and who would never think of themselves as enforcing class divisions. Good people know it’s not nice to say somebody who was born poor is unsalvageable, but somebody who publicly likes NASCAR or enjoys drinking diet soda from the can— well, good luck explaining that at the next departmental cinq a sept.

There’s a yawning, routine anti-Americanism which comes into play in this, of course, and it’s impossible to defend against the screeds of Canadian jingoists. I understand the role of elitism in the cultural production of poetry and how it simply does not welcome reference to working class culture (beyond sad imagery about defeated fathers in undershirts watching sports on the tube) and, on occasion, picking up on the simple bigotry behind it all, hurts to hear. But it remains strange to me that most of this tut-tutting comes not in service of actually promoting the ancients (my poetry is actually fond of the ancients, is conscious of both canon and repertoire) but mostly in service of trying to preserve a provincial notion of elitist social order organized around the idea of “poetry.” To keep it free of references to Miley Cyrus. Not in the name of Milton or Wordsworth, but in the name of some rather recent Canadian book of poetry with a title like In the House of the Moth-Stone. Not in the name of Mozart, but somehow in the name of boxed wine and sensible sweaters.  I actually prefer my snobs snobby.

People’s Coop books is my local bookstore. They handsold Delible, as they do a lot of other books by Vancouver-based authors. Every time I drop in, I always find some interesting political or literary boardbook for my babe.

Come to the Wise Hall Friday night, 7:30, and $10 will get you entrance to a marathon line-up. Charlie Demers is hosting. The writers on the bill include George Bowering, David Chariandy, Kevin Chong, Rex Weyler and me, as well as playwrights Marcus Youssef and Camyar Chai. You’ll see performances by comedians Morgan Brayton, Katie-Ellen Humphries, and Alicia Tobin, DJing by Dreamscene and music by Chelsea Johnson, The Carnival Band and Team YPE.

I just can’t see the drive without People’s Coop Books.

The suburbs themselves interest me as a locale. They’re often portrayed idyllically in literary stories, but I wanted to explore how suburbs are (or aren’t) shaped for social uses. Suburbs aren’t built for walking or gathering – the suburbs are generally asocial in their organization. Especially now that I have a daughter, I really appreciate the way that the Commercial Drive neighbourhood is a series of beautifully social spaces, shared and inhabited by many different people. It’s quite remarkable. I can’t help but compare the experience of living here with living in a suburb, a neighbourhood of quiet homes set very far apart from gathering spaces (which tend to be very condensed commercial spaces, like malls). So, you get miles and miles of houses, then a node of commercial activity (a mall), then miles and miles of houses. In the Commercial Drive area, by comparison, social spaces dot the neighbourhood; residential, commercial and social areas intermingle. The asocial organization of suburbs makes driving a necessity. For a teen, who cannot drive, a suburb can be as entrapping as an island; it can be experienced as a real wasteland.

CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

which is smart and made me laugh out loud. Until I read on, the part where he talks about his (scientist) friends at the Sante Fe Institute. He says something here that feels much more true, and echoes something Wayde once said to me:

CM: I have friends at the Institute. They’re just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, “It’s really more important to be good than it is to be smart.” And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.

“I know one thing I wanted was to write about an intelligent person who doesn’t have money; usually, the kinds of characters who get to have existential worries are middle-class types, while working-class people deal with external challenges, say, oppression by social and natural phenomena.”

We get into class and representation towards the end of the interview — a subject that there’s so much more to say about.

You can hear my interview with Demers below (or subscribe to “Books Rational” through Itunes, and also get older interviews with Hiromi Goto, Aaron Peck, & others).

Here is the advanced praise:

“Charles Demers writes wittily, unguardedly, and often downright scandalously, until he arrives, in The Prescription Errors, with a novel that is as much about an individual’s uneasy condition as it is about a society’s deeper illness. Read this book if you’re prepared for fiction’s equivalent to a raucous stand-up performance, if you’re prepared for a merciless send-up of social pieties, and most of all, if you’re prepared to confront and enjoy the strangest of symptoms.”— David Chariandy

“The Prescription Errors is a thoughtful, hilarious and deeply engaged novel. Charles Demers’ many obsessions make for compulsive reading.” — John K. Samson

“An impressive debut in fiction.” — George Fetherling

“With this book, Charles Demers has written a complicated love letter to Vancouver. The Prescription Errors is as filled with debilitating insecurities, troubled relationship histories and affirmation of the power of community as the city itself. I read it on a trip and it made me homesick for the city I so love/hate.”— Morgan Brayton

Demers will also be launching a book of non-fiction, Vancouver Special (Arsenal), which is highly anticipated. Oh, and there’ll be refreshments, short readings from each book and, of course, books for sale!

Cafe Rhizome,
317 East Broadway (just east of Kingsway),
Thursday November 26th, 7:30 p.m.

]]> http://annestone.net/2009/11/05/charles-demers-double-book-launch/feed/ 0 http://annestone.net/2009/10/31/the-syphilis-notebooks/ http://annestone.net/2009/10/31/the-syphilis-notebooks/#comments Sat, 31 Oct 2009 22:22:29 +0000 admin http://annestone.net/?p=318 When I read at SFU on Thursday, Mercedes Eng was there and asked a great question — or made a great point. In distinguishing the earlier (two) novels (jacks and Hush) from the later one (Delible), I’d said something along the lines of how the earlier works had more in common with poems, and in each short novel, I’d tried to sustain a single note or pitch (chord, more accurately, as both of those novels are multivocal). In Delible, by contrast, I’d aimed at more than a single note (or chord). Mercedes pointed to a passage I’d read that day about 15 year old Lora, who takes to (sometimes) wearing her missing sister’s glasses after she is gone. Is that how you tried to achieve more than one note, she asked, with the glasses? And, yes, — I realized, the glasses concretize something I was getting at. In the earlier works, it occurred to me then, one might mistake perspective for ontology, but that’s less likely with Delible.

Last month, I visited Roger Farrs’ contemporary-literature-for-creative-writing-students class (he’s teaching Delible). The students asked a lot of questions, some quite good, about everything, including my intentions in writing that book. The other day, I came across an old notebook, and in it, a series of notes I’d kept while writing jacks. In reading those notes, I came across a mention of Hermeline (the narrator’s name in my first novel). The name, I rediscovered, is an allusion to a female demon that an eighty year old priest was accused of invisibly keeping company with for some forty years. If someone had asked me if that were the case, I wouldn’t have remembered it before I salvaged the notebook (from a cycle I then called the syphilis notebooks, a massive scrawl of notes ranging from Pythagoras’s thoughts on squaring the circle to his admonition that his followers keep their hands from beans to meditations on 15th to 18th century representations of syphilis). So much for authorial intention. And retention.

Thursday, October 29, ‘09
12:30 to 1:30 p.m.
Special Collections, Room 7100
WAC Bennett Library, SFU,
12:30pm to 1:30pm.

Matrix 84 is out now, with a dossier on new Vancouver writing (which I co-edited with Sachiko Murakami).  Our intro:

The work collected here reflects some of the ways that the Vancouver writing scene has constituted itself through ties to the visual, to social critique, and to genre-busting. Aaron Peck’s protagonist performs a post-Benjamin tour of the Richmond night market (a time-honoured pilgrimage among bargain-seekers and certain of the Vancouver intelligentsia), his thoughts turning to a visual and material analysis of what appears in his path by happenstance and by design. Charles Demers’ protagonist, no less the contemporary flaneur, performs an astute social analysis of place and class set off by the purchase of a one dollar slice of pizza. Meredith Quartermain’s assay into historical fiction sees her character’s biography focussed through the narrowest of prisms (a language of “footings and slip joints”), reshaping the genre.

Daniela Elza’s poem evokes Mountain View Cemetery, a large inner-city graveyard that straddles a dozen city blocks (the crematorium’s contrails are said to distract local highschool students); it is a historic Vancouver site, literally graven with memory, but also the recent site of cultural activities including a Vancouver Biennale vernissage and Capilano University Editions book launch. Social issues and writing have long been entwined in Vancouver, and Rita Wong, Larissa Lai, and Reg Johanson offer up important social critiques in poems that are political, tactical, and deftly languaged. In these, meaning accrues through feints and imputations, images are glancing and meaning is unsettled: Wong’s piece, a non-fiction meditation, poem, and call to action at once, traces the devastation wrought by our contamination of water as life source; Lai deftly connects commodified substances with natural sources — so long uncoupled that the reconnection of leaf and paper is felt as small shock; and Johanson offers up, in his “Escratches,” a glimpse of the social outrages mounted in the name of Vancouver’s upcoming Olympics. In the poems of Scott Inniss, history emerges alongside place names to collide with the present, and tensions mount between “affluence” and “effluent.” Nikki Reimer offers accounts of the RCMP’s tasering of Robert Dziekanski at YVR. The poems stutter through distorted grammar and syntax, echoing both the failure of communication that contributed to Dziekanski’s death and the debacle of public inquiry that followed. Jacqueline Turner turns her attention upwards to the ubiquitous building cranes at sites of development that more familiarly define to a Vancouverite the cityscape than the buildings they create; Ray Hsu questions whether it is the Empire or its inhabitants who define a city. Inhabitants abound, from the “barrage of khaki pants” in Dina Del Bucchia’s tribute to Nyac, longtime Vancouver Aquarium resident and YouTube celebrity otter, to those “busy loving everything” in Jen Currin’s “You are on Yew Street.”

In the world of images, Vancouver veers between utopia – a fabled city of glass rimmed by mountains – and city of bedlam, in which images of the Downtown Eastside’s inhabitants are portrayed as irrationally drug-ridden and intractably poor. Bastin and Van Camp avoid such narrow representations of the city: Richard Van Camp’s lens captures a whimsical and nuanced Vancouver in the scrawled and hand-made signage this city’s occupants sometimes use to hail one another and Sarah Bastan’s diptychs offer views of the city and its citizens, separated. While at first glance Bastin’s pictures — like the poems and writing gathered here — might appear to be of any city, in the details one sees that these could only be, powerfully and unmistakably, portraits of Vancouver.

Sachiko Murakami & Anne Stone, eds.

September 2009