Year: 2020

Nope. I mean, I can write… I’m just… not writing. Sure, I am working slowly on some poems towards my next book, but can I sustain the narrative and voice needed for this monstrous 700 pages fantasy novel (currently nearing page 400)? No, I cannot. It’s not normal. It’s upsetting. And it’s what I’ve got right now. Amy Sackville commiserates.

In the last weeks I’ve taken up, and put aside, woodcutting, drawing, German. I’ve cooked and painted walls and baked. Several weeks in, I caved and made a sourdough starter. (It really does seem miraculous, the raising of bread, though I won’t go on about it.) Watched the lilac, then the climbing rose, then the honeysuckle bloom. Planted sweet peas and watched them sprout. I know I am fortunate. Sat in the small, overlooked garden, for which I’ve never been more grateful, with a book unread in my lap, picking up and putting down my phone, listening to building works and the radios of neighbours, staring into this fragrant, sunny, confined space. I can’t settle to anything.

I work at a university and the last months have been the busiest I’ve known, as we respond and support and adapt and plan. This is not about having an excess of time on my hands to be idled away, and wondering what I might do with it. It’s about what I’ve been doing in the time that I do have, when I’m not doing that job; and whatever that has been, it is not writing. This is all just distraction. From everything. From what’s beyond the flat, the garden, and from this sudden circumscription to those bounds. From writing, and the fact that I am not writing. Because I have not done any writing. (Writing this, here, is terrifying.) Why can’t I write?

Can literary talent be inherited? This article at the BBC looks at three examples of mother-to-daughter blood-based transmission of poverty and heartache writing as a career choice. Obviously its mostly kids learning these future-crippling behaviours from their parents. My son, 17, is also currently engaged in writing a fantasy novel in his spare time (which is whenever the options of video games, socially-distanced picnics with friends, and making sandwiches at odd hours have been exhausted). Will it be any good? Who knows. The ideas are good, for sure. Over time, if he sticks with writing and reading he’ll get better at the writing part. I am a decent writer, but that’s partly because I have some talent and partly because I put in 25 years at it. He perhaps could have inherited an artistic eye (though I think that’s learned as well), but the rest he’ll have to make up on his own if he wants to go follow this inadvisable career path calling.

The art of novel writing isn’t often a family business. The combination of talent and perseverance required, plus the good fortune to be published, are rare indeed. Even rarer are literary generations of mothers and daughters. But there are three notable pairs of mother-daughter novelists throughout literary history who share the gift of language and the same storytelling talent – and suggest that talent can be inherited, either through natural ability or through careful nurturing. An author mother can be a path opener or a role model for her daughter, or both, and help shape her literary destiny.

• New Yorker gets witty with pandemic terminology;
• What are safe practices for bookstores now?;
• You must be this tall to take this booksalescoaster ride;
• Comics, however, were doing just fine up until this year;
• Sunburst Award shortlists for Canadian SpecFic is up;
• Postcards from Anne of Green Gables creator;
• Academic librarians face layoffs as school budgets are cut;
• And yet, national crises are when libraries get to be vikings;
• In fact, literature in general shines during a pandemic;
• Jane Austen’s former home is now a B&B… At least it’s not a Starbucks?;
• RIP: Elizabeth Harrower, Australian Novelist, dead at 92;
• Dr. Trump is free to talk on Sixth-Grade Trump;
• There’s so much wrong with China and books, but not this store;
• Global piece on literary diversity initiative for Calgary school kids has only one face pictured, the white woman who created it (it’s not her fault, but you can see how people are probably rolling their eyes?);

So that letter from last week, eh? Woof. Anyway, here is some analysis of why none of these rich, White, over-privileged people are not being “cancelled” along with a defence by one of the signatories.

• “Cancel Culture” is a scam perpetuated by people who don’t want to do the work of helping to change things because it would not allow them to continue hurting others, whether on purpose or as inadvertent consequences of their selfish behaviour;
• It is also a way for oppressors, abusers, and bystanders to play the victim;
• AOC sums it up pretty nicely (people, let’s make her president);
• Thomas Chatterton Williams on what he saw as the letter’s intent;

Blerg. Here we go. Come at me, bro-week.

• Happy Birthday, Alice Munro! Ever since that hoax last fall, I gasp when I see her photo in the news;
• There’s a typo on the cover of Douchald Trump Jr’s book – enough said;
• All the Warren Ellis stories (not the ones he wrote) are becoming public;
• The story of #publishingpaidme;
• Juno Roche writes stories for young “Gender Explorers”;
• Libraries also provide lifelines during regular times, too;
• When wondering what books will help you survive a pandemic, ask the zombie expert;
• Here’s hoping we never see a Charlie Kaufman headline that doesn’t include the word “strange”;
• Colson Whitehead wins Orwell Prize;
• Have you read The Innocents by Michael Crummey? Get it;
• Here’s how to be white without being fragile: apologize when you get it wrong and make amends;
• China: back to Mao-level strong-arming of books;
• Courts are still playing tennis with Mary Trump’s tell-all and Cohen is in the same boat, except his is dumber and more skeezy and probably has stains o n the seats;

No, not the book itself, the story inside. TLS investigates.

How, when and why did novels start? Conventionally, people used to say two things, in the main: that Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) was a game-changer; and the novel started in the “long” eighteenth century. Only Don Quixote was published in 1605, and in critical circles Cervantes’s giant may have eclipsed Defoe’s marooned mariner as the most influential book-that-might-be-called-a-novel there has ever been. Don Quixote holds in his bony hands the “romance” stories of love and chivalry he believes in, the ones he inherits from earlier centuries; but these outré influences are vulnerable to certain corrosive satirical scepticisms based in the stony reality of the Castilian landscape. Romance, satire and realism make the novel; they are already seething nicely in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688).

No, not the stories in them. When, and how, was the book invented? The BBC investigates.

Sometime in or before the First Century CE a new kind of book appeared that promised to address the scroll’s shortcomings. The evidence is sparse but telling: archaeologists have discovered a few key scraps of papyrus whose text unexpectedly continues from the front to the back, and whose neat margins one might expect to find in a paged book. And that is exactly what these fragments are: they are leaves from the first paged books the world had ever seen. We know that the Romans called this new kind of book the codex (from caudex or tree trunk, because of its similarity to their wooden writing tablets), but how the codex came to be in the first place is shrouded in mystery. The first written mention of the codex appears in the words of a Roman poet named Martial, who encouraged his readers to buy his books in this new, paged format:

“You who long for my little books to be with you everywhere and want to have companions for a long journey, buy these ones which parchment confines within small pages: give your scroll-cases to the great authors – one hand can hold me.”

Written between 84 and 86 CE, Martial’s sales pitch tells us not only that paged books were known of in the First Century CE but also that some of them, at least, were made from a new material called parchment. This alternative to papyrus, invented in a Greek city-state some centuries earlier, was made from cleaned, stretched animal skins by means of a bloody and labour-intensive process, but its smoothness and strength made it an ideal writing material. Archaeologists have since confirmed Martial’s claims via fragments of parchment codices dated to the First Century – and yet, these few tantalising finds aside, we still know very little about where or why the codex was invented, or who might have done so. Even the question of whether the first codices were made of papyrus or parchment has never been satisfactorily answered.

It’s Friday, folks. You’re here again. Still alive. Shit went down this week, you survived it. I hope you nailed assholes and bigots to the wall this week and will congratulate yourself with something sinful this evening.

• The celebrities are getting back to vanity poetry books;
• And there are a million new celebrity memoirs, including this one that is presumably written entirely in the native language of dolphins;
• ABA is trying to diversify the board;
• Some SciFi/Fantasy/Horror recs from The Guardian;
• Trump family still trying to block book that won’t make any difference;
• I mean, “Cheating as a way of life?”… this is news? They don’t care;
• How to Make Toddler Reading Nooks (pro-tip: add a lock on the outside);
• On academic freedom, boycotts, and the question of Palestine;
• Friday fun: the hardest part of writing, a comic;

Should you be worried that Jr. just wants to read the same damn book every day? No. Unless the book is something like Mein Kampf or anything by “Donald Trump” or Norman Mailer, et al., it’s fine. While this tiny advice column article addresses younger readers, my 17-year-old has always read and reread his favourites. The last few years he’s done this with the first two books of the legendarily-late-to-complete Patrick Rothfuss fantasy series, The Kingkiller Chronicle (in which no king has yet been killed, I might add). I’m okay with that, since I’ve also read those. Though the conspiracy theories about what’s behind the Doors of Stone are getting a bit stretched, I tell you. Anyway, point being, he’s decided to become a writer based on his love of this one series (not his poet dad and novelist/screenwriter step-mom), and for that I have to give Patrick Rothfuss credit where credit is due and say, “Screw you, nerd, he could have been a scientist.”

Kids love repetition—watching the same movies, singing the same songs, and, yes, reading the same books. They’re hard-wired to prefer familiarity, probably an evolutionary thing that helps keep babies close to their caretakers.

But repetition also helps kids learn. One study showed that hearing the same words in the same story helped more than hearing the same words in different stories.

What should we do with the art of people who are brilliant and yet bad for progress in the world? I don’t know, man. I’m just trying to not be a bad guy and still create art myself. It doesn’t get as much attention, that’s for sure, but at least I can look at myself in the mirror and admit less unpleasant things like, “You’re getting old” or “If that hairline goes any thinner, you’ll have to start giving individual hairs names to track them”. But I digress: this is an important question for our time, since we’re now in the business of pointing out and punishing bad behaviour instead of chuckling at it and rewarding it. But how far back do we punish? The way I look at it is, there’s SO MUCH art out there, why would I spend time on something that leaves a bad taste in my mouth when there’s something equally as good or enlightening by someone who isn’t a douche? Good for discussion, anyway.

When I recently interviewed American author Richard Ford for this paper, one question was bound to come up: his treatment of critics who have given him bad reviews, one of whom was sent a book with a bullet hole in it, another of whom was spat on. Ford’s response was not especially enlightening – he gets asked about this a lot – but it did raise an interesting, secondary question.

On social media and in the interview’s comment section, some readers said they no longer bother with Ford’s books after these actions. Part of this response is likely because what Ford did was so targeted, personal and grotesquely intimate; but writers also lose readers for broader political reasons, and for speech as well as actions.

When Peter Handke won last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the commentary in the press was not about the work, but about Handke’s defence of Serbia’s actions in the 1990s Bosnian war. “The Swedish Academy is still an attention-seeking trashfire,” said one British newspaper books editor. Aside from the damage to the Nobel’s reputation – already on shaky ground – there is an additional loss in that many will no longer want to read Handke, whom John Updike called “the finest writer in Germany”.

But can we really separate the writer from the work? If a book is an expression of the author’s psyche, why would we want to rummage through the dregs and peelings from the mind of someone we find repellent?