Iceland’s Good-for-Nothings

101 Reykjavik by Hallgrímur Helgason (Faber and Faber, 2002)

Iceland is one of those countries near the middle of my list of countries I’d like to visit. And near the bottom of the list of countries great literature emerges from (Viking sagas aside). While 101 Reykjavik isn’t what I’d call great literature, it’s a rollicking good read despite what the premise might insinuate: it’s a first person novel following the life of a slacker-degenerate thirty-something too lazy to move out of his mother’s house and just active enough to masturbate every morning before a day of snoozing in front of the television.

This main character is Hlynur, and despite being a despicable human being and pretty disgusting sexual pervert, he’s entirely likable. I think Hlynur gets a reader in touch with the sarcastic assholes inside themselves. He’d prefer a good monotonous life, but there’s much more in store for him. His mother comes out with a lesbian and is in a relationship with the irresistible Lolla, with whom he has a sexual encounter leading him to believe he’s suddenly the father of his mother’s child. Which is hilarious in its own right. However, the vast majority of the book involves Hlynur getting drunk and into all sorts of foibles and follies. Throughout is a biting humour that pokes at every bit of society mercilessly. By the end of it all, I even had a bit of sympathy for old Hlynur and his going-nowhere life.

The writing is stream-of-consciousness in style, but that also could be due to the fact that it was translated from Icelandic. By the end, the style becomes addictive – it’s like a nice little peek into the mind of the unassuming, disinterested guy you pass on the street sometimes. In fact, this novel makes me wonder how many Hlynurs are out there, thinking hilarious thoughts without anyone the wiser. It certainly proves that the shiftless loser still eating mom’s cooking at 34 does have some thoughts in that head, and even gives some insight into that underwhelming section of our society. Luckily, the other characters are just as vibrant and interesting as Hlynur, making Reykjavik’s drab city backdrop at least liveable in the mind of the reader. 

The perfect thing is that 101 Reykjavik ends just as unassumingly as it begins without much pomp or ceremony. Despite a potentially life-changing period of enlightenment that Hlynur experiences in nature, he returns to his home at the end of the novel generally unchanged and still as hilarious. Would it make sense for a slacker to make a move to improve their life? Of course not, and certainly not in the case of Hlynur.

The Rent is Cheap

Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets by Al Purdy (Harbour, 1996)

Poetry is a hard art form to write about, as it tends to be even denser than novels can ever inspire to be. Question: how do you say a hundred different things in fourteen words? Write a poem. How do you make a complete fuckwad of yourself? Write a bad poem. And then read it out loud. The great thing about good poetry is that it can take you to anyplace and fill your head with a good many ideas and sensations with very few words in a very short space. The bad thing about poetry is that it can be abused in that very way.

I still can’t decide if Al Purdy is a good or bad poet. When I read a poem, I like it to be a mystery as to what the meaning of it all is. I like to try to figure out just what the author meant by whatever they said. Al Purdy just seems to lay it bare on the table. His poetry is particularly centred on place – landscapes and trees – which certainly is nice. But it seems to stop there. Purdy’s poems appear extremely accessible – they tell stories of people and places, animals and rocks, which is probably why he was an extremely successful, published poet. His poems are like walking down to the beach and describing what is easily seen: the sky, the sand, the water, the rocks. Which is why I can’t say I really enjoy it. Then again, the trick to all this is that I could be completely wrong about it all. Purdy’s accessibility could be just a front for the deeper, mysterious meaning beneath. It very well could be just one big stinking metaphor for, I don’t know, the human experience or something. The thing with poetry is that I’ll never really know the answer.

Regardless, I had a great deal of trouble slogging through this tiny book. I didn’t feel engaged or motivated to keep reading, rather, it was a chore to pick up. It could be that my mind was erring on the side of simplicity, but I felt that Purdy’s poems were just cheating me out of a good whodunit, a real mystery that would normally be spun by the inquiring and philosophizing poet.

Tubby: Skinny on Content

Tubby, or, “Right About Face” by J. Howard Brown (S.W. Partridge & Co., 1909)

If I had been a writer of novels for kids back in the early 1900′s, I could have made a fortune churning out the kind of vacuous crap that is epitomized by the novel Tubby, or, “Right About Face.”  One wonders if the authors were getting paid only by the numbers of books they wrote in a year, rather than for producing anything of value. Tubby surrounds a group of English schoolboys at private school who, despite their propensity to play pranks, are all plucky, charming, polite, virtuous and just gosh-darned perfect little gents. The problem, other than the syrupy characters, was the plot, or lack of one. The book was more like a series of interconnected shenanigans that usually ended up with a teacher being humiliated or someone receiving detention.

A common thread through the book is the all-to-well named character of Baddeley, an unsavoury cripple boy who hates all fun and goodness. Thus, the schoolboys tease and pick on him, and make fun of his condition, and make him an even angrier character. However, half way through it, Baddeley discovers God, and after that, he’s a changed guy. Good thing, too. I was beginning to hate the little cripple – Tiny Tim’s evil twin, he was.

Regardless, it all ends well. Much fun was had by all, except for the reader who’s looking for some actual content. I suppose I could be being a bit too harsh. Tubby‘s audience wasn’t a group of greying academics either. Perhaps its purpose was merely to entertain: to give the real school boy of the 1900′s some escapism into the idealized world of carefree English private school days. Which has me wondering if I shouldn’t have packed by bags for England at the age of twelve for some ripping good shenanigans myself.

Sex Ed Old School Style

Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living by Dr. H.W. Long (Eugenics, 1919, this ed. 1937) 

It’s hard to believe in these days of rampant, commercially driven sexuality and comprehensive sex education as soon as a kid hits the big 1-0 that there was a time when people learned about sex from whisperings in the schoolyard and back alley conversations, all because what happened between Mom and Dad to make you stayed within the confines of that locked bedroom. When a couple got married, the night of consummation understandably would be a terrible one indeed, with neither party knowing exactly what they were supposed to be doing, but trying real hard anyway. Then steps in the aptly-named Dr. Long to fix the burgeoning problem. It seems that in Dr. Long’s practise, he’d run into all sorts of psychological and physical issues between couples because they simply didn’t know how to, erm, couple. So, he published Sane Sex Lives and Sane Sex Living, a handy tome for the beginner.

The first half of the book outlines the absolute basics – the stuff you probably learned in sex education in high school. This is a penis, that is a vagina. Babies are made. Etcetera. He describes society’s problem with keeping sex under the covers, the churches keeping it immoral, and the system keeping it out of the schools. Even his book was only initially published in the medical community due to skittish publishers. All of this led to a great deal of problems, not to mention a bride being practically raped on her wedding night by the overzealous male. So, basic information was absolutely necessary.

However, the second half is entirely different; Long puts forward the idea that sex is, by nature, not intended for reproduction only, but for pleasure as well. He debunks popular theorists of the day that humans were no more sexual than animals – that sex was for babies and that was it. His proposition is this: since female animals, e.g. cats, are only sexually open at a certain time in their cycles, (in heat), their version of sex is just for the kids. Humans can have sex any time they choose, meaning that nature intended sex in humans as fulfilling other purposes than reproduction. This would have been a shocking proposition for the time, no doubt. The rest of the book teaches things my high school sex education didn’t: basic positions, the nature of orgasms, how to synchronize orgasms in partners. Useful stuff, really, and strange finding it in a book older than my grandparents.

It’s hard to say what kind of ripple effect Long’s book may have had in the 20′s and 30′s, but one thing is clear: it improved the lives of many very unhappy people who just didn’t have a clue. The fact that the book remains useful in some ways today points to a real problem in our society: it’s all still terribly taboo. Judging from my comparison of the book to other modern sex education materials I was given at school as a kid, not much has changed in the way of sex education in several generations. So, if you still need to learn what you should have already known, just refer to a 80 year old sex manual. You’ll do better by it.

Gruesome Stories + Morals for Children = Disaster

Fanny’s King by Darley Dale (Blackie & Son c. 1900)

Fanny’s King is a group of short stories that any child is best without: they would only serve to mess up their worldview so much as to make them good, obedient citizens for the rest of their lives if they took the morals of this book into their lives. I suppose that was the intention of the author in the first place: to write a group of somewhat gruesome, upsetting stories and then pound in a moral at the end of each one.

The first, from which the collection takes its title, centres on Fanny, an impoverished child street sweeper in London. Here mother is an alcoholic and beats her whenever Fanny does not earn enough money. The conditions in which she lives are deplorable. However, one day she sees a handsome, rich man who she treats as an idol and whose actions eventually lead her into a church, where she discovers God through the help of the kind Reverend. All is well as Fanny is baptised until she dies under the horse of the rich man being caught in the street at the wrong time. But the moral is this: she found God, her soul is saved, and everything is fine. The problem is that the story explains away the inadequate nature of capitalism in that it always condemns a portion of society to decrepitude by stating that as long as they have religion, it doesn’t matter what their life is like here on earth. Thus, it encourages an unquestioning nature into why young Fanny is living in a hovel.

The next three stories continue to encourage children to remain unquestioning, but this time it’s about God’s works in nature. The first of these is a horrific tale of a hen who decides her eggs will hatch as kittens rather than chickens. The author suggests that the hen was slightly more learned than the rest in the barnyard and believed that she was able to make such a decision. When the eggs hatched and she found chickens instead of kittens, she killed them all by pecking their brains out. The farmer, seeing this, kills her immediately.  The same theme is reflected in a story about Willy, who asks how a flower grows and is chastised for questioning the works of God, and a fish who is curious about the nature of the surface and is eaten. I hope you’ve seen a pattern by now.

The influence of such a book on a young mind would have been disastrous had they taken its morals to heart: making quiet, accepting adults out of excited, questioning children. Children should be always curious and interested in their world and its function in order for their lives to work to improve our world as it is. To squash all that at an early age is nothing short of tragedy. 

Why Take LSD When You Can Read It?

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon (Penguin, 2006)

Thomas Pynchon is one of a small number of authors that chooses to remove themselves from the glories of fame, or at least a well-deserved press photo op, for the even greater glories of fame found in being a recluse. Pynchon made sure that there was no press or advertising linked to his new novel and gave critics only two weeks to read and review the 1085-page tome, an act that gave him horrendous reviews as most of them weren’t able to make it past page 700 before penning their critiques. The fact that Against the Day reads like a never-ending LSD trip through history probably didn’t help either.

Against the Day would be my second Pynchon novel – two summers ago I read his most popular work, Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel that wascritically acclaimed and relatively popular. Today, it’s kind of a hipster cult book. If you’ve read it from cover to cover (it took me three months, but I did it) it’s almost like a right of passage into the upper echelons of hipsterage. Pynchon’s style is to have a huge amount of characters, some vaguely related, travelling through a certain period of time with the reader. Against the Day concentrated generally on the period just before until just after World War One. Characters jump in and out and events are sometimes only half explained before something else takes the reader far away from it all again. Bizarre sexual scenes couple with explanations of scientific wonder as yet unknown. The whole thing is like taking a lot of drugs and meeting the lives of a multitude of people without the harmful after effects of the chemicals. Thus, when I was lugging this one to the pool this summer and people asked what it was about, I was generally at loss for words.

Regardless, Against the Day left me spellbound by the time I had finished. It was hilarious at parts, including a great parody of one of my favourite types of literature – adventure books for kids from the 1920′s, and beautiful at other times. The characters draw you in with their humanity. Despite the fact that you just barely know them, you find yourself connected to them. They are very much like us, living their lives and only vaguely aware of that very fact. Pynchon’s ultimate thesis is this: time is not relevant, but what we do with it is. When we accomplish things, think ideas, get wasted and laugh and fuck around, we are doing exactly what we ought to.

What’s Mine is Yours

This is my Country, What’s Yours? by Noah Richler (McClelland & Stewart, 2006)

Despite many efforts to counter its effects, Canada remains a country still encumbered with the question of its national identity, and this time it’s Noah Richler (Mordecai’s son) pushing his idea of his country, though the title still gives the book a democratic ring. However, I’m certainly not saying that Richer is incorrect in his mapping of Canada by any means, but his ideas certainly come out at times as rather half-baked. The book is a difficult one to get into, as Richler throws a lot of terms around to describe cultural literary periods and trends (like “Age of Mapping,” “Myths of Disappointment,” etc.) without explicitly stating what he means by them. Eventually, this all becomes clearer and the book improves, but only after the reader has slogged through a good 200 pages to get to it. Indeed, by the 200 page mark, Richler’s ideas about Canada’s development as a country reflected though literature begin to sound intelligent.

The one enduring theme of the book seems to be the place of nature in the Canadian consciousness, mostly as a threat and a friend. It’s a threat because we’re constantly fighting to survive the Canadian climate, and a friend because of what we’ve taken from it to ameliorate our own lives. Except, the problem is that our friendship with nature is often plagued by the guilt we feel from exploiting it.

The most useful functions of the book lie in performing two tasks: eloquently defending the usefulness of literature in society and providing a map of the contemporary Canadian literary scene. The first is achieved in providing examples of the use of literature by various cultural groups, such as the Inuit, in moving their own culture along out of the places they have been put into by European settlers. The second is the meat and bones of the book; interviews with authors and excerpts from their works that give the reader a clear view of the amazing depth and range that Canadian writers are currently exhibiting in their works. Had Richler chose to highlight any dead authors, it’s clear the book would have not been able to sustain itself for the immense bulk of the past.

Richler has done something which has been lacking in Canada up until now: a clear, critical look at our past forming the present as seen in literature. For whatever is lacking in this work can be reviewed and redone by some enterprising author in the future, ready to answer the question posed by Richler at the finish: “This is my country, what’s yours?”

Comic Relief

Blankets by Craig Thompson (Top Shelf, 2006)

I have a terrible habit of judging books by their covers and doing the same of new and different experiences by initially reacting to them as immoral or below me. Thus, for the longest time, the graphic novel remained on the unworthy list of literature good enough to grace my eyes. However, my girlfriend Katherine at camp miles away recently sent me her favourite graphic novel, Blankets, and since love makes me do crazy things, I read it. And I read it in one afternoon. Apparently, I judged wrongly.

The graphic novel is a true piece of art, bringing together literature and drawing in a very different way from a traditional comic book. It’s another example of the successful merging of two media to create a new, successful and accessible medium (the first example being television merging sound and image). The story reads like a true novel, and without the drawings, it would still read like a novel, albeit a deconstructive modernist one, which, had this been the case, I would have praised in this very weblog. However, the drawings are what bring the words to another life in creating a work of beauty. For Blankets is a truly beautiful work.

The story is a touching one of an awkward teenager stuck in a rural, evangelical backwater who encounters his first true love. It deals with the difficulties of managing one’s life in the midst of a challenging family, bullying schoolmates, and the fight to live one’s life as one’s own. And it has that lovely power to bring back those first moments in your personal life that were filled with that wonderful feet-above-the-ground feeling of love.

I’ve learned today that literature is not specifically unaccompanied by pictures. It’s quite clear to me that Craig Thompson put as much work into illustrating some 500 pages of artwork combined with a meaningful, touching story, as any old dyed-in-the-wool novelist. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so damn judgemental.

It Takes All Types

Types of Canadian Women Volume II by K.I. Press (Gaspereau, 2006)

The best poetry hits you days after you read it. You’re walking down the street, and BAM you get hit with one of those good lines you read a while back. K.I. Press’s poetry is that kind. It plays with the imagination and psyche, creating a world within the book. In this volume, the author is wittily copying a format of an earlier volume from the early 1900′s called “Types of Canadian Women Volume I,” which outlined the biographies of a number of esteemed Canadian females. Accompanied with each poem is an old photograph of some woman or another, presumably from which Press wrote her impressions in poetry.

While I can’t say the book has enlightened me at all concerning the enigmatic Canadian character, it’s a solid piece of work that works both as entertainment and food for thought. She shows women not sticking to the confines of gender – women here are desperately doing things – saving people from boats and having adventures and saying just about anything they please. It’s almost like an oral history of the secret lives of so many women – lives perhaps not considered at one point socially acceptable.

The Medium is the Massage, Right? Or the Message? Whichever.

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore (Gingko,  2001, orig. ed 1967)

Marshall McLuhan is the kind of guy that has a lot to say but not always the best means of saying it. He’s not always clear about things in the way he should be. In other words, his wisdom doesn’t always hit the proletariat in its stomach, even though it would be good if it did. Because the things that McLuhan expresses in The Medium is the Massage apply to every one of us, especially as the electronic age that McLuhan is recounting is actually the environment that is in our midst.

It’s difficult to write with very much gravity having finished the book a couple of weeks ago, forgetting in the process what I planned to state, and then having neglected writing about it for fear of being unable to communicate the gravity that this book deserves. Nevertheless, The Medium is the Massage, as it is described, is truly a “collide-o-scopic” view of the world, filled as it is with the incredible graphic design of Quentin Fiore. Indeed, the pictures to the book provide just as much information as the text, which is re-stating what McLuhan wanted to say in the first place: that the medium that we create… oh fuck it. I can’t state this properly. I think it’d be best if you read the book for yourself rather than reading about the book this time. It’ll all come together.

My favorite part of the book was a quote from Laotze. It’s incredibly thought provoking and it’s meaning be extrapolated however one likes:

“Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,
By vacancies joining them for a wheel’s use;
The use of clay in molding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence;
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness;
Thus we are helped by what is not,
To use what is.”

Thus, you are helped just as much by the empty space between these letters of this sentence as the letters themselves in finding the meaning of the sentence. What isn’t is just as valid as what is. The person you aren’t only contributes to the person you are. Ad infinitum. 

I guess the main point of the book is, after I think about it for a bit, that the world is changing in a very different way because of the advent of television and electronic communication. It made the world back into its original being as a villiage, but rather than large numbers of individual villiages, one great big villiage. If the book set us into ourselves, what with its inward way of communication (words to voice in your head) and the straightforward logic of the alphabet, television, and more recently, the internet, will only serve to bring us together. Like me to you, the reader, right now, and you back to me, if you choose to comment on this. Or you to me if you choose to write something else on some other topic. It’s really quite amazing.