I'm inaugurating a new reading project for vestige.org. It will be independent of Reading 2008 and subsequent related projects. It's called The Long Read. There are a number of books in my stack that I've wanted to read for years, but have put off because they are daunting either intellectually or by virtue of their extreme length (or both). There aren't many of these books, but they could take months or perhaps even a full year to read and therefore don't fit well into my Reading 2008 project, nor my policy of reading only one book at a time. I'm talking about books like The Anatomy of Melancholy or In Search of Lost Time. What I propose is this: alongside my regular reading, I will read one of these long, daunting books. Rather than posting a single review after reading the book, I will post periodic reports, including interesting quotations and my thoughts on the process of trying to engage with such heavy reading material and how, or even if, the extended duration of that engagement might affect my thoughts and feelings about the material. If that sounded convoluted, I suppose you might just say that I'll be blogging about a big, difficult book alongside my regular reading list.

The first book I've chosen for The Long Read is Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. I've been interested in this book since taking a class in 1999 with Canadian author Eric McCormack (The Dutch Wife, First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, The Mysterium, etc), in which he spoke extensively about writing his thesis on The Anatomy. I picked up the NYRB edition in 2001, and it's been sitting on my shelf ever since, glanced at but never opened seriously. With one or two exceptions, I've never been a fan of pre-Victorian prose, so I don't anticipate a smooth ride with Mr. Burton. I'm hoping that my natural affinity for the topic will sustain me. These lines from William H. Gass' introduction give me some hope:

The analytical outline should not daunt. Burton pays as much attention to his own schematisms as he pays to the syntax of his sentences. Imposing indeed are his interconnections, but it is rather as if a net had been flung down on top of fish who continue to roil and flop freely about beneath it.

So here's hoping this works out. I don't think I've ever been so intimidated by a book in all my life.

The problem with the comments has been fixed. Because I'm quick like that. If you've previously visited individual entry pages on vestige.org, it would be a could idea to do a refresh before you write your comments, as the problem was with a faulty template, the data for which might still be in your cache (and for some reason still affects the comments—wonders never cease).

It has come to my attention that there is yet another problem with the commenting system (MovableType seems to fail more or less at random, after working properly without issue for months or years at a stretch), and every single comment is now appearing on this entry, no matter what entry the poster actually intended to comment on. I won't have time until later tonight, or possibly tomorrow, but I hope to have it corrected quickly.

I've been re-reading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen this weekend, in anticpation of Zack Snyder's upcoming film (warning: link re-sizes your browser). Ironically, the sense of nostalgia the work tries to elicit—for the supposedly more innocent comics (and times) of the 1940s and 1950s—is not the nostalgia I experience. I'm simply too young. I instead experience a nostalgia for the period when Watchmen takes place, 1985. The fear of nuclear annihilation was never something I felt palpably. I was thankfully too young for that as well. I could sense the fear, and sometimes the outright paranoia, in the world and some of the people around me. That paranoia dribbles and oozes through the the pages of Watchmen, coating the characters and distorting everything. There is so little hope in this book, and so much despair. How sad is it that these are my "simpler times"?

In the book we see headlines of the Soviet army moving swiftly through Afghanistan (the notion of anyone moving swiftly through Afghanistan is laughable, in this day and age) and into Pakistan, bringing Cold War tensions to almost unprecedented heights. We already trade stories about where we were on September 11^th, 2001. I wonder if one day people of my generation will also trade stories about where we were and what we were doing when the Iraq war began. I remember where I was. My friend Jon and I had gone for lunch to a pub in downtown Waterloo called Fáilte. There was a big screen television in one corner, and Jon and I watched as the first American bombs fell on Iraq. At that moment I felt a shame like I'd never felt before, like I never thought possible. I felt ashamed to be a human being. We hadn't intended to make it a drinking lunch, but after watching the news we felt it necessary. Nostalgia is a complicated emotion, and sometimes, like now, I'm not entirely comfortable with where it takes me. I think, however, that we ignore complicated emotions at our own peril. It was in part a dismissal of complicated emotions in favour of uncomplicated ones that led us down this path to begin with. There is a great movement now to embrace some amorphous concept of hope. Overall I think it's a good thing, but what I hope, is that we will learn to embrace our complicated emotions, and not repeat past mistakes by clinging to the promise of a single word rather than working to make that promise a reality.

This is why I read, to seek Harold Bloom's difficult pleasure, examine the complexities of my nature, perhaps even become a better version of myself. Perhaps it's why I can be so hard on contemporary Canadian writing. I see tremendous potential for depth, sophistication, and ingenuity, and it's not being realized. Is this naïve of me? It's a shame that so many of our literati (Iron Maggie in particular) are so dead set against acknowledging the value and contributions of genre fiction, which Watchmen most certainly is. I only hope that Zack Snyder can live up to the challenge; Moore's shoes are quite difficult to fill.

I had expected this book to take me only a day or so to read; after all it's not only quite short, it's written by one of my favourite authors. It took me more than two weeks to read. Usually taking so long with a book means either that it is extremely long, or it has trouble holding my interest. Neither was the case with At A Loss For Words. Instead I found that I was so emotionally invested in the material that I found it virtually impossible to stay with the book for any length of time. If you shortened the time frame and switched the pronouns around, the plot—a writer, suffering from writer's block, is reunited with a lost love for an intense long-distance romance, only to be callously abandoned by him a second time, with traumatic consequences—would be a pretty accurate description of the last twelve months of my life. I don't normally like to discuss personal things on this blog, particularly in the middle of a review, but I can't help but wonder if those recent events in my life are causing me to think more than I should of a weak book.

The narrator's dry, intelligent voice cleary marks At A Loss For Words as a Diane Schoemperlen book, but a lot of the careful, clever diction and playful sentence structure that are among the chief delights of her best work are missing or subdued. It would be easy to dismiss the lack of playfulness as owing to the heavy subject matter, but Schoemperlen has dealt with sombre themes before and not been any less lively or inventive. I've come to the conclusion that there's two possible explanations for this, one quite interesting, the other rather less so. The less interesting explanation is that it's a weak book and my emotional involvement with the content is making me think it's stronger than it is (not an idea I relish, on any level). The other explanation has substantial artistic merit, and strikes me as the sort of thing Schoemperlen would do, though (if it is what's going on) it's not as effective as it may sound. At A Loss For Words, despite being about a specific failed relationship, is far more general and abstract than literary fiction—and Schoemperlen's in particular—tends to be. The bulk of the novel "happens" in the form of first-person recounts of dialogue in the absence of virtually all context. Much of that dialogue, if we can rely on the narrator, is inane and clichéd and completely recognizable to anyone who's ever been furiously in love and then been hurt by that love. What I think Schoemperlen might be doing with this is examining the curious blend of sameness and hyper-specificity that comes with love and heartbreak. No love has ever been as fierce as our love, no hurt as big as our hurt, but somehow even our greatest wordsmiths can't discuss it without falling into to the same cadences as the least of us. Our experience of love and heartbreak and our reactions to them are so predictable they might be akin to genetic memory. It doesn't quite come off, but I like that idea better than being unable to trust my own judgement because of emotional turmoil.

Next up is Entitlement, by Jonathan Bennett.

Anyone who may have tried to contact me via email over the last twenty-four hours more than likely found that they could not. Due to some inbox weirdness, I was able to send but not receive email until early this afternoon. All the messages I was sent during this period were lost; you will have to send them again. The problem seems to have been resolved, so things should go back to normal. Thanks for your patience.

After sitting on the idea for a couple of months, discussions like this one have finally forced me to draft a book review policy. It's kind of wordy, but I think it covers everything I wanted to say. If I find that I need to make some adjustments later on, I'll post about it here. So: authors, publishers and publicists, if you have a book that you'd like me to review, get the skinny here. I'd love to hear from you.

My friends, it's about damned time.

A few words for my American readers on this momentous day: I'm not an American citizen (I don't live there, in fact I haven't even visited for something like sixteen years), so it's not really my place to tell you what election day is all about in your country. I would not be making this statement at all if I did not believe the outcome of the election mattered to you, or indeed to me.

In a free and democratic society, voting for your leadership is not only a right, it's a responsibility (an opinion I've expressed before). What you do today will have an effect on you, your loved ones, your community, and even those of us in other nations. I won't pretend that I don't have an opinion about who would be the best choice, both for your nation and mine (ahem), but I'll ask only these two things of you: first, that you vote. Free and democratic societies are harmed when their people become apathetic, letting their voices go unheard and placing the choice of their leadership in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Second, that when you do vote, you consider carefully the issues and the platforms of the various candidates, and that you then vote for the candidate you believe will do the best job for you, your loved ones, and your society. An active informed electorate is the finest defense against corruption and tyranny. I believe that if you understand who you are voting for, and why you are voting for that person, you will be able to leave the booth knowing that, win or lose, you did your best. It's a fine feeling, and you deserve it.

Best of luck.

There's a lot of energy in this book. The opening story, "A Sound Like Dolphins," is possibly the weakest in the book, but it also sets up nearly every story in the book with its blend of frank violence and sexuality and the every day mess that is domestic life. When we think of tales of domestic life, particularly in this country, we tend to think of rural—or at least not explicitly urban—families living lives of no real import but nonetheless dealing with nuanced emotional and moral consequences. We also tend to think of these works as focusing primarily on the lives of women. Being, as we are, nearly a decade into the 21^st Century, one would hope that we could put aside in both our national literature and our national subconscious such simple, ridiculous notions such as women having more or more interesting/important things to say about domesticity through fiction. We of course have not.

Pardon Our Monsters examines a variety of mostly domestic situations (divorce and single fatherhood, siblings dying, the onset of puberty, fucking up your life and having to move home), mostly, though of course not exclusively, from male perspectives or with male protagonists. Hood's characters are not grand people living grand lives, are not explicitly urban, and the stories definitely involve issues of emotional and moral nuance and consequence. They also refuse to strip out the violence and puss and blood and shit and decay that regularly inhabit the periphery and sometimes even the cores of plain old domestic lives. And I'm not just speaking metaphorically. There's a wonderfully true to life scene in "Giving Up the Ghost" wherein a thirteen year old boy sneaks off to a hospital washroom to masturbate to completion for the very first time while his sister lays dying of a brain tumour on the next floor. It's quite remarkable stuff, in its way. Not quite as good as the blurb by Trevor Ferguson (I'm not sure who that is, but he apparently he gives great blurb) would suggest, but he's certainly somebody to watch. Particular favourites are the titular piece, a fine exemplar of the criteria stated above, and "That Ghost We Had," which is simultaneously the sweetest and saddest thing ever.

Next: At A Loss For Words, by Diane Schoemperlen.