Apart from being dark, musty and having ceilings so low tall folks bump their heads, my apartment is notorious for two things: first, it's quite messy, as I am an atrocious housekeeper, and second, it contains a lot of books. And by a lot, I mean a whole lot. Folks tend to not believe me when I tell them how many books I have, so I went around and took some photos tonight (don't worry, the apartment is cleaner than it looks from the photos). Bear in mind that I left quite a few behind in Dryden, and still have some packed away in boxes and such here in the apartment that I wasn't able to get photos of, nor did I make a survey of my various magazines. Behold:

The homemade bookcase in my living room:

The tall bookcase, also in my living room:

Books on the desk:

Books near the television:

Books on the chair:

Books on the black hole that is my homemade coffee table:

Books stacked on random things in a corner:

The third bookcase in the living room:

Books on and about the chest, also in the living room (yes, that's a Ziploc bag full of Smurfs):

Books by the couch:

Books amongst the DVDs (yes, that's The Imitation of Christ below Stephen King's Four Past Midnight:

Books on the cat:

Books in the bathroom:

Books near the bed:

Books in boxes:

Books on the dresser:

Books in the dresser:

I don't believe in guilty pleasures. Six years of studying literature at the university level taught me many things, and perhaps the most important thing it taught me is something that seems obvious in retrospect, but that most people have difficulty applying in their daily lives: not everything you like is good, and not everything you dislike is bad. We don't need to feel guilty or ashamed because we like something we know is not necessarily of the highest quality. Still, most of us, myself included, fall into that trap from time to time.

For literary folks, especially here in Canada, guilty pleasures often come in the form of genre fiction, like romance, science fiction, or fantasy (though, strangely, mysteries tend to be pretty accepted). When our writers produce works that would fall into those categories, our inner snobs emerge to label them "dystopias" or "magic realist" or some other such bullshit. Code words for the literati, for the most part. We don't want to be mistaken for the kind of people who read books with airbrushed paintings of dragons on the covers, do we? Hell no. Some of my best friends read books with airbrushed dragons on their covers. I'm not sure how this plays out in other jurisdictions—perhaps its a matter of geek community politics; I'm okay with being a book geek, but I don't want to qualify for Beauty and the Geek—but I think here in Canada it has a lot to do with wanting to be taken seriously. Being taken seriously is a national obsession for us even outside the book world, and as Brian Busby has noted, we've been pretty good about deliberately marginalizing pulp and genre publishing in this country, Harlequin being among the few notable exceptions. Why we think this makes us look good is beyond me, but then so many things are.

I'm not falling into that trap anymore. Here it is, for all the world to see: I read books by David Eddings, China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, Ursula K. Le Guin, R. Scott Bakker, Phyllis Gotlieb, Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, Bernard Cornwell, Patrick O'Brian, Phillip K. Dick, William Gibson, Alan Furst, Guy Gavriel Kay, H.P. Lovecraft, Douglas Adams, Neal Stephenson, John MacLachlan Gray, Simon Scarrow, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, Jack McKinney, Robert E. Howard, Robert A. Heinlein and Harlan Ellison, and I enjoy them, even with the odd airbrushed cover. But, you say, with newspapers now covering comic books (oops, sorry, graphic novels—can't actually call the damned things by their true name), an admission like this, that includes some pretty famous, respected names, isn't so big a deal. You're probably right. Let's talk TV.

I watch a lot of television, and if you're keeping track of folks in Canadian publishing via Twitter, you'll know that so do a lot of "book people". From what I can tell, the programmes they watch tend to come in two categories. They either watch the new breed of high-budget, critically acclaimed dramas like True Blood, Mad Men and Dexter, or trashy, low-budget reality television like American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, and Canada's Next Top Model. I suppose this is progress. A few years ago, before programmes like The Sopranos and The Wire brought television drama to a new level of quality (or, rather, got it more attention—there were a handful of shows before them that came very close to the same quality), I think you'd have been hard-pressed to get a lot of die-hard book people to talk TV around the water cooler. I can't imagine them being excited to talk about last night's episode of Fraiser, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, or LA Law.

What I wonder about is why there's so little discussion of trashy television drama. There are a number of shows on right now (Legend of the Seeker, Spartacus: Blood & Sand, Burn Notice, Leverage, White Collar, Castle, Eureka) that may sometimes have decent budgets, but where the writing and acting aren't quite up to the level of something like Deadwood. (And then there's shows like Supernatural, which started out as a monster-of-the-week dramedy, but over the last four and a half years has morphed into one of the smartest, funniest, and best-executed things on TV, though nobody seems to be watching it.) There's still some folks who don't watch television at all (like Rebecca Rosenblum, who seems to be one of the few people who can say that without sounding like a hipster snob—which I can assure you she is not), but what really interests me is why there are so few people who watch—or will admit to watching—those trashier dramas. Is there a stigma attached to them? Does watching trashy reality TV seem so much like a guilty pleasure that it's excusable, while watching, say, Spartacus (like Legend of the Seeker, it's from Sam Raimi, the man behind Hercules and Xena) might be mistaken for something you would watch for genuine, non-ironic enjoyment?

I think that it's good people are more open about the television they watch these days, because the medium has come a very long way in the last decade, to the point where I think a lot of the lower-quality dramas are now as good or better than many of the higher-quality dramas from only fifteen or twenty years ago. So to give some love to the trashy dramas, I will admit: I watch Legend of the Seeker (and apparently so does Amy Jones; the leather, it creaks), Burn Notice, Eureka, Leverage, and pretty much every show I've mentioned in this post (except the reality TV; for some reason the closest I can come to watching reality television is Mythbusters and Top Gear, which don't really count).

Step out into the light, Book People. There's no such thing as a guilty pleasure, no matter how many people deny that The Year of the Flood is science fiction. You don't need to hide anymore! Now that I've opened the floodgates, you can expect posts about television programmes in this blog's future.

This is the one post I never wanted to write. People who know me, and regular readers of this site, will already know that I am not a feminist. I am, in fact, quite critical of feminist theory at times. I resist making this a big issue on this site for two reasons: first, emotions can often run high when it comes to identity politics (of which feminism and feminist theory can play a significant part), making it very easy for a poorly-worded sentence to cause a colossal misunderstanding, and second, feminism remains a useful movement, and feminist theory a useful set of tools for a variety of fields; I don't like limiting my tools, and criticizing something too much on the Internet can do that. But this thing, this stupid, stupid, embarrassing disgrace brought to us by the Editorial Board at the National Post has left me no choice but to articulate my position as clearly as I can, because the absolute last thing I want is to be grouped with those ignorant jackasses.

There are legitimate arguments to be made criticizing Women's Studies programmes. Lack of rigor is a complaint I've heard from serious scholars, both male and female, from other disciplines. I've even seen examples of it myself, when a former partner of mine was taking Women's Studies courses and became extremely frustrated by what she felt were academic standards well below what she was used to in her primary field. Most importantly to me, however, is that such programmes, while admirably dealing with an extremely broad set of social and theoretical issues, quite clearly privilege a particular theoretical framework and point of view. This isn't a problem in the hard sciences or certain professional schools, but it's more than a problem in the arts, social sciences, and interdisciplinary studies. Degrees are for fields of study, not points of view. I think folding Women's Studies into something more inclusive, like Gender Studies, would allow for a more diverse and therefore robust programme, a diversity that feminist theory helped bring to my own field, English Literature.

I think the above paragraph constitutes a reasonable critique of some of the problems (or perceived problems) with Women's Studies programmes as they now exist.

This bullshit from the National Post does not:

The radical feminism behind these courses has done untold damage to families, our court systems, labour laws, constitutional freedoms and even the ordinary relations between men and women.

Women's Studies courses have taught that all women — or nearly all — are victims and nearly all men are victimizers.

[...]

Divorcing men find they lose their homes and access to their children, and must pay much of their income to their former spouses (then pay tax on the income they no longer have) largely because Women's Studies activists convinced politicians that family law was too forgiving of men. So now a man entering court against a woman finds the deck stacked against him, thanks mostly to the radical feminist jurisprudence that found it roots and nurture in Women's Studies.

[...]

Over the years, Women's Studies scholars have argued all heterosexual sex is oppression because its "penetrative nature" amounts to "occupation." They have insisted that no male author had any business writing novels from women's perspectives; although, interestingly, they have not often argued the converse — that female writers must avoid telling men's stories.

I'd be curious to see the Post's research into how judgements in family court have changed with respect to husbands and fathers, or how patterns have shifted with regard to awarding custody in various jurisdictions across Canada. It would be equally interesting to see how—or even if—those number correlate with the growth of Women's Studies programmes in those same jurisdictions. The Post has cited no numbers, no Stats Canada documents, no independent surveys, not even any anecdotal evidence. Surely if there is a clear culture of "radical feminist jurisprudence that found it roots and nurture in Women's Studies," then Canada's most obsessive-compulsive bureaucratic wing must have data on it somewhere, and no doubt the Post's crack Editorial Board has ferreted it out. Perhaps they simply forgot to cite it.

It would also be interesting to find out what educators they spoke to about the pedagogy involved in teaching Women's Studies, and what course materials they perused, and from which courses and institutions, that led them to describe the programmes as courses deliniating women as victimized and men as victimizers. Unfortunately, the Editorial Board doesn't see fit to tell its readers. The course material I have first hand experience with, from Laurentian University, is far from being so cut-and-dried, and though I did not always agree with the approaches or conclusions, offered a highly nuanced set of theories about human interactions that presents ethical and intellectual challenges (in many senses of the word) to both men and women. Perhaps the Post felt their readers would not be interested in this information.

I know I've been hard on the Post in the past for having less than stellar Books coverage, but lately they've improved tremendously with The Afterword, matching and often even surpassing coverage at the Globe & Mail. They seem to have no trouble covering Russell Smith with little apparent controversy, an author who has more than once used female protagonists or written from a woman's point of view (including a pornographic novel, under a female pseudonym). But of course the Editorial Board is talking about the academic world. Well, that's something I happen to know a little bit about. You see, before I ran out of money, I was actually an English Literature student, training to become a university professor. You don't see much of it coming out here in this blog, but I like to wade hip-deep in hardcore theory and academic criticism. Academics love gender reversals in protagonists; there is a tremendous amount of work to be done studying not only the standard literary techniques, cultural and theoretical implications, but also issues of gender identification, authenticity of voice or even appropriation of voice, basically a truckload of the fun things that keep academics writing papers and teaching interesting, though-provoking classes. George Elliott Clarke's libretto Beatrice Chancy focuses on the experiences of a young black woman in 19^th Century Nova Scotia, and is a favourite teaching text of feminist and non-feminist professors alike. Not only is it not frowned upon for this acclaimed poet to be writing in the voice of a female protagonist (well, partly, at any rate), the book is among the most lauded on the many curricula that use it.

(And as for the sex as "occupation" bit, let's just say that the women I know, feminists or otherwise, make their own choices based on knowing they have the power and freedom to explore their sexual identities, and have control over their own pleasure, over their own sexual relationships and destinies. The ladies I know are fierce, and I can't help but wonder how the Post's Editorial Board has gotten these notions stuck in their heads. Perhaps they're projecting. The world may never know.)

In short, the Editorial Board of the National Post has apparently done no research into their claims (or none it wishes to share), and frankly doesn't know shit about literature and how it is studied or taught in Canadian classrooms, regardless of the ideological leanings of the professor or the programme. So what are they on about? Here are a few other quotations from the screed—er, editorial—that might shed some light:

Their professors have argued, with some success, that rights should be granted not to individuals alone, but to whole classes of people, too. This has led to employment equity—hiring quotas based on one's gender or race rather than on an objective assessment of individual talents.

Executives, judges and university students must now sit through mandatory diversity training.

[...]

They have pushed for universal daycare and mandatory government-run kindergarten, advocated higher taxes to pay for vast new social entitlements and even put forward the notion that the only differences between males and females are "relatively insignificant, external features."

So this, really, is what's got the Post hot under the collar. Most of this seems like pretty good ideas to me. What it looks like is incremental (and in the case of employment quotas—something I actually believe undermines equality—hopefully temporary) steps toward finally enacting the equality promised on paper in the Charter. The Post is pissed off, it seems, that women are being recognized as people. It's no wonder the National Post Editorial Board doesn't sign their names to these pieces. I too would be ashamed if I'd contributed to this poorly conceived mess. There is a difference between disagreeing with aspects of feminism, and outright misogyny. The Post's editors are clearly incapable of recognizing it.

My challenge to the Editorial Board of the National Post: sign your names to this document and face the public shaming that is your due, or shut the fuck up entirely, you smarmy fucking cowards.

I apologize if this post has been a bit rough, unpolished, or emotional; I'm not a professional journalist. But then, judging by this editorial, neither are the members of the Editorial Board at the Post.

The 1980s was not exactly my favourite decade, musically speaking. The disturbed geniuses who brought us the spartan soundscapes of post-punk had discovered island rhythms and African beats. Those influences softened their edges, muted their anger at the largely urban disenfranchisement that originally fueled the punk movement. The resulting mess of genres, usually lumped together as New Wave, became little more than a massive John Hughes soundtrack, eventually devolving into cheesy synth-pop before finally dying of auto-erotic asphyxiation, here in Canada at least, with World On Edge's 1991 self-titled debut.

And yet there was a Moment, ever so brief, just as New Wave was about to topple into the realm of AM radio self-parody, when bands like Talking Heads, the darker Depeche Mode, and a handful of others made some really great records. To me those albums seem to have a shorter half-life than those produced at other high points in 20th Century popular music, in no small part because of the deluge of sound-alike crap that would follow them almost immediately. There's been a huge '80s revival in the last few years, and while groups like Chromeo, !!! and others have made careers out of an ironic homage to the flashy surfaces of New Wave, Red State Soundsystem reaches back to that one moment of strength and lets us see it now, right at the point of its decay.

I don't mean to say that Ghosts in a Burning City is a retro album; it's very clearly not. But Red State Soundsystem's heavily textured album is so clearly, so directly a reaction to that moment that it makes much more sense to talk about it in those terms than it would to compare it to other modern New Wave inspired acts, like The Strokes or The Killers. For one thing, Joshua Ellis (the man behind RSS) incorporates synthesizers in a way that references Zero 7 as much as Devo. In fact, I had a "eureka" moment when listening to "Scarecrow" and "Secret King of Africa" when I finally saw how much of the "chill-out" downtempo sound I love can be traced just as easily back through the Manchester club scene to Factory Records (and ultimately, New Order/Joy Division) as it can through trip-hop and dancehall.

What stands out most about Ghosts in a Burning City is Ellis' skill as a songwriter and producer. His guitar work is good, though not exceptional, but tracks like "Divine Intervention", "Redwood City Station", and the wonderfully low-key "Not In This World (Or The Next One)" are so tightly structured, so solidly put together, that's it's hard to believe this is his first album. To be fair, he's been making music for quite a while; I have a stripped-down copy of "Berlin Floor Show" that dates back to at least 2002. It's one of the few tracks that I don't think benefits from Ellis' rusty, atmospheric production technique, actually, and I think he would have been better off releasing that older recording, even though it wouldn't have fit as well into the overall dusty-laptops-in-the-desert feel of the album. Maybe it would make a good B-side.

Ghosts in a Burning City sometimes falls down from Ellis' vocals. He's not a bad singer, but he's also not a great one, and while his scratchy baritone works beautifully on "Not In This World" (probably the best song on the album) and "Coda: Requiem For A Diplomat" (a fun little punk-cabaret number that manages to avoid both Amanda Palmer's over the top theatrics and Andrew Bird's tongue in cheek delivery), he seems to stumble at times, particularly on "Scatterlings + Refugees" and "Every Hour Wounds (The Last One Kills)". Those last two songs in particular seem like "Bob Dylan tracks" to me, by which I mean tracks in which the quality of the songwriting outstrips his abilities as a performer.

Ghosts in a Burning City is a strong, if slightly flawed, debut that manages to incorporate a great many powerful influences without ever being overwhelmed by them. There's enough variety here to see that Red State Soundsystem has room to grow as a project, and it will be interesting to see how (or if) Ellis can push past his New Wave-inspired textures into his own Moment.