As I write this, Apple's supposedly wonderful Time Machine software is busy making its third attempt in twelve hours to backup my system. Those who follow me on Twitter (again with the Twitter—all the cool stuff happens there first these days) will know that I've been having issues with the hard drive in my iMac, and that I finally have the opportunity to get it fixed. What I didn't have was an external hard drive large enough to do a full system backup onto before taking it into the shop. It would be an incredible shame to have my computer repaired only to lose all my data. Like curing a disease by killing the patient.

Someone who relies on their computer as much as I do not having a backup drive is kind of like a lawyer who doesn't have a will, and since I'm not all that eager to be compared to lawyers at the best of times, I went out and bought a 2TB (that's right, TB) external drive. It took me some time to figure out how to format it for use with Time Machine, but I got that down, and started the backup. Five hours later, "Time Machine Error: Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume." Fuck a duck, as my mother would say. Being the Google super-sleuth that I am, I found a couple of fixes, but only one that really looked promising. I did that, started it up again, and went to bed. I awoke six hours later to find... "Time Machine Error: Blah blah blah." Fuck a duck. This time I was more clever. I reformatted the target drive, went back to Google, and poured through the Time Machine logs.

It turns out that Time Machine chokes on corrupt files, and deep in the rabbit-warren that is my downloads folder was a music video I downloaded more than a year ago and then completely forgot about, letting it sit there and collect dust, corrupt as you like. 30MB of bad data, all confined to a single file, made a 320GB backup fail. Fuck a duck. So I deleted that, and twenty minutes later my third Time Machine backup seems to be going smoothly. Fingers crossed.

Oh yeah, the reason for my post. I was supposed to take my machine into the shop today, but because I'll be at work by the time this nonsense finishes, it's going to have to wait until tomorrow. I still have Marina Endicott's Good to a Fault and Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese to review before next week, which might be a bit tricky without a computer. The folks at the shop tell me I should have my computer back by Saturday afternoon, barring unforeseen complications, so aside from on Twitter, which I have access to at work, you won't be seeing much activity from me online in the meantime. Just a heads up.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, my Time Machine backup drive is named "Wells".)

This weekend I went to Waterloo to visit my mother. She and my stepfather were originally supposed to come and see me in Toronto so we could visit the King Tut exhibit at the AGO, and go to one of my favourite neighbourhood eateries, Caplansky's. But my mother has been very ill these last few weeks (she's on the mend, never fear), and it's perfectly reasonable for me to be the one to travel instead. I love traveling by train, and it tends to be a tad cheaper than the bus, so I booked a ticket on Via Rail, and off I went. Those of you following me on Twitter know what happened.

I sleep when I travel. I don't know why this is so, but it's been the way of things since I was too young to speak my own name. Put me in a car, a bus, a train, a boat, sometimes even an airplane, and I'll be in the land of Nod before we've gone more than a couple of miles. I'm a decent highway driver with a lot of experience on different road conditions, but this selective narcolepsy generally makes me a poor choice for driver on long trips. Anyway, I knew I would fall asleep on the train ride to Kitchener (only getting two hours sleep the night before didn't help), so I asked the guy in the seat next to me to wake me when we got there. He agreed, put on his headphones, and did his thing.

The next thing I know I'm being nudged awake by the guy in the headphones. I look at my watch, and we're right on schedule. I stumble out of my seat, wipe my eyes, and zombie-walk my way to the terminal. I look around, and my ride has not arrived, so I go to the washroom and wash some of the sleep out of my eyes and off my face before heading out to the parking lot.

Here's something you may not know about the Kitchener train terminal: it doesn't have a large entrance with steps and stone pillars, nor is it on the crest of a hill. Somehow those things are present. Still groggy, my first thought is: when did they renovate this place? Disoriented is not the word. The terminal looks pretty much as I remember it on the inside, though granted I'd only been there the once, but everything outside is cockeyed. Familiar, but not quite right. A rather bracing blast of wind and snow hits my face, and I wake up enough to read the signs on the businesses across the street. They tell me I'm in fucking Guelph.

Christ on a bike.

I turn around and grab the terminal door so I can cut through, and the damned thing is locked. I look through the window, and, oh yeah, the fucking train is gone, snuck off like some fucking diesel ninja on rails. Now don't get me wrong, Guelph is a lovely community, home to one of Canada's finest bookstores, and the reason it had looked sort-of familiar is because I had been there before. But Guelph clearly wasn't where I wanted to be. I walked around the terminal trying all the doors, and every one of them was locked. I have no idea how I even made it inside the first time. Perhaps I didn't, and was simply so groggy I was peeing on some frozen bush and didn't even realize it. The world may never know.

Thirty or so minutes later, as I was beginning to fear for my fingers and toes, my mother and stepfather arrived to collect me, finding the situation rather funnier than I did. You know, I didn't realize there was such a plethora of traveler-at-the-wrong-stop jokes out there, but by God I've heard them all now. I was extra careful on the way back. I didn't even fall asleep.

Fucking Guelph.

There is this thing out there called Goodreads, which appears to be a kind of Facebook for books and book people. I signed up today to see what it's all about. I only have one friend so far, so it's not very "social" for me yet. If you're the sort of person who's into that kind of thing, we should be friends. I've added a little under half of my books to the account already, and will be adding more as the week progresses.

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.

It's been quite some time since I posted an entry; no doubt those of you who don't follow me on Twitter will have simply assumed that I've been eaten by dragons, or abducted by aliens, or sequestered in some dungeon by shadowy men in black Ray-Bans. None of these things are true, but they're rather more interesting than the truth, the truth being that I've been struggling with a pretty severe bout of depression for most of the last year and a half (for reasons I have more than once alluded to, but will not go deeper into today), and have done little more than stare glassy-eyed at television and video games. I don't vilifiy these things the way some do, but I've certainly let them take up more of my free time than I should have. Well, to be fair, I've also taken up running, but that's a far more recent development.

Right now I'm seven book reviews behind, and I also owe my man Josh Ellis of Red State Sound System an album review, something I've never done before here on vestige.org. I'm going to do my level best to get caught up on those things, starting this weekend. In the meantime, I'd like to share with you some bits of news, and a couple of sites that have recently captured my attention.

First the news:

As you're all by now aware, Canadian novelist and musician Paul Quarrington passed away Thursday morning after a much-publicized battle with cancer. I was not fortunate enough to meet Mr. Quarrington, nor have I yet read any of his works, though the much-acclaimed Whale Music is lined up for later in the year. I direct you to Mr. Beattie for a better sense of the man and his impact on Canadian letters, and links to the various tributes that are being gathered around the Web.

Respected Canadian poet P.K. Page also died earlier this week, at the age of 93. New Quarterly editor Kim Jernigan remembers her.

Blogger Ed Champion has an excellent piece on the recent San Francisco Panorama issue of McSweeney's. Definitely worth reading.

The Canadian Periodical Fund guidelines have at last been finalized and presented to the public, and the results are grim. There are no exceptions for literary journals or other small arts magazines. I have no doubt this means a great many fine journals will not be able to survive. You can find more of my (rather quickly dashed-off) thoughts on the matter in the comments for this article at the Quill and Quire blog.

Brian Joseph Davis kept things classy over at the Globe and Mail today with this piece on one of the rumored names for the tablet computer that Apple is expected to unveil next week.

Finally, Kerry Clare of Pickle Me This is doing an independent alternative to this year's Canada Reads lineup, called Canada Reads: Independently. It features an exciting list of panelists and, to this blogger anyway, a much more exciting list of books.

And now the sites:

The first is The Dusty Bookcase, "A Very Casual Exploration of the Dominion's Suppressed, Ignored and Forgotten" (no Oxford commas for Mr. Busby, apparently). It's a remarkably fun look at books and writers from Canada's past that have more or less been lost to all but those troubled few who rummage through the scrapheap of literary history. What I thought I knew about the history of Canadian publishing has been completely turned on its head by this blog, and it only makes the outright snobbishness of our literary lights (we don't produce mass market pulp here, no sir, our publishing stars are all Literary writers, with a capital "L") all the more disgraceful. The Dusty Bookcase is a must read for anyone interested in what has come before us—the entries on Harlequin alone make digging through the archives more than worth it. I should point out that this blog was brought to my attention by a post Daniel Wells made on the CNQ blog.

The second blog I discovered by way of The Dusty Bookcase. Caustic Cover Critic is maintained (if I understand things right) by Australian writer/editor/book designer (?) JRS Morrison. The blog not only features book covers from a variety of countries in an astonishing array of styles and genres, but Morrison also provides great, meaty histories and commentary regarding the evolution of cover art and the work of specific designers. He's also managed to get some book designers to speak about their work and process, including David Drummond, who designed Dead Man's Float by Nicholas Maes, a book I wrote about back in January 2008, and originally only picked up because of its cover.

Speaking of book covers, if anyone over at Capuchin Classics wants to send me some review copies of their absolutely gorgeous books, I'd be more than happy to write about them. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Knowhatimean, saynomore, saynomore.

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, as translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, changed the way I look at fiction. I read the book first as an undergraduate, and then later as a graduate student. Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is astonishing, and I don't think I'd have connected to the work so strongly if I'd read a lesser version. There's any number of ways that you can divide up Gogol's stories, but the obvious way is to place them in the same two categories Pevear and Volokhonsky do; rural Ukranian tales, and urban St. Petersburg tales. Seeing them side by side in that way, the careful reader will notice that the rural/urban division mirrors another division in the tales. The rural tales are very clearly oral in nature. They are loose, fluid, comfortable, adaptable. The urban tales, on the other hand are tight, structured, detailed. They are the very embodiment of written stories. I suppose you could read them aloud, but they wouldn't work in quite the same way. When I realized that, I realized what kind of writer I was.

None of my stories really work when you read them out loud, but they do work on the page. This was brought home to me with particular vigor when I read from my story "Tobacco Hand" at the Draft Reading Series on October 4^th. "Tobacco Hand" is part of a rather large group of stories and other scraps, orts, and fragments I've written that take place in the fictional Northwestern Ontario town of New Prospect, which is modeled very loosely on my home town of Dryden. The plot of the story is fairly simple; a man named Earl is such a dedicated tobacco user that he has deep stains on the fingers of his right hand. His wife Janine has left him, and she has convinced him that it's because of his stains. Earl gets drunk in his kitchen, has an emotional break, and ultimately mutilates himself with a belt sander in an effort to get rid of them. Earl's story is told in a limited third-person subjective mode, and I think it's fairly clear that the voice is Earl's, more or less. It hasn't yet been published, but those editors that have seen it have all sent it back, to my delight, with considerable praise (the one consistent criticism, which seems to be the thing preventing it from getting picked up, is that it lacks context; this is true, but it's also deliberate, and that decision—and why I haven't changed my mind about it—is a subject for a whole other post), and on the whole they "get" what I'm doing with the language of the piece.

Now with all that in mind, "Tobacco Hand" fell rather flat at the reading. I've done work on the stage, and can be a charismatic reader of other people's work, but when it comes to my own, put me in front of an audience and I become a stuttering, nervous, flat-voiced fool. As I read from "Tobacco Hand" and looked out at the audience, I could feel the disconnect between what I was trying to get across and what they were receiving, and I'm not willing to blame it all on my abysmal performance as a reader. There were a fair number of men in the audience, but I did a couple of head counts and found they were clearly outnumbered by the women. Not an unusual thing at literary events, and of no particularly significance in and of itself. But as ridiculous as a sentence like "Earl's been working all his life and he's a big man with a big temper to match, but he's never hit a woman no matter how angry he got and that's probably one thing he knows he can be proud of" sounds when read all on its own, imagine reading it to a roomful of women writers whose work your respect. It doesn't fall flat, it trumpets out like a nasty wet fart during someone's wedding vows. It declares itself boorish, clichéd, a tad misogynistic, and perhaps even naive. Which of course it's meant to, because that's exactly who Earl is, and exactly how he thinks. Even as I was saying it I knew that wasn't the effect it was having. I felt embarrassed by that sentence. The bigger problem is that while, yes, it is one of the weaker sentences in the piece, it still works on the page, and more importantly, it still feels necessary.

Why? There's violence behind that sentence. The first time I read Alice Munro's "Royal Beatings"—indeed the first time I heard of it—there was this discourse surrounding it, a mostly urban, undeniably middle-class Southern Ontario discourse, about how horrible it must have been to go through a primary school experience like that, how different, how violent was the past, and isn't it great that we have all these zero tolerance policies and have been able to put all the behind us. That's all well and good, of course, except that we've done no such thing, and I'm not entirely sure we should. I'm not going to go into depth about my views on minor violence (and as a recipient of some genuinely severe physical bullying in my youth—among other things, I've been punched, kicked, bitten, stabbed, slashed, whipped with a toy bullwhip, beaten with blunt objects, and once four boys held me on the ground spread-eagle while a fifth jumped on my ribs from a height of four or five feet—I can assure you that most schoolyard fights and bullying are minor), but I will say that rural Ontario is still very much the world depicted in "Royal Beatings," and there are some pretty important lessons in that world for someone like Earl. If that kind of childhood violence doesn't break you—and it won't break most, though it marks them forever—it could leave you with a deep understanding of the consequences of violence. The ethics of violence are surprisingly nuanced for someone like Earl, though he's not equipped to articulate that nuance. He knows in his own flesh what happens when you strike someone, and though he knows there are situations where a man can, and indeed should commit an act of minor violence, there are also times when no justification is sufficient. He simply doesn't have the language to articulate that either, so he falls back on simple clichés like "a man never hits a woman," and takes justifiable pride in living up to the hidden complexities of his ethical system.

Of course none of this is explicit in the text, but I think that once Earl's voice gets inside you, enough of it becomes implicit. But it wouldn't without that damned embarrassing sentence, and a handful of others like it. I can't recall who said or wrote it, but I do recall one author lamenting on how terrible it is when a godawful cliché really is the best way to say something, and that's exactly how I feel about that sentence. This is not to say "woe is me, editors don't 'get' my story, and nobody will publish it." I'm actually quite pleased with the rejections I've gotten so far. They tell me that the piece is being taken seriously by editors I respect, and the feedback I've gotten make the rejection letters some of the best and most useful I've ever gotten. They are encouraging rather than disheartening. The point of this rather red-faced confession and sort-of-case-study, is that not all pieces will work in all ways. I enjoy going to readings, despite my bumbling and my nerves, and I think it's a great opportunity for me to put myself out there, to network, and to meet writers whom I greatly admire, like the wonderful Rebecca Rosenblum, but aside from one unusually successful bawdy house reading I gave in 2003, it's not a very good venue for the kind of work I produce. Too much of what I do depends on the page. After years of hearing advice like "read it out loud to see if it works," I think I'm finally okay with that. After all, if it's good enough for Gogol's St. Petersburg tales, it ought to be good enough for my New Prospect stories, right?

I was interviewed by Finn Harvor at his blog, Conversations in the Book Trade. Christ, I'm a long-winded bastard. I do hope I made at least a little sense. As always, errors, omissions, and so on are on me.

So I've actually had a Twitter account for quite some time, but no real interest in using it. An application called Tweetie launched yesterday that was interesting enough for me to revisit Twitter, and now I'm having great fun with it.

So if you're interested in reading my clever quips, quotations without attribution, and endless ability to complain about the minutiae of life, feel free to follow my Twitter feed. I might even mention books from time to time. Ah, so many things to keep me from reading and reviewing like I should be.

So I was walking through the lunch room at work on Wednesday, and sitting on one of the tables was the Living section of the Toronto Star. The entire front page of the section, even below the fold, was taken up by colourful photos and sketches of pretty girls wearing short skirts, and the articles were all about how short skirts are the new big thing this year. The entire front page of a section was taken up by this revelation. No wonder people don't buy the fucking newspaper anymore.