Fall book launches

For the last eleven years, I have not missed a single Mawenzi House’s fall launch event. It used to be held at the Gladstone hotel till a couple of years ago and now, for the last couple of years at the cozy, comfortable almost homely Centre for Social Innovation at Bathurst.

For the last four decades, Mawenzi (earlier known as TSAR) has become the authentic voice of multicultural Canada, by focusing on providing a platform to authors from different ethnicities who have made Canada their home.

Mawenzi House has introduced me to many contemporary authors, some of whom have supported me in different ways in my attempt to become an author. It has published some of the best books that I’ve read in the last decade.

An illustrative (not exhaustive) list would include Chelva Kanaganayakam’s translation of R. Cheran’s Tamil poems You Cannot Turn Away; Kwai-Yun Li’s The Palm Leaf Fan and Other Stories; Safia Fazlul’s The Harem; Saima Hussain edited The Muslimah Who Fell on Earth; Dawn Promislow’s Jewels and Other Stories; Ava Homa’s Echoes from Other Land; Loren Edizel’s Adrift; Sheniz Janmohamed’s Bleeding Light just to name a handful.

Earlier this month, at the fall launch, Mawenzi again unveiled some excellent titles. I was at the launch and based on the readings by authors, I bought Lamees Al Ethari’s Waiting for the Rains – An Iraqi Memoir and Sohan S. Koonar’s Paper Lions (fiction).

Here’s an extract from Al Ethari’s memoir:

We knew that the Americans intended to erase us; if they had wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, there were less violent ways of taking him out. No one was safe. In the first Gulf War, they had bombed Al-Amiriyah Shelter, which had housed hundreds of civilians, mostly women and children. Father and husbands had dropped off their families there, hoping they would have a better chance of surviving the air raids. Four hundred and eight civilians died that night. Three missiles that hit the shelter led to the doors locking from impact and imprisoning people within the burning walls. I had seen images of the shelter and went to the annual memoriam at the site; the remains of bodies were plastered on the walls of the shelter.

Shock and Awe, as George W. Bush called it, was exactly that. Everything was a target; we saw smoke rising from different parts of the city, until the smoke was all we could see.

You may buy the books here: Mawenzi House

bobobobobododododod

Also, in November, my friend Fraser Sutherland’s collection of poems Bad Habits (Mosaic Press) was launched at the Yorkville Library. Fraser has published nearly 20 books – mostly collections of poems, but also a short story collection and a number of nonfiction titles. He is great editor, who has contributed to turning unreadable and badly structured writing into scintillating and compellingly readable prose or poetry.

Bad Habits has a section titled An Introduction to Fraser Sutherland, which has a page-and-a-half of Fraser’s idiosyncratic observations that are pithy, epigrammatic and memorable. 

Here’s a sample:

“Poetry can’t defeat ongoing ignorance, repetitive wrong-doing, physical deterioration nor persona extinction. But to say a few meaningful words about being in the world in the face of infinity and eternity – well, that’s something.”

“The idea of poetry-writing as therapy is especially seductive; if you’re writing a poem and it’s going well, there’s no better feeling in the world.”

“Somehow a good writer has to work aslant to the existing order. For a writer to be popular, to win prizes, to be feted by the media – those to me are grounds for suspicion. If the trappings of public success, however welcome, began to descend on me, I’d start to suspect myself.”

And here’s a poem from the collection

You may buy the book here: Mosaic Press

Thinking like an Oulipien

Guest Post

Review By Fraser Sutherland

Wishes: Georges Perec

Translated and transmogrified by Mara Cologne Wythe-Hall

Wakefield Press 2018, 229 Pages, $17.95, ISBN 9781939663337

The day my review copy of George Perec’s Wishes arrived I had spent part of the time wondering what a Shakespearean sonnet would look like if it had been written by a sheep.

I sheepishly admit that I naturally didn’t get far with my woolly speculations. Other than the indefinite article a (“ah”), Shakespeare’s lines tend to lack the short a, and anything resembling “baa baa black sheep” is nowhere in sight. Unwittingly, though, I was thinking the way Oulipians like Georges Perec do. They make up rules and obey them, come what may. As Jacques Roubaud says, “An Oulipian author is a rat who himself builds the maze from which he sets out to escape.”

As a group, Oulipo (an acronym for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, “workshop of potential literature”) was co-founded about 1960 by the prose polymath Raymond Queneau and included Perec, whose most famous, or perhaps notorious, work is perhaps the book-length lipogram La Disparition, translated by Gilbert Adair as A Void. The novel entirely dispenses with the letter e, the most frequently used alphabetical letter in French (and English.)

Oulipo rebelled against a heavyweight literary movement, surrealism.  In Perec’s words

At the OuLiPo

We prefer

The cocktails of Queneau

To the quenelles of Cocteau

If playfulness sometimes descends into sheer silliness, unlike surrealism or automatic writing it never becomes so mired in depth psychology so as to become humourless. Like surrealism, it specializes in opening doors to the unexpected. To that end, one of many Oulipian subversive tactics is “N +7”: each noun is replaced in a specified text by the seventh noun following it in a specified dictionary. Thus “To be or not to be: that is the question” becomes via Random House College Dictionary (1979) “To be or not to be: that is the quibble.”

Most of Oulipo’s members, except for the American expatriate Harry Mathews and the occasional elected luminary like Italo Calvino, have been French. France may be the only country ever to honour a merry band of literary jokers by issuing a postage stamp, which it did for Oulipo in 2002.

Oulipo’s predecessors or anticipators can be said to include Lewis Carroll, with his crazed logical consistency, and Alfred Jarry with his “pataphysics,” his so-called “science of imaginary solutions.” And one may as well throw in James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who share Oulipo’s devotion to puns. For an Oulipian, as for them, a pun is not just the source of a cheap laugh, but the repository of a complex truth. No wonder Oulipians adore the creative mishearings (to which personally I’ve always been prone) called mondegreens. In one of his works Perec tells of an elderly Russian Jew who arrives at Ellis Island. He’d been advised to choose an Americanized name to offer the immigration officers. Unfortunately for him, he nervously forgets Rockefeller, the name he had chosen, and stutters, “Schon vergessen” (“I’ve already forgotten.”) The officer puts down “John Ferguson.”

Between 1970 and 1982 Perec sent about 100 or so people New Year’s greetings in the form of short texts which, as Maurice Olender says in his Foreword to Wishes, raise “the pun to the level of punishment.” Especially, one may add, punishment of a hapless translator. Mara Cologne Wythe-Hall bravely copes with the abundant challenges posed by the texts by producing two versions, one a “semantic” translation focussing on meaning,” the other a “transmogrification…that renders the play (rather than the meaning) of Perec’s text into English.” Added to them are tables that list the words or phrases generating the text.  But, as Wythe-Hall admits, “to present direct homophonic renditions of Perec’s tables into English along with their semantic meaning is simply impossible.” She gets high marks for translating what are in effect translations of names, titles, proverbs, and clichés, like trying to solve a crossword puzzle with maddening clues.  Reading Wishes demands a lot of consulting back and forth.

One example: a table gives “Rare est rire aux rues” (“Rare is the laughter in the streets,”) which Wythe-Hall translates as  “A passerby remarks how exceptional it is to hear people laughing in the street.” “Les choses (the things), in a table is transmogrified to “Lay shows” in answer to the question “What should one say to a girl exiting a bedroom, her face flushed, her clothes wrinkled, and her hair disheveled?” Les choses is also the title of Perec’s first novel. Oulipians are prone to in-jokes.

Historically free verse came about as a liberation from imprisoning, rule-based end rhyme and metre. For the Oulipian the greater the constraints, the more fruitful can be the results: a complex verse form like the sestina is more productive than rhyming couplets. So is the cento, a poem composed of other poets’ lines. Oulipian procedures and processes can lead to wonderful imaginative discoveries. The Canadian poet Christian Bök won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize for his Eunoia (“beautiful thinking”) that includes five chapters, one for each vowel: “Awkward grammar appals a craftsman,” “Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech,” and so on. Still, the pursuit of literature would be tiresome, trivial, or ultimately sterile if it were confined to wordplay and language games, entertaining or rewarding as they often are.

Harry Mathews, author of the marvellously inventive and hilarious novel The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, came up with one of many Oulipian innovations, the “perverb,” a cross between two proverbs, e.g., “A rolling stone leads to Rome.”  

Which may be true. Nonetheless, all roads need to roam.

***

Biographical Note: Fraser Sutherland is a Canadian poet and lexicographer.  He’s published 17 books, 10 of them poetry collections, this year forthcoming Bad Habits (Mosaic Press.) He lives in Toronto.

READING: ENOUGH FOR A LIFETIME

Guest Post

By Fraser Sutherland

I taught myself to read before a school taught me the alphabet. This happens to children more often than one might think so I make no special claim to have been some kind of autodidactic prodigy. From a very early age reading became a way of life; it was in fact another way to live. Apart from helping my father milk Jerseys and shovel manure on the farm, and helping my mother set the table and look after my crippled brother, I was a solitary child. But someone who reads a lot is never truly solitary. A book is always company.

Only in recent years have I come to realize just how much reading has dominated my life.  I married someone, a children’s librarian, who read even more than I did though, unlike me, she had a penchant for rereading her favourites. For her, reading, like eating or sleep, was one of the essential functions.  Ultimately it did not save her from suicidal despair, but on many occasions it’s saved me. To read is to enter a parallel world in which, as an absorbed onlooker, one is always welcome.

When I told someone I wanted to compile a list of books that in my lifetime had impressed me in some way he said I’d do better to list really  bad books, giving them the equivalent of a skull-and-crossbones poison symbol. Some books haven’t just been tedious, they’ve made me want to do physical damage to them, like the time an Andy Warhol film, Chelsea Girls, once made me want to rush up and stab the screen. Overwriting or logorrhea, as in John Cowper Powys’s swollen novel Wolf Solent will do it.  One hazard of travelling is to be trapped without suitable reading matter, and it’s almost as bad to be trapped with execrable reading matter.  I still remember an overnight ferry trip I took from Barcelona to Palma, Majorca  in which the only thing at hand to read was Jack London’s dreadful novel Martin Eden.  Nightmarish.

Realizing how reading has consumed so much of  my life, I embarked on the dusty, laborious task of listing all the books that have in some way been meaningful to me. It’s part of my ongoing project to make  sense of my life.  Surely reading all those books, all those days and weeks and months chasing letters of the alphabet across a page, hasn’t been a waste of time. Surely. Now, to slide one’s eyes down the rows of the spreadsheet I set up for the titles of notable books,  makes me envious of the writers who were famous during their lifetimes. True, most didn’t enjoy the celebrity. A few  got rich, but riches brings problems too.

Typically I voluntarily read between 120 and 150 books a year, two or three books a week, and have maintained that pace for many years.  Most have come from a public library. Toronto’s public library system is so good that alone is enough of a reason to live in the city. I record the author and title at the back of my daybook (I won’t dignify it by calling it a diary.) Only a few are rare ones that I think deserve rereading or somehow belong to the permanent furniture of my mind. Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life, for example. Or Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.

Titles can also come from the legacy lists of university English courses I took  in my early 20s, or at least the ones that stuck. I’m happy to omit Joseph Conrad’s dreary Nostromo and Henry James’s baroquely affected  The Ambassadors－ maybe I’d feel differently if I read them now, but I don’t think so. I have a weakness for diaries and memoirs. Titles can also come from  lists that I seemingly made for the sheer joy of making lists. I follow up book reviews－there can never be enough book reviews－and other readers’ recommendations. They give me a book, I read it for better or worse. Skimming and scanning used-and-antiquarian bookshops, fund-raising or charity book sales, books spread out on a newspaper or in cartons on a sidewalk －all are resources.  I’ve read almost all of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark,  Anthony Powell, Ernest Hemingway, and my longstanding American friend Elizabeth Spencer.  I’ve extensively read far too many poets to mention but their number certainly includes Sylvia Plath and Philip Larkin.

Yet there’s always a chance I will find something invaluable that I haven’t read, such as another Donald E. Westlake novel starring Dortmunder, his accident-prone thief, or a P.G. Wodehouse dealing with Lord Emsworth and his adored prizewinning pig the Empress of Blandings. Or maybe a similar comic triumph such as the Grossmith brothers’ Diary of  a Nobody. I know I will never find another Wind in the Willows, which is unique. To my childhood mind it was the greatest book ever written or illustrated. Kenneth Grahame wrote it, Ernest Shepard did the illustrations.

I’ve neglected to mention one vital source of authors and titles for my lifetime spreadsheet, which now numbers about 3,200 titles, and growing by the week. I refer to books already on my shelves.  After all, they wouldn’t be on my shelves if I hadn’t already favoured them. It’s a motley assortment. It includes not just masterpieces, far from it, but books that have some geographical or generational connection with me, say, the Rev. J P. MacPhie’s Pictonians at Home and Abroad (1914), a compendium of local boys from Pictou County, Nova Scotia －where I come from －who made good.  Sutherlands related to me were not among them.

On the shelves, too, are books whose titles or contents charmed me, such as Barbara Ann Kipfer’s 14,000 Ways To Be Happy: I keep trying to find useful pointers toward happiness in it. Or the books have a vocational link: dictionaries, reference works, or other books I consulted, edited, or contributed to. I have an 1821 edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, though I can’t say I’ve used it much.  Cookbooks are found in my kitchen, logically enough. History, philosophy, psychology, and general nonfiction populate the dining room, novels the living room, reference books and biography the office, poetry and crime fiction the bedroom. No books in the bathroom.

I close with a quotation taken from, fittingly, a book, Maggie Ferguson’s fine biography of that wonderful Orkney writer, George Mackay Brown.  I like to think the sentiment applies to me. Ferguson: “The biography of an artist, George once wrote, is really a pattern of those experiences and images that enter deeply into his consciousness and set the rhythm and tone of his work.”

Books are both experiences and images.

• Fraser Sutherland is a poet, editor, and lexicographer who lives in Toronto. The most recent of his 17 books is the poetry collection The Philosophy of As If.

Brockton Writers Series

Brocktown Writers Series image

Farzana Doctor is a writer. Her Stealing Nasreen is a book I intend to read before the end of 2010. 

At the launch of Canadian Voices II she invited me to the first anniversary celebrations of Brockton Writers Series. 

Fraser Sutherland's book 

It was at St. Anne's Anglican church on Gladstone Ave. I went because Fraser Sutherland was to read his latest poems from his highly acclaimed book The Philosophy of As If...

The venue for the event – St. Annes Anglican church – is an absolute marvel. 

Fraser told me that among the artists who painted the murals on the church’s walls include artists from the famous Group of Seven. Reading about the architecture of the church on its website revealed its fascinating story. 

Vivek Sharya's book

This is serendipity, and I must thank Farzana for it.

St. Anne's Anglican Church

I must also thank her for introducing me to the work of Vivek Sharya, a young writer who has written a book of short stories – God Loves Hair. The stories are about growing up in a world where his sexual orientation is an issue that seemingly acquires a larger dimension than his being.

He cast a spell with his reading and singing. His reading was especially memorable because it was accompanied by a slideshow presentation of illustrations of his stories. The stories carry original illustrations by Juliana Neufeld.  

Fraser Sutherland is a friend, mentor, editor, and a lot more. He wears his fame lightly and is embarrassingly modest for someone who is quite simply brilliant. 

He read from his book The Philosophy of As If... A poem in the collection is called Replies To a Little Girl in the Back Seat of a Car That Draws Up Beside Me at a Bus Stop on Chilly Night in March Whose Smiling Mother Calls Out ‘She Thinks You're Santa Claus'. 

Other writers and poets who read included Catherine Paquette, Michael Erickson, Hema Vyas. 

Images from Internet

Canadian Voices Volume II

Canadian Voices 2 Launching at Supermarket Art Bar from Imelda O. Suzara on Vimeo.

BookLand Press organised the launch of Canadian Voices Volume 2 at the Supermarket Art Bar on September 20. 

It was without any doubt the most rocking book launch events I have attended in Toronto in the last couple of years that I’ve been here. 

There were writers everywhere – Fraser Sutherland, Katherine Govier, Dawn Promislow, Farzana Doctor, Mariellen Ward and Kevin Lobo, among many others.

Writers and poets whose works are in the volume were there in good numbers, too. As Zohra Zoberi wrote about the event, “people were spilling out on the streets.”

Robert Morgan and Jasmine D’Costa had put together a rocking event.

..whoever said writers are boring?

Meeting writers

MG Vassanji, Dionne Brand, Olive Senior, Nurjehan Aziz, Priscila Uppal, Jasmine D’Costa, Tasleem Thawar, Dawn Promislow.

There were more writers per square foot at The Gladstone Hotel last Tuesday at Tsar’s annual book launch than I had seen in a long time.

And so many others that I didn’t know. Not that I know all of those I've listed here.

It was my first visit to Gladstone. I can't think of an equivalent institution in Mumbai.

I wanted to hear Sheema Khan read from her Hockey and Hijab – a book that has become a talking point everywhere in Toronto. She wasn’t there, but there were many other – equally interesting – writers.

I particularly liked the short passage Tasleem Thawar read from her work published in Her Mother's Ashes 3 (edited by Nurjehan Aziz), the translation by Chelva Kanaganayakam of a Tamil poem and Olive Senior’s passage from her book Arrival of the Snake-Woman.

For me the highpoint of the event was to be able to exchange a few guarded words with MG Vassanji. And to meet Dionne Brand. I went up to both of them and introduced myself.

Believe me, that is unusual; even though I sometimes do come across as a shameless self-promoter.

Thankfully, Vassanji remembered me. It'd have been rather embarrassing if he didn't. He's generally reticent, I guess. So exchanging a few pleasantries with him, especially after he had just won the Governor General’s prize for non-fiction, should count as a major achievement.

I told Brand that I had written about her book A Map to the Door of No Return (Notes to Belonging) on this blog and that I hadn’t read a more succinct explanation of VS Naipaul’s lifelong anxiety as a writer than her's. Brand said she had read my blog recently. That should count as another major achievement. Brand is Toronto's poet laureate.

Dawn Promislow introduced me to Olive Senior. I told her about my discovery of the Indo-Caribbean culture in Canada. Jasmine D’Costa introduced me to Fraser Sutherland, an editor of literary works and to Mariellen Ward, whose Hindi is as beautiful as she is.

A young woman walked up to me and asked whether I was a poet. I answered, “Yes. All my submissions have been rejected so far.” She laughed. I laughed, too. What can’t be cured has to be endured.

Everyone had a great time.

Image: Book Covers + Adobe Photoshop