branta

If art has value at all, it does so because it speaks to us about those aspects of our lives that have nothing to do with money — our joy in the visible world, our longing for order wrought from chaos, our desire for transcendence of the merely material. Things of that nature which music, dance, painting and language offer us to help articulate our common humanity.

Okay Booknet, you can stop throwing things anytime you want. I don’t really know if you can vilify them, or not, but I know they have Google alert because I’ve written about them before. Fine, I get it, agents scour Booknet to see how crappy my sales are and then sign some canoe paddling Canadian forest ranger who stubbed their toe in Manitoba and was lost in the woods for four hours. I get it. I’m not anti-Booknet, I just thought I’d be relevant.

Harry Potter, Harriet the Spy, Clary Fray, Nancy Drew, the Pevensie kids from the Chronicles of Narnia, Anne Shirley and Elena Gilbert of The Vampire Diaries were faster, higher, stronger (and probably fought dirtier) than their contenders. These (un)lucky souls get to continue the battle of their lives in the remaining head-to-head rounds.
Erin Balser/CBC Books

While it’s true that I haven’t lived in very many places… and therefore my opportunities for comparison are slim… I feel like Fredericton has more than its fair share of peculiarities that make it an alternately fascinating, wonderful, frustrating and sometimes truly fist-clenchingly dumb town. Let’s throw light on a few of them over the next few posts, shall we? OK.

Handling said too many Canadians films were submitted to the festival, and the domestic industry and audience cannot properly support them. Perhaps the juiciest and most controversial quotes from Handling included, “We shouldn’t be making 250 feature films in this country. I don’t think it can sustain. Where are those films going? I mean, are they just home movie productions done on credit cards? For what audience?”
Christine Estima/cbc.ca

First, is art merely a hobby? For some, probably. But for those who take it seriously, it is not. Art takes tremendous determination, practice and time for it to evolve. I can only speak of writing because that is the artistic discipline I practice: much study needs to be undertaken to learn elements of craft (style, metaphor, prosody, etc.) and then much time needs to be spent to develop. A hobby is something done in spare time; art is, in many ways, an employment.

While the whole Health Bill backlash in the U.S. isn’t exactly our problem, like most American politics and nuclear testing, fall out tends to drift beyond borders. On what could be called “the lighter side” of scary rhetoric a Flickr user called Paragon has compiled a set of photos taken at various Tea Party demonstrations illustrating their ironically liberal interpretation of the English languange. It’s a set called Teabonics.

Do critics complain that Christian Bök doesn’t use enough rhyme-scheme? So why ignore the serious formal structures of, say, David McGimpsey, for the sake of his hilarious pop references, dismissing a collection that should have won major awards, it seems, as frivolity, and not “serious verse”? Are “flarf” authors, such as ryan fitzpatrick, accused of not understanding narrative storytelling? If books and manuscripts are to be (inevitably) judged, why can’t they be on their own merits, and not on what isn’t happening.

I would never purposefully hurt someone’s feelings in my daily life, but in writing everyone I’ve ever met is just fodder for stories. For reasons I can’t really justify, I think this is acceptable. If creative writing is a merging of experience and imagination, then what do writers really have except what happens to them? All I know to write about is my life, and if other people happen to be present for those experiences - or to cause them - then of course they have to be part of the story too. So I wrote about those people, and I never told them.