Making art from shmatas, or 'extreme sewing'

Not to be missed: One of Canada's preeminent textile artists, Barbara Wisnoski, is showing recent works from October 29th until November 26th, details here. From the press release:

Décorum ou la broderie in situ is a performative installation featuring Barbara Wisnoski’s ‘extreme’ sewing combined with text adorning the gallery walls. Produced over a ten-month period from an accumulation of cast-off clothing, the textile motifs form a repeat pattern that expands a small domestic embroidery motif to a public scale. The family archive aspect implicit in her raw
materials – a household fabric inventory - is rendered explicit, with narrative text on one wall echoing the design. Through a serial process of destruction and reconstruction – slashing fabric apart with scissors, sewing it together, then slashing it apart again - the remnants form a dense, homogeneous texture where surface melds into structure.

On Thursdays and Fridays throughout the duration of the exhibition the artist will be present in the gallery, where she will finally tend to her large pile of mending. Furnished with comfortable seating and a sewing machine, visitors can engage with her about the artwork or come with clothing repair projects or a good book to talk about.

Part open studio, part performance, part sewing bee, this temporary pavilion mixes the languages of public and private space in a hyperbolic act of decoration, inviting questions about art and labour, ornament and utility, consumption, the measure and value of time, memory and the uses of nostalgia.

It's literary awards season and...

Let the griping begin. Actually, the Canadian scene turned out kinda interesting with two novels that few had ever heard of before hitting the literary equivalent of a grand-slam homer by making it to the shortlist of the GGs, the Rogers Trust, the Giller and the Man Booker. One of them even looks like it's loads of fun to read, which would be a switch for most literary prizes. And that's part of the point of this interesting critique of this year's National Book Award fiction shortlist. The ever-widening gap between what some people think we ought to read and what most of us would actually enjoy reading. I think the writer makes one interesting point in particular: In a culture dominated by film and television, all literary novels are so obscure as to be virtually invisible, and books that seem ubiquitous to people embedded in the publishing world are anything but to those who aren’t. (The next time you’re waiting for a bus, ask the person next to you if he or she has heard of Jeffrey Eugenides or “The Art of Fielding.” Hell, ask them if they’ve heard of Jonathan Franzen.) As I've said before, the proliferation of literary awards has been inversely proportional to the cultural significance of books. In other words, as books have become less important more awards have been created. Presumably there is a relationship between the two ie. that awards are being created in the hope of salvaging their declining cultural prestige. Which begs the question, what ought to be the role of literary awards, if salvaging the novel's status in the cultural marketplace clearly isn't working? If you ask any prize juror, they always say that they make their choice on the basis of merit alone. They try to identify the best book to bring it to the reading public's attention. But what's a 'best' book? I think that, increasingly, the reality is 'best' however you define it, has no relevance for most readers. Not the way it might have fifty years ago when novels enjoyed a certain cultural influence. And anyway, no one is ever going to convince me that a juror really reads all 150 novels submitted for any given prize in any given year (that's like reading a novel every two days for an entire year). If 'best' means nothing, than I vote for 'most enjoyable' cause that's about all any juror can honestly tell, and it's the only thing that most readers truly care about.

The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls

One of the most thrilling memories I have is standing with my daughter - I think she was ten or eleven years old - in front of a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls and listening to her read it, recognizing words from a 2000 year old document. Every penny spent on Hebrew parochial school seemed to make complete sense (cents) for the first time. The vastness of two millennia of history and tradition suddenly vanished, time and space contracted into a single awesome moment in a chamber more powerful than a nuclear reactor; the mind of a little Jewish girl. I'm guessing this why the Dead Sea Scrolls going on the internet actually gives me goosebumps.

Coco Chanel: Opportunist and Anti-Semite

In addition to her collaborations, Chanel spoke loudly and vehemently against Jews, and even tried to take advantage of the Nazi seizure of Jewish businesses and property. Her world-famous perfume, Chanel No. 5, was owned and produced by the Wertheimers—a rich Franco-Jewish family. Chanel had always been paranoid that the Wertheimers were stealing from her (though her lawyer assured her of the contrary), and during the war, when the family had fled to America, she attempted to take full control of Chanel No. 5. But the Wertheimers had anticipated that the Nazis (or Chanel) might try to steal their company, and therefore they signed it over to a Frenchman for the duration of the war. Chanel couldn’t touch it. The Wertheimers also sent a spy, Herbert Gregory Thomas (under the pseudonym, Don Armando Guevaray Sotto Mayor), to retrieve the chemical formula to make Chanel No. 5 as well as collect all the necessary ingredients. He then brought everything back with him to America, so that the Wertheimers could continue to produce and sell the fragrance. Vaughan finally gets his spy moment here, and it is certainly one of the most exciting portions of the book.

She partied with the Nazis at the Paris Ritz and then gave bottles of perfume away to American GI liberators to bring back home to their mothers, wives and girlfriends. Read the book review here.

The failure of university English departments

In today's university, no one is any longer in a position to say which books are or aren't fit to teach; no one any longer has the authority to decide what is the best in American writing. Too bad, for even now there is no consensus about who are the best American novelists of the past century. (My own candidates are Cather and Theodore Dreiser.) Nor will you read a word, in the pages of "The Cambridge History of the American Novel," about how short-lived are likely to be the sex-obsessed works of the much-vaunted novelists Norman Mailer, John Updike and Philip Roth or about the deleterious effect that creative-writing programs have had on the writing of fiction.

With the gates once carefully guarded by the centurions of high culture now flung open, the barbarians flooded in, and it is they who are running the joint today. The most lauded novelists in "The Cambridge History of the American Novel" tend to be those, in the words of another of its contributors, who are "staging a critique of 'America' and its imperial project." Thus such secondary writers as Allen Ginsberg, Kurt Vonnegut and E.L. Doctorow are in these pages vaunted well beyond their literary worth.

The indispensible Joseph Epstein on why we don't care about novels anymore... Well, not really, but may as well be about that. It's really about how universities have failed students, critics, readers (and by extension writers) of American fiction. I'm not sure that the works of Roth and Updike are likely to be short-lived, or that Vonnegut is a secondary writer. But there is no doubt that the importance of 'contextualization' in the study of literature has raised mediocre novels to an undeserved status, and given aspiring novelists a low bar to shoot for. 'Good' and 'bad' are no longer legitimate criteria on which to judge novels since everything is culturally relative. And it extends beyond the walls of academia. I read far too many book reviews (a practice I have told myself I have to stop for fear that it will turn my brain to sludge). And one notices how readily and often reviewers laud new novels, how loosely they throw around terms like "masterful" and "exceptional" and how rarely "bad" (or its euphemisms) show up. You don't have to read a ton of reviews like I do (did). Pick up any new novel off the shelf and read the blurbs and 'praise for' on the back cover and you see what I mean. With so much mediocre work stocking the shelves and being lauded to the hilt it's no wonder that readers don't know what to believe anymore and seem to have stopped caring.

Sevillians Unite to Save the Empress!!!

Leila Marshy over at The Rover writes about the ill-fated Empress Theatre building which has shamefully sat idle and deteriorated over the past 20 years while politicians and community organizers argued over what to do with it. I remember the building when it was Cinema V, sister repertory film house (in a sibling rivalry sort of way) of the old Seville Theatre where I worked as a doorman for a few years in the early 80s. Yes, their building was more art-deco beautiful, but we Sevillians thought of ourselves as cooler because our building had a more venerable history (Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr.) and it was downtown, a block from the Forum. Also, our ticket booth was on the street, while theirs was inside. Working the Seville door every Friday and Saturday night (Rocky Horror, Dawn of the Dead, The Road Warrior, Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival) was my rite of passage into young adulthood. I cleaned up more than my fair share of beer-smelling puke, and stopped more than one speed-induced fight between patrons, but the unmentionable perks (Leila mentions some of them) were unmatched and I was the envy of all my friends. Now, the Seville is nothing but a memory. All Sevillians should unite to find new life for the Empress, undeniably a Montreal landmark. We can't let this opportunity slip away, the way it did with the Seville. My seventeen year old is currently looking for part-time employment while she attends CEGEP and I can't help lamenting the fact that there aren't jobs with perks anymore like at the Seville and Cinema V.

Four Montreal Jewish writers worth hearing (at least three of them anyway.)

I organized and participated in a session of the recent Association of Jewish Libraries conference in Montreal. The idea was to gather a group of local writers to read from new work and talk about what it means, if anything, to be a Jewish writer. It's worth your time if you happen to have a spare hour and a half, or less.