distance!

i was going to try and write this post using proper punctuation and capitals, but the thought of it got me a little too hung up. whereas i’m a finicky editor and writer in day to day life, this blog seems to work better as a stream of consciousness vomit. here i am, bolstered by many strong cuppas after a wild and late (and sober) night out at the cameron house last night, which consisted of chris and olena and i wearing fox masks and stomping around to klezmer music. i’m fairly certain that there was barking at some point. no, i’m positive. because i did it.

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i’m not sure if any of you ever experience this, and i decided to write about it because i wonder what everybody’s distance is. and when i say distance, i mean the amount of distance that you have to put between yourself and what you’re writing about.

i should specify – that for me, it means time. as of late, i’ve been acutely aware of the amount of time that i apparently need between experiencing something and writing about it. i used to think that my poetry fared better if i wrote it down the moment anything momentous happened, but now i wonder. and different things – perhaps things that carry different weight for me – seem to take different amounts of time and distance. i’ve been more aware of this as of late because i’ve been suddenly pumping out a lot of fishing-lodge themed writing, and considering i worked at that lodge a year and a half ago, i’m a little surprised. but might i add that i haven’t been able to write any poetry or non-fiction about my trip to northern ireland, which happened right after work at the lodge. so basically, there are two events that have had almost the same amount of time, of distance, between them and the present, and yet i’m only writing in depth about one.

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i've written about 34 poems about this one scene alone. enjoy!!

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i feel so lost when people try to get me to describe burning man, and i think this ties in. if i had been sharper, i would have written something pert and pertinent about burning man the second i got home from it, and i would have pitched that somewhere. because as soon as i came home from burning man, it blew up into the mainstream, and there were articles about it everywhere, and i think i may have missed a chance to write a story or a poem or a non fiction piece about that and have it picked up by a major source or outlet. but i just couldn’t do it. it took me two months to even write sloppy blog posts about each of the days there, and i could remember everything that had happened, i didn’t even take notes when i was there, so it was all in my noggin, but it still felt strange to try and squeeze it out onto a page (albeit it an electronic one).

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let's write an article about this.

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i still haven’t properly processed burning man yet. i’m like a treacle-slow plant, not doing my share of photosynthesis. or maybe that’s “normal” (?) – using the term “NORMAL” very loosely here because let’s face it in in a writing community normality is pretty much frowned upon, and your weaknesses and oddities are instead badges of valour. maybe, for me, normal is a long time. i think about things a lot. as of late i’ve been noticing that i’m living in my head, almost completely at times. i’m legitimately talking to myself – especially in the shower, i seem to think of a lot of things in the shower, don’t know why, what a think tank – legitimately saying things out loud (imagined interviews, poems, phrases that look good on paper but may not sound good out loud, or phrases that may sound good out loud but look odd and repetitive on the page) like i’m rehearsing something. my head is the space in which i live right now, so it’s clear that i really do think about things quite a lot, that i feel things thoroughly. that it seems to take me longer to get over some things as opposed to other people. maybe my heart and my head are just too weird and sensitive and so that’s why it takes me so long to process things that meant so much to me – relationships, experiences, jobs, travel, infatuations of any kind. i create delicate webs of story in my head when i glom onto something like that, something that means something so much to me, so maybe i feel the need to finish that web before i can get it down.

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looking back on what i just wrote, it sounds something like the dissolution of nijinsky’s brain in his final stages of sanity.  i wonder what my brain is slogging towards right now, because apparently i have a lot of thoughts at cette moment. actually, i can feel the agitation of a new adventure burning under my bottom, to be honest, and i have one in mind but it might take a while to get there.

the point of this post was this: do people find it easier to write (or create, or paint, or act, or whatever other creative – or even non creative – form they do) about an event right right right after it happens, or do they take time like i do? am i mad?

frauds!

my friends have been busy sending me semi-clothed pictures of benedict cumberbatch (you know who you are….) so i guess i’ve been a bit distracted this week. but i just finished jt leroy’s “sarah” and apparently i’m supposed to have a lot of thoughts about this.

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soon after i finished this book, i got a flurry of twitter messages from people asking me if the book had stood up to hype of the hoax, or simply asking me if i knew that leroy was, in fact, a “hoax.” i was totally confused. i picked this book up at another story bookshop on the direction of the shop attendant, because i had asked her for a mix of “cormac mccarthy, faulkner, and weirdness”. clearly, that girl knew what she was looking for. thank goodness for that! the blurb on the back of the book sold me, and the first page sold me even further. i didn’t know anything about leroy at the time because i’m not a name-shopper when it comes to books – i only read the sisters brothers because my father had it around the house, and i’m only planning on reading half-blood blues because my mum has a copy. i don’t believe in buying a book solely because the person who writes it has specific credentials or experience. i buy a book based on the recommendations of friends, and the way the cover looks (oh my goodness i buy books based on their covers…) and how the book is described on the back, and how the first page feels. one of my professors once told me “if a book bores you after fifty pages, THROW IT ACROSS THE ROOM!” which is the best advice i’ve ever gotten re: reading and literature. anyway, i got the book because it’s about gender-bending lot lizards, not because of leroy.

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i had to crop this because i was wearing a very unflattering toque.

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but i GUESS that there’s some guff surrounding leroy. who isn’t a man at all, but actually a woman. and i guess that when “sarah” came out in 2000 it was taken as a semi-autobiographical work, because leroy had a backstory of prostitution and drug use and abandonment quite like the main character in this book. i missed this… completely. which is probably not a great thing for a writer in this day and age to admit, but considering this came out when i was 13 i wasn’t in the right age group to read it or be aware of the “fraud.” which is a tricky words to use.

i answered my twitter messages as best i could: i answered that i hadn’t known about the furore, so – for me – the writing stood as was. i have a copy of the 2001 paper edition of “sarah”, which was before the expose (october 2005) and yet there is no hint on the blurb or inside the cover that this book is supposed to even be remotely autobiographical. so what’s the big deal?! i admit that i didn’t follow that james frey stuff that happened, but i surmise that the public is really angry when they find out that they’ve been lied to. nobody wants to look like a fool (especially not oprah). i’d need to read the book (million little pieces) to make any sort of educated comment on this, and since i haven’t i’ll hold off, but i mean… really… even creative non-fiction has elements of untruth in it. come on. you can’t expect to read something that’s completely true anymore. it’s either a glorious or sad fact of our society, but i can’t decide which. frey falls into a different category because he marketed his work as a memoir, but it’s still all related, i think.

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i mean… we’re all frauds. all of us writers, fiction or non or poets or whatever. i’m writing about a gay man based in another part of the world in a totally different time period. every day i feel like a fraud, capische? i guess the difference is that i’m not saying that i’m actually a gay man who lived in that time period… but someone reading my book might think that i’m a liar and a shit. i think that people make inferences without even educating themselves – that they assume that a writer feels that they have a RIGHT to write about what they are writing about. i don’t feel that i have a right, but i feel a pressure in some unidentifiable place inside of me to write about what i’m writing about. but readers will often assume that writers have a high and mighty need to subvert… maybe. i’m not sure. we’re all writing about things we don’t know about. some of the most beautiful pieces i’ve ever read in workshops have been pieces that people have made up entirely – i mean, all writing is based in some form of truth, and we put parts of ourselves into everything we do write, whether we want to or know it or not, but more often than not we try to make something up entirely and sometimes it’s pretty great.

laura albert said that she made leroy – who she describes as a “veil” – so that she could write about things that she felt she couldn’t write about as a woman, as herself. how is that any different from garth brooks putting out his ill-fated cd as “chris gaines” or nicki minaj rapping as “roman zolanski”? the difference seems to be diclosure – people get angry when they look like fools. the public is aware that roman is an alter ego. they weren’t aware that leroy was one. honestly, who flippin’ cares!? GOOD WRITING IS GOOD WRITING.

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my final word on this book – “sarah” – is this: i was totally entranced. this writing was thick and cloying and powerful, the plot so twisted and full of a perverted magical realism. for a debut novel, this is great, “fraud” or no. i wonder if people might be even angrier about the “fraud” thing because this writing is so good. i wonder if it might be part jealousy. because leroy’s debut was – and still is – scintillating.

THIS IS THE MATHEMATICS BOMB

guys, you should all go and read the wonderful chris urquhart’s alphabook (edited by her momma che, also leonine) RIGHT NOW.

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so CLICK ON HER FACE.

 

CLICK MEEEEEE

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CLICK ON IT!

and be sure to play the song while you read it, because it just makes everything INFINITELY (that’s a joke, you’ll see that soon) better!

what i read: rm vaughan’s troubled

somehow this blog is only turning into a book review blog, but that’s because i haven’t been writing so much lately as i have been editing, and apparently i don’t have any scintillating philosophical thoughts on that process. i will say one thing – that this is the first time i’ve read my thesis all the way through, not just in chunks and pieces, and it’s not as shit i thought it was. it’s odd, this writing process. if someone had told me at the beginning of the process how much it sucks, i probably would not have undertook this thing. maybe sucks isn’t the right word… more like… gut wrenching. how often do i doubt myself when writing! all the time. good grief.

for christmas i got a gift certificate for another story bookstore which was TOTALLY AMAZING. what with toronto’s (actually, not just toronto but apparently all of north america’s) bookstores going down the pooper lately, it felt so good to buy books. i managed to squeeze 3 books into my 50 dollar gift certificate, which was also amazing. i literally crawled on the ground to find the poetry section, which was pretty damn sad for a bookstore (COME ON) but i did the gasp when i found rm vaughan’s troubled.

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disclaimer: i’ve met vaughan. he came and read for carolyn smart’s creative writing class in my fourth (??) year at queen’s university. he was kind and gracious and struck me as soft-spoken, quiet, almost meek. he also read my application for me for applying to ubc, gave it an eyeball to make sure i wasn’t being totally inappropriate re: queer issues.

i know i’ve read troubled before. i must have grabbed it from the queen’s u library and gotten part way through it, or maybe i got a chance to sit down in a bookstore somewhere and give it an eyeball. but this is the first time i got to read it cover to cover.

troubled is about vaughan’s affair with his therapist, back in… i’m tempted to say 1997 or 1998. the late 90s. the book consists of his poetry, most of it simply titled “session” (as to connote goings-on from a therapy session), excerpts from films that vaughan has made or written, and excerpts from medical journals re: therapists committing sexual indiscretions with their patients , as well as photocopies of letters to and from the college of physicians and surgeons of ontario regarding the affair and legal action taken against it by vaughan.

mouthful.

i really love the way vaughan writes. his poetry is totally unflinching. it tackles issues that are not often discussed – vaughan’s body consciousness, for example, and the way that he talks about his body insecurities – the fact that he feels pudgy (god i hate that word) next to his therapist, the way he feels shamed. he talks about his fat peeling off his body in layers, the fact that he wants to go on a diet to please his new lover (i hate that word, too), the fact that dr m, his therapist, won’t touch him for the longest time and vaughan thinks that it’s about his own body. it’s so raw, and so peeled open, and it gives the reader no chance to back away. it’s sex, and gay sex, and animal references, and actual copies of the actual letters that they sent to each other in the wake of it all blowing up.

i did have trouble with the blame, though, and i can’t tell whether vaughan has done this on purpose or not. (sometimes i have trouble determining emotional and purposeful intent in writing – i think it stems from my inability to properly read human emotion. i often need things to be expressly stated to me [especially in relationships] for me to completely understand. i always better understand emotion when it has been explained to me, outright). i had trouble with the fact that vaughan comes across as completely wounded at times, and that there are times when he shifts the blame completely onto the therapist, dr m. relationships always take two to tango, to use a tired adage. two people have to engage and ratchet each other up to inappropriate levels, make each other crazy and cruel and awful. reading these poems, i get no sense of what vaughan did to dr m. i only get a sense of what dr m did to vaughan. and this was written (published, actually, since i have no idea when he started writing poems about it) about 10 years or so after the affair so there must have been some personal introspection about the whole thing, and i wanted to see more flaw. i guess every reader wants the writer to break down a little more, which seems like such an awful thing to demand of your authors, but it reassures the human condition. we see the therapist as cruel, borderline incestuous with his teenaged daughter, as vain, as twisted, but vaughan remains the naif, the sad, large child. i have a feeling that vaughan must have been totally terrible at one point. i wanted to see that. maybe it’s the cruelty in my own soul that responds to that. but that would have really sealed the deal for me.

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deeeeldldleleldeeee!

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aside from that, i do love this book. it’s an anna book for sure – strong, disquieting, disjointed, jarring images, things that you can taste on your tongue even though you’re not supposed to. it’s poetry that’s really not going to be attractive to everyone, but some of these images are going to stay with me forever. to close, a quote:

“On a flowered couch, I seed     crack like milkweed pods

in frost, spores in mud

call all the old gods to harvest.

My father, mad as a paper kettle,

as three glass balls in a blender.     My mother, her sleepy violence,

a limbless she-cat, all caterwaul and cant.

My body, a wrung pillow

and the quiet habits of rough sex, for spice.”

 

– RM Vaughan, ‘Troubled’, 2008

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i actually remembered the phrase about glass balls in a blender for three years, that’s how powerful it was to me. so go and buy this book! RIGHT NOW. ps the paperstock is totally luxurious – the poetry is printed on thick cream coloured paper. lovely. so seriously, go buy it.

THE BOOK MARK

i am so angry.

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photo credit to BlogTO

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the other day i read THIS ARTICLE, which, if you’re too lazy to click on the link, is about The Book Mark. the book mark is apparently toronto’s oldest independent bookstore, but i know it as my local. it’s in etobicoke, which is where my family lives, and so i’ve been there many times. it’s lovely. it’s a lovely bookstore as bookstores are. it smells like pages. and it’s being fucking forced to close.

this is why i get so irked when people tease me for buying books instead of renting them at the library. (which is also due to my ptsd re: bedbugs, but that’s a whole other story) and people teased me for spending so much money to send my books home from vancouver when i moved back to toronto. they said why don’t you just give them away? hell no. i shed a lot of stuff in that move, but if i’m a collector, i’m collecting books. and this is why. they are on the road to becoming obsolete.

i know people might get all ridiculous at that statement – books will never become obsolete! so i guess that is a sweeping statement, and i should know better. but notice that i haven’t put a time cap on that statement, because i really do believe that somewhere down the line, be a hundred years from now who knows, books are going down the poopchute. already i’ve noticed a difference being back on the ttc – people hold e-readers in their laps instead of books. it’s a little disquieting, and i can’t complain thoroughly because i did just buy my first e-book the other day, but in my defence, it was a rare, rare book from the 1990s that probably ISN’T available in print format right now because of the dawn of e-readers, because now that it’s on e-readers it’s not needed in print and so the remaining copies have been driven up in the price range. it’s an ouroboros, really. and it’s so frustrating.

the book mark is a beautiful bookstore. how is it fair that it’s closing? there have been so many closures lately, and it’s maybe because people don’t want to spend 30 dollars on a hardback book when they can spend 15 on kobo, and i get that, the economy is kind of crap, but fine, don’t disrespect my choice to be a book collector. and how can the kobo or the kindle ever compare to that satisfying crack that you get when you open up a new book for the first time and the spine gives way? the spine becomes your tarot deck, your highlighted topography because it wears itself to you, falls open wherever you have loved the most, become most familiar with the words. how can the kobo or the kindle compare to the smell of paste and paper, that smell you get when you press your nose into the pages? it doesn’t, it can’t. we are a generation glued to our screens – and i am just as guilty of that, as i am writing a BLOG right now, instead of writing this as an article and trying to submit it to our newspapers… oh, wait. so much of the newspaper content is online, now, instead of in print… god, i just don’t know where readership is going, where the literature trends are going. for the meantime, maybe we’re safe, but as bookstores close down – old, established bookstores with knowledgeable, kind staff instead of websites – things get a little scary. and yes, i realise that there are scarier things in the world right now, and i’m being a bit glib i suppose, but if you can’t stand up for something you love, be it small, be it seemingly insignificant, then what can you stand up for?

so don’t tease me for buying books, and for starting to fill my shelves. these things are going to come with me wherever i go, because i love them. because books filled my childhood, not IPADS, and because they were always a refuge, always comforting. and if you need to borrow one or two from me in the future, then so be it.

the resolutions.

it has been a wild year. (says the girl who is sitting in her housecoat, drinking ginger tea and ordering books online.) i did the half-year check in, and now – for your benefit, i suppose, but really also for mine because sometimes i get really excited about things and then don’t have the follow through – i’ll do the final weigh in for the resolutions that i made last year. see: HI-RES. that’s a link. click on it.

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also, listen to this while reading:

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oh so good.

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- go to burning man.

• yes, i totally did this! this was kind of a pipedream last december, because i thought my anxiety would get in the way, but not only did shanny and i go, we kind of flourished too. you can read all about my burning man experiences in my six piece blog series starting HERE. it will be easier than trying to sum it up here. at the bottom of each page, there is a link to the next day.

- grow my hair long enough to tie scarves into, to braid feathers in.

• why YES! i didn’t braid feathers into it, but i did braid glowsticks into it in the black rock desert, and when i went out to my first drag king show in east van, i braided a long red scarf into it, which REALLY complimented the pinball machines at the cobalt, i think. now my hair is so long i’m not really sure what to do with it, so i’ll just keep growing it until i get bored.

- play clarinet once onstage again. perhaps even with a gypsy punk band if shit shapes up.

• yikes. sorry clarinetty. this one has fallen by the wayside. to be fair to myself, i HAVE picked it up a few times, and the language of music is still there. i didn’t really forget it. i laughed the whole time i tried to play marche slave. but granted… i was trying to play marche slave.

- do karaoke without the need of alcohol.

• god, no. i realised that i just really, really hate karaoke. i’d rather do a drag act. which maybe should be a new resolution….

- think locally, fuck globally.

• sure!

- polka in public, not just at malanka.

• YES! julian and i went to a few lemon bucket orkestra shows. at the last one we went to (on dec 23, with the stunningly wonderful christine urquhart, we punched a girl in the head – BY ACCIDENT – because we were dancing so violently.)

- do an unassisted headstand.

• pft no. it takes a lot of guts to go upside down. i wasn’t aware of that!

- decide on my next travel location. (germany? norway? sweden? morocco? russia?)

• i haven’t decided on a new place to travel to, but i do have the travel bug. nevada kind of drained me financially, and it’s going to be a long while before i have the dough to travel again!

- have more sex and be less uptight about it.

• this is an interesting one. it’s a yes and a no, because i learned that maybe i’m not the most ‘go with the flow’ kind of person. i tried that mantle on for the summer, and got really hurt because of it, but looking back, i know that it wasn’t a bad hurt, and it wasn’t malicious, so i guess all things are lessons, and all people are teachers.

- free my throat chakra so the heart will follow.

• getting there.

- read many more books (everything is illuminated, the age of innocence, ascension, harperland, queer london, bowie in berlin, the bible.)

• i actually haven’t read ANY of those books above hahahahahahah whoops. i forgot about these resolutions, see, so i’m seeing them again for the first time in six months. but i can say that i have been reading more. i have a queue of about 6 books right now.

- buy books of poetry in anticipation of when the books go out of print in favour of the kindle.

• YES! i just bought rm vaughan’s troubled, and i’m sure there will be a blog post about him soon because i just love that book and i think he’s great.

- dance down the street at least once with my earphones in, uncaring of people staring.

• i feel like this could be accomplished in toronto.

- try another instrument to see if the lateral musical mind truly exists.

• oh dear. my musical resolutions have really been neglected.

- have a dance floor make out. (truth: i have never had a DFMO.)

• hahahahaha no dammit. considering i really only dance at gay bars, and i’m mostly attracted to men, this has not come to fruition.

- get a raven to eat from my windowsill with the window open.

• YES I DID THIS. see: proof

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- do mdma.

• i did this too! (sorry mum and dad).

- pierce something new.

• nope.

- finish my bloody thesis and finish it goooooooooooddddddd.

• we won’t talk about this right now.

- consider taking a welding course.

• well, i will say that i’ve considered it.

- attend a milonga that karen has tried to get me to do before and actually try dancing in front of someone. (major fear, to dance in public.)

• no i haven’t done this either.

- sketch out a tattoo with ravens.

• like i have the money for a tattoo!

- wear feathers and quartz.

• yes!

- submit my pieces to publications for once.

• YES! my third published piece is going to be available in EVENT some time in the new year. i’ve set a baseline for rejection, so when i do get an acceptance, it’s a very happy day indeed.

- go fishing again and fillet well.

• i’m working on this. ice fishing is next on the agenda.

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well, that’s it for the resolutions. i’d make them again for this year, but i really don’t feel like it, which sounds mopey, but i think that 2011 was important for having resolutions, and 2012 is going to be about finishing my thesis and decided where to go with my life… where to live, and what city to fall in love with next. the travel bug has bitten me on the ass, and i think it’s important to really start seeing the world (or whatever parts of it i can afford to see) while i’m still young and vital and just that little bit wild. and probably drinking less. that’s a good resolution too.

to all of you who celebrate this holiday of forced frivolity, i salute you. i do wish everyone a happy happy new year and i hope that you all don’t believe the inane threat that the world is going to end in 2012. COME ON!

 

LOVE

 

ME!

From TS Eliot

“Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.”

 

- TS Eliot

book bonanza – another story bookshop

today i went to another story bookshop (click on that, it’s a link) in toronto. because i had received a FIFTY DOLLAR GIFT CERTIFICATE (!@!#%$!!hjdkjafsdsyahooligans!) for saint nicholas day. anyway, the bookstore was interesting and lovely, as bookstores always are. it wasn’t necessarily my scene – because there were no classics. i really wanted another findley novel – or one by cormac mccarthy – or one by william faulkner. this bookstore mirrored a sentiment that i had heard during the mfa at ubc – “if the author’s dead, he’s not worth reading.” and the poetry section was tres petite and on a bottom shelf, so i was crawling on my hands and knees to explore.

so i was pushed out of one comfort zone (old or dead men who write about violence with lots of adjectives) and into a new one (contemporary literature. ah!)

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deedle deedle!

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i was very fortunate to pick up rm vaughan’s troubled – which i had heard him read years back when carolyn smart got him to come and read for our creative writing class at queen’s. he also proofread one of the first (read: 14 page) drafts of my thesis, which was incredibly kind of him to do, and so i have always wanted the book (which is about his affair with his (married, male) psychiatrist) and now i have it. i also picked up swamplandia! (why? i don’t know. the title stood out in my brain. someone in the program had mentioned it before) and sarah by jt leroy. that was a rec from one of the staff there, after i had asked her for a “messy, adjective-laden mix of a book between cormac mccarthy and timothy findley. but new, i suppose.”

anyway, i have lots to read and report on, and apparently now i also have a whole new city of bookstores to explore and report back on, as well. and might i add that it was a weird pleasure to walk down the shelves and see names and say “that’s my thesis advisor. i met that guy at a bar. i met that guy at another bar. she edited one of my first ever workshopped poems. he edited my application to ubc. i met her at steven’s christmas party.” i feel so blessed to have been thrust into this writing world, and to actually know some of the people behind the titles! (cheesy. but true).

What I Read: The Sisters Brothers

i’ve never been a girl for labels. the only brand name i own is marc jacobs and that’s a pair of raggedy old black leather boots that i’ve worn the shit out of. (fun story – i fell over in chicago this past weekend and broke the boots. also, i was holding a bag of cheesecake at the time. and it was in front of a tour bus. crowning moment!) therefore, i care not a whit for a cover of a book that blares “MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE FINALIST ROGERS WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE FINALIST!!!!!!” it’s funny, because i always forget that the giller is sponsered by scotiabank, so having that “scotiabank” thrown in there makes it seem even more like an advertisement. it’s so interesting how the publishing business really really pushes some books for sale, and then leaves others by the wayside. (i was having lunch yesterday with my friend who is a literary agent and this was a point of discussion. if you have time, check out carly’s website. does it sweeten the deal if i tell you that she used to play football with me? girl was an offensive lineman!!! she’s a tough cookie!!!). anyway, where was i? the cover art of the book is pretty cool, i must say. i have trouble with those gestalt exercises (do you see the two faces? do you see the vase?) but regardless – neat.

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i didn’t actually buy this book for myself. my father got it, and i usurped it before my mother could read it. i don’t usually care about the giller prize shortlist, because while i’m sure that the books are all good, or even great, i usually don’t want to fall victim to commercialization – i don’t want to pass over a lesser-known book that someone has told me that i will REALLY love for a shortlisted book that i might ONLY just like a little bit. book prizes are weird things. but the thing is, the names of the books get thrown around so much, and with this title being so distinctive, it really stuck in my head. and from this point onward, do not read, because there shalt be spoilers.

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the sisters brothers was good. it wasn’t great. keep in mind that i have a really specific type of writing that i like, but i was surprised that a book with such simple narration, and, to be honest, simple(ish) story would be so lauded. as soon as i started reading, i was immediately reminded of cormac mccarthy’s writing, but without the blisteringly good adjectives. TSB (as it now shall be referred to) covers the story of two assassin brothers – eli and charlie sisters – and there is where the title comes from. they are trekking across the states to murder someone. the year? honestly, i have no idea. 1800s. the time of the gold rush and the gold diggers.

whatever patrick dewitt does in this story, someone has done it before. that’s not necessarily a cruel statement, because everyone is deriving something from someone else – everything i have ever written has been written by someone else before me. it’s just what happens in the arts, the fine arts. this book felt like a mix of cormac mccarthy and ernest hemingway – neat and tight language, a potential for violence in the wild span of the 1800s united states. but wherever the language could have been maybe expanded upon in specific moments to impart more of the situation or more of a feeling, it was not. and wherever the violence might have been pushed a little farther in order to horrify with nuance, at the right moments, in order to create a scene that burned into the mind of the reader and never left, it was not. i’m not someone who wants to read the most violent books (though i am someone who eschews hemingway for faulker, so full disclosure, i’m biased in that regard) but there were moments where incandescence was possible, and yet it was never brought to that level. and that might have been on purpose, and it might have worked for other people, but for me, as a reader, i kept on biting at the bit, wanting something wild and feral to happen. and it never really did.

the toothbrushing. i was hoping that dewitt would pull the wires and bring it all into one fabulous knot at the end. eli, the narrator of the story (his brother, charlie, does not have a voice as eli does), brushes his teeth. which is an oddity for that day and age. it starts because he has an abscessed tooth, and a dentist gifts him with tooth powder and a toothbrush, and for the majority of the book eli takes immense pleasure in brushing his teeth. he even brushes his teeth alongside a woman that he wants to be intimate with, and it’s a charming scene. you can picture it perfectly. double foamed mouths. and i was hoping that something about that tooth powder was going to be strong and important at the end of the story. i do realise that it sets eli apart from his brother – whereas charlie is smelly, animalistic, crueler than his chubbier brother – eli takes pleasure in cleaning himself, in at least pretending to be kind and thoughtful. and the readers do get a hint at eli’s hidden rage, in a particular head-stomping scene, which was one of the scenes that did stick with me the most, but we never really learn why.

the gold. the theme of the gold was only brought in at the last third or quarter of the book. we know that eli and charlie are set to murder someone, but we do not know why, and it is only when they get to san francisco that we are told that the gold rush is so important. maybe i should have caught onto that before. maybe it didn’t happen for me because i am not american. i didn’t immediately assume that the gold rush would be so pertinent in that day and age. and when it turns out that the target (the man that the sisters brothers are to kill) has been targeted by their boss specifically for something related to gold, i didn’t feel connected to that at all – maybe because i had felt none of the gold mania leading up to that moment. the gold seemed an afterthought. money seemed important to the sisters brothers, but not raw gold specifically.

the intermissions. there are two intermissions that are literally set apart in the book with pages of illustrations book-ending them. in each of those intermissions, we are introduced to an unnamed little girl who first poisons a dog and then attempted to poison charlie. i get that. charlie is, at times, no better than a dog, but the intermissions seem so abrupt and so odd, separated as they are from the rest of the book with big, dark pages of curlicues and swirls. i’m not sure that i grasp why they were important. this could be my fault, entirely.

the diary entries. in which the sisters brothers discover that one of their associates has left the order of henchmen and has, instead, gone off with main target to harvest gold using a strange, magical alchemical solution. a diary is a crutch. it’s like playing a video game and entering a new room, and a message bubble popping up: “link, all of the people in the village are gone. maybe if you read this diary that has been left between the mattress and the sheets, you might learn of the tragedy that has happened here.” i did not, not, not like that part. dewitt is a subtle enough writer that he could have shown us the scene part by part, could have let us think that we had figured it out by ourselves as he showed us morris and warm (the former associate, and the target) harvesting their gold by the light of the moon. it would have been both a beautiful and triumphant scene for us readers. one of those scenes that makes you clap a hand to your mouth, reading on the subway.

and i can’t even start with the witch.

but i did love the way that the book was set out, aside from those intermissions. i love choppy little chapters that can sometimes only last a page, or even half a page. because that is how the human mind thinks. jerky and disjointed. i love a book that can take risks in formatting like that, and i really appreciated it. and the story is good. the writing is good. it’s not a bad book in any sense of the word, and i think that i am being especially hard on the story because it has been so incredibly lauded, and has been put up for so many prizes. who knows – if this book was unknown and just something that i had picked up on a shelf in a little independent bookstore somewhere, this review may have been much different. and maybe that is the negative aspect of being nominated for so many prizes as a writer – people will most certainly buy more of your books, but they go into reading them with much higher expectations.

anyway, do read it. dewitt was born in canada (YAHOOLIGANS!) but he lives in the usa now (not yahooligans). i don’t actually know if he identifies as “canadian” because in any of his bios, he never, ever refers to himself as “canadian”, which is a bit of bummer. but regardless, he’s from vancouver island originally, so get thee out there and support canadian writers! and you may like a book completely differently from how i do! because i give you full disclosure about my boner for adverbs, and apparently that love classifies me as a philistine of writing! (yeah okay whatever.)

and remember – i do NOT have a book published, so regardless of what i say in these reviews, i am always writing them from a space of immense respect for a writer having published something!

Hey Girl.

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just saying. go to more libraries.

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