Review: The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage, by Kingsley Amis

This is a curiously titled tome by Kingsley Amis—curious because it was released in 1997. Should it not then be called “The Queen’s English”? Of course, the title is a play on Amis’ first name: this book, published posthumously two years after the author’s death, is very much a collection of Kingsley’s English, his sense of what the language is and should be, and a grumpy guide to its spelling, pronunciation and overall usage.

Those expecting a farrago of anachronism, snootiness, misogyny, class obsession and good ol’ arbitration, all delivered with tongue placed lightly in the cheek, will not be disappointed. Unlike the other Amis collection I recently read and reviewed, Everyday Drinking, The King’s English doesn’t exactly wear its humour on its sleeve. This book takes as its key antecedent the Fowler brothers’ seminal text The King’s English (1906) and wishes to expand and contemporize their rules surrounding the modern usage of English. The problem is that reading this book in 2013, one can’t help but feel that Amis’ observations aren’t very contemporary at all. And we’re not just talking about his rant about how useless word processors are compared to typewriters.

Take, for example, his section on the proper pronunciation of the word “either.” We all know that “eye-ther” and “eee-ther” are both generally accepted, though we may have our individual preference. Me, I favour the former and agree with Amis that it sounds more officially learned. Yet, that’s not how he puts it. Instead, he takes a gentle dig at lingering class distinctions, saying that eee-ther comes off sounding a bit “underbred.” Of course, there is humour in the audacity of such a statement, and yet I still mistrust the voice saying it.

The King’s English is also not a particularly helpful book to read if you happen to be female. Amis goes to great length outlining the regrettable trend of allowing gender neutral terminology to creep into the language, as if it were a necessary but annoying change on par with, say, no longer being allowed to smoke in bars. He has a whole section on what he calls “womanese”, and states, inaccurately, that malapropism is almost exclusively the domain of the female sex. “I had better take refuge behind the rock-hard factual observation that, unlike most men, women are always getting set phrases wrong.” Is the tongue in the cheek when he writes this? It’s hard to take any of it seriously, especially when it’s coming from someone who considers equality between the sexes to be nothing more than a chimera we should all just give up on.

There are other problems, of course. For a man who published several volumes of poetry, Amis appears to have a rather loose grasp of what it means to speak or write metaphorically. How else would we explain, for example, his chastising us for using words like “panacea” or “crescendo” for anything other than their literal definition? Even when Amis is inarguably right about something, he doesn’t quite get it completely right. He should, for example, be applauded for saying that the rule around split infinitives is nonsense. But he doesn’t go on to say, as Bill Bryson does in his far superior book Mother Tongue, exactly why the rule is nonsense: that it originates out of the fact that, in Latin, the infinitive cannot be split because it is a single word (example: “to love” is amare) and English simply transmuted the rule from that.

Still, there are a few joys coming out of this book. Amis is always engaging and knowledgeable, and he’s able to bring a breadth of knowledge to bear on various elements of our language. The split infinitive rule notwithstanding, his exploration of Latin’s influence on English is thorough and very much worth reading. His guide to common errors between similar words – example: alternate(ly) and alternative(ly) – can also be a great refresher for those of us who learned about them elsewhere.

But the book overall has a mildly dated feel and doesn’t have nearly as much pluck and re-readability as Everyday Drinking. For me, The King’s English will no doubt be a (very) occasionally used reference guide to usage, and little more.

Review: Li’l Bastard, by David McGimpsey

Ah yes, the ‘chubby’ sonnet—David McGimpsey’s innovative retrofit of two extra lines onto this traditional poetic form, plaything of Shakespeare and Milton Acorn, confounder of high school students and other haters of poetry. So instead of the typical 4-4-4-2 breakdown, McGimpsey’s final stanzas get two extra lines, for a total of 16. This affords the pieces in his 2011 collection, L’il Bastard, some additional wiggle room, but it also establishes an air of the unconventional, a bald statement that says, No, this ain’t your daddy’s sonnet.

Even this feels like an understatement. The poems in Li’l Bastard take us to places we rarely go in Canadian verse: part picaresque, part ribald exposé of the middle-aged self, part send-up of the ubiquity of pop culture, McGimpsey’s work is unafraid to explore both the high and the low aspects of our ultramodern world. The book’s 128 sonnets are divided into eight sections, mostly geographic in nature (spanning Montreal, Texas, and other locales that have played a role in the poet’s life) but also includes a flight of ventriloquism involving the 1970s detective show Barnaby Jones. If there is a unifying refrain to this collection, it is that of the poet having to return over and over again, for financial necessity, to the role of teacher. As McGimpsey puts it in sonnet 49, one of the many references to this reality:

In the end, I had to go back to teaching.
I missed the apartment buildings and bookstores,
and by that I mean I needed the money.

One imagines various poetic exploits coming to an end after some prize money or grant funding runs out. But to focus on this binary—of poet as free spirit vs. poet as participant in the work-a-day grind—would be to do Li’l Bastard an injustice. McGimpsey writes with smash-mouth intensity about how even a writer deeply committed to the rich tradition of poetry cannot escape the relentless chatter of popular culture in every aspect of our Western world. He doesn’t critique this noise; he relishes it, finds musical verve in references that span everything from Twitter and The Flintstones to Major League Baseball and the Robin Williams film Mrs. Doubtfire. It shouldn’t work—in lesser hands it wouldn’t work—but the author’s grand vision wins us over.

McGimpsey can be comic and serious, silly and condescending, a prankster and cool observer, all in a single 16-line poem. The success of Li’l Bastard—if I may pay it a slightly backhanded compliment—is that McGimpsey is able to perform his antics on the page without the book growing tedious or predictable. He skirts pretty close to that line in several pieces, especially near the end of the book, but he thankfully has the talent and good sense never to cross it. The result is a poetry collection unlike most you’ll find in Canada, a book as loud and unapologetic as it is clear-eyed and insightful.    

My Q&Q review of Under Budapest, by Ailsa Kay

is now posted on Quill & Quire's website. It's been a while since I've read a book that started out so iffy but then turned into such an engrossing and satisfying read. Kay's exploration of the lingering effects of Soviet aggression in Hungary is well worth checking out. Also, she's guest writing the National Post's Afterword blog this week. Here's the latest post.

M.

My Toronto Poetry Vendors poem is out!

Got word today that my poem "Dressing in Layers" is now out in the spring issue of Toronto Poetry Vendors. As mentioned when I posted about the acceptance, TPV is a really cool concept and I'm pleased to be included in it with so many fine poets. Currently you can find these poetry-dispensing machines in four venues here in the city: the Terragon Theatre, TYPE Books, Saving Gigi, and 3030 Dundas West. So go pop in, buy a poem (they're only a toonie each) and then come back here and tell me what you think.

M.

Review: Flip Turn, by Paula Eisenstein

Stories about competitive sports enjoy a well-earned place within the pantheon of Canadian fiction and poetry. We’ve seen stellar contributions over the years on everything from boxing (Steven Heighton, M.T. Kelly) and the Winter Olympics (Priscila Uppal) to running (Alexander MacLeod) and our ubiquitous national sport, hockey (Mark Anthony Jarman, Cara Hedley, Lynn Coady, Jeffery Donaldson, among many, many others). Why athletic competition lends itself so well to creative writing, I would argue, is that there is often a built-in tension already there for the author; sports can provide a clearly defined set of characters we can root for and an arc that mirrors the tenets of traditional storytelling.

Which makes Flip Turn, the debut novel from Toronto writer Paula Eisenstein, such a curiosity. The sport in question is competitive swimming—an activity that requires intense focus, rigorous diet, and an endless regimen of early-morning practices—and Eisenstein overlays her examination of this sport with a story about a murder committed by the brother of our nameless narrator. Yet despite these promising elements, Flip Turn is almost completely devoid of tension or anything resembling a narrative arc. Eisenstein has instead written her novel as a set of murky, vaguely defined fragments, as if recited to the reader under water. She may very well be trying to subvert our expectations as to what a sports novel can be; but having reached the end of the book, I wondered what she thought she was replacing those expectations with.

A big part of the problem is the awkward and stilted sentences with which much of Flip Turn is written. There were many opportunities with both the swimming and the story of the murder for Eisenstein to use sharp, evocative descriptions and poignant internal monologue. Instead, the book provides passage after passage that left me baffled by what the author was attempting to evoke. Sentences like “Our class feels quiet in an effective, superior way” or “But Julie said she couldn’t be best friends with me because she was already best friends with Donna Snowden so then I wouldn’t be friends with her anymore because it wasn’t good enough for me” had me scratching my head. How am I to imagine a class being “effective” in its quietness? What, exactly, wasn’t “good enough” for the narrator? (That “it” just sort of dangles there.) The worst of these passages came near the end when the narrator is describing her French class. She says, “At least in French I can feel the dark closing in around me, like I have a chance to survive. Math is like the brightness of already being on the other side.” In the margin below this, perhaps channeling Mordecai Richler, I wrote: I have no idea what the author is expressing here. Does she?

But the real issue with Eisenstein’s book is how it overdoes the elusive and elliptical approach to its core story. The narrator’s brother Cal sexually assaulted and murdered a young girl named Selena at the local YMCA, and is now doing time in a psychiatric prison. The narrator takes on the improbable obsession of using her victories in the pool to clear her family name—or at least induce a different response when the public sees it printed in the newspaper. But Flip Turn never fully explores the impact of Cal’s crime on the community, and his actions’ influence on the narrator’s family remains frustratingly obtuse. What’s worse, there are other horrible things going on with our protagonist: she and her swimmates are sexually abused by more than one of her swimming coaches, and yet these encounters are given but a cursory mention. (The narrator seems to have a warped sense of sexual boundaries anyway, to the point of even indicting Selena in her own assault. She says, “Like being that way was Selena’s fault, what she did wrong, for attracting Cal. Not a fault she could be blamed for, just a fault.”)

What Flip Turn does explore, inexplicably, is an array of petty relationships that the narrator has with other girls at school and at the pool. A motley assemble of vague, poorly drawn female characters are marched out, given some kind of trivial interaction with our protagonist, and then scarcely heard from again. This approach goes on for dozens of pages, and left me wondering what all these relationships would amount to, what sort of jouissance they would instill by the end of the story. The answer, sadly, was nothing and none.

Sill, Eisenstein does have her moments in this novel. There are times when she does get the balance of elusiveness and detail just right to create little sparks of pleasure in the reader’s mind. Here’s a passage, of the narrator describing womanhood, that stunned me with its off-kilter beauty:

The reason the moon is a woman and your mother and one day you is because of its pulling power. Your mother pulls you into doing things for her all the time. Like being a great swimmer. Like not being a problem. The reason there’s a man in the moon is the man represents men getting sucked up into her.

Yes, that first sentence is grammatically awkward and yes, there's a lot of jarring repetition in this passage, but it all works. It has the spirited cadence of a fully formed thought.

Sadly, there just isn’t enough of this kind of writing in Flip Turn. The book feels so bogged down with the need to challenge our assumptions about narrative that it undermines itself and misses opportunities for emotional impact. There may be a better story buried somewhere in there, full of tension and well-formed characters and little moments of catharsis. But Eisenstein doesn’t seem interested in running that race. Instead, she’s happy to have her book just do practice laps over and over again in the pool, in the hopes that we’ll still watch even though nothing appears to be at stake.

Review: Distillery Songs, by Mike Spry

The title and cover image of Mike Spry’s debut short story collection, Distillery Songs, leave one with the impression that this book is going to be about beer. Well, perhaps not beer itself, but those who drink it—tales of shambling men and women who drift from pub to pub getting into mischief, postulating on the universe, and trying to “make sense” of their odd and idiosyncratic lives.

Well thank God it’s not that kind of collection. Instead, what Spry has done is create a series of off-kilter tales that defy expectation and intoxicate us with their own unique constructions. On more than one occasion I found myself writing things like ‘oddly alluring’ or ‘bizarre, in a delightful way” in the margins of this book. Each story is the distillation of a weird concept, served up as a concoction meant to jar us.

Take, for example, his wonderful “Club Soda Unbridled”, a story about a couple who live and work together in a high-end hotel. Spry establishes a sense of repetition in the piece as the two lovers go about their respective chores in the hotel. There is a deliberate sense of elision here: we know that there is another story living beneath the surface of the story on the page, and yet we have a certain expectation as to what that might be. Spry surprises by turning his piece completely on its head by the end, creating a surprising burst of profundity.

Or take “Jesus of Thunder Bay.” In one sense, we know what to expect from this tale: a quirky exploration of what it might be like if the messiah ended up in isolated northern Ontario. But again, Spry plays with these expectations and finds ways to surprise his reader—not only with Jesus’ behaviour but also how his holy presence affects the other characters in the story.

While I did enjoy most of Distillery Songs, I did find that Spry would occasionally undermine his approaches with opening sentences consumed with the need to shock. These often come across as needless shoehorns to get inside narratives that would eventually reveal their inherent strangeness and Ballardian torque. Examples include the title story, which begins: “I once killed a two-fingered mitten salesman from Cleveland for half-fucking my wife.” Or “Five Pounds Short and Apologies to Nelson Algren”, which starts with “No one ever tells you not to fuck the monkey.” The worst example of this was the story “Emulsification”, which kicks off with:

Okay, there’s a Goddamn dead hooker named Crystal or Shelley or Raven or something duct taped to my couch and it’s one twenty-four in the afternoon and my notoriously punctual parents will be here for dinner at five-thirty and wouldn’t you know it I’m completely out of almonds and cumin …

This story reads like little more than an unconventional creative writing exercise: write the most outlandish opening you can and then reverse engineer the story to make it work. Spry does make it work, technically, but there is a certain soullessness to the final product.

Still, there’s no denying the power of this collection. Distillery Songs is a book comfortable with its own weirdness: these stories are not meant to be frothy pints of ale sipped slowly at the pub. They’re more like small, hard shots of whiskey—meant to be downed fast, and burn you behind the eyeballs.

A Time to Re-Joyce: “Circe” to “Penelope”

It was perhaps not James Joyce’s intention to create a “Little Gidding” moment for his reader at the end of Ulysses, but this was indeed my experience as I closed in on the climax (and that is the proper term for it) of this great and exhausting novel. I felt as though Joyce had taken me back to the place where we had started, and that I, after 700+ pages of prismatic, mesmeric (and often baffling) text, came to know it for the first time.

This place has of course a literal locale—7 Eccles Street in Dublin, home to Leopold and Molly Bloom, though the novel does not technically begin there—as well a figurative one. The best way to describe this more metaphoric circumnavigation is to say that Ulysses returns us, in the end, to a place of Heightened Irony, one that Joyce establishes earlier in the book. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that irony itself—a concept, an exploration, the very frame for this novel—becomes Ulysses’ chief protagonist. It becomes, oddly, a character onto itself. I’ll come to what I mean by that a little later.

But first, I think it’s important to describe how these four remaining episodes cause a collision of worlds between Leopold Bloom and his newfound companion, Stephen Dedalus. As I described in both my first post and my second, Joyce uses the novel’s diurnal framework to slowly draw these two men toward each other in space and time. But it is here in “Circe,” the book’s 15th episode, that their two worlds fully collide. It is perhaps fitting that this happens in a brothel in Dublin’s red-light “Nighttown” district, as Bloom as been wrestling with various bodily urges and exigencies—most of them sexual—throughout the story.

Yet Joyce does a queer thing in this chapter to show how these two damaged men come to expose their worlds to each other in this episode: he structures it like a play. Of course, anyone trying to stage “Circe” would have a hell of a time with it, what with so many bizarre stage directions, countless characters roaming in and out to speak a single line, and appearances from the dead—specifically the recently deceased Paddy Dignam and Bloom’s own dead son Rudy. Creepy yes, but also wholeheartedly woven into the other structures and preoccupations of Ulysses.

Joyce uses this dialogue-heavy approach to reveal undercurrents to Bloom and Stephen that we did not have access to before. The men find not just sex in the brothel: they find yet another confrontation with Irish nationalism as well as the sins and failure of their own past. Joyce casts Bloom here as whinging and emasculated as his own sexual ineffectuality comes to the fore. “Circe” takes us on a journey through Bloom’s relentless failures, not only with his place within Ireland as a Jew but also with his wife Molly and his inability to keep her faithful to him. There are parallels here that Joyce plays with to great effect, and it reveals much about the novel’s grander vision about the relationship between the mind, the body and the heart.

It is interesting to see how the relationship between Bloom and Dedalus flourishes over the course of the next two episodes. The men flee the brothel and look to anchor themselves back in some semblance of a logical world. To do so, they retreat to a cabmen’s shelter. Bloom and Dedalus spend most of this episode, called “Eumaeus”, reflecting on the day and what has passed between them. It seems as if they are aware on some level how closely their lives have been intertwined during this diurnal period. But in another way, it seems as if the mysteries of the day have very much eluded them:

For which and further reasons he felt it was interest and duty even to wait on and profit by the unlookedfor occasion, though why, he could not exactly tell, being, as it was, already several shillings to the bad, having, in fact, let himself in for it. Still, to cultivate the acquaintance of someone of no uncommon caliber who could provide food for reflection would amply repay any small … Intellectual stimulation as such was, he felt, from time to time a firstrate tonic for the mind. Added to which was the coincidence of meeting, discussion, dance, row, old salt of the here today and gone tomorrow type, night loafers, the whole galaxy of events, all went to make up a miniature cameo of the world we live in …

The next episode, “Ithaca”, sees Dedalus follow Bloom back to his house on Eccles Street, but the narrative literally begins to doubt the solidity of the preceding events by framing itself in a series of rhetorical questions. These enquiries are, in a way, Joyce’s tipping of the hat to the improbable sequence of events that have unfolded, but of course there is more to it than that. If we are to see Ulysses as Joyce wanted us to—as a long, elaborate and modernizing play on Homer’s epic The Odyssey—then this episode represents the Great Return, the journey’s end, the reuniting with home and land and love. Never mind, of course, that the most significant thing that occurs in the episode is that Bloom and Dedalus take a piss together in the back yard, and then Bloom unsuccessfully attempts to convince Dedalus to crash for the night. The questioning nature of the narrative throws all of this into speculation, as if daring us to believe there is something else here, that surely if Joyce was playing on The Odyssey, there would be something more epic to this epic moment.

Mind you, “Ithaca” feels almost like a mere precursor for what is to come in the final episode, “Penelope”: Molly Bloom’s infamous and oft-quoted soliloquy. It’s tempting to see it as ironic that Molly gets the final word in the novel, and indeed this was probably what I thought when I read it the first time. But upon this second (closer, more engaged and more informed reading) I can see that she has been a looming spectre over the entire book, her presence very much affecting Bloom’s relationships with the characters he encounters, including Dedalus. It’s fitting then, that we come to her so fully personified in this final episode; that we are given her in the flesh, speaking her own version of her relationship with Leopold.

And what a fleshy presence it is. It goes without saying that Molly Bloom is in the full flush of her sexual peak; she is driven by deeply held physical desires in spite of (or, perhaps, because of) her flagging marriage to Leopold and the death of one of her children. Joyce captures her rapturous voice perfectly, its cadences a haunting, horny, late-night simulacrum. But that voice is also tangled up in the quotidian tedium of her past; and indeed, for Molly, it’s virtually impossible to separate the two:

yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he made me thirsty titties he calls them I had to laugh yes this one anyhow stiff the nipple gets for the least thing Ill get him to keep that up and Ill take those eggs beaten up with marsala fatten them out for him what are all those veins and things curious the way its made …

If we accept Joyce’s insistence that Ulysses is structured as a retelling of The Odyssey, then Molly represents Penelope as the lady in waiting: waiting, not necessarily for her Odysseus to come home, but waiting for passion itself, the deep and fruitful ravaging that she longs for, to arrive through her door to slake the desires that have overcome her. This is not mere explanation for her dalliances with Blazes Boylan. It also represents a metaphor, perhaps, for all of Ireland, for its nationalist pride and desire to return to a passionate sense of its own identity. This has been an ongoing trope throughout Ulysses, and it’s ironic that it finds its figurative apex in Molly, a woman who was essentially born and raised in Gibraltar.

But this is not the ultimate irony I spoke about above. Because of course to accept this and other paradoxes within Ulysses, one must accept Joyce’s precept that this is all just a giant retelling of The Odyssey. But can we? Can we really? As I pointed out in my first post, most of the criticism surrounding this novel finds its origin in Joyce himself, telling the scholars of his day how to process and interpret the novel. But do these allusions to Homer’s epic actually exist independently in the text itself? The episodes are not named—we get their Homeric titles from references outside the novel. There are plenty of ebbs and flows, characters and situations, that would fall well outside a one-to-one mimicking of Homer’s work. And is Joyce’s masterpiece really an epic? Does its diurnal approach not, ultimately, undermine that essential assumption?

I think this is the greatest irony of the novel, worthy enough to name Irony itself a character. Upon this second reading, I felt as if Joyce (abetted by my edition’s overseeing critic Jeri Johnson, as well as the critics who came before her) had put me on a wild goose chase, daring me to spot (or even manufacture) these allusions in the text itself. And Joyce also dares me to come to one final haunting conclusion—that they are not actually there. This is my experience reading the novel for the second time around. I will most likely return to it in another 10 years, and perhaps my reading of it, my interpretations of its ironies and intentions, will be different once again.

One final word on the experience itself of rereading Ulysses. The book takes not a small amount of guff from contemporary readers as being too dense and impenetrable. But my impressions at the end of this journey (yes, journey, though perhaps not a Homeric one) is that the juice is definitely worth the squeeze. Yes, Ulysses is hard. Yes, its points and counterpoints, its high- and low-culture allusions are hard to track. Yes, it is written by a dead white male. Yes, it has no real plot. Yes, it is set in a period dubbed “modern” and yet feels about as alien to life in 2013 as life on another planet. But this novel is worth it. It challenges and foils not the just the inner eye that we all read with. It challenges—and ultimately  strengthens—the very thing we need in order to read anything effectively: our attention span. And this accomplishment, coming to me in 2013 as it did in 2003, is a great gift indeed. To complete a reading of Ulysses is to celebrate the very notion of attention span, of giving yourself completely over to a novel. To complete a reading of Ulysses in 2013 is to understand how much our attention spans can feel like an endangered species, and really require a lush sanctuary such as this one.