ANNEX LIVE
296 BRUNSWICK AVE., south of Bloor St.

FEATURING:
WHITNEY FRENCH
SUZANNE ROBERTSON
LINDSAY SMAIL
DANE SWAN
LISA YOUNG
with emcees MICHELLE ALFANO & GIOVANNA RICCIO

Come early and enjoy the food and ambiance at Annex Live!

FOR MORE INFO PLEASE GO TO: notsoniceitaliangirls.blogspot.com
THE (Not so) NICE ITALIAN
GIRLS & FRIENDS Celebrate new and emerging writers …
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012. 7:30pm

This May marks the return of the LeftWords Festival of Books and Ideas, a day-long showcase of progressive and left-leaning authors, publishers, and book sellers. The festival, which has been on hiatus since 2005, is re-launching this year in partnership with the Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts.

This year’s LeftWords has much to offer. In addition to a marketplace showcasing more than 20 exhibitors, the festival will host a series of panel discussions and workshops on subjects ranging from activism and dissent to community art and graphic novels.

According to Matt Adams, one of the festival’s organizers, what makes Leftwords unique is the way it responds to the salient—and controversial— social and political issues of our time. “Among our panelists this year, we have G20 critics, Occupy activists, and labour experts,” says Adams. “For better or for worst, the time is certainly ripe to re-launch.”

Highlights of this year’s festival include a keynote address by famed feminist and activist Michele Landsberg and a panel discussion featuring Frances Fox Piven, who recently earned the ire of Glenn Beck for her involvement in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

LeftWords is on May 6, 2012 at the Ryerson Students’ Centre, 55 Gould St. The festival opens at 11 a.m. and runs until 5 p.m. It will be followed by an After-Party hosted by the Socialist Register. For more information, please visit: www.leftwordsfestival.ca.

• On Wednesday March 28th 2012 from 6:30 p.m.- 8:30 p.m.at Kensington and Descant favourite, The Supermarket, NOW HEAR THIS presents the sixteenth edition of the HEAR/HEAR Reading Series. Our reading series has had a face lift, showcasing a mix of talented writers unlike ever before!

NOW HEAR THIS has partnered with Operation Springboard, a   youth justice service, to bring engaging and relevant creative writing workshops to young offenders. In support of the project, HEAR/HEAR is dedicated to voice the facilitators and their experience at Springboard, alongside other talented artists who are actively involved in their community.

This HEAR/HEAR features:
Chris Harris a.k.a Wasun
Ibi Kaslik
Sheniz Janmohamed
James from the Songs

Join us for an evening of literature, music, raffles and positive impacts on the community. All are welcome. Suggested admission is $5 or PWYC. Bring your friends and friends of friends to HEAR/HEAR!

• On Thursday April 5th, 2012 from 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. join our bff Whitney French at The Central (note: venue has changed, is no longer at The Trane Studio) to celebrate the release of her collection of poetry 3 Cities, an exploration of her experiences living in Bradford, Montreal and Toronto. Musical guests include: Jef Kerns, Mario Munoz, and Whitney Messam. Grab some friends, some strangers, some drinks and come out and hear some poetry. Books are $15. Admission is FREE. You’ve never heard poetry like this before!

• On Tuesday April 10th 2012 from 6:30 p.m. – 10:30 p.m. at The Annex Live (296 Brunswick Ave., between Bathurst and Spadina), we are happy to announce that The Descant Arts & Letters Foundation will celebrate the release of its Spring 2012 issue, entitled Bosnia and Herzegovina: Between Loss and Recovery.At the event, we will announce the winner of the Winston Collins Prize for Best Canadian Poem. Contributors Priscila Uppal, Jim Bartley, Gorcin Dizdar and Amela Marin will read poetry, fiction and non-fiction, while Velibor Bozovic will present a slideshow of his photographs of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The event will also feature a raffle and numerous prizes, ranging from vouchers for various Toronto venues to selections of newly published books, and free hor d’ouvres.The selection of writings and photographs in Descant 156: Bosnia and Herzegovina testifies to the ongoing fascination the small Balkan country continues to exert over the international community at large and over our local literary community in particular. Come out and show us your support!

• Lastly, since we always want to show our support to our amazing contributors, join us on Tuesday March 27, 2012 at 7:30 p.m., again at The Annex Live for the release of contributor Mark Frutkin‘s book of essays entitled Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously.  This will be one of four books launched that evening by Quattro Books, including: Nevermore: Meditations on Extinction, by David Day; Bravo! A Selection of Prose and Poetry by Italian-Canadian Writers edited by Caroline Morgan Di Giovanni; and Pledged Poetry by the late Mexican poet Abigael Bohorquez, translated by Beatriz Hausner.

Did you get all that? Good!

Dickens did not take critique very well either.

The e-mail appeared in my inbox along with the usual make-money-from- home spam. It seemed I had been chosen to be a juror for the Ontario Arts Council. All I had to do was read a few manuscripts and give my opinion about the relative literary merits of each application. For this simple task I would be financially compensated.

Naturally, I did not believe the legitimacy of this e-mail. Why me? I was hardly a famous author, just someone who had published in a few literary magazines. I goggled googled the name of the e-mail’s sender, John Degen, and he was indeed the Literature Officer at the Ontario Arts Council. Perhaps this really was a genuine request to adjudicate this year’s grant applicants.

I eagerly accepted the assignment, and soon two boxes of manuscripts were delivered to my door, each box stuffed with the aspirations and sweat of some one- hundred- thirty-five struggling writers. Just how many hours of collective gazing-into-a- monitor did these stacks represent? How many agonizing rewrites and how much head banging for just the correct word? Each deadline the OAC Works in Progress program only ever has enough money to dispense less than two-dozen grants. Thus the statistical reality is that the majority of these submissions would receive a rejection letter, and although we writers are accustomed to rejection, no one finds it painless. I was beginning to regret having accepted this responsibility.

There were four jurors assigned to adjudicate the literature category, which consisted of short-fiction, novels, non-fiction, young adult (both fiction and non-fiction) and graphic novels. The competition is anonymous; each entry is marked only with its title. Each juror was asked to read every word of all the manuscripts, making notes on each entry on a special form sent to us, along with our vote of either, a yes, a no, or a maybe. A meeting had been set up at the end of September where all four jurors, along with the Literature Officer, would gather to reach a consensus upon which few would receive a grant this year.

The manuscripts had arrived in late July (delayed by a postal strike) and that meant there was less than two months to read all the manuscripts and still do them justice. And as luck would have it, I was flying to the UK for three weeks smack in the middle of this intense reading period. This is where a writer’s discipline is useful. I worked out that if I could read six manuscripts a day, I should be in good shape before the scheduled meeting with the other jurors. Submissions are allowed to be forty pages, plus up to three pages of bridging material and a one page summary. However, the majority of submissions seemed to be over forty pages. A few even attempted to pack in more pages by shrinking the font (most were disqualified by OAC but a couple did slip through). The jurors, just like publishers and literary mags, are inundated with submissions they need to read before a deadline. Any writer who adds stress to that process does do himself any favors. Personally, I made a conscious decision to not read anything past page forty of any manuscript sample: there is nothing in the remaining four pages that is going to alter my opinion about the writer’s clarity with structure, the prose, the dialogue, the plot and characters that he has not demonstrated in the previous forty.

The OAC also allows writers to include a summary of the book they are attempting. Although this page is not mandatory, I discovered that many of the entries included two or three pages of summary, much of it full of hyperbole, as though these pages were a pitch meant to make me want to read the sample. Jurors are obliged to read all samples. A hyped up summary, to me at least, served as a wish list for what the writer hoped to achieve in this book. The attached sample then, spoke of the writer’s ability (or inability) to reach that goal. I later found out that some of the jurors did not read the summaries at all. My advice would be to not include a summary of the book. I know from picking up books at libraries and book stores that by reading the first page I have a pretty clear idea of what the theme of this book is and whether or not I will find it engaging. Your sample writing is there to speak to the juror about the themes and conflicts in your book, as well your style.

The adjudication meeting itself turned out to be the most enjoyable part of the whole process. The OAC has been doing this a long time and they have honed it to an art. As the title of each submission was called out, the jurors gave their vote of either yes, no, or maybe. Any manuscript with four yeses (about 10%) needed no further discussion. These entries were brilliantly skillful. They had rhythmic sentences, which flowed effortlessly into concise paragraphs. Such manuscripts were notably free of grammatical and spelling errors (perhaps proofed by a professional editor?). Similarly, any manuscript that garnered four nos was destined for a rejection letter (about 40% in our batch). A few of these were clearly amateur, more a demonstration of vanity than talent. Others were bizarre derivatives of au courant fiction (think teen vampire superhero who attends wizard school), or they were so experimental as to be abstract and indecipherable. It was the remaining 50% that we the jury spent the day discussing. Each of these entries had potential that was cluttered by clumsy writing. Some manuscripts had passionate champions among the jurors (both for and against) attempting to persuade the other jurors to change their votes. The debates were lively, but respectful to both the writers and to the fellow jurors. It was interesting to hear the different viewpoints and all the jurors benefited from having his or her biases and justifications challenged. Often the writers were very close to having a winning manuscript but were making one or two fatal mistakes in the writing process. It is unfortunate that at present the OAC does not have a mechanism for submitters to benefit from that discussion (they are working to rectify that).

After listening to this insightful discussion, we were given a chance to review our votes for the remaining undecided entries. By 5 o’clock we had narrowed down the 50% into a consensus of yeses small enough to match the available funds from the OAC.

John Degen mentioned at the end our session that in his time at the OAC he had not encountered a jury which had discussed the manuscripts with such depth as we had and he felt we had given each writer his just due. I believe he meant it. I too was impressed by my fellow jurors. Despite the sometimes arduous reading schedule, all the jurors agreed that we would accept to adjudicate should we be asked again.

Pradeep Solanki

Please check out new blog on http://awarenessisfree.wordpress.com/

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.

The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me.

I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!”

Happy Holidays to our Descant friends and family!

As this year comes to a close we look back on another busy and successful year here in our office. Another year of beautiful poetry, prose and artwork – as well as the beautiful people who shared them with us – has passed, and I feel very lucky to have been able to participate in it and thankful to everyone who continues to make this publication a possibility. However, with the swell of pride still in our chest from 2011’s hard work, we are already looking forward to the future. This upcoming year is already proving to be full of new and exciting opportunities to share our love of language with you, our readers and contibutors, and we are already working busily like Santa’s helpers to prepare for a jam-packed January. Don’t feel to bad for us though! There is no shortage of Christmas cheer here… with the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack on repeat and Paul rocking out on his air guitar.

Looking forward to seeing you all in the new year.
Happiest of holidays,

Courtney, and the entire Descant team.

Written in 1989 and allegedly unearthed amongst the Chilean author’s notes, The Third Reich is centred on the first-person account of Udo Berger, a renowned German war games expert vacationing in Costa Brava with his girlfriend, Inebord. Rather than basking in the hot sun of coastal Spain, Udo—a man driven by rules, motives and strategy—opts instead to spend his time indoors perfecting a “variant” of his favourite war game, The Third Reich.

Soon Udo and Ingebord befriend another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who in turn introduce them to an enigmatic collection of local characters, including a shadowy beach dweller named El Quemado (literally “The Burned One”). When tragedy strikes (or at least appears to), Udo’s perception of the world around him begins to adopt a darker, more bizarre hue. His waking life slips seamlessly in and out of dreams and he begins to suspect those around him of deceiving him.

What results is a quietly brilliant novel that unfurls steadily like a mystery in search of a crime. Clues abound as do suspects, but the object of investigation remains hopelessly elusive—both to readers and to Udo. It is this ever-looming abysm of unknowability, however, that truly interests Bolãno. At one point, Udo, upon discovering the inconsequential factoid that El Quemado is not in fact Spanish but South American, comments: “I didn’t feel deceived. I felt observed. (Not by El Quemado; actually by nobody in particular: observed by a void, an absence).” The novel equates this “void” with a sort of ominous evil lurking in the negative spaces between a cause and is effect, a person and his or her motives. For Bolãno, it seems, existence itself is tantamount to deception. It’s esoteric stuff, but that’s why Bolãno remains such a force: His books coextensively compel and confound.

As expected, The Third Reich doesn’t carry the weight of The Savage Detectives or 2666, but it serves as a fitting and elucidating prelude to both works, providing hardcore Bolãno disciples with what may be the most direct entry to date into the author’s thematic, philosophic and aesthetic interests.

The Third Reich is published by Penguin Canada. Translated from the original Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.

The novel reads like an old Hollywood western, complete with two intermissions, an epilogue and concise chapters you’ll race through with the ease and speed of a belly through the bush. Although written in short, choppy chapters and sentences – true to real Southern-twang and free from frivolity – five or six words alone will hit you with such a force that there is nothing left to do but sit back and say “dang!” There is a striking contrast between the abrupt form, the crude subject matter and the entirely heart-warming sentiment behind DeWitt’s words. It is at all times humourous, tender and tragic. While the Sisters brothers reign in a time nearly unrecognizable to our own, the chaos and destitution of the California gold rush, Eli’s insights are no less relevant today. In this short excerpt, Eli discusses life in San Francisco in a description that is still fairly comparable, and eerily so:

“It is a wild time here, is it not?” I said to the man.

“It is wild. I fear it has ruined my character. It has certainly ruined the characters of others.” He nodded, as though answering himself. “Yes, it has ruined me.”

“How are you ruined?” I asked.

“How am I not?” he wondered.

“Couldn’t you return to your home to start over?”

He shook his head. “Yesterday I saw a man leap from the roof of the Orient Hotel, laughing all the way to the ground, upon which he fairly exploded. He was drunk they say, but I had seen him sober shortly before this. There is a feeling here, which if it gets you, will envenom your very center. It is a madness of possibilities. That leaping man’s final act was the embodiment of the collective mind of San Francisco. I understood it completely. I had a strong desire to applaud, if you want to know the truth.”

“I don’t understand the purpose of this story,” I said.

“I could leave here and return to my hometown, but I would not return as the person I was when I left,” he explained. “I would not recognize anyone. And no one would recognize me.” Turning to watch the town, he petted his fowl and chuckled. A single pistol shot was heard in the distance; hoofbeats; a woman’s scream, which turned to cackling laughter. “A great, greedy heart!” he said, and then walked toward it, disappearing into it. Down the beach, the man with the whip stood away from the dead horse, staring out at the bay and the numberless masts. He had removed his hat. He was unsure, and I did not envy him.

Despite moments of cowboy cliche, and embellishments that I’m sure would make any American historian squirm, DeWitt’s writing is deserving of it’s praise and this novel is an insightful, enjoyable and dignified piece of literature. You will find no balderdash here, The Sisters Brothers is an ace in the hole!

The Turn of the Screw — Henry James

Critics and scholars love churning out essay after essay trying to decode this enigmatic novella about a governess who struggles to maintain her sanity after becoming increasingly convinced that her wards are mingling with ghosts.

The Cement Garden — Ian MacEwan

Not so much frightening as it is off putting, MacEwan’s early foray into the grotesque—with its dead parents rotting in the basement and consanguineal lust—is certain to make anyone’s day a little less cheery.

The Fall of the House of Usher — Edgar Allen Poe

Perhaps not the best work in Poe’s oeuvre, but this short story centred around a haunted house and its ageing denizens remains a genre staple.

The Changing Light at Sandover — James Merrill

This three-part epic poem chronicles the otherworldly communications resulting from Merrill’s own experiments with séances and Ouija boards over a twenty-year period. Very eccentric stuff from the Pulitzer Prize–winning son of Charles Merrill, founder of Merrill Lynch.

The Birth-Mark — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Sure, nobody’s perfect, but that doesn’t stop an ambitious (and, some might say, deranged) doctor from performing a rather untraditional form of cosmetic surgery on his wife who just barely misses the mark of perfect beauty.

The Monk: A Romance — Matthew Gregory Lewis

Nothing romantic about this Romantic novel with its fascination with all things satanic. The Monk remains a seminal novel of the Gothic genre and an enduring favourite among English lit. students.

• TIFF’s slightly frumpy cousin, the International Festival of Authors is on from October 19th to 30th. But who needs glitz? Readings by Joan Didion, Ken Babstock, Michael Ondaajte, Gary Shteyngart and dozens of others, as well as an interview with Douglas Coupland on Marshall McLuhan, and Seth in conversation with Daniel Clowes all promise to be more interesting than Brangelinacloonadonnagosling.
• The Toronto Reference Library has some great authors lined up for their Appel Salon series.  Jefferey Eugenides will be discussing his highly anticipated novel, The Marriage Plot on October 24th.  Umberto Eco will be there on November 16th to talk about his latest novel The Prague Cemetery as well as “semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory” for the legion of The Name of the Rose fans out there. The tickets are free, but are sure to go fast.
• For something a little different, check out Ron MacLean, Canada’s unofficial poet laureate, at the Appel Salon series on November 3rd.
• Or, check out The Wrecking Ball, a series that combines heavy metal and short stories, on October 22nd. There will be readings by Jessica Westhead and Jamie Popowich and music by Kosmograd and Black Faxes.

The head of Medusa became part of Athena’s shield, symbolizing the goddess’s invincibility. At the time of the Romans, the head of Medusa was replaced by a sweet-looking young maiden with stalks of wheat protruding from her head instead of the horrifying snakes. The substitution was probably made to emphasize the fertility of Sicily. The Romans, in fact, used the island as the granary that fed its legions. (p.141)

As an interesting aside, the coat of arms of Dohalice, Czech Republic (pictured on the right) hasn’t undergone such a revision. It prominently displays the ugly, snake-tressed head of Medusa.

Also in the Sicily issue, Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews draws on the myth to characterize the island in her poem, ‘Sicily’: ‘Medusa’s Gorgon lair / of unexpected dangers / rising from her deep, dark seas.’ (p. 131)

With her great metaphorical potential, Medusa has been invoked variously in literature, visual art, psychology, and feminist thought. Some sources indicate that the early stories of Medusa portrayed her simply as a monster with snakes for hair. The myth evolved, however, and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Medusa was once a beautiful maiden whose hair was her most alluring trait. The goddess Athena turns her into a petrifying monster as a punishment after Poseidon rapes her in Athena’s temple. The irony of her fate is horrific, and the images associated with her annihilating power are haunting enough to have endured and captured many artistic imaginations over the centuries.

In the resolution of the Medusa tale, Perseus succeeds in approaching Medusa and decapitating her by looking at her only through the reflection in his shield:

Across the fields and along the tracks he had seen the statues
of men and of beasts transformed to stone at the sight of Medusa.
He, however, had only looked on those terrible features
as they were reflected in bronze, on the shield which he held in his left hand

(Metamorphoses Book 4, trans. Raeburn)

Extrapolated beyond their literal context, these four lines are fascinating for what they imply about the relationship between fear and representation. Perseus’s method resembles the superstitious way we use images to mirror reality, thinking that they will allow us some degree of control over it. We arm ourselves with symbols and ideas as we approach the unknown, not wanting to look at it directly — only ‘as it is reflected in bronze.’

We do the same thing when we assign an emblem to a place. When the Medusa image on the Sicilian coat of arms was replaced with a benign agrarian symbol, the latter represented only one facet of the island’s reality (which, after centuries of war for its control, must have been complex). So perhaps the original Medusa head, as a symbol of the totality that we refuse to face head-on, is a more faithful image for the inscrutable nature of the real world at any single time, in any single place.