Canadian Summer Reading: A List
Jonathan Ball looms by lamplight.My Canadian summer reading lists have almost always been a game of catch-up. Summer means four straight months of binging on all those titles launched during the school year, and in case you missed them, too, here’s a look at the (mostly) Canadian titles that have crossed my bedside table for The Puritan’s Town Crier.First of all, Daniel O’Leary’s The Lower Provinces (DC, 2012) is a long-anticipated (at least, he’s been telling people about it for years) series of translations and verbal reconstructions of early Canadian poet visionaries. The book opens up with translations of Albert Lozeau, a contemporary of Emile Nelligan whose work has a severe shortage of English transmission, and Anne Hébert, twentieth century modernist. The stand-out piece is “Whitechapel Bess,” about a kind of Canadian St. Mary of Egypt, who goes from prostitution in London to visions and preaching in Halifax. Next up in my Canadian summer reading list is Jonathan Ball’s The Politics of Knives (Coach House Books, 2012), a bloody and slightly sinister collection of poems that take the reader inside Kafka’s infamous Castle and replay Psycho. One thinks Ball should have considered a career directing films given how often he pretends to be a camera, but “He Paints the Room Red” is genuinely chilling. “In Vitro City” presents condotopia in its finished form: a city where “former members of the regime are not welcome. ... torn clothes are not welcome. … without money they are not welcome. you are not welcome.” The titular “The Politics of Knives” reads like an infomercial with the important parts blacked out. It will teach you all the things you can do with knives, “Things you never considered, but those Things step into your footprints with great stealth.”Finally, because sometimes you just want to look at pictures, there’s Full Frontal T.O.: Exploring Toronto’s Architectural Vernacular (Coach House, 2012), with photos by Patrick Cummins and introduction and captions by Shawn Micallef. Cummins’s photos capture Toronto’s unremarkable and often dumpy “vernacular” architecture.Sometimes the photos are arranged as a series of addresses on a single street, and others are photos of the same building throughout several decades, highlighting the human narratives behind DIY renovations, changing storefronts, and neighbourhood decline and gentrification. One section is devoted entirely to eighty photos of variety stores and the humble variations underneath those Coke and Trident-sponsored signs. Micallef’s introduction is typical of his kind of urbanism, which values the quotidian and overlooked, although the subject matter in Full Frontal T.O. isn’t quite as inspired as his look at Scarborough strip malls. When your bleary eyes can’t take another line of verse and the warm weather begs to know why you’ve been ignoring it on your couch, Full Frontal T.O. is worth a look before you finally get out of the house. Maybe you’ll recognize something.