TB: How Should a Person Be? is very much a
novel that deals with the idea of contemporaneity, making visible your present
place in the world. We can look at the question, How should a person be? in
relation to a number of themes in the book: sex, being a young woman, an
artist, a moral person, but the idea of being contemporary seems to encompass
all of that. The two themes I picked up early on in your prologue are themes of
ugliness and of fame. And again, that made me think of Stein who said
contemporary art always looks ugly at first and then it becomes beautiful over
time. So could you speak about that preoccupation with ugly art in relation to
being contemporary?
SH: I thought a
lot about that quote. I thought it was Picasso but maybe they both said it in
different ways. I know that Picasso said an original work of art is always ugly
at first to its creator. So I guess they were both thinking a lot about that,
and I was thinking a lot about that when I wrote this book: how you have to
sometimes break down your ideas of what beauty is in order to have some air
flowing through your process. If you’re just trying to make something beautiful,
which we all are—beauty is compelling—you’re going to go towards a certain
shape, let’s say, or towards a certain narrative structure. You’re trying to do
something well. But the only way you can do something well, I think, is if at
first you have some model in your mind of what the good is. To do something
that doesn’t move towards this picture that you have in your head of what you
want the work to be, that’s a very difficult thing to do. And you kind of have
to trick yourself, and be vigilant. I mean all editing is always in the
direction of greater clarity, towards communicating in a more precise way that’s
related to beauty. To try to edit, not in the direction of beauty is really
hard. But all of that felt really necessary for me because, I mean it seems
crazy to say that this is true of somebody so young, but I felt that I’d
reached a dead end. When I was working on Ticknor
I was really trying to make something absolutely perfect and I knew that I couldn’t
do that again. I felt it would be dead if I tried to do that again. In truth, How Should a Person Be? isn’t the book
of mine that I like the most. I prefer
Ticknor or even The Middle Stories.
How Should a Person Be? is very much
against my innate aesthetic. It makes me uncomfortable to have put out
something that isn’t, in my mind, beautiful or perfect, even though this book
has had the biggest response. So I think there is something to be said for
making yourself uncomfortable, and for questioning your instinct to please some
internalized aesthetic criteria. Maybe there’s something lifeless about that,
on some level.
One
of the most compelling interviews I’ve read in some time has to be Thea Bowering’s interview with Toronto writer Sheila Heti, “’a portrait of thinking’:
Sheila Heti and Thea Bowering on the phone,” in the new issue of The Capilano Review (3.22 / Winter 2014)
(an excerpt of which exists on their website). What fascinates about Heti’s
work generally is a sense of innate curiosity, one so wide that one never
entirely knows just what she might end up producing next, and her books (I reviewed her third title, here) end up showcasing a curiosity as well as an incredible
fearlessness—moving in directions that might not immediately make sense, or read
like anything previous she might have produced.
4
It breaks
in your hands/ the long
break comes cleanly/ splays itself/ before you
some same sake is/ no
name at all – the warm up gropes for it/ says
nothing – therein lies
the voice/ of things the itch that turning/ softly
sounded page (Mark
Goldstein, “Poems for Alice from Medium
Point Blues”)
Of
course, the issue also includes a whole slew of poetry, fiction, critical work
and visual art, including pieces by Mark Goldstein, Lisa Robertson, Lyndl Hall,
Cecilia Corrigan, Adam Frank, Deborah Koenker, Paul Nelson and Dorothy Chang,
as well as a short story by Sheila Heti, from her collection, The Middle Stories. The issue also
includes a tribute to the late Vancouver poet Nancy Shaw, “Reading/Writing for
Nancy Shaw,” as friend, Shaw-collaborator and poet Catriona Strang writes:
The late Nancy Shaw,
poet, curator, art critic and scholar, was an integral member of the vibrant
and influential Vancouver poetry and art scenes of the late 1980s and early
1990s. Her books include Affordable Tedium, Scoptocratic, Busted, and Light Sweet Crude. She also wrote bracingly on art, dance, and
popular culture, and undertook fruitful collaborations with musicians,
composers, dancers, and other poets. Her death from cancer in 2007 was a great
loss to the Canadian art community; she is still much missed.
The Vancouver New Music Society’s October 2013
re-mounting of composer Jacqueline Leggatt “Cold Trip,” originally written in
2007 and dedicated to Nancy, was the catalyst for the “Reading for Nancy Shaw,”
which took place at The Apartment Gallery in Vancouver on October 20, 2013.
Louis Cabri, Amy De’Ath, Jeff Derksen, Christine Stewart, and Catriona Strang
read selections from Nancy’s writing and their own, as well as pieces written
for her and in response to her work. Amy’s and Louis’ pieces are published here.
All the readings were interspersed with Jacqueline Leggatt’s audio recordings
of Nancy reading her own work—a rare chance to hear Nancy’s voice again.
From
her own response to Light Sweet Crude,
the second section of Amy De’Ath’s “Security Cloak” reads:
A kaleidoscope is a
prudent safety hazard
As much as I as much as
I can get.
I have pissed, and what
I’ve become is tendered.
Effectively constructed
myself.
On a period, blazing
ruins.
Nothing extraordinary
Nothing empirically justified
Still the affect-bleached, impossible co-star-
I resign from my
shelter
absolutely sovereign
very much civil and
betrayed I
never saw I never saw
it coming.
Otherwise,
Toronto writer, designer and publisher Mark Goldstein includes a powerful short
essay on the dissolution of book-as-object through digitalization, and the true
realization of just what is being lost, as he discusses the gift economy of the
chapbook, the Toronto Antiquarian Book Fair and the works of the late Glenn Goluska. Set at the end of the issue in the “see to see—“ section, with works by Clint Burnham, Sonnet L’Abbé,
Oana Avasilichioaei, Rebecca Brewer & Tiziana La Melia and Julian Weideman,
the opening piece by Tracy Stefanucci, “Making space for artist publishing,”
provides a context for the small grouping of essays, writing about Vancouver’s Project Space: “Situated at an intersection of disciplines—namely the visual arts,
literary arts and/or graphic design—publication presents a unique space of
inquiry that is often complemented by interdisciplinary practice, collaboration,
or co-production. With an interest in this particular context, Project Space
explores publication as an artistic medium.” There is something magnificent
about how this issue brings together a myriad of ideas, disciplines and
approaches, all of which provide their own challenges. The best thing any
reader (and writer) needs to keep asking themselves: how do we approach text
(and writing), and what might we be missing? From the interview with Heti to
the essays included at the very end. Goldstein’s piece includes:
Goluska was a designer and typographer of the highest
order (he died in 2011), and in his hands A
Change-ringing of the Mind became the perfect marriage of text and texture.
The translation is sublime, with Goluska’s artistry and total vision apparent
throughout. A work such as this could not survive the digital realm—the pleasure
of the letterforms, their special arrangements on the page, the touch of the
papers themselves, the subtle echoing of word-stuff would be lost in such
transference. A Change-ringing of the Mind best exemplifies the necessity of the small press, one where the
difficulty of creation and dissemination is met with vitality.
Unfortunately, both the work’s beauty and scarcity has
pushed it into the rarified air of the antiquarian bookseller. This divide
between reader and collector keeps works such as these in private libraries,
out of reach of those laboring writers who need them most. It is obvious that A Change-ringing of the Mind was meant
to be read and yet, with a $100.00 asking price (a bargain compared to other
items at the fair), it is beyond reach
Yes, a digital version would provide the content of the
work but the total power of the book would be lost. The bitter irony here is
that Goluska’s superb translation has now been rendered mute.
