Attention all fringe artists. The Toronto Fringe Festival, otherwise known as the @Toronto_Fringe TD Culturally Diverse Artist Project (CDAP), is taking place from July 5-16, 2017. Click on the previous link and learn more about how to apply and if you qualify for a bursary.
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In the wake of all the new rules breaking down art into different categories, I’m stretching the limits a la Swedish, too. That’s why today’s Quote of the Day is a poem, William Blake’s “On Another’s Sorrow.” If you don’t think an 18-stanza poem is a quote, take it up with the Swedish Academy.
Said beautiful work of poetry was published in 1789 by Blake in his Songs of Innocence and Experience. Per the mighty Wiki, “The poem discusses human and divine empathy and compassion. It was published…as the last song in the Songs of Innocence section. Blake argues that human sympathy is a valuable trait. After making this observation about man he then speaks of the sympathy of God, as well.”
Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief?
Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow’s share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?
Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
And can He who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird’s grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear –
And not sit beside the nest,
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant’s tear?
And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
O no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
He doth give His joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.
O He gives to us His joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.
Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another’s grief,
And not seek for kind relief?
Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow’s share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?
Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
And can He who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird’s grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear –
And not sit beside the nest,
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant’s tear?
And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
O no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
He doth give His joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.
O He gives to us His joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.
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If you know of an artist or arts organization that should be nominated for this highly prestigious (and financially lucrative) award, make sure you nominate them through the Ontario Arts Council by December 1, 2016.
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Talk about taking Edvard Munch’s The Scream to the next level!
Jowita Bydlowska, author of the controversial memoir Drunk Mom, posted a thought-provoking (if you’re not an artist) and thoroughly frightening (if you are an artist) piece on the correlation between mental health/addiction/suicide and the artistic process on alllitup.ca called “So you’re an artist? Help is on the way! ”
Congrats to Jowita for the buzz she’s created with the recent release of her first novel, Guy, which The Globe and Mail recently reviewed and said is not only “fascinating and disturbing,” but “a timely study into…[a] toxic and predatory masculinity.”
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Oh, to have a first and last name that match! For Jerome K. Jerome, he was one of the lucky blokes. Perhaps that’s what gave him his first insight into humourous writing. Just look at this humdinger from his 1899 travel guide turned comedic account, Three Men in a Boat, which chronicles a two-week jaunt along the River Thames. Jerome and two of his chaps, “martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness,” are sure to have you Rolling On The River Thames Laughing with zingers like this one:
“It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
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Author of Another Place You’ve Never Been (the prequel to I Know This Much is True?), debut novelist Rebecca Kauffman posted a thought-provoking piece on publishersweekly.com called “Is Social Media Toxic to Writing?” Ms. Kauffman explores an issue that I wrangled with for years, ever since publishing my first book way back in the Stone Ages of 2003 (hard to believe, but in that year there were no such things as Facebook [2004], Twitter [2006], Tumblr [2007], or Instagram [2010]): Do I succumb to the pressure and become a social media who**? For many years, I resisted. Social media platforms were dumb, fake (goddamn phonies, to quote Holden C.), pointless, and a waste of the space-time continuum.
Then, in 2013, I published my first novel and reality hit me like a stinky fish from Tsukiji Market across the face –> No social media presence = No chance of building a core audience = No chance of landing an agent = No chance of signing with a respectable publisher = No chance of turning my dream into a full-time career. So what did I do?
Well, I think the answer is obvious by now. Perhaps Nick Carraway would be disappointed in my decision to sell out, but then again maybe Jay Gatsby would have seen it like Carraway described in Fitzgerald’s classic novel:
“And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.”
Although Ms. Kauffman looks at literary superhero Murakami Haruki as a case in point as to whether one should spend hours on social media daily, exposing intimate parts of yourself and your inner-workings to the public (the Japanese literary superhero is notorious for giving very few interviews or public readings, let alone using social media on a regular basis), I think it’s dangerous to seek guidance in this area from a writer such as Murakami; for anyone who started a career in writing after 2004, the rules of engagement are forever changed.
I believe it was Jonathan Franzen, celebrated author of The Corrections and Freedom, who said it best when he expressed his sorrow for young writers trying to make a go of it in today’s publishing world because they are so pressured to spend time Tweeting and Facebooking, for example, that it takes time away from their craft. Franzen is especially irked by Twitter, telling all those who gathered for a talk of his at Tulane University in 2012:
“Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose. It’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters … It’s like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’… It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium. People I care about are readers … particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves.”
Ultimately, I think Ms. Kauffman would agree with Franzen when she ends her Publishers Weekly piece by stating:
“For me, the best way to work, the only way to work, really, is to create a space for myself in which the reader’s perception of me (as a person) does not exist. It’s only after I have squashed down all awareness of myself that I’m able to access another world and explore it freely and truthfully.”
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While not his most famous literary achievement, Michael Ondaatje is money in the bank when it comes to beautiful prose regardless of the work you’re reading. The selection below is from Coming Through Slaughter, Ondaatje’s debut work of fiction about legendary cornet player Buddy Bolden, and the same book that would go on to win Amazon.ca’s First Novel Award for 1976.
In a week marred (yes, marred) by Nobelgate, it still confounds me that Mr. Ondaatje has (a) not won a Nobel Prize in Literature to date, and (b) wasn’t even in the running this year. (According to an article by Russell Smith in last week’s Globe and Mail, “The Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami was the leader at 4/1, followed by people such as Syrian poet Adonis, Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Albanian Ismail Kadare. The only American writers who were considered even a possibility were the cerebral and serious Philip Roth and Don de Lillo.”)
But without further ado, here’s just one example (among thousands) of how Michel Ondaatje bends the English language to his will, effortlessly, it seems, in ways mere mortals like myself could never hope to accomplish.
“Accidental lust on the bus carrying her new into his dead brain so even months later, years later, pieces of her body and character returned. What he wanted was cruel, pure relationship.”
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Fewer passages have resonated with me as much on a personal level than this one below from Somerset Maugham’s “masterpiece” (as some claim), Of Human Bondage (1915). Considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century by Modern Library, many said upon its release that it was essentially a retelling of Maugham’s own life experiences, to which Maugham replied, “This is a novel, not an autobiography, though much in it is autobiographical, more is pure invention.” Whatever the case, it’s an intense and compelling story about what Spinoza called the “Strength of Human Emotions” in his philosophical treatise, Ethics.
“There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood. I have nothing but contempt for people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off…You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer.”
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Attention all artists residing in Ontario! There are a number of Ontario Arts Council (OAC) grant deadlines approaching in many different artistic disciplines. Click here to see if you meet the requirements for any of them.
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In the wake of Nobelgate, Anna North at The New York Times printed a well-crafted response to the decision to give this year’s Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan. Although argued from a slightly different point of view than my own post yesterday, it essentially resonates with the same message: The Swedish Academy got it wrong. Badly.
But instead of focusing on the negative, I thought I’d offer some examples of poetic literary quotes over the few next few days to remind us all of the power and inspiration behind the written word.
This one comes from the hugely talented British expat writer Lawrence Durrell (1912-90), whose most famous tetralogy of works, The Alexandria Quartet, includes some of the most beautiful writing I’ve read. Here’s a taste of TAQ #1, Justine:
“[F]alling in love…is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside each of them. Around this event, dazed and preoccupied, the lover moves examining his or her own experience; her gratitude alone, stretching away towards a mistaken donor, creates the illusion that she communicates with her fellow, but this is false. The loved object is simply one that has shared an experience at the same moment, narcissistically; and the desire to be near the beloved object is at first not due to the idea of possessing it, but simply to let the two experiences compare themselves, like reflections in different mirrors…from here love degenerates into habit, possession, and back to loneliness.”
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Richard H. Harris 
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