philipquinn.ca

Sometimes the best of intentions completely
backfire. During the promotion of my poetry book The SubWay I was interviewed
by OpenBook and I mentioned a rather obscure 1980s novel, The Hook of It Is.

That resulted in this e-mail from the author Basil
Papademos:

Hello,

My brother
brought the Open Book Toronto interview to my attention. I found your
recommendation of my old scrawl as a ‘Welcome to Toronto’ selection to be
evidence of a very evolved sense of humor.

Congrats
on your being voted the winner of the Get Lit thing. Writers in this country
deserve so much more than the few crumbs handed out by the various regimes. If
GM and Chrysler execs are allowed to pocket hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy
their companies, what is a sharp-eyed poet worth?

SubWay is
a great read. It’s interesting that until now, no one has ever captured the
poetics of this city’s transit system (at least that I’m aware of). And as we
all know, poetry is far closer to the truth than the so-called ‘facts’; a
version of Disraeli’s famous comment about lies and stats, I guess.

I look
forward to your upcoming novel.

Here’s another comment contained in a later
e-mail:

First of
all, your confidence shouldn’t be affected by what’s out there. I’ve been
reading Subway again and you know, it really does have a great many layers, a
lot of beautiful ambivalence, lack of exact definition, those things that can
make poetry so much more truthful than any other kind of writing. But it’s got
that fine balance too - not being obtuse for its own sake, an all too common
gimmick in poetry.

I haven’t
been on a transit system in many years for reasons too fucked up to go into
here but my wife rides it everyday and I was reading your stuff to her in bed
and it resonates, actually brings back some of the mystery of the thing. It’s
also work that sounds great out loud. And she’s somebody that’s a voracious
reader, a real book nut. Well, it’s not like I’d marry someone who isn’t.

Great. Basil, what a supportive, endearing, king
of guy!

He also sent me some of his work and I decided
to do an interview with him and promote his work on my website.  He was struggling to get his literary career
going again after a gap of some twenty odd years so I thought it was the least
I could do. After I put up the info, he thanked me. I was then in the midst of
doing the final changes to a novel, The Skeleton Dance, which was supposed to
come out in 2009 but for all intents and purposes wasn’t published until the following
year.

Anvil did launch it in Toronto, along with
Dennis Bolen’s Kaspoit! in March of 2010. Basil decided to attend it with his
wife, brother and some other friends. 

I had some ideas about the type of promotion
that might work in creating interest for the reading but for whatever reason
Anvil went another route. As well there had been some editorial disagreement about
the actual manuscript and other things, and so my level of enthusiasm had
rapidly depleted. I take some responsibility for not doing more to promote the
Toronto book launch once it was scheduled but there wasn’t a great deal of time
either.

The reading at the Toronto Arts and Letters
club was poorly attended. I felt a bad vibe right from the beginning. I picked
a selection from the novel that wasn’t a true indicator of the work itself.
Read poorly. Dennis did his thing with electronics which created a looping sound
effect that heightened the conversational tone to most of his novel.

The usual polite applause, with a sprinkling of
questions to follow.  Basil and I spoke
briefly, before and after the reading.

But within a couple days of the reading, Basil
began trashing the event and then our novels. First,  by sending an e-mail directly to Anvil’s
publisher, Brian Kaufman, then by using his blog to turn the reading into
almost a set piece from his earlier novel which I guess is his right except his
criticism was filled with inaccuracies. He condemns Bolen’s work without apparently
grasping that it was a fictional account of the Robert Pickton pig farm
slayings. There’s no actual female dismemberment portrayed in the book as far
as I can remember. In fact it’s as much about the peripheral characters
including the cops who propped up Robert Pickton and helped make the killings possible.

But Basil claims Bolen and I suffer from a
typical middle-aged male preoccupation with such female dismemberment ‘tropes’.

I did read
a scene that portrays a woman being savagely attacked. And for that I can be
held accountable. But in the context of the entire novel, there’s doubt as to
whether that scene and subsequent events, are a product of the main character’s
increasing paranoia. As in the case with Bolen’s novel, I suspect Basil never
took the time to read my novel which he characterizes as being about drugs and
gangs. That’s one element but a truer description of what occurs is found in
Lisa Foad’s review in Quill & Quire:

“But
what’s most interesting about the novel is its examination of masculinity and
sexuality – in particular, Robert’s ambivalence about desire, his convoluted
“queer knot,” and the suggestive fissures through which he and Klin interact.
At its heart, The Skeleton Dance is a love story, but one from which “beauty’s
long gone.”

As well, I told Basil it was a first novel,
mainly written back in the early 1990s, not too far removed from the time
period of his own first novel, The Hook of It Is. One could easily attack his
book for the negative portrayal of almost every single female character in the
book.

However Basil’s blog attack didn’t stop at the
novels or even the reading but continued into a personal attack of Bolen and
myself, by questioning our ‘balls’ and our intelligence. And rather than let
the matter rest, he appears to be polishing and further embellishing the
attack.

Well, Mr. Papademos you should know. You’re the
man; you’re the aging 1980s hipster going to show us the error of our ways. You’re
channeling W.S. Burroughs (love the monotone featured in the YouTube videos)
and god forbid anyone who tries to befriend you in any way. So let’s cancel out
the good things you wrote to me about The SubWay with the bad things you’ve
since said about me and The Skeleton Dance and let the internet sort it all out.
It’s that kind of basal cell carcinoma, you cut the lesion out, live with the
scar.

Almost a year since the launch of The SubWay, a humbling experience for sure, as  I count the slowly dwindling number of copies in the Book City store on the Danforth. They started with two, then ordered another five (after I spoke to Pat, and mentioned the story in the East York Mirror, and the Get Lit competition).  So out of the 7, they’re down to three. God knows what the sales have been like in other book stores. Certainly there’s been a bigger yawn of silence than I anticipated. I was hoping that the book might reach outside the poetry ghetto (I think that was Jay’s (the publisher) hope as well) and find readers that traditionally shy away from such stuff. But that didn’t happen even though a review of the book appeared in Spacing, which reaches a different kind of urban reader. Small presses are usually not the best places from which to receive sales updates and I’d be very surprised if BookThug sends me the current count and whether I’ve generated enough sales to receive some kind of royalty cheque, over and above the modest advance.

Here’s the announcement from the Toronto Arts Council regarding the Get Lit! Competition at Doors Open Toronto

May 25, 2009

This Spring Torontonians of all ages were invited to get creative and submit their Toronto-inspired works to the first-ever Get Lit! competition. Get Lit! explored text and spoken word and showcased interdisciplinary creativity by presenting new ways of telling city stories.

A special jury comprised of Geoff Pevere, Diana Bennett, Alana Wilcox and Paulina O’Kieffe reviewed all applications and selected Philip Quinn for his series of poems entitled The Subway with accompanying photographs for the First Prize ($700). Goran Boskovic won the Second Prize ($200) for his short video obscure(d) and teenah edan placed third ($100) for her poems and magnets entitled Union and part ii, departure. The winners were announced at the Doors Open Toronto [link] kick-off event on May 22. All Get Lit! submissions were also featured at a special weekend-long exhibition during Doors Open at the Toronto Arts Council/Foundation, which was an official location for this year’s festival.
Get Lit! was produced by Toronto Arts Council Foundation (TACF), in association with Lit City, Toronto stories, Toronto settings. An initiative of City of Toronto, Lit City was a three-month festival part of Toronto’s 175th birthday. Get Lit! and the TAC/F are also being featured online through www.openbooktoronto.com

From Goran’s video

A Doors Open visitor, re-arranged teenah’s magnets into this:

Finally good subway news (so much for my transitory screeching) Nathaniel G. Moore reviewed The SubWay in issue 43 of Broken Pencil and his interview with me is now posted on The Danforth Review website, www.danforthreview.com. As well, the Toronto Arts Council awarded first place to poems from The SubWay in its annual Get Lit event. Here’s the e-mail I received:

Congratulations on placing top three in our Get Lit! competition and thank-you for your submissions.

We had over 50 entries and are looking forward to displaying all of them at the weekend-long exhibition during Doors Open Toronto, here at the Toronto Arts Council/Foundation.  The exhibition will take place Saturday and Sunday from 10am-4pm at our offices located at 141 Bathurst Street.

We would like to invite the 3 of you to attend the Doors Open public kick-off event at the ROM this Friday where the Mayor will acknowledge you as the winners of Get Lit! and let people know about the display.  Details below.

Kick-off details:

Please join us at the

Doors Open Toronto public kick-off

Friday, May 22 

4:30 to 9:30 p.m.    Free

Royal Ontario Museum

100 Queen’s Park

• Join Mayor David Miller and the evening’s host, Mary Ito, CBC Radio One 99.1 FM, 6 pm.
• Toronto’s Maza Meze, 4:30 p.m. and 5:15 p.m., and Porkbelly Futures, 8 p.m., in concert. 
• Lit City — Toronto Stories, Toronto Settings readings and panel with authors Dionne Brand, Barry Callaghan, Amy Lavender Harris and Paul Quarrington, 6:30 p.m.  
• Open Book Toronto literary quiz with prizes!
• All museum galleries open. 

I felt uncomfortable in the ring, the event hadn’t even started and I’m going down for the count, the referee chewing on soggy French fries and getting his introductions and explanation of the rules all wrong.

As T. S. Eliot put it so eloquently:

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. All the better, then, if he could have at least the satisfaction of having a part to play in society as worthy as that of the music-hall comedian.

So there I was at Clinton’s Tavern on Bloor Street, one of the three scheduled poetry readers for the evening. I was the first ‘poet’ to arrive; the back room where the event was to take place had Alaska tending bar, and Fletcher running the audio board.

Clinton’s seen better days (haven’t we all). April is the cruellest month and part of her cruelty on the night of the 7^th was to put so few in attendance. And of those few, I had no sense of their interest or what might work for them so the poems I read from The SubWay felt awkward, ridiculous and insignificant and were met with a stony silence.

There’s so much bad writing out there and one feels a responsibility to correct that in some way. It is a mug’s game, a journey of self-promotion and generated hype and there are so few good poems written and even fewer ones available to read out loud at such places as Clinton’s.

Oh yeah, I was paid a $100. Does that make me a whore or just a whorish mug?

You know who you are: your fame for your work far outstrips its worth. You have dainty little web sites that look like they’ve been constructed by the ladies who used to produce tea doilies.

Yes, you are frequently nominated for lit prizes by your mainstream publishers who know how to work those channels and your books inevitably find their way into the review sections of all the major papers.

Your mug often peers out of those ‘summary features’ that newspaper and magazine hacks like to generate, the new something or other.

A recycling Class structure, made up literary agents, chick-lite editors, university English departments, guaranteed to filter out the raw unique and instead produce the trite and true, make everybody their 15%.

But whenever I pick up your work it inevitably disappoints, so slight, so without anything that catches my attention, and I’m left shaking my head wondering, who stole the goods in the middle of the night, who ransacked the joint and left this empty space between the covers, the lights are still on etc. etc.

Where are our Sebalds, our Houellebecqs, our Bolanos?

The SubWay kind of disappeared, almost as if it was vapour published (no slight to Jay and BookThug press). People promised interviews and reviews but I’m still waiting, the train stuck somewhere between the Yonge and Bay stations.

I thought the various Toronto web sites and those with an interest in the TTC would also rush to board The SubWay but so far it’s a car half-empty.

So I’ve decided to convert this ‘blog’ into snap shots of my writing life. First up, Melanie Little, ex-editor of Freehand Books.

Melanie gave my novel The Double a terrific review in the Globe and Mail so when I saw that she was actually acquiring and editing books for Freehand Press, I decided to send her a letter and a brief sample from my new novel. Months go by, and then I receive a rejection letter from Robyn Read (appropriate name). She’s taken over from Melanie who’s left though remains on Freehand’s board, whatever that means. I was curious, did Melanie ever see the package I sent her. Here’s a sample of our e-mail correspondence:

Hi Philip, That’s wonderful news about you’re the Subway and the Skeleton Dance. Alas, I left the imprint for very real reasons of physical and mental health and I’m unable to look at submissions. I didn’t have a chance to read your submission, no—it came in after my acquisition duties had been relinquished.

 As a fellow writer, I know you’ll understand that I must try to get my head back into my own work.

 All the best,

 Melanie

 Melanie Little

  Melanie,

—– Original Message —–

From: Melanie Little

To: interrobang@primus.ca

Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2009 3:15 PM

Subject: your submission to Freehand

 Hi Philip,

 I have indeed stepped down as Freehand’s editor. However, I did see that your submission had come in as I was training Robyn, and  I did mention to her that I had found The Double very intriguing. However, I do have great confidence in Robyn as the imprint’s new editor, and this must now be her decision.

 All the best,

 Melanie

 Melanie Little

Freehand Books

an imprint of Broadview Press

412, 815-1st St. SW

Calgary, Alberta T2P 1N3

End of story. End of the romance (yeah I had checked out her online photos), found myself a trifle smitten. I had written the new novel with her in mind as my ideal reader even before I found out about her working at Freehand.

So The SubWay’s derailed on its way through Can/Lit land; my Little romance finished as well.

BookThug had its fall launch on Nov. 18, 2008

Supermarket 268 Augusta Ave Toronto, ON Paul Hegedus (In Stereo), me (The SubWay), Victor Coleman (MAL ARME), Mark Goldstein (After Rilke), Amanda Earl (Welcome to Earth) and Steven Zultanski (This&That Lenin) reading from our new work. Best readers that night: Amanda Earl and Steven Zultanski. My mouth got so dry in the middle of my reading (left my beer back on the table) that I decided to drop The SubWay Transfer piece. I read a selection of poems from the book that were easy on the ears and didn’t require the utmost concentration; in fact, Victor Coleman made a reference comparing me to Raymond Souster which I wasn’t quite sure how to take. Certainly The SubWay is not about language, though there are language pieces. Somehow I wanted to connect back to the world, and as it’s about history (the history of the TTC) there was a history of different styles of ‘poetry’, from simple narrative right up to flarf. But, now the yawn of silence. Like music, like film, there’s just so much product out there and it’s hard to get any kind of attention for one’s work. As Jay (the BookThug) and I have joked; it might require my jumping in front of a train holding a copy of my book; that might just get me my 15 minutes.

Final, final changes made to manuscript. Jay, terrific Jay, patient, understanding, and very careful Jay, has made the changes and sent the MS to the printer this week (Oct. 21, 2008). So there it is.

Everything locked down, my mistakes, my failings, there for all to see. This poor fragile bookthing will be tossed out into the world by the BookThug.

Like a drop of rain hitting a calm lake, it will cause a brief fracture of the surface tension and then sink into anonymity. Oh well. The ride was great while it lasted.

Something to be said for endlessly revising, and adding new material, so the bookthing remains in a permanent state of flux; like the world, like the Internet.

But the book will soon be out there, circulating in its wee small numbers, how to get it in the hands of the transitory readers, how to get it into the CNS of the ridership?

Plant a few copies on the subway. That is one idea but how to track their progress, as they ride the red rocket, too large for any pocket.

Silly, frivolous thots as I prattle on; my pockets stuffed with yesterday’s bratwurst.

I’ve spent the last two months putting the finishing touches to The SubWay manuscript. The previous weekend, I tracked down all the images and photographs I wanted to use in the book and David Foster Wallace died by his own hand, a dangling participant in some mystery; I was not a ‘fan’. My fantasy is that all the writers that are eulogizing him, have died in a David Foster Wallace short story, that they are actually only footnotes in a David Foster Wallace story and that the memorial service for all and sundry is taking place on this subway car that has never been constructed and will never be built or ever thought of again.

So on Monday, Sept. I sent the manuscript and the photographs off to the BookThug to begin the process of creating a book of poetry. I sent the various forms to the Toronto Archives to purchase the rights for the six historical photographs that I want to reproduce in The SubWay. The rest of the photos were shot by my own hand.

I can also claim not a cent of government money (federal, provincial or municipal) went into the creation of these poems. In terms of the book, well that’s another matter, and Mr. MillAr can add the appropriate genuflections.

BookThug’s fall launch of its books has been set for Nov. 18, 2008 at the Supermarket in Toronto’s Kensington Market (8 p.m. 268 Augusta Ave. just south of College Street). Besides myself, the other readers/launchers include Victor Coleman (MAL ARME) Paul Hegedus (In Stereo), Mark Goldstein (After Rilke), Amanda Earl (Welcome to Earth), and Steven Zultanski (This&That Lenin).    I start telling neighbours and friends about the book and the launch. I steel myself for more (justified?) obscurity. I mumble a half-prayer for David Foster Wallace ( a penny for the old guy), have nothing else to offer except that silence that eventually empties all our mouths.