Songs of Another World

An essay about Canadian art and experience, republished

2024 republishing note: This essay originally appeared in the first issue of Emily Keeler’s Little Brother Magazine, in 2012. I’m reprinting it, with permission, because I’ve been thinking about ‘Canadian literature’ since Alice Munro died on Monday. The 11,000 words below started their life as an essay for a class called African-American Modernists that I took during the first semester of my MFA in Alabama, in 2010. I was initially hesitant to write about “being Canadian” in this class about the African-American experience, but after I submitted it, my professor encouraged me to publish it in an academic journal, and told me it “reached into [her] heart and played all the crazy strings inside it like a violin.” I never pursued academic publication, but when, in December 2011, Emily told me she was starting a magazine and asked me if I had anything, I thought of it. I had never published non-academic nonfiction before though, so, to get it ready for a more general readership, Emily, in Toronto, worked with me through many drafts over the course of winter and spring 2012, while I was in Tuscaloosa and Chicago and Montauk. It was published in the magazine that summer, and the fourth of its seven sections was also excerpted in the Toronto Standard. As I write this now, on the sixth floor of an NYU building in Greenwich Village, next to two guys on bean bag chairs experimenting with the new ChatGPT that talks to you, it feels like a very different world, but I also feel like my life is basically still oriented towards pursuing the same mission I wrote about in this essay.

ONE: THE INTRODUCTORY PARALLEL

A bummer of a truth though is that you cannot choose who you are.

I want to tell a story about my semi-trepid/semi-gleeful possibly/probably-temporary emigration, or maybe it’s a sojourn, to the United States, and then also just backing it all the way up to think about how Canadian narrative art works and could work. I think what I’m describing here is myself trying to find a balance between two competing concerns: success, and an aesthetic that works for me. And I think this essay describes a tack to one extreme, and then a possible groundwork for a tack back toward the middle (a synthesis), like this:

, but let me start by talking just for a minute about an American writer, Jean Toomer. JT was born in 1894 and he published his first novel in 1923, when he was thirty-one. This first novel was Cane. It was highly lyric and mixed prose sections with pages of poetry. It is an archetypal High Modernist narrative. It is also pretty much exclusively about African-American characters in the American South. Toomer described his own ancestry as “Scotch, Welsh, German, English, French, Dutch, Spanish, with some dark blood. For the point of this book let us assume the dark blood was Negro—or let’s be generous and assume that it was both Negro and Indian.” Toomer is categorized by scholars as African-American.

In December 1922, in preparation to publish the manuscript that would become Cane, Toomer met with a publisher named Horace Liveright. Liveright pressured Toomer to describe himself using the word “Negro” in advertisements for Cane. In the end, Toomer complied. Upon publication, Cane was well-received by critics referring to Toomer as a “Negro” author. Toomer felt humiliated. He didn’t want his public persona to be “Negro.” He wanted to be, simply, an “American” writer. He considered himself an American—just an American, just a human—and wanted to be perceived as such. In order to achieve this, he decided he had to write about white people. Ergo, after the publication of Cane, he never wrote anything involving African-American characters or African-American issues in any way.

Unfortunately, readers and publishers weren’t interested. Although he wrote diligently for the rest of his life—about white American characters—Toomer published almost nothing after Cane.

Toomer’s reasons for wanting to escape the “Negro writer” label were complex; in his early years, he was raised among whites, and only spent four years of his pre-Cane life living in black communities. Toomer’s desired flight from the African-American race is understandable: the man wanted to escape what he saw as a literary ghetto. He wanted to be an “American writer.” For someone in whose mind “American” was synonymous with “human,” this is hardly surprising.

Here is my transition into how the situation Jean Toomer was in is kind of like the situation me and some other Canadian writers I know are in: it’s different, but it’s kinda the same. One thing that’s similar is that Canadian writers, more than writers whose personal circumstances are basically in harmony with the hegemony of American culture (e.g., say, white male Americans), are constantly torn between writing for ‘the book-buying masses’ vs writing for our own tastes, and we’re always acutely aware of the exact contours and capacity at any given time of the overlap of those two Venn circles. Par exemple: if we want ‘broad’ appeal—which for Canadian writers basically means being published in the US—we can never write a The Mezzanine (1987), by Nicholson Baker, consisting almost entirely of descriptions of sensuous joys of consumer goods, because Canadian consumer goods are different from American consumer goods. A Canadian can, however, write a book of poems about her long-lost brother intermixed with translations of ancient Greek verses by recognizable names like Nox, by Anne Carson (2010). There’s nothing ascribably Canadian about any of Nox, and indeed, most Americans I know first learn that Carson is Canadian through me.

Canadian writers are aware of these limitations (or, to be generous, ‘constraints’), but some are aware of them more consciously than others. Here’s some anecdata/personal context for you: on the Christmas break that I came back to Toronto after my first semester in an American MFA program, I went to a party at a friend’s house. She’s a writer, a writer of fiction and a theater reviewer, and most of her friends and almost everyone at the party are and were writers. One girl I met had also just started an MFA degree—actually, the creative writing MA at U of T—and, discovering that I was in an American program, was interested in whether I thought it was any different in America; specifically, whether it was any more advantageous, careerwise. She asked if I thought the Canadian writing scene was a ghetto. Later, she said that as a sort of practice lap for tackling the American market, the Canadian writing scene would be easy to take over, and that she would do it sometime in her thirties.

Five months later, it’s the summer after my first year in Alabama and I’m splitting my time between Toronto and Kingston. Aside from working on my fiction, I’m sort of half-working on a version of the essay you’re now reading. As a result, sometimes the subject of the particular constraints of the Canadian narrative-art-maker would come up in conversation with friends, a lot of whom, again, are writers. So: I’m having coffee with my friend Dominika in the back of ideal in Kensington Market. We haven’t seen each other since I’d left for Alabama the summer before. She tells me about how she’s thinking of writing a Harlequin-style romance novel, and is considering where it should be set: Jamaica? The Levant? Manhattan? She’s spent her whole life in Toronto and we talk about how it’s never occurred to her to set her romance there. And why would it? Who in the world associates Toronto with images of steamy nights and elicit trysts?

Another time last summer: I’m having a beer with a friend of mine who writes plays. She says she likes how I drop references to Canada into my fiction, and I talk about how chewed-over each of those decisions are. She says she’s never thought about it before, but in fact she elides references to Canada in her plays and makes sure they’re set in the archetypal and anonymous ‘North American city’. Indeed, the last play I saw of hers was set on a bare stage and nothing was discoverable in the dialogue that would indicate what country the action was set in, though the syntax and inflections of the English were all recognizably North American, and, for those who knew, faithful to a particular class of young Toronto women. She is doing very well, has had residencies in Ireland and New Hampshire, and will be at Yaddo this summer. I’m sure she’d exact bodily harm on defenseless puppies¹ to be produced in New York, and it’ll probably happen for her.

Last example: just a few months ago, my aunt, who is writing a memoir of her marriage, ran into a publisher for a large and well-known Canadian house at a party. She mentioned that she was writing this memoir, he asked to see it, and she sent him a few chapters. In getting back to her, he was very encouraging, but asked: “Is there any reason this story has to stay in Toronto? What if we changed the place-names and moved it to, say, Chicago?”

TWO: IS THERE ANY HISTORICAL CONTEXT TO THIS, STEVE, AND ARE THERE RELEVANT QUOTATIONS YOU CAN OFFER US

“A boy meets a girl in Winnipeg, and who cares?”

—Hugh MacLennan, 1959

Specialists in the history of Canadian publishing will find the line my aunt got from her potential publisher familiar. In a widely-quoted passage from a speech delivered to a symposium hosted by the Royal Society of Canada on “The Revolutionary Tradition in Canadian and American Society” in June 1976, Northrop Frye explained: “If a Canadian novelist writes about people in Manitoba and wishes to find an American publisher, it is relatively easy for him . . . to push them over the border into North Dakota, in deference to the publisher’s conviction that his readers will have a nervous breakdown if they pick up a novel with a Canadian setting.”

Lest ye believe this phenomenon superannuated and my aunt’s experience an anachronistic fluke, I draw your attention to two contemporary quotes from Canadian Smiths:

1. Smith, Neil, in an interview I did with him in 2010:

Me: Regarding […] Canadian setting specifically, do you think about being accessible to a broader audience, be it […] American readers?

Neil Smith: The city in [one particular] story is Montreal. In other stories, however, the city is more ambiguous. For example, the town in “Scrapbook” is a more generic place. The same goes for the title story. […]

I do think about commercial prospects when I write books. My new novel, for example, has only American characters. Canada isn’t mentioned at all (maybe this is heresy). I’m hoping for universal appeal.²

2. Smith, Russell, in The Globe and Mail, also 2010:

[The] naming of a real intersection is a daring act and one that is controversial in Canadian publishing. […] I have had editors suggest I take out [Toronto] street names to make the city a less specific one: If you replace College Street with “a street of cafés near the large university” you sum up the atmosphere of the place in a way that’s accessible for a foreigner.

But then you also lose a certain amount of pride. Let’s be honest: We all know the primary reason for such erasures. It’s to make the book more saleable to Americans. We all want our books and films and TV shows to be published in the United States, and we know a large proportion of their entertainment-consuming population is not interested in looking beyond their borders. The story might be set in Ottawa, and it might be recognizable to Canadians as Ottawa, but if the Americans think it’s a nameless northeastern U.S. city, they’re more likely to buy it, so let’s not scare them off by naming it.

Both these quotations are from the year I first started thinking seriously about these things, mostly because in February of that year I got a phone call while sitting in the kitchen of my apartment in Kensington Market informing me that I had been accepted to the creative writing MFA program at the University of Alabama. Up until then I was, I think, one of the least American-focused among my writer-friends. After spending a really pretty harrowing three years in my early twenties bouncing around countries and continents lonelier than a monad, nothing appealed to me more than the community of artists and writers writing and creating for each other between Yonge and Roncesvalles and King and St. Clair. I set my stories specifically and intentionally in the community I knew, peopled with the people I knew. I did it not because I thought it was valiant but because I was writing what I wanted to see in print: I wanted my life interpreted and fiction was how I did that. I would share my stories with friends, and sometimes get them published in small publications run mostly out of Toronto.

There’s a lot to be said for being an artist in, and making art for, a tight little scene of like-minded artists. You show your work regularly, you develop an identity as an artist, you learn that art is for the living, not the dead. You develop self-confidence and you feel that it doesn’t matter if critics in distant capitals aren’t extolling your virtuosity, because the people you care about, the people you love, the people whose opinions you most respect appreciate, are interested in, and sometimes even love, your work. This is good.³ In some ways I was doing exactly what I wanted to be doing. I was ‘writing my truth’, or something.

The thing about that though is—at least for me— I want more. I want to be widely-read. I want money. I want to be successful. And all of these things require more readers.

As a Canadian writer, what does that mean?

Superficially, it seems to come down to this: On the one hand, as the good doctor Harold Bloom says:

the Muse, whether tragic or comic, takes the side of the elite. For every Shelley or Brecht there are a score of even more powerful poets who gravitate naturally to the party of the dominant classes in whatever society. The literary imagination is contaminated by the zeal and excesses of societal competition, for throughout Western history the creative imagination has conceived of itself as the most competitive of modes, akin to the solitary runner, who races for his own glory.

On the other hand, there’s this: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., pre-eminent African-American literary scholar and the guy who was brought into popular consciousness as the Harvard professor who had the beer with the cop at the White House, has said he’s happy to be known to posterity as a ‘race man’. This may be all well and good for an academic not bound by the appetites of the popular market. However, with very few exceptions, the readership for Canadian writing simply maxes out at the same point that Canadians who read maxes out. As a Canadian writer, do you want to be a ‘nation man [/woman]’? Or do you want to race for your own glory?

THREE: WAIT IS IT REALLY JUST THOSE TWO OPTIONS, I.E. SELF-SACRIFICING FEALTY TO COUNTRY VS. PURE MARKET-DRIVEN SELF-INTEREST

OR, I DON’T WANT TO MOVE TO THE UNITED STATES

As ambitious as you are, if you’re not feeling it, you won’t make good shit.

No. There are certainly options for Canadian writers who want a larger dose of success than can be supplied by Canadian readership. For example, you could:

• Make fiction, or other kinds of narrative art, without a realistic setting, thus trading on tropes and experiences you as a Canadian share with Americans/the rest of the world. This can be done by more or less retaining realism but artfully obscuring/anonymizing the setting, like the above quoted Smiths talk about and like my friend the Yaddo playwright does.

• You could write realistic scene-based fiction that’s simply set elsewhere in the world, like a lot of Michael Ondaatje’s work.

• You could create a narrative set in America such that it is understood on some level to be an America of the Canadian imagination, which I think is a good and compelling idea and is arguably how Sheila Heti’s Ticknor works.

• You could use a realistic Canadian setting but employ various supernatural/genre tropes, like Andrew Kaufman’s All My Friends Are Superheroes (2003) or Andrew Pyper’s The Killing Circle or Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, all of which (i.e. Kaufman’s and Pyper’s and O’Malley’s) narratives are identifiably set in Toronto.

• You could set your story primarily in Canada but have the character make an excursion to say, New York, as in Leonard Cohen’s The Favourite Game and Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?

• You could keep your realistic Canadian setting, but be a heavy-hitting literary genius and write something so compelling that it makes everyone in the world want to read it. If there’s any example of this, it’s gotta be Alice Munro.

In a word, you can accept the discrepancies between Canadian and American culture as a strictly-enforced constraint, and create what you can out of that. And if that works with your aesthetic, or if you can make it work, that’s great. A lot can be done with those constraints. All of the works I just mentioned are excellent, and they’ve all also been (or will be) pretty commercially successful.

However, if you’re not really fully feeling a project, it’s hard to take it above ‘product’ into the level of ‘art’. So for me, for all my talk of market demands, none of these strategies fully align with my personal aesthetic. Probably because of the tight relationship fiction has had with my life-decision-making process—I still like fiction that feels like a real human in a real geographical place in the world. I recognize that my devotion to this guide/travelogue/connection-to-real-feeling-type-character-in-a-real-place function of fiction is a shortcoming of my poetics, but I cannot alter how the good Lord made me.⁴ In order to pursue my own aesthetic vision, then, while still growing as an artist and also taking market constraints into account, I ‘ran for [my] own glory’ and moved to America.

FOUR: THE COIGNE OF VANTAGE, OR, THE DIFFERENCE

Isn’t it easiest to just think of Canada as just a smaller United States?

I grew up a straight white male in southern Ontario. As a child growing up in the rural outskirts of Kingston, ON, life, at least along indices of systemic privilege, was easy. The income of the families of the kids I went to school with had a remarkably low variance, and there were no class divisions. Everyone was white so there was no race stratification. What there was, at least in my own mind and possibly no one else’s, was a premium on cultural capital, of which I had plenty, due to my well-educated Toronto-born parents’ pretty efficient propagation of early literacy and cultural fluency. My own parents’ valuation of cultural capital over economic capital was so textbook, in fact, our family could have come straight out of the pages of the original Bourdieu case study of the 19th-century provincial French middle-class teachers and culture workers. Notwithstanding a little nerd-discrimination and all the normal hardships of just basic life that everyone is saddled with, I was pretty much the picture of systemic advantage while I remained within the limits of my Canadian world.

Then I moved to America. I was 27, and although I had lived for extended periods of time in China, the UK, Australia, Cambodia and Thailand, and had traveled to France, Spain, the Czech Republic, Malaysia, and elsewhere in Europe and Asia, I never felt culturally inferior as a guest in any of these countries and still thought of myself as essentially unhyphenated—second class to no one.

The revelation of my own otherness came not in the moment of disembarkation from the plane, nor, indeed, all in a day. It came spread out over a series of little moments, most in the first few months of being here. First, of course, were the accents: “badminton” was “bad-mn-n,” tomorrow was “d’mor-ə”; “thirry” for theory, “sarry” for sorry, “abat” for about. Walking around, I would notice little things like a sign in the park that said “for information, call this number or visit this website” that specified the name of the person to ask for: “DARREN.” Then there how people relate to each other in public. A guy hosing his car fifty feet up his driveway one day says “How you doin” to my walking-by-on-the-sidewalk self. Greater eye contact in public generally; if I pass someone in a more intimate but still public space, such as the corridors of an English department, eye contact and greetings skyrocket.⁵ Then, playing “Ticket to Ride,” a board game, at someone’s house, on a board that represented the continental US and includes about thirty American cities, accurately placed within their state borders, and then 4.5 Canadian cities—“Vancouver,” “Calgary,” “Toronto,” “Montreal,” and “Sault Ste. Marie” (ambiguous)—located in an undifferentiated expanse the whole upper existence of which fades off into abstraction north of the borders of the game. Realizing that the people I was playing with—being from Nebraska, New Jersey, Baltimore, Washington state, and Georgia, were all from cartographically accounted-for parts of the board, and I was from the undifferentiated expanse.

Another time, one day, as I was leaving my apartment to go to campus, an aging hippie —long greying hair, weird sunglasses, etc—was sitting on my front step. He first introduced himself by way of explaining the business he was running out of the apartment next to mine, which, no, he didn’t live in, but his son did, and he visited on weekends. See, they were vending a product called “bluegrass,” which was a drug kind of like marijuana, but legal. He said it had been invented by a chimpanzee that lived on his ranch in Mississippi where he himself lived most of the time. The chimpanzee, he said, had come back from the fields one day with a bunch of different kinds of herbs he, my new neighbor, had never seen before. He decided to smoke them, and lo, bluegrass was born. By the way, my neighbor asked me, did I know who Tom Wolfe was? I did. Had I ever read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test? “Well,” said my neighbour, “I guess you might be interested to know that I was one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.” “No shit.” “Indeed. I was the youngest one. In the book I was called ‘Starchild’. There been documentaries made about me. I been on 20/20. I was one of the original founders of ‘The Farm’,” which he explained was a hippie commune/intentional community in central Tennessee. Holy shit, I thought. American culture is real people.⁶

A lot of the weirdnesses I’ve experienced have been in moments when I’m engaging with art, narrative, music. One of the times that the depth of difference between an American and a Canadian really did burst upon me all in a day, was during my first few weeks here in Tuscaloosa. I was listening to the radio alone in my apartment, and Jewel’s “You Were Meant For Me” came on. And it occurred to me: this song was made by a citizen of the country I’m now in. This sounds like an elementary fact, but it really kind of rearranged my understanding of reality. Here’s the thing: first: listening to this kind of music (top 40’s pop) in Canada, as I did, there were a lot of layers between it and me. First layer: it’s American, it was made by no one I know and no one I will ever likely encounter. Second layer: it’s made by people, yes, but really it sounds like it was made by some market-tested industrial machine that is American Pop Music. Third: it’s pop music and so, as a—how should I put this? As someone whose primary operating system was, briefly, a Linux distro?—it’s not really for me. I could enjoy it unironically because I had existed until very recently in a community in which ‘cultural omnivorism’⁷ was the norm—but on some level I knew I wasn’t the audience the machine had in mind, foremost. Then suddenly, all that distance between me and American culture had collapsed. Suddenly, I’m in America, surrounded by Americans, the like of whom the superstars of this country are plucked from. Jewel is a rhetorically bad example, because she grew up in Alaska, but a few days later, the same thing happened when OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson” came on the radio, and this time it hit even closer to home—two of the 17 people in my year in the program are, like OutKast, from Georgia. Nothing could be closer to my contemporaries.

Iterations of this same revelation thwumped me repeatedly throughout my first year here. Rewatching, e.g., American TV shows and movies was a whole new experience. The shows had settings; they took place in actual geographical places it was possible for a human—say, me—to go to. See, before this, I had always read American settings as metaphor. A show set in L.A. was a show metaphysically set in what L.A. “meant” (i.e. late-stage consumerism, money and physicality, aura of sleaze), not what L.A. was (i.e. a city in Southern California with 3.7m people, many of whom probably aren’t that different from me). Characters having a conversation about struggling to get an audition for a toothpaste commercial in L.A. was an allegory for opening up about weakness to someone in a superficial capitalist market. Visiting New York recently with my girlfriend and sitting around in the apartment of her friends who work in cafés and restaurants and write plays, puppeteer, choreograph, and artist-assist, I thought: oh—these people are who NY-based shows from Friends to Girls are supposed to represent; not me and my friends in Toronto.

And then one morning⁸ in the last week of my first semester at Alabama I got out of bed and went outside to check my mail and saw I had a postcard from someone I’d been in a relationship with before I came down here which had ended in part because I came down here. The postcard was from New York, where she was apparently visiting. It was the first contact of any kind we’d had in months and the last day before one of my major term papers was due, and I cried and worked on my paper until I had to go meet my writing teacher in the student cafeteria for our weekly appointment at 4pm. I left my apartment early and edited my paper at a table with a large umbrella that shaded me from the sun outside the cafeteria because I didn’t want to stay in my apartment because of sadness. I could see through the window my professor and one of my fellow-MFAs, and when my fellow-MFA got up I went in and sat down at the table with my professor. Michael Martone, my professor, seeing my face, said “You still worried about Wikileaks? You look concerned.” I said “I got a postcard that made me unhappy.” He looked surprised and I said did I tell you about how I sort of broke up a relationship to come here? He said no. I told him the story of K., and he told me about breaking up with his girlfriend from back home in Indiana when she came to visit him in his first semester of grad school at Johns Hopkins, and then getting together with this other girl soon thereafter who became his wife, and with whom it was never stormy or extreme even at the start. I said I’d never had a relationship that wasn’t stormy and extreme, and after a while I had to look at myself and realize I was the common denominator. He said you know, some people are just like that. “You know Mary Carr?,” he continued.

“I’ve heard the name, I don’t know who she is,” I said.

“She wrote these memoirs, The Liar’s Club, Cherry, Lit. She was up at Syracuse when I was there. She had this magnetism, this energy, that, all the guys were in love with her. Everything all the time is in maximum drama mode. It’s very attractive to some people. You know David Foster Wallace, they were together there for a while, and they had a stormy relationship similar to what you’re talking about. Throwing chairs all over the place.”

“He was at Syracuse while you were there?”

“Well, he was actually in recovery there. He had come up to try to get away from New York and Boston, and Mary was also there, so he was living there for a while. That’s where he started Infinite Jest, actually.”

“Did you know him?”

“Oh, yeah. We had known each other from before. We were both Midwest kids. I had commissioned him to write something for an anthology. That’s what’s great about anthologies—‘I can’t pay you, but why don’t you write something?’ You know that essay about Illinois...” “The tennis and math one?” “Yeah, that’s the one. I got him to write that for this anthology, Homelands. He had also had doubts about the university system—you know, he had been at Arizona and had had an awful time—that was during the height of this realism resurgence, and he was writing what he was writing, and I had turned down Iowa to go to Johns Hopkins, so we would talk about that, you know. We would have these serious literary discussions”—he laughs—“and then he’d go home and throw chairs with Mary. Jonathan Franzen also came down while we were there, you know. He thought he wanted to get out of New York, he had this idea that we’d all hole up in this backwater town and write. I remember touring him around the town, going around to Raymond Carver’s house, which was up for sale, the three of us in the car. Tess had added $10 000 to the price—because it was Raymond Carver’s house. It was like, ‘This is a working class town, nobody can afford to pay that, and there’s a thousand other houses all over the city that look exactly like it that Raymond Carver didn’t live in’. I remember driving around town, and I could feel Jonathan, who had grown up in the suburbs of St Louis, thinking like, ‘Why am I going back to St Louis?’ I could literally see his face fall as we drove around. So he didn’t stay, he went back to New York. But yeah, David and I were together there for a while.”

Let me try to get at what this meant to me: The first eighteen years of my life I spent five minutes past Trans-Canada Highway 401, which marks the outskirts of Kingston, ON (my parents still live there). On a map, the Kingston Census Metropolitan Area, which wraps around the northeastern corner of Lake Ontario, is so close to the American border it almost bleeds over into it. As the crow flies, my childhood address on Battersea Road is about 18km, or 11 miles, from the American border. Syracuse, NY is about a two-hour drive from that point. The ABC I watched was the local Syracuse affiliate; I watched Syracuse news and weather. In fact, Kingston and Syracuse aren’t that different. They’re about the same size, they’re both university towns. But because of what America is, and what Canada is, and also because of the American MFA system—because a college in this small town in upstate New York happens to have a highly-esteemed MFA program—very different things are liable to happen in them. In Syracuse, literary legends past and future rent, feud, marry and die; in my Kingston, I watch Step by Step at 9pm on a Friday. And two decades later, I’m listening to a tale peopled by characters whom a minute before had belonged to the most distant possible echelon of literature, set in a city so close to where I grew up that while all that stuff was happening in Syracuse, I was watching their meteorological report via my home’s roof antenna. And my professor can namedrop “Tess” without explanation, and he doesn’t have to explain, because I know all the characters in his stories, because this is like the mainline of American literary mythology, which, in my bedroom with a view of a rolling Great Lakes Basin cattle pasture, was what I was raised on.⁹

As it happens, having my own personal romantic psychodynamics compared with the man hisself’s was sort of the final dealie that de-deified this writer who several additional previous revelations of mine re Canada/US differences orbited around. Those additional previous revelations had been due to (1) MetaFilter; (2) talking to the people here; and (3) another of my professors, Mr Fred Whiting.

Relevant background: I’d finished reading everything DFW’d (then) published by 2004 and had duly felt my tiny mind shatter. In 2007, I started reading an ‘online discussion forum’ called MetaFilter. A large majority of MetaFilter’s userbase is American, a significant proportion are very well-educated, and among those, a sizable minority are what is usually referred to as ‘hyper-educated liberal-arts types’. This is a type of person that doesn’t exist in Canada, not only because we don’t have a network of Americanesque small, private liberal-arts colleges but because of vast differences in economy and culture,¹⁰ and is the “type” of person, if any, that David Foster Wallace was.¹¹ A funny thing happened when I first started reading MetaFilter. I started to notice some things. I started to notice a lot of the verbal tics Wallace had elevated into algorithm being used in the wild, by all kinds of different people. Grammatical things like his intensifying adverbs (‘impossibly’, ‘hideously’, ‘abjectly’), cultural things like objectifying ‘primitive’ cultures through things like ‘yurt’ jokes, and general vibe-type things. As large and multitudinous as David Foster Wallace is, MetaFilter is larger and more. Not everyone on MetaFilter has read David Foster Wallace,¹² and even fewer were so affected by his verbal proclivities that they aped them, consciously or otherwise, although DFW’s influence on some users’ commenting style, like many who grew up with him, is, as he might say, pellucid. The conclusion was clear: David Foster Wallace was borne of these people, not vice versa. All these things I thought he invented, all these things I was giving his genius credit for, he was actually just re-jiggering, retooling, playing with, playing among.

Now, despite the MetaFilter demystification, when I first arrived here, I was still deeply obsessed with Wallace, and really, still to a large degree interpreted the world if not exactly through the lens of, then certainly with constant reference to his writings. However. Divine as he otherwise seemed to be, when I was still in Canada I always used to scoff at David Foster Wallace’s provincialism when he used “US” as a predicate to mean, as I saw it, “Western.” “US sadness” and “US loneliness” were favourites. But, I reasoned, by his own admission he had barely been outside US borders; how would he know which traits were US-only and which were North American, Western or universal? Then I came here. And I got to know some US civilians. And, I think, maybe, I began to see what he was talking about. My fellow-matriculants in this Full-Ride¹³ MFA program seemed to have had adolescences not dissimilar to those “high-functioning”¹⁴ ephebes¹⁵ of IJ: my classmates had toured the country with high school band, they toured the country as Quiz Bowl champions, they were debating champs, they completed three BA’s in five years, they finished their BA at age 19—etc. The years of youth of the type Wallace paints in IJ, and, nonfictionally, in “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” suddenly seem not so invented.

And then there was Whiting. Fred Whiting was my instructor for EN635, “Literary Criticism – Narrative,” and what happened was that in our first class meeting he used the phrases ‘aleatorics’, ‘fillip’ and ‘Piaget’s second stage’ in extemporaneous speech. We were not studying Piaget or developmental psychology of any description. This was his assumed general knowledge that he didn’t dumb down for anyone, even at the risk of being perceived as snooty or show-offy. Remind you of anyone? To me this bravado linguistic performance smacked so hard of DFW I almost dropped my copy of Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Whoever this guy is, I thought, wherever he comes from—this guy is ‘of’ the same class, he is ‘of’ the same type, as DFW. They share a milieu. And so I’d stumbled upon yet another slice of Wallace’s gestalt he didn’t invent: upper-level academia, which it’s pretty safe to say Wallace is ‘of’, and in which this bravado/show-offy attitude seems to simply be the climate.

My point is not that Wallace sucks, but that there was a lot of context Wallace’s writing was operating in that I was ignorant of, and, perhaps, some pretty tall shoulders he was standing on that I hadn’t read, and this made the experience of reading him more mind-blowing than it perhaps otherwise would have been. And that this is an example of the idea that, when you experience the art of an artist from a context that’s not your context, you may be liable to overestimate their creative power, at the expense of your own sense of what it is artists do, and subsequently your own sense of self-worth as an artist.

And my other point is that, it seems to me, this issue may particularly afflict Canadians.

FIVE: RETURN TO OPTIONS BESIDES MOVING TO THE UNITED STATES

“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.”

— William Blake

You may recognize what I’ve just been relating about how I was misreading American TV and fiction as a phenomenon our friend Harold Bloom calls ‘misprision’ and considers, actually, a necessary thing for writers, because the difference between what our fore-authors really mean and what we think they mean supplies an imaginative space in which our own zany new Weltanschauungen-cum-aesthetics can blossom. The thing though is, there are a lot of common-sense ingredients that go into making what Bloom calls a ‘strong’ writer that he doesn’t really go into (though he does mention, in The Western Canon, their requirement of having read a great deal at a young age), and I think one of them is having a strong sense of self-worth—being confident enough in your own judgments to consider how you see the world the only way to see the world and having the chutzpah to say, like Jay-Z: “He who does not feel me is not real to me.” To that end, seeing how David Foster Wallace was writing in an American context he didn’t invent for American readers I knew nothing about has made him seem just a little less sui generis, and has been invaluable for my own sense of self-worth and understanding of what writers are capable of, and what writers actually do.

But I want to put my own Künstlerroman narrative aside now and look at what it means to all Canadians that, on the one hand, there’s this pressure on Canadian writers to write to the American reader, and on the other hand, American artists are making art for and about themselves to a degree to which I think most Canadians don’t really realize. What’s at stake is much more than any individual (Canadian) writer’s success. What’s at stake is the experiences Canadians get to have and the kinds of understanding it might be possible for us to have about how we live our lives. And how the only ones preventing us from speaking to ourselves in our language like the twin brothers in fn. 1 is us (and, unfortunately, the market).

Now, I realize it may be clearer to some people than it was to me how American culture, or American-like Canadian culture, isn’t ‘their’ culture. This has come up for me a few times in conversation with friends: one time, the summer before I left for the US, in conversation over Coronas at Squirly’s on Queen Street with another playwright friend of mine, we got to talking about this issue of being a Canadian writer. I had started a single-use blog called ‘Canadian Theses’ where I had been posting thoughts on being a Canadian and a Canadian writer, and we were talking about one of my posts. I described a lot of the things discussed already in this essay, and he looked interested, but when I was done talking responded with: “I guess I don’t really feel any of that because I feel like more of a Jew than a Canadian.”

Another time I had posted something Margaret Laurence said about this stuff to Facebook.¹⁶ In a long debate that followed, a black Canadian friend of mine said this:

My dad used to constantly warn me when I was a kid “stop acting like those Canadians!” I was born and raised in Toronto by the way. There is no way that I could buy into: ‘There is a Canadian (and their cultural products) and There is an American (and their cultural products)’. Or an African (and their cultural products). All I’m saying is this is no longer about differentiating a specific Canadian culture and experience from American culture. “Canadian” can now be individually defined in many different ways and I’m not talking about our “multi-cultural mosaic.” These national labels are difficult. I would offload mine in a minute if I could.

As would, I think, a lot of people.

But for some of us, what that would mean is far from clear: how do “those Canadians,” i.e. white Canadians, “act”? I suspect this kind of problem particularly affects white Canadians because it is not at all clear, from inside or out-, how white Canadian life is different from white American life, and so how art made by white Canadians could be different from American art.

The crux of this aporia lies, I think, in what for some of us was the near-total bifurcation of experience: on the one hand, input from ‘meatspace’, i.e., the unmediated physical world around me, the people I personally knew, the places I moved around in, pretty much all of which were in southern Ontario; and on the other hand, input from TV and books and websites from mostly foreign origins, predominantly American. The concrete specifics (place-names, names of colleges, historical and/or contemporary events) and cultural allusions (bat mitzvahs? Mormons? Republicans? ‘the South’? ‘Race relations’? Presidents? California?) of these foreign cultural products I intook being for the most part unfamiliar to me, those specifics were tuned out as noise, which left only the most general, universal messages and patterns to make any sense to me. This allowed me to process those general messages and patterns, possibly not such a bad thing, and eventually, as children do, I inferred what I was meant to infer about Mormons, the South, bat mitzvahs—I learned what they ‘meant’, or at least what they were supposed to mean in the realm of mass culture—but experiencing all these things at a remove like this also left me without a sense of those stories really applying to me in the same way that a work of art set in the town in which I grew up, focusing on characters of the same occupations and class as that which I and the people in my world inhabited feels like it uniquely and very specifically applies to you.¹⁷ To some Canadians, this might feel like a ridiculous and inconceivable luxury, and maybe even impossible and undesirable. Most books my mother reads, for instance, are set in a part of the world quite different from where she lives, concerning characters leading lives quite different from hers. Not that I think there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s worth noting that Canadians are to some extent conditioned to think that this is what narrative art is about—the lives of others—simply due to never having experienced the alternative. Whereas, by way of a by no means perfect example, this very morning (4/30/2012), I watched Mean Girls (2004) with my Chicagoan girlfriend. Its fictional setting was the actual high school she went to, Evanston Township High School; it was filmed at the university I went to, the University of Toronto. This was not choreographed to serve as an apologue for my essay. This kind of thing happens all the time.

But this issue isn’t just about setting. What’s uninteresting about the differences between American and Canadian culture, of course, is the place-names. What’s potentially interesting, and what may have the potential to hit Canadians harder than they’ve ever been hit by narrative art, is exploiting and playing among cultural/cognitive codes in the way we experience the world that may be unique to us but that we don’t know how to think about or talk about or write about.

SIX: AN IMAGINATIVE EXERCISE INTENDED TO REALLY DRIVE THE POINT HOME

What if something like “how we understand ourselves through the people closest to us” is the aspect of our lives that explains the most about who we are and why we think the way we think and why we act the way we act, and isn’t addressed in non-Canadian art? How would we ever know if this was true? We wouldn’t. So we have to act like it is, because to not do so is to risk everything.

Imagine this: you are a mouse. You live in a shady grove beside a mountain. From the other side of the mountain you can hear voices. In fact, everyone in your little mouse village has always heard voices from the other side of the mountain. You have been hearing these voices speak since pretty much the time you became able to understand language. In fact there are not one, but several mountain ranges all around you, and from behind them you also hear voices. All the voices you hear from, let’s call it Mountain A, sound roughly like “Mountain A”-type voices, all the voices you hear from Mountain E, sound like “Mountain E”-type voices, and so on. Each mountain’s voices have their own “national identity.” But for now that’s besides the point. The important thing is that you’re a mouse and you live in a shady grove and you hear voices from behind mountains, and you’ve grown up listening to these voices. You grow up and you hear these voices talk about their lives. You hear them talk about what’s going on in the world. You hear them talk about each other. They rarely mention you, but when they do, you strain to decipher what they’re implying about you, because you’re curious about yourself. You learn the languages of the places beyond the mountains, and you learn their histories, because you’re curious about the world (and maybe you want to improve your job prospects). But that’s not the important part. The important part is that you’re a mouse and you’re trying to figure out your self and your life, which are very very important to you, because they’re your own self and life, by listening to voices from beyond the mountains that surround you. This doesn’t seem like such a crazy thing, because when they talk about their lives, and the things in them, and how to do things, like how to make French toast, when they talk about getting eggs and milk and bread and syrup and putting them together on a stove, and you do what they say they’re doing, it turns out pretty totally well. You’re like “Yess... French toast... I love... you.” And you do a bunch of other stuff that corresponds with how they say they’re living their lives, and you’re like, my life is pretty good.

But what if they’re cats and beyond the mountains is all desert. What if you’re speaking the same language, but it means totally different things to cats’ ears as it does from mice’s ears, and furthermore they’re all out in the desert sweating away, and they don’t even talk about the nice beautiful things that can be found in a shady grove, because they don’t even know what a shady grove is, they’ve never seen one, they’ve never been to one. Importantly, they don’t even have the vocabulary for the things found in shady groves. The things you see all around you every day, they don’t even have words for, and so they never talk about them. And the things they do talk about mean totally different things. Like for instance maybe they only eat French toast once or twice a month or something because they only have time to do that, because their lives are totally hectic and besides good bread is hard to find in the supermarkets where they live. And so they eat French toast only once a month, and that’s how they talk about it, and so that’s how French toast comes to you as a concept: something you eat only occasionally; a treat. But maybe in the middle of a shady grove good bread is plentiful and affordable and so are eggs and milk and syrup, and you don’t have to be at work till 10am every day, so why aren’t you eating French toast every morning? It’s delicious. But it just doesn’t occur to you, because that doesn’t fit into your idea of ‘how life is’ that’s been shaped by how the cats beyond the mountains live their lives. And besides, they don’t even know about, let’s call them pancakes—you’re a mouse and you’ve never heard the word pancake, but you have them all over the place, they grow on trees, and sometimes people try them and they taste good, but because you don’t have a vocabulary or a place in your array of concepts for them, you aren’t sure how they’re supposed to fit into your life, and so for the most part you ignore them. Sometimes ‘weird’ people eat them, but because they (pancakes) have no status in mainstream society, the people who eat them are usually laughed at, because it’s weird to eat weird things you have no name for.

And but also, what if they’re cats and the words themselves mean totally different things. Like, opposite, sometimes. Like cheese. Or “mouse.” Or hairball.

Hairball is a good example. It’s the opposite of the French toast example, in that it’s something cats have that mice don’t have. So you have whole societies, whole cultures, whole civilizations of cats, with a concept of “hairball,” and a history of that concept, and what hairballs have meant to long-lost generations of their cat ancestors, and what hairballs mean socially, sociologically, psychologically. What it means to cough up a hairball in public. What it means to collect your hairballs as opposed to throwing them out. Different disposal methods of hairballs. Whether there are correlations between diet, genetics, upbringing, environment, education, work conditions, marital status, number of children in the household, mood, time of the month, what you’ve just been watching on TV, and the number and kind of hairballs you’ll experience on a given day, at a given hour. Hairballs are a central experience in feline lives, and they think about them a lot, and attach a lot of meaning to them, and discuss those meanings with each other and publish papers about them and write books about them. They’re in the news.

But so here’s the thing. Mice hear all this stuff, they read the books about hairballs, they read the studies, the newspaper articles. They sometimes even see TV shows that are full of mice coughing up hairballs, and they laugh at such a ridiculous sight, right on cue with the laugh-track of cats. They sometimes even meet cats and hear them talk about hairballs, and just like, nod their heads and feign understanding. Because mice don’t get hairballs. But hairballs are such a huge part of cat culture, of cats’ identities really, of how cats understand the world, when mice come across references to hairballs—which are everywhere—they either tune them out or assume they’re metaphors. Once in a while maybe they’ll think “that hairball metaphor’s pretty played, these cat writers sure are lazy.” But the progression of thought will stop there. Because they have no reason to question the existence of the hairball. It’s always been there, it just seems like a traditional part of what they think of as their culture. And it is their culture. Sort of. They’re certainly voracious consumers of it. And they can even participate in it, they can even become producers of it. They can figure out what ‘hairball’ means, and can even invent their own jokes about ‘what a pain hairballs are huh fellas amirite’. And so in a sense they can make it their own culture. But it will never hit home as squarely as jokes about how the taste of cheese just drives me wild, amirite. And from a kind of philosophical point of view, you can easily say, well, hairball jokes are a part of mouse culture just as much as they’re a part of cat culture; hairballs just have a more complicated relation to their audience in mouse culture. But do you want to be the mouse culture in this scenario? I don’t. I want to have my culture’s art reach directly into my heart and play all the crazy strings inside it like a violin.

This, I submit, is in fact the situation in which Canadian artists—in fact all Canadians—find themselves, and why it’s urgent that Canadian artists trust their instincts and throw off received forms, tradition. Because what if there is a whole layer of existence of Canadian life that isn’t addressed in art made by non-Canadians? This is certainly true in a trivial sense, insofar as the circumstances of life in Canada shape consciousness in Canada. E.g., no one else in the world knows what it’s like to live in a northern country that takes up half a continent and has free health care.

However, what if that layer is non-trivial? What if it’s the bedrock of how we understand ourselves? This is like Pascal’s Wager: if you assume all the basic aspects of Canadian existence are pretty much covered by artists from other countries, and don’t bother to go to the source, your own soul, to discover what existence is and means, there is an extremely high chance that you will overlook things, that you will look past your own self. On the other hand, if you assume artists from other countries have missed something huge about what it means to be alive in and to live in Canada, you are almost certainly correct even if in only a small way, and you lose nothing by assuming this and taking it upon yourself to forage in the jungle of your own soul for what it means to be you.

And it doesn’t matter if no one outside of Canada gets it. Make art for those you love. Everyone else in the world certainly does. You just may not realize it, if all you’ve ever heard were the songs of another world.

SEVEN: SYNTHESIS

“Poets are not born in countries, they are born in childhood.” — Ilya Kaminsky

After Goethe left Germany for Italy at the age of thirty-seven, he said: “I lost myself, but I gained the world.” That sounds nice. Coming to Alabama, I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I don’t think that’s what I got. Looking back at my decision to leave Toronto now, from the vantage point of having gnawed off the tiniest little ampule of success since coming to the United States, I can’t help think I may have just been hasty in leaving Canada, that the problem wasn’t Canadian literary gatekeepers but simply my having not really produced anything of note. Maybe I would’ve been happy had I stayed where I was and matured as an artist. The thing, though, is that the Canadian literary establishment didn’t especially want me. All of my grant applications to the Toronto, Ontario, and Canada Councils of the arts were rejected, and none of the Canadian MFA programs accepted me. In contrast, in the 1⅔ years I’ve been in the US, I’ve been granted a Truman Capote Foundation Fellowship; I won an award in a fiction contest here in the UA MFA program my first year here; stories of mine have started to be published in American journals; and this summer I will be spending six weeks in Montauk, NY in a small artist residency run by the Edward F. Albee Foundation. This could all be a coincidence, but somehow it doesn’t feel like it. And I don’t think I improved that dramatically as a writer the moment my emigratory Delta flight 4059 from Toronto touched down in Birmingham, and besides, many of the American awards/fellowships/etc I’ve received since coming here were for things I wrote while still in the vaterland.

So here I am in the United States, where, for now, they want me. In fact, writing this final paragraph, I’m now in Montauk. Maybe as a result of this little bit of success, and maybe because I now understand just a little what it means to live in the US, and because I’ve been able to see a little of what life is in places like Chicago and New York, when I think of this dichotomy I’ve set up between ‘success’ and ‘being true to my own aesthetic’, it seems to me that no amount of situating and re-situating my body will supply a solution to problems of art, and that the synthesis must be achieved by the smithing of the art itself. But then that’s easy for me to say, now that I can describe the medleyish accent an art dealer who summers in Amagansett uses with her long-haired dachshund on the Hampton Jitney, and I can tell you how the sun sets over Napeague Bay (through a peplum of mist), and I know that in the Montauk IGA the cashier is a teenage daughter of a millionaire and asks you to unpack your basket while she studies her nails. But was it necessary to come all this way to know that, or, more to the point, to be able to write that sentence? For a certain kind of art, maybe not. Rimbaud wrote “Le Bateau ivre,” a 100-line poem set entirely at sea, without ever having seen the sea, by shanghaiing lines he liked from other poets. Geography and experience doesn’t prevent the appropriation of signifiers; the signifiers are always all around us, wherever we are. I’ve said I like being taken on an immersive journey by work that feels like bodies in a place and not just a mind manipulating symbols, but to be honest, at this point, I’m not so sure. Where does all this wandering take you? In an 1899 letter to a friend, Henry James, after thirty-six years in Europe, wrote: “If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.” But how can you know.

1 Just kidding! I know she’d never do that.

2 Remind you of anyone? Jean Toomer: “I am an American. You are an American. Everyone is an American” Jeff Webb: “‘American’ in Toomer’s idiom is thus equivalent to ‘human’.”

3 There’s even a, pretty compelling argument that making art expressly for your friends could maybe result in the best possible art of all, for at least one other person; viz., imagine two twin brothers who grew up together and have developed a highly idiosyncratic idiom which functions as their main mode of communication and which no one else understands. Imagine one brother is making art for the other. Now assume, provisionally, that because of the very vast amount of knowledge that brother A has for brother B, coupled with the very vast amount of affection/love A has for B, which results in him putting a lot of energy and care into his work—all these things combine to make brother A’s customized work for brother B a more engrossing and transcendent work of art, for B, than anything he could possibly experience made by someone who doesn’t know him or know his highly personal idiom. This is just a hypothetical. In practice I wouldn’t dream of offering it as an organizing principle for How To Make Art—“make it specifically, in a very literal and concrete way, for the people or person you know best.” The thing is though, if it’s even remotely possible for someone, anyone, to make good art, very good art, amazing art, Great Art, in this mode—then it shouldn’t be dismissed. What if it’s possible that, after years of honing his art, and after years of knowing me, a friend makes the best work of art I’ve ever experienced, based on his knowledge and affection for me? Why would I want to prevent or denigrate that?

And to a certain extent, this is also a conversation about art in Canada. should we make art that feels right to us, or should we try to make sure that all our references are globally recognizable?

And also the idea that these two ideas are exclusive is a red herring too. As long as you’re not literally working in a different language, your art will still be accessible, in theory, to everyone, if it’s recorded. So for writing books, this holds. We come back to the idea that maybe something that just happens to have been created for a very specific audience will in fact be widely like by a large and diverse set of people—people’s published letters, for example, or something like The Story Of O, which was written by a woman for her lover.

4 Writer is actually an atheist.

5 My Chicagoan girlfriend, when we visited Toronto, said she felt like people looked away like she was harassing them if she looked at them and smiled like she normally does to people on American streets.

6 ...who know fuck-all about Canada: the next weekend, on our shared back porch, he says out of the blue: “Y’all got a shitty healthcare system up there dontcha?” As if that weren’t enough strangeness from 1425A, a year and a half later, the guy that moved in to take over the bluegrass business when Starchild and his son skipped town had some kind of psychic break and destroyed his apartment, bludgeoned his parakeet to death in the street , tried to rob a grocery store with his father and sister and his sister’s baby girl waiting in the car in the parking lot, and, returning to his car and finding a police officer in the parking lot, shot the police officer in the leg, and the police officer returned fire, hitting him in the chest. He died.

7 For a thorough run-down and perfect investigation of cultural omnivorism see Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, but for now I’ll shorthand it as “the paradigm that replaced high-browism as the de rigeur status aesthetic: to be culturally omnivorous is to be fluent in both high- and low-brow culture and signifies that you’re both not a snob and not dumb.”

8 The one of 12/1/10

9 Which before I came here I never would have thought of as odd or uniquely Canadian—growing up predominantly with (literary) heroes from other countries. Predominantly is the wrong word, actually; until Sheila Heti, every single one of my literary heroes were foreign: when I was a kid, my favourite writers were American: Stephen King, Jack Kerouac, Dave Eggers. In university, my heroes were American (David Foster Wallace), Russian (Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky), Irish (Joyce), and Austrian (Wittgenstein). And lately, my biggest influences have been American again: John Berryman, John Ashbery, and Tao Lin. This is something it wouldn’t occur to a lot of Canadians I know to ever think strange, while I don’t think it could be overemphasized how strange this would be for most American writers, especially my peers here in the program at Alabama.

10 Hyper-educated individuals do exist in Canada, mostly in some degree autodidacts; however; it just doesn’t exist as a type. The distinction being that, pace the King’s College and University of Toronto Schools graduate diaspora, there is no ‘class’ of hyper-educated individuals in Canada; if they exist, they exist separately, or at most coalesce into a circle or scene. A ‘type’ of person is something commonly understood and identifiable to anyone; it’s something you could pretend to be. Quick, what kind of shoes does a Canadian intellectual wear?

11 When I say “hyper-educated” I follow conventional usage in using it more as a signifier of kind rather than amount: when people say “hyper-educated,” I find, they often mean “has been exposed to a lot of European-style critical theory.” I rarely hear physicians or physicists described as “hyper-educated.”

12 I asked them, I know this (I’m not joking—I did mad research for this).

13 Oh, that’s another one: people here use the phrase ‘Full-Ride’, meaning a scholarship that covers 100% of the school’s tuition, in the wild, a phrase I thought was an Infinite Jest invention.

14 Another DFW/IJ term.

15 Another one.

16 “Are Canadian writers Third World writers? In a cultural sense, very definitely yes. Canadian artists in general can be said to be of the Third World. . . . ‘“International art” means the cultural forms of the dominant imperial cultures of the . . . times. And it is only as that dominance wavers or becomes suspect that independent artists of Third World countries like ours can assert their true voices even in their own society, let alone the world at large.’ That is a statement with which I wholeheartedly agree. Canadian writers, like African writers, have had to find our own voices and write out of what is truly ours, in the face of an overwhelming cultural imperialism.” This was in an essay titled “Ivory Tower or Grassroots? The Novelist as Socio-Political Being,” which was reprinted in a book called Canadian Novelists and the Novel in 1978, which I think, relevantly, is now out of print.

17 It’s possible my upbringing was unique, but I believe this bifurcation of experience of on the one hand, “culture and art,” and on the other, “real life,” can be seen in a lot of our country’s best writing. Contra the outdated image of Canadian literature as a sanctum of po-faced domestic realism, our strongest writers—and here I’m thinking of Margaret Atwood, Sheila Heti, Yann Martel, even L. Cohen, but also Barbara Gowdy, Pasha Malla, Derek McCormack, and hell, lots of others, including some I’ve already mentioned—run in the other direction. To me, the turn away from realism signifies the disconnect between what that hoary old Canadian institution Adbusters called ‘the mental environment’ and input from that which there may be no better term for than ‘meatspace’.