So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, goodnight!

Visit my new blog, Writer's Block, at http://outsidetheblock.wordpress.com/

I plan on posting book reviews, film reviews, reflections on Canadian literature and culture, as well as criticisms of the state of education as it relates to my own experiences as a tutor.

Blogger, you have deleted my post mid-edit for the last time!

See you on the flip side,
Kim

To blog or not to blog

I've been lazy about blogging lately for a variety of reasons (including watching an unfortunately large number of movies about bloggers), such as:

1) Script Frenzy is upon us! I find the 100 page script goal to be much more attainable than the 45,000 words necessary to complete NaNoWriMo. I usually zip right through the dialogue in my prose, so it makes sense that I'd be a speedy playwright. I really enjoy the challenge of creating tension and movement in a scene with only the one tool - speech - at my disposal. I have a tendency to be a tad over-descriptive in my prose, a problem that is easier to avoid while staying true to each character's voice. During my undergrad in Montreal, I spent years helping my roommate find the perfect Stanislavsky verbs for her lines in acting classes, and it's all coming back to me now. I'm not at the half-way point yet, but I'm anticipating a surge of creative energy to kick in about the same time I run out of job prospects to apply to. So even if I'm still sans job, I can be like every other unemployed English major and start toting a manuscript around with me.

2) The employment scene in my area is picking up! Meaning I'm spending less time every day lying in bed thinking about how to turn a crack in the ceiling into a blog entry (haiku? Social commentary? Image?), and more time actually applying to jobs. Even if my best prospects so far have involved a drive through window or cleaning the aforementioned window at the end of the day, it's still a nice change.

Though, thanks to McGill's ever-so-helpful suggestions for future career paths, I did write-off a crossword puzzle book as a job-hunting expense.

3) The Tournament of Books was killer this year, and I'm trying to figure out how to fit another 1000+ pages of reading into my life right now. I'm going to start with Mantel's Wolf Hall, because I just read Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, and even Thomas Cromwell's life story has to be more uplifting than that. Sorry, Barbara. I'll get to The Lacuna one day. Somehow, I have a feeling your sales figures will do just fine without me.

Canada Reads (In English)

My hate-on for Jian Ghomeshi and this year's CBC Canada Reads panel has abated in the last few months. I didn't listen to the round-table debates this year, for the first time since I became a pretentious, CBC-listening literati so many years ago. So I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Nikolski had taken the tournament's top honors this weekend.

I discovered this by reading an electronic billboard in the Chapters at Granville and Robson. When I got over my initial reaction ("Oohhhh pretty colours!") I was doubly pleased to notice that the winner was indeed the only book in contention that wasn't a typical piece of Can-Lit canon fodder.

"Excellent!" I thought to myself. "So the competition wasn't a complete waste of time this year, and may even have met its supposed goal to bring the average Canadian's attention to a novel that would otherwise disappear into obscurity!"

Unfortunately, once I managed to find a copy of Nikolski in the store, I saw it had been marked down to ten dollars (a bargain-bin price if there ever was one in the world of Indigo-Chapters). Worse yet, the Canada Reads sticker was squarely covering the translator's information on the novel's cover.

The Canada Reads website, thankfully, has translator Lazer Lederhendler's name all over it. I don't mean to undermine the work of the novel's original French author, Nicolas Dickner, but rather to point out that the Can-Lit Powers That Be have a bad habit of down-playing the role of quality translation in the final production of an English language novel. As anyone who has ever had to struggle through the early translations of Pierre "Class Classifies the Classifier" Bordieu's works on communication theory knows, no matter how good the original work is, a shoddy translation can render it virtually unreadable. There exist a wealth of examples of well-publicized botched translations of non-fiction (Simone de Beauvior, anyone?), but when it comes to fiction the role of the translator is often treated as though it is a lesser occupation than the original author's, or somehow less creative.

While I still disagree with the majority of the selections in this year's head-to-head, the trumpeting of Lazer Lederhendler's creative role in the creation of the English version of Nikolski is one of the things Canada Reads 2010 has done right.


I may have allowed my ire to get the best of me when the competition debuted a dew months back, but the championing of Nikolski provides a small glimmer of hope that Canada Reads can regain its relevance with the cultural debate on what Canada should be reading, instead of just re-hashing what it already has stacked on the back of the toilet.

Until then, we can all thank god for the Tournament of Books. What it lacks in Canadian content, it makes up for in, oh I don't know, relevance? Intrigue? Innovation?

Oh, Joy.

Whilst on the job hunt, I was browsing through the supposed "resources" that my new Alma mater offers to its graduates from the arts faculty. My query as to what kind of jobs my English major can get me produced this ever so helpful pdf document.

Pupeteer or professional crossword puzzle maker? How shall I ever decide between the two?