It's All About Me

"It's All About Me - how criticism mirrors the self", brings together all my critical essays to date, but for those already excerpted in "Bowering and McFadden". Something of an homage to the years when serious review essays were commisioned and paid for by reputable journals committed to extending the honourable art. But as I marshalled my long dormant doc files for this project, assuming rather blearily that the good days were gone, a resurgence of the form was spied on the horizon, composed by mainly American and mainly youngish women with social and cultural concerns, rather then purely literary ones, and I was, to put it mildly, pleased. We shall see, as digital time speeds up to the flash of near invisibility, if they have the stamina of a Joan Didion or Janet Malcolm. Will they slouch towards Bethlehem with the bit between their teeth or succumb to the lure of the easily adapted novel ? One watches and waits. So my farewell to all that becomes a warm welcome to the next wave. The form is ancient and endlessly adaptable, the space it gives for opinion and argument expands without effort, particularly if wit remains the tool of wisdom and rhetoric pauses for pitstops in beauty. When composing these research projects, which is what they amount to if you seriously take the plunge, I was always conscious of my contemporary inspiration, Anthony Lane of New Yorker fame. As I revised, these years later, I noticed a distinct rumble from the erupting direction of George Bowering, whose literary effusions retain an immaculate originality of thought and expression as they snuck in under the door and charmed me with their carefully carved impudence. And it would be churlish, even after all these years, not to bow and thank Olga Stein, whose editorial acumen as editor of Books in Canada pushed and pulled me at just the right junctures. For a writer, particularly one prone to praising his own opinions, there is nothing quite like an insightful editor. As I have moved, somewhat reluctantly, with the times, and am now a blogger rather than a reviewer, I thought it prudent to provide a few examples from my online presence. A careful reader will note the various mystical and metaphysical atttudes peppering my literary work have fully blossomed into a take-no-prisoners philosophical platform from which all rationalist and religionist assumptions are challenged and esoteric options provided. It's still all about me, but that me has expanded to include all differing others in the embrace of what some might call mystical mumbo-jumbo, but what I prefer to see as the brotherhood of all sentient beings busy waving their flags. Basically everything is alive and aching to be more so.