HUMAN WRECKAGE

Bookends

Twenty-nine titles read in 2022. At this time last year, I was hoping to read closer to 40, break 30 for sure. Since I began keeping an annual list, I’ve found there’s always one book that bogs me down and costs me a couple of weeks of time I’d have preferred to spend otherwise engaged.

This year’s holdup was Value(s) by Mark Carney, former governor of the banks of both Canada and England. Portions of his book served as an abridged refresher of my university economics and philosophy courses. He explained the role of central banks before weighing in on the economic benefits and consequences of climate action (although we’ve all since given up on the 1.5-degree goal of the Paris Accord). Another portion of Value(s) read like a pitch for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada and, frankly, I wouldn’t mind a proven intellect at the national helm. Page counts never deter me, but it was a slog filled with acronyms following With a Mind to Kill, the breezy final installment of Anthony Horowitz’s delightfully retro James Bond trilogy.

Twenty twenty-two began bittersweetly with the posthumous publication of Silverview, John le Carre’s final novel; I no longer have a favourite living author. The story opens innocently enough in a bookshop. Because le Carre was unfailingly current, the cessation of the Cold War didn’t hinder his career, the reader ultimately tunes into the pandemic parallel: working from home just isn’t viable for certain branches of Britain’s secret intelligence service.

My year ends with John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, a sixties satiric allegory that somehow manages to combine Animal Farm with academia’s ivory tower. Its narrator is a kid who was raised as a goat. The world is the University, humanity is studentdom, rival academic factions control the East and West campuses and neither side wishes to provoke a Third Campus Riot. It is beastly strange and, I think, was of its time, until recently, now that scholarly institutions wring their hands and whinge over what constitutes acceptable and correct free speech.

The new year, hours away from now, will commence with an echo of 2018. Late that March my friend Netflix Derek, then on the University of Alberta faculty, took me to hear a lecture on Bob Dylan. The speaker was a visiting Harvard man, a professor of the classics. Dylan, like Shakespeare’s exploitation of Holinshed’s Chronicles for his tragedies, has mined earlier, primary sources for inspiration, displaying a particular penchant for digging through surviving works from classical antiquity. Naturally, academics have coined a ten-dollar word for this particular aspect of the creative process. It’s not research, no, it’s “intertextualization.”

I enjoyed the lecture. Its advertising poster hangs on the wall in front of me as I type, compliments of Netflix Derek who gently removed it from a hallway bulletin board thus saving it from the recycling bin and for me. Columbia Records released Dylan’s debut album in 1962. As with the Stones, I’ve no memory of life without His Bobness (Still mildly jarring that I can’t say the same for Queen Elizabeth II any longer). Like many Dylan fans I’ve ridden a pogo stick on a trampoline because he’s been everywhere, man, and doesn’t care who follows. Eventually you come around to his entire body of work, some of it spotty, on your own terms because, again, he doesn’t care what you think. "Jokerman" doesn’t welcome or thank his audience, he taunts us.

Seated beside Netflix Derek in that classic academic arc, that dazed lectern-facing smile, I wondered: “After all the songs, the albums, the concerts, the films, the books and the music press interviews, has it all come down to this? Guess the Nobel Prize for Literature will do that.”

Thankfully, Dylan continues to confound. His Bootleg Series of archival records continues to flow like his Bob branded bourbon. Rough and Rowdy Ways dropped during the pandemic, and like le Carre’s Silverview it’s a worthy addition to an expansive catalogue. The “Neverending Tour” is off covid hiatus. And to my latent academic joy His Bobness published The Philosophy of Modern Song a few weeks ago. This will be my first read of 2023. Sixty-six essays about 66 songs. I suspect his editor’s suggestion would have been the more obvious 61. But if Dylan wants to take that route instead of that particular highway, I don’t care, I’m riding along anyway.

For the record: The best book I read in 2022 was Colson Whitehead’s novel Harlem Shuffle. It flows like the Bob & Earl song and therefore more gracefully than the Stones' affectionately slaughtered cover. Whitehead is one of those bastard authors whose style and storytelling abilities make me wonder why I bother. This is not New York City as traditional background vaguery: American Psycho, The Bonfire of the Vanities or Bright Lights, Big City; tourist map locales, Woody Allen, Times Square; that stuff. I was reminded of Mordecai Richler boring into Montreal’s grittier neighbourhoods and Hubert Selby writing about Brooklyn. Because Whitehead set his story in the sixties and he was born in 1969 I must assume some form of intertextual process was involved. I’ll leave that question for American lit professors because Whitehead is worthy of inclusion in their canon.     

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of literature since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers.