Top Five Books
A List by Angela Rawlings
Posted July 23rd, 2007.
Each week we ask a local celebrity to enumerate five pieces of literature, or "books," which have deeply affected or influenced them at some point in their lives. It is our aim to introduce you to an artist, and to give you a sense of his or her tastes, while also providing you with a wealth of interesting literature to explore, in the hopes of raising our national and individual literacy level. Enjoy.
Week #1: Angela Rawlings
Angela Rawlings is the award-winning author of Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (Coach House Books, Spring 2006), which was featured in The Globe and Mail's list of top 100 books of 2006. She is the co-editor of Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, Fall 2005), a compilation of up-and-coming poets working from a diverse range of influences. As well as being a poet and editor, Angela has been involved in coordinating the Scream Literary Festival, and has taught several successful workshops on poetry and creative writing, including her Poetry Toolbox Workshop for youth. Wide Slumber was recently adapted for the stage. You can read more about that, and about the book itself, at www.commutiny.net.
Angela lives in Toronto.
1. Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Seraphini
This book is best discovered without copious pre-amble. However, the limited edition print runs of this artist-designed book, written in an alien language and illustrating a world eerily similar to Earth, may prove difficult for many readers to track down (or to afford, as copies can cost more than $2,500).
Try your local inter-library loan (Carleton University has been known to share their copy with other libraries in Ontario, as an example).
It's not as thrilling as clutching the oversized hardcover original, but a kind soul has scanned the book for all to see.
2. When FOX Is a Thousand by Larissa Lai
"I come from an honest family of foxes."
This opening line commences the story of the fox, the titular character and narrator. Two other narrators flesh out this magical tale: an eleventh-century Chinese poetess and a twentieth-century Vancouver-based student. Lai's an alchemical author, morphing the everyday into wonder. Prepare to be enchanted.
3. The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed by Racter
"Bill sings to Sarah. Sarah sings to Bill. Perhaps they will do other dangerous things together. They may eat lamb or stroke each other. They may chant of their difficulties and their happiness. They have love but they also have typewriters.
That is interesting."
Racter is a computer program designed in 1984 to compile syntactically accurate sentences from a wide array of words. The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed is the first full-length book generated by a computer program, compiled by Bill Chamberlain. The prose and poetry in the book are lucid and readable, its programmatic origins not noticeable. The program and book are early forerunners of digital poetics, raising questions of what an author's function has become (where the human author, relating to Racter, is in fact the computer programmer).
Full text available online through the indispensable ubu.com.
4. Journal by bpNichol
"all these words are only nothing all these words are only sounds i dance with the sounds i sing with the sounds the sound is all the meaning that there is the sound is the loving the sound is the longing oh god i am so full of sound i open my mouth and sound escapes i open my mouth to let the sound escape my body fills with it i vibrate with the sound i hate the words the words destroy the sounds with useless meanings the meanings pile up and the sound is lost i scream with the sound i live in the sound the sound flows around me i am lost in it oh surely this is knowing to live & breathe & celebrate the sound all heaven is sound i am caught in the sound father you named me but gave me no sound it was a flat lifeless thing this naming"
Depending on your source, you could receive recommendations for any number of texts by Canada's patron saint of poetry, bpNichol. My personal favourite is Journal. This chameleon-like text blends poetry, fiction, and diary. Its publisher, Coach House Press, describes the book as employing "Gertrude Stein's technique of using evolving yet repetitive syntax to develop language as a correlative for intense emotional states."
5. A Humument by Tom Phillips
This treated text is an ongoing project from British artist Tom Phillips, who unveils the story within the story of Victorian novelist W. H. Mallock's A Human Document. Phillips conjures the spirit of a page through an erasure exercise! Try at home today.