New, Old and Notable: Volume 2, Issue 1
Reviews and Comments by Gordon Phinn
New, Old & Notable is a recurring column by Gordon Phinn in which he concisely reviews several books from the past and present. Links will take you to the publisher’s page for more information.
You can access Gordon’s previous columns here: https://www.theseaboardreview.ca/t/new-old-and-notable
The Waste Land Project, Al Moritz, editor, (Vallum Chapbook Series #40, 2025)
It is in the nature of anthologies for the reader to warm to some entries with more alacrity than others. Even in chapbook sized collections, such as The Waste Land Project, with only six contributors, three Canadian and three Ukrainian, one is presented with a depth and breadth of vision and interpretation, one can easily stumble in asserting a coherent reaction. The attempt to embrace T.S. Eliot’s iconoclastic genre breaker of 1922 and the contemporary invasion of Ukraine by Russia is a tall order by any stretch of the imagination, but both the Toronto International Festival of Authors and Theatre of War have organized live-on-stage renditions featuring twelve poets interspersed with sections 1,3 &5 of The Waste Land. How that cornucopia fared (2022 apparently) in front of a live audience is but a matter of speculation at this point, although one has to admit radical juxtapositions can jar an audience into surprise reactions, as did the original exposure of The Waste Land to the early modernist audience, as did Wallace Stevens Harmonium and James Joyce’s Ulysses, both unleashed in 1922 as was The Waste Land. The current print pamphlet, issued by The Vallum Society for Education in Arts and Letters and edited by A.F. Moritz, features a slimmed down selection and no Waste Land as such. Although fleeting references are inserted here and there, the feeling is more Kiev than London, and by extension as much Syria and the Balkans. Wars, whether civil or seemingly international, awaken their dormant demons of blood lust and vengeance as if from an afternoon nap, whereas Eliot’s innovation in poetic form and utterance remains standing alone and aloof from the fray.
Diversity, both of origin and expression, is to be welcomed, indeed celebrated, and the reader here is the beneficiary of that bounty. From Madhur Anand’s Love Letter To A Burning World and the found poem Influence Is Infinitely Circuital, both deeply and subtly referential, to Alex Averbuch’s two untitled epistles from the war zone, “how to survive what has already happened” and “how do you return to a town which does not exist” where destruction breathes its rancid breath as the poet asks of his beloveds, “where am I to go now” and “where does one say goodbye to oneself these days?” Then to Erin Robinson’s surreal fantasias: “O brains blanching/in their skulls unreeling with the steaming sea/Carboniferous kings nursing a hangover from 1970/still out a-fishing in the old green heat”. It is here where Eliot’s “I can connect nothing to nothing” becomes “everything connects to everything” and “the violet hour” becomes “the violent hour”.
Editor Moritz’s Who Cares If The Sky calls the insults of anguish into song, that suffering of the world, the seeking of pleasure in despair, “your joints snapped/an arm and an eye separated/your face dwindled in the rain to a muddy trace” and wonders “Is there anyone that cares/if you enjoy your hope?” Perhaps it matters not when “Once I entered/death’s other kingdom, life’s true kingdom, /furnace of the purple center/of the morning glory flower./Now I was gone – alive and dead./Now only I was here, always, the adventure/of sparkling water rippling into leaf shadow over pure rocks…Let it all vanish, it will. Who cares?”
The more narrative entries from Halyna Kruk and Iryna Shuvalova pulled me back into bleak survival mode, the burdened experiencers rather than the astute observers. “We stopped digging deep long ago,/but only about two fingers down/we leave the plowed earth unturned/so the fertile soil won’t blow away/altogether in one generation/so we rake the beds,/we make signs of the cross, and sow/we sow, from here to there/just like everyone.”
And thus to complete the circle, the one where you pause “at the heart of light, the silence” seeking the blessing of “Shanti Shanti Shanti”, I found myself recalling Eliot’s Prufrock (1917) dedication “pour Jean Verdenal, mort aux Dardanelles”.
The Second Law Of Quantum Complexity, Michael Mirrola (Aeolus House, 2025)
I have been following, over the decades, the progress of quantum physics, in as much as one can when not in any way qualified to partake of the debate but only observe from the bleachers as those in the know pursue the ever more elusive goals that might one day reveal themselves as answers when the veils of paradox are persuaded to step aside that we might see, in some blinding moment of revelation, all that is, but apparently not actually there.
Of course, we know that we cannot actually observe any particle or particle interaction without changing its behaviour. Or, even if we desperately desire, cannot see through the carnival-like chaos of the subatomic world to anything resembling a dance with steps that might be studied and shaped into some kind of order. Oh no, forget all that. Abandon hope all ye who enter here. Categories, definitions, predictable outcomes, persuasive ideologies, basic ground floor understanding? Better try Alice Through The Looking Glass or a compendium of DMT reports. Those dastardly photons and their cousins act with the same mocking impunity of the self-replicating machine elves. Neutrinos, even though millions of them can pass through the planet without a moment’s hazard, are notoriously difficult to detect. When you throw in the current factoid, doubtlessly to be someday debunked, that dark matter, whatever the heck that is, makes up the bulk of the known universe, while we live, think and have our beings in about 25%, you want to go right back to cheerful wine and cheese parties, where cultured interactions lend us a momentary sense of balance and humour.
Michael Mirolla, well-known and respected editor and publisher of Guernica, has seen fit to forage amidst the endlessly growing information in the quantum ocean of possibility and contradiction to somehow grow a carefully nurtured watergarden of meandering narratives, impossible timelines and metaphors magically unleashed from their moorings. It is a brave effort, doomed I fear to an inevitable but noble defeat, even as it blazes brightly in its daring.
“There are a thousand thousand stories here and there is but one story here. Let us pick and choose the ones that pluck at the strings. In the spirit of research and to avoid tedium (a little too close to Te Deum, non e vero), we will sample rather than repeat verbatim in languages few are left to understand. Three samples in keeping with the three tenses that allow us to time travel without the danger of running into one of the paradoxes that will condemn us to a Mobius Strip without any hope of jumping off.”
In assembling a catalogue of narratives, is the poet seeking some uber-narrative? I suspect that is the drift of his determined and delirious confusions, and who am I to complain? Me, just another packet of information, a quanta of consciousness, questioning the drift of its quest, the poet’s quest in his Möbius strip of mirrors, as images manifest and disassemble with dizzying speed whether measured by seconds or eons
“shut your eyes. It all seems to take place In a flash. So what if that flash lasts For ten-to-the-ten-to-the-ten years. It’s still A mere flash in the pan. Open your eyes. If you could see, there would be nothing To see. An emptiness so vast not even The most Joycean imagination can populate. But hold on a minute. Do you hear that? Of course not. If you could, Might not that be a hum in the background? The sound of something resetting itself. Like a Picasso setting Into the colours that gave it birth. Or a planet declumping its way Back from planetary embryo To planetesimal to clusters To dust grains and ice in a glass cloud. A mere Few million years in the dismantling.” “And once back to its elemental self, Within a subatomic quantum womb Unable to receive or send out messages, What can be inferred about that universe?” “No matter what universe emerges this time around (and what number it represents in the revolving lineup), it’s good to know that the old second law isn’t he last word. Come on now, admit it, the idea of rebirth is always welcome.”
I dare you to reconnoiter this enemy territory in the shadows cast by lyric and sonnet. I dare you to read this poem at your leisure and lean into the risk of not knowing where you stand, where you used to stand or where you’d like to stand as galaxies multiply and planets proliferate and sentient beings shift their allegiance from one species to another tempting belief system where evidence seems to be accumulating. Though the laws of quantum complexity chuckle at themselves, physicists can offer heartfelt testimonials. Try Werner Heisenberg or Niels Bohr.
Loud and Clear: The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound and the Quest for Audio Perfection by Brian Anderson (St. Martin’s Press 2025)
Biographies and critiques of seminal rock bands have become the norm these past decades, their struggles to get established, find a record company that does not cheat them and a line-up that looks sufficiently reliable to sustain the pressures of fame and money that inevitably taints the original brotherhood of creative expression and expansion. Some are shiny cash-ins replete with research from secondary and tertiary sources and titillating trashy gossip, others are labours of love, with years of tireless research and a deep well of penetrating interviews. One thinks of Dennis McNally’s Long Strange Trip or Harry Shapiro’s Electric Gypsy.
But a biography of a sound system? Brian Anderson’s Loud and Clear would seem to stand alone. David Gilmour has had a book devoted to his iconic Black Strat but little of consequence on the evolution of Floyd’s sound system. Praising quotes and comments, yes. The Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound system, better thought of as a behemoth, slowly and carefully assembled from about ‘69 through ’74, has become a legend of near perfection, huge and precise, to be celebrated by younger fans through in-concert recordings. That’s folk like me who had his turn in ’84 and ’87 at Canada’s Wonderland when my ears, attuned through years of rock gigs when bands like King Crimson and Pink Floyd made accuracy and purity number one for concert-goers. Those Dead gigs astonished me with their pinpoint accuracy and delectable separation of instruments. The sound system seemed very much a seventh member of the group. The philosophy of stoner perception you may say. So send me to the back of the class to reevaluate the Rite of Spring. Fine by me.
Meanwhile, let’s meander through the highways and biways of Loud and Clear. Many tales are told and reflected on with quotes from the roadies, the sound and lighting engineers. Names like Steve Parrish, Rock Scully, Dan Healy and Betty Cantor resound with the more obvious Owsley Stanley who took on the Dead’s amplification and sound balancing early on, financing much experimentation with his own LSD profits.
As the Wall of Sound expanded year by year, mainly through unbridled enthusiasm on the part of band and crew, to almost impossible proportions in the era of Europe ’72, the reader is astounded by the challenges of transportation and endless equipment breakdowns. The quest for audio perfection takes on the cast of legend, a holy grail of mythical proportions. On April 1st 1972, fifteen thousand pounds of equipment sat inside flight cases in customs at JFK.” By then they had upgraded to an Alembic PA and recording equipment, and Alembic’s purchasing agent Rosie McGee recalled how intense the inventorying became. The seven and a half ton load had to be itemized in one document, a “chaotic and imperfect process”. Rosie was the “first in line of baffled customs officials, venue and hall techs and stagehands, fire code auditors across five countries”. Even the 16 track deck recording unit was “as big as a wall”. The touring party “counted 49 people, 7 musicians, 5 managers, 5 office staff, 10m equipment handlers, four drivers and over two dozen others”. As Rock Scully observed, The Dead now believed that “in order to hit the big crowds they’re playing to they need a wall of sound, born in Owsley’s brain and materialized by Healy.” This love of the gargantuan continued until ’74/75 when a truce was declared, leading to a pause in touring for psychic and physical regeneration.
Flash forward to Las Vegas June 2024: the author and friends are seated in the 19,000 capacity Sphere, a 2.3 billion performance venue , where Dead & Company were at the 14th show of a 30 show residency. The group plays in front of an animated film of the Wall of Sound. “Like the Wall, the Sphere’s Holoplat X1 uses gobs of individual speakers and amps in one single sound reinforcement system. But whereas the Wall had something like 600 speakers in an early line array, the Sphere’s system uses 167,000 total speakers, distributed across I,578 Holoplot X1 Matrix arrays , weighing over 197 tons. The arrays use state-of-the-art ‘beamforming’ and wave-field synthesis technology that throws sound spatially throughout the orb, providing each seat with a consistent mix and volume.”
Anderson observed that “the experience was more than I expected, absolutely worth it, and melted away my skepticism.” Does every show need this level of sensory overload? “No, but for a one-off immersive, almost out-of-body trip, giving in to total escapism was sublime.”
Negotiating With The Dead, A Writer on Writing: Margaret Atwood (Cambridge University Press 2002)
I’ve been living with the legend of Margaret Atwood for decades. I watched it develop slowly but surely from her grim but gripping early novels and poetry to fame, international fame and her present residence in icontown, where she continues to shock, amuse and inspire. Startling insight and acerbic wit continue to please even those outside her gloomygirl fanbase feathering her dystopian nest. I never found her catalogue of authoritarian repressions any more convincing than Orwell’s 1948/84 nightmare. Sure, she was not the first to riff on his themes, and you can bet she will not be the last.
Meanwhile, I have checked in from time to time on her non-fiction (Moving Targets/Payback) and found them smart, sharp and witty. Negotiating With The Dead does not concern itself with that legendary rock band, but that unavoidable mountain of literary achievement we dare to call the canon and the writer’s journey in coming to terms with its lengthy shadow as it creeps into every orifice of the scribbler’s life. Finding one’s perch on that ancient leafy oak which overlooks the garden of wordy creative efforts can be a lifelong task. Thinking you’re in the middle as you start out once again, peeking out from a pile of manuscripts.
These essays were adapted from the Empson lectures at the University of Cambridge in 2000. That, my friends, would be William Empson, the 23-year-old author of the now legendary Seven Types Of Ambiguity (1930), a critical milepost referenced by many. As Atwood notes, the young fellow was expelled from Cambridge as he composed, for, wait for it, having contraceptives in his rooms. Nowadays, she chuckles, he’d likely be expelled for not having them.
As Atwood reflects on her early years in the virtually non-existent swamps of CanLit circa, 1958-68, many similar jibes are included. Literature was not seen as coming from this vast outpost of ours but from London, Paris and New York, where real writers, guys mostly, executed their blows against the empire, guys mostly. Girls, suitably coiffed, guarded the glamour castles of movies, theatre, and modelling.
“By the time I was twenty, I knew some people who wrote, but not one of them expected to make a living at it. To get even a crumb from the literary moveable feast you’d have to publish outside of the country, and that meant you’d have to write something that might snare you a foreign publisher. It went without saying that these foreign publishers were not much interested in Canada. Thus my generation was doomed, faute de mieux, to a devotion to art for art’s sake, though we had by no means explored the history and the iconography of that position.” Yes, Peggy, all that starving in a garret to get some visions. How distant that all seems now, with the army of the digitally dispossessed doing it all for the love of it.
Recall that these pensees were penned in the triumphalist years around the turn of the millennium when Canlit practitioners could command largish advances, work foreign book fairs and tours, be gifted with international distribution and the dutiful hustle of agents. But back in the poverty purity days to “write for money, or even to be thought to have done so, put you in the prostitute category” and even now, circa 2000, she could yet be addressed by a Parisian intellectual who sneered, ‘Is it true you write the bestsellers’ Not on purpose was her reply. Always the wag, our Peggy, as she notes the two types of snobbery, “that which ascribes value to a book because it makes lots of money, and that which ascribes value to a book because it doesn’t.”
Referencing Lewis Hyde from ‘The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property’ she notes “any equation that tries to connect literary value and money is juggling apples and oranges.” What about Chekhov, initially writing exclusively for money to support his poverty stricken family, does that make him ignoble? Or Shakespeare churning out stuff for the stage, hoping to please his audience?
Apparently there are “four ways of arranging literary worth and money: good books that make money, bad books that make money, good books that don’t make money, bad books that don’t make money.” According to the previously quoted Hyde, the serious artist would be well advised to acquire an agent who can mediate between the realm of art and that of money. This saves the writer from any undignified and contaminating haggling on his own behalf.”
Again, weren’t those the days. Now it’s more like finding an agent, any agent who might dignify you with a reply and who isn’t sleeping on her friend’s couch and working whatever shifts she can get in the gig economy. Have we not come full circle? Maybe that circle will become a spiral, a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning….
Gordon Phinn, a longtime resident of Oakville, Ontario, has been active in literary production since 1975, with several titles in a variety of genres to his credit: Non-fiction, fiction, poetry, criticism and memoir. His early critical work for Books In Canada and Paragraph is collected in It’s All About Me, and his four-year reviewing stint at WordCity will soon be available as Joy In All Genres. Other recent essay collections: Bowering and McFadden, Laughing At The Universe Of Lies and Consciousness: A Primer. A novel, An American In Heaven, a memoir Moving Through Many Dimensions and a poetry collection, Winter, Spring and Eternity’s Seduction. He is currently editing a collection of essays in celebration of the work of Laurence Hutchman, to be published by Guernica in 2026.