My WEBSITE

 After so many years of using this blog to share my stuff, I finally have become a real boy and have my own WEBSITE! 

Please visit www.ellieanglin.com from now on to check out what I am up to!! 

White Tears review

White Tears

By Hari Kunzru

Published in The Kitchener Citizen, October 2018

White Tears is the latest offering from author Hari Kunzru, who specializes
in “translit” -- a literary genre that seeks to collapse space and time while
maintaining narrative traction in the reader’s mind. Kunzru accomplishes
this so masterfully in White Tears that you will gladly surrender to his
ever-shifting reality.

Seth, our protagonist, is average in every way and therefore serves as a blank

screen on which other characters are crisply projected. The achingly cool (and

ultra rich) Carter Wallace is the focus of his attention, and takes him on the

coat-tail ride of his life to New York, where they become music producers.

Through Carter, we enter a world of record collectors: mostly white men who

are alienated by the present, and obsessively collect the past. The rarest and

most prized treasures are early blues records made by black slaves, ex-slaves

or descendants of slaves. It is not enough for Carter to listen to the music -- he

wants to own it, by any means necessary. He becomes increasingly unhinged

as he hunts down one record, the extremely rare and groundbreaking Graveyard

Blues by mythologized figure Charlie Shaw -- one we are not sure even exists.

When he at last gets his hands on it, the universe of the novel is flipped upside

down. Reality disintegrates and space, time, and sanity become fluid and shifting.

The book gains dizzying momentum, and you’ll find yourself devouring pages to

find what happens next. Kunzru shows how seemingly innocent acts of appropriation

are echoes of the total forms of violence they descend from. The collector’s desire to

own black music springs from the same well that fueled slavery. In the world of White

Tears, however, the would-be possessors come to be possessed themselves by the

ghosts of retribution. Dark secrets materialise, and the final pages sew everything

together neatly like an intricate quilt, as interlocking and systematic as oppression itself.

White Tears is an entrancing, fast-paced mystery full of twists and turns that feel at once revelatory and inevitable. But it is so much more than a great read -- it is a metaphysical examination of white privilege, cultural appropriation, and selfhood that in the end will leave you with the satisfying sense that justice has been served.

Our Ink, Our Stories for KPL

In September I started my dream job at the Kitchener Public Library, as a Library Assistant (helping people sign up for library cards, check in and check out books, DVDs, CDs, audiobooks, helping people use the internet, the printer, access classes and resources) at the main branch of the library, which is like a beautiful art gallery as well as being a breathtaking work of architecture, as well as a place that houses a lot of very happy personal memories of reading, learning, art and community, but also at the four community library branches (Forest Heights, Country Hills, Pioneer Park and Grand River) which each have their own distinct personality and populations they serve.

In addition to loving the work, I also love the organization and what they stand for. I also work with and for some of the nicest, coolest, smartest people in the area. I honestly enjoy going to work every day and actually believe in what we do. It's so unusual! Unlike some libraries, the KPL is super progressive and forward thinking in it's vision, and in the last year enrolment has increased by 20%! The library is so much more than a place to get any book, movie, or piece of music for free, but it's kind of the true manifestation of democracy - a non-capitalist town hall - where anyone is welcome regardless of where they are at in life, where people can come when they come as refugees to Canada, when they get out of jail after twenty years, when they don't know how to use the internet, when they have five kids and are about to have a nervous breakdown, when they can't read, when they have a disability, when they want to make art or use technology or make music but can't afford the supplies, and they are all welcomed as our customers. Or you can come use the library if you have everything you could want and need in life, and you'll get more than you could ever imagine out of it. You can borrow musical instruments, toys, try virtual reality, make a 3D print, make a podcast, make a video on our green screen.

As if the job couldn't get any better, one of the people I work with - Meg Harder, is an amazing artist and person, and asked me to help her with a really cool project that the CEO Mary Chevreau asked her to take on, and I've been loving to contribute to it. The project is Our Ink, Our Stories, and it is a blog telling stories of the residents of Waterloo Region through their tattoos (or other uses of ink/paint on their bodies).

New pages from Tender Buttons

"Fluid"

"HER FACE"

"Reaching, Reaching!"

Regarding Construction.

March 7, 2012

For the Attention of:

Councillor Diane McArthur, Ward 8

Office of the Mayor and Council

Kitchener City Hall

200 King Street West

Kitchener, Ontario

Canada, N2G 4G7

Dear Councillor McArthur,

I am writing to you concerning the construction of the Bauer Lofts behind my family home, from the year 2003 to 2008. 

As you know, Councillor, the soiled roots of our sister-cities resisted gentrification by any means at their disposal, and their tactics proved highly effective. 

First it was the K-W Lifers who came in with guns blazing -  hollering at city council suits that they’d lived there since before WWII when Kitchener was still Berlin and (darn it) if all these ritzy new buildings started popping up, she just wouldn’t be the same city! 

Then Secret Societies of Dirt took up the resistance against the building. Asbestos vined its way towards God between steel girders and damp drywall. Mould splatted its spores like Pollock's paints, feeding on blank canvas. 

The ghosts of our proletariat past put up a good fight too: the old mattress factory out of which the lofts were to be built spat out a young labourer fourteen stories down – back-breaking on the main drag – all for trying to transform it into luxury lofts for the Young Urban Professional. 

Yes. The soiled roots of Kitchener-Waterloo resisted at every step, but progress and economy stepped on also.  Still, it took them eight long, expensive years of stumbling through a jungle of red tape to erect that beautiful behemoth. 

At twenty-nine, I watched from my bedroom in my parent’s ancient house as the lofts came to dwarf us, and the city I grew up in became foreign to me.  The buildings and landmarks of a city anchor us in time, and my anchor was losing its hold. Each trendy new boutique or café that popped up pasted itself over part of my past.

Councillor, I used to be somebody in this town. For instance, I never had to fill out those little slips at the karaoke bar. They knew I would sing “Life Is A Highway” – a Canadian classic – every time.

Now the karaoke bar is a highfalutin jazz club.

I’m not too proud to admit that I tried going back to that club once, but I just kept fumbling with the zipper of my raincoat and then I made the waitress mad at me by asking if they still sold pizza fingers.

I couldn’t get my hood up and slink out of there fast enough. On my millionth walk home down King Street in the rain dropping night I could hear music wafting from the buildings that I passed and I didn’t recognize a single song.  

I guess it’s really gone. I guess all that remains of that rocking 1980’s ghost-city of my teenage years (the bowling alley, the ashtrays, M’s clear nail polish, the smell of mattress factory fire, D whistling Hotel California, the Dollar Store, the train tracks) are Memories. Can’t I at least keep these? 

But oh, how they evaporate! See them float skyward like cottonseed caught in the wind! See them take flight from us like unsecured helium balloons!  And see me – shamelessly – leap! jump! and snatch! them to my body in a desperate dance of recovery. 

And as I see D turn his chair toward shadows, see him retreat within to contemplate the corners of his mind, I dance myself into vapor not to resist change, but to stop time.

I stop time too by looking backwards.  As part of this backwards-looking project at some point I became obsessed with my own family history.

With a crowbar and might I prised open a trunk in our attic at night and the family secrets – wound tightly for decades in disquietude and dyspepsia - unfurled from it like streamers shot from a novelty party canon.

Those dim and burnished corridors of our descent - unending like an anvil that falls but does not drop –inhabited by geometric faces and cut glass minds! Names encased in crystal, embedded in space and time, revolve slowly and twinkle in the spectral dust of ancestral ghosts.

Crests, Medals, Portraits!  Iron, Copper, Lyme! And the letters! These are the proof I’ve needed!

I want everyone to know! He was once that turbine the sun that spins forever!  He too is the iron blanket of winter that rusts over time.  He is fading to shadow now but I want them to know: D wrote letters and told jokes and collected coins once.

My new genealogy pet project seamlessly replaces my loft-protesting pet project and this forces me to concede that it is not this new set-design of a city that I find so repugnant. And outrage and resistance just take too much energy these days anyway.  Just between you and me I was drunk and melancholy at the Residents Association Action Meeting and it kind of soured me on the whole community involvement thing.

I just wish, I just so wish! – against reason, against hope - that this city would always stay the way it was when M & D were young and healthy and so fully alive in it - when D could write books and give lectures and M fairly waltzed. 

M made me join a support group for adult children.  At first I felt like I didn’t fit in there, but then I came to love this group of middle aged women helping their parents to die.  They are beginning to convince me that, in the end, resistance is no match for entropy. Nor are draftsmen, nor money, nor architects, nor mortar. Even your Young Urban Professionals are but soft-headed souls like me, who too will make memories and forget to keep them. 

Still, I had to write this letter because it did get pretty lonely living among construction for eight years. 

But there was this one day that I saw the sunset squeal through the gaping metal mouths of the new lofts, and I felt the giant crane loom its make-shift cross over the city, and for a minute I felt its arms connect the cracked sidewalks between my present and my past. 

I thought you should know.

Sincerely,

Susan Knox. 

Tender Buttons: Sneak Peek

Hoi Gois, Please check out this sneeeeky peek at some of the pages I've done on my up-coming book, Tender Buttons.  Let me know what you think because I still have a lot of pages to do!  Thank you.

Cover

Frontispiece

(Note: the letters that I'm using are from a 19th century children's science book!  How precious!  When they are printed they won't have the same shadow, nor will the individual snipperdoodles. ie the line around the flies won't be visible)

Page 2: "Staggering Gems"

Page 12 "it's too hard"