An academic with a conscience that compels him to contribute to the poorest neighbourhoods, Peter Babiak worked as an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia for ten years and later assumed the role of academic director of humanities 101, a pioneering outreach program that brought classes in the liberal arts and social sciences to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
His first non-fiction book Garage Criticism (Anvil, 2016) presents a new voice in cultural criticism and critical theory. Babiak attacks best-selling books, television shows and other popular cultural mores of current times by satirizing Hunger Games ("The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - But It Might Be Carnivalized 'N' Shit) and Twilight (Really Dumb Students). He casts a gimlet eye on student/professor relationships, inappropriate office visits, deconstructs our fascination with internet culture, and critiques the dogma of economics and marketing. Babiak does all this in aid of bringing attention back to the supremacy of linguistic thinking in evaluating everyday cultural affairs.
BOOKS:
Garage Criticism (Anvil, 2016) $20 978-1-77214-050-7
*
Garage Criticism: Cultural Missives in an Age of Distraction
by Peter Babiak
Vancouver: Anvil Press 2016.
$20.00 / 978-1-77214-050-7
Reviewed by Ginny Ratsoy
*
Fortunate is the reviewer who, confronting the blank page after finishing reading, finds her most pressing concern is how to do such a fine book justice. She is even more fortunate if the reading stimulated a detour to some non-reviewing, non-academic writing of her own.
Garage Criticism, a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, an Eric Hoffer award, is a cohesive collection of essays rich in literary references and redolent of the classics of the form; it is equally - and profoundly - relevant to the twenty-first century. Incisive, fresh, witty, wry, philosophical, and dramatic, Babiak's essays demand -- and reward -- deep reading.
The subject matter is a diverse and wonderful melding of the public and private worlds. Topics range from the popularity of zombies, Fifty Shades of Grey, Facebook, and the Ashley Madison extra-marital affairs website, through to the history of pulp fiction, the relative merits of similes and metaphors, sex in early novels, and the ongoing American response to the terrorist attacks of September 2001.
Babiak's own life is intimately woven into the material - from a lengthy coma and the loss and recuperation of his sense of smell through to his relationship with his students and his daughter, an extra-marital affair, and the demise of his marriage. He is a master of fruitful digressions.
An adherent of Marshall McLuhan's conviction that the medium is the message, Babiak pulls no punches in his scrutiny of electronic technology with a clarity and vitality many might find lacking in McLuhan. In the context of avatars and gaming, he writes, "All we're talking about is the conflation of the two old enemies - culture and economics - and about the fetishization of absolutist consumerism, the linchpins of the entire system"; (p.24).
Several essays elaborate on this theme. Babiak apparently remembers well what Douglas Coupland called (in the Telegraph, September 14, 2014) the "Pre-Internet Brain,"; and he is not amused (although amusing) about its alteration: "Our brains are evolving new circuits to skim through the mass of words and images they see online, and though that can be fun as hell, it is not always good, because reading is one activity and skimming is what you do to get the scum off the top of milk"; (p. 72).
His reverence for words is palpable in his comments on society's image fixation: "It's words - always harder to understand and much less fun to look at - that can deliver us from evil and make us more complete thinkers, not images..."; (p. 72). There's no ambiguity in Babiak's wry take on the aggregate influence of the electronic sphere.
Garage Criticism embraces the local as it deconstructs the homogenized, dumbed-down global picture the digital world promulgates. Babiak's love of the larger literary world is patent in each of these twenty-one essays, but his belief in the importance of place and in the literary history of Vancouver shines through.
"My Agreeable Illusion"; focuses on the description of a specific Vancouver view in the opening words of Ethel Wilson's novel Swamp Angel (most of which, incidentally, is set in the B.C. Interior) that so profoundly impressed him that a top criteria in his house hunting was finding that view.
Babiak's essay "Poetry Isn't Elsewhere: Vancouver Poetry"; examines works by Earle Birney, George Bowering, and others about various physical spots in Vancouver to illustrate his contention that poetry is "the only kind of writing ... that can drill its way into the thought control centre of [our] minds and deposit a load of knowledge there"; (p. 141).
Zsuzsi Gartner, Douglas Coupland, and various Vancouver visual artists are brought into service in these and other essays as Babiak examines the role of art in cementing the city's sense of itself.
When I first opened Garage Criticism, I wondered if this wide-ranging critique of twenty-first century popular culture might be vulnerable to the three frequent pitfalls of non-fiction. The most common is overkill. Typically, the first several chapters will be fresh and cogent, but the remainder will only hammer home the points of those initial chapters -- rather than extend them -- by piling on more case studies and rhetoric.
The second flaw is an absence of rich connection. Essays can be isolated from each other -- fine on their own, but with no "the- whole- is- greater-than- the-sum-of- its-parts"; effect.
A third, albeit rarer, hazard is that every chapter will hang together until the final one, which might not fit with, and might even be contradictory to, the rest of the work.
Garage Criticism deftly sidesteps these pitfalls. Far from stumbling into them, Babiak ambles through the bewildering territory of the new millennium as a storyteller confident in the power of language - the collection's unifying force.
As a student and teacher of fiction, he also grasps the importance of structure. Beyond being (roughly) chronologically ordered, these essays connect, overlap, and form an appealing narrative arc. Each one is also about both reading and writing. As they explore the finer details of writing -- down to the exact word, and, especially, the construction of compelling sentences -- they remind us of why we read.
Babiak sometimes gives short shrift to the role his day job plays in his successful writing, likening teacher of literature at Vancouver's Langara College to a museum night watchman or a library book shelver: "it's rewarding in an intangible way and it's always more pedestrian than provocative."; (p. 175).
As my longtime job has been teaching literature (mostly Canadian) at a university and, as I have held positions that are slight variants on the two to which he compares teaching, I feel compelled to respond. Yes, all three are in service of a greater public good and do not result in an immediate, tangible product -- in the way that my father's hobby of woodworking, for example, did.
However, the museum and library positions are limited in scope and performed at the behest of those of higher rank, which might account for them being more prosaic than electrifying. The post-secondary educator, despite working in an increasingly bureaucratized environment, still has considerable freedom and influence.
Furthermore, engaging with other human beings (even considering the deleterious effects of their online lives) about powerful words and narratives has considerable potential for invigoration, as well as being a handy connecting device for writing about writing in the twenty-first century -- as Babiak's own essays corroborate.
Garage Criticism: Cultural Missives in an Age of Distraction should be a welcome addition to the libraries of those educators, parents, students, or just plain engaged citizens interested in our complex and enigmatic relationship with popular culture.
It will also appeal to readers drawn to the memoir form. I found some of what the jacket blurb calls "memoir-based essays"; jaw-dropping in their candour.
And to those interested in the history of writing and in learning how to write, Babiak's collection will be both an exemplar and an unorthodox instruction manual.
*
Ginny Ratsoy is an Associate Professor of English at Thompson Rivers University specializing in Canadian literature.
[Ormsby Review 2017]
His first non-fiction book Garage Criticism (Anvil, 2016) presents a new voice in cultural criticism and critical theory. Babiak attacks best-selling books, television shows and other popular cultural mores of current times by satirizing Hunger Games ("The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - But It Might Be Carnivalized 'N' Shit) and Twilight (Really Dumb Students). He casts a gimlet eye on student/professor relationships, inappropriate office visits, deconstructs our fascination with internet culture, and critiques the dogma of economics and marketing. Babiak does all this in aid of bringing attention back to the supremacy of linguistic thinking in evaluating everyday cultural affairs.
BOOKS:
Garage Criticism (Anvil, 2016) $20 978-1-77214-050-7
*
REVIEW
Garage Criticism: Cultural Missives in an Age of Distraction
by Peter Babiak
Vancouver: Anvil Press 2016.
$20.00 / 978-1-77214-050-7
Reviewed by Ginny Ratsoy
*
Fortunate is the reviewer who, confronting the blank page after finishing reading, finds her most pressing concern is how to do such a fine book justice. She is even more fortunate if the reading stimulated a detour to some non-reviewing, non-academic writing of her own.
Garage Criticism, a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, an Eric Hoffer award, is a cohesive collection of essays rich in literary references and redolent of the classics of the form; it is equally - and profoundly - relevant to the twenty-first century. Incisive, fresh, witty, wry, philosophical, and dramatic, Babiak's essays demand -- and reward -- deep reading.
The subject matter is a diverse and wonderful melding of the public and private worlds. Topics range from the popularity of zombies, Fifty Shades of Grey, Facebook, and the Ashley Madison extra-marital affairs website, through to the history of pulp fiction, the relative merits of similes and metaphors, sex in early novels, and the ongoing American response to the terrorist attacks of September 2001.
Babiak's own life is intimately woven into the material - from a lengthy coma and the loss and recuperation of his sense of smell through to his relationship with his students and his daughter, an extra-marital affair, and the demise of his marriage. He is a master of fruitful digressions.
An adherent of Marshall McLuhan's conviction that the medium is the message, Babiak pulls no punches in his scrutiny of electronic technology with a clarity and vitality many might find lacking in McLuhan. In the context of avatars and gaming, he writes, "All we're talking about is the conflation of the two old enemies - culture and economics - and about the fetishization of absolutist consumerism, the linchpins of the entire system"; (p.24).
Several essays elaborate on this theme. Babiak apparently remembers well what Douglas Coupland called (in the Telegraph, September 14, 2014) the "Pre-Internet Brain,"; and he is not amused (although amusing) about its alteration: "Our brains are evolving new circuits to skim through the mass of words and images they see online, and though that can be fun as hell, it is not always good, because reading is one activity and skimming is what you do to get the scum off the top of milk"; (p. 72).
His reverence for words is palpable in his comments on society's image fixation: "It's words - always harder to understand and much less fun to look at - that can deliver us from evil and make us more complete thinkers, not images..."; (p. 72). There's no ambiguity in Babiak's wry take on the aggregate influence of the electronic sphere.
Garage Criticism embraces the local as it deconstructs the homogenized, dumbed-down global picture the digital world promulgates. Babiak's love of the larger literary world is patent in each of these twenty-one essays, but his belief in the importance of place and in the literary history of Vancouver shines through.
"My Agreeable Illusion"; focuses on the description of a specific Vancouver view in the opening words of Ethel Wilson's novel Swamp Angel (most of which, incidentally, is set in the B.C. Interior) that so profoundly impressed him that a top criteria in his house hunting was finding that view.
Babiak's essay "Poetry Isn't Elsewhere: Vancouver Poetry"; examines works by Earle Birney, George Bowering, and others about various physical spots in Vancouver to illustrate his contention that poetry is "the only kind of writing ... that can drill its way into the thought control centre of [our] minds and deposit a load of knowledge there"; (p. 141).
Zsuzsi Gartner, Douglas Coupland, and various Vancouver visual artists are brought into service in these and other essays as Babiak examines the role of art in cementing the city's sense of itself.
When I first opened Garage Criticism, I wondered if this wide-ranging critique of twenty-first century popular culture might be vulnerable to the three frequent pitfalls of non-fiction. The most common is overkill. Typically, the first several chapters will be fresh and cogent, but the remainder will only hammer home the points of those initial chapters -- rather than extend them -- by piling on more case studies and rhetoric.
The second flaw is an absence of rich connection. Essays can be isolated from each other -- fine on their own, but with no "the- whole- is- greater-than- the-sum-of- its-parts"; effect.
A third, albeit rarer, hazard is that every chapter will hang together until the final one, which might not fit with, and might even be contradictory to, the rest of the work.
Garage Criticism deftly sidesteps these pitfalls. Far from stumbling into them, Babiak ambles through the bewildering territory of the new millennium as a storyteller confident in the power of language - the collection's unifying force.
As a student and teacher of fiction, he also grasps the importance of structure. Beyond being (roughly) chronologically ordered, these essays connect, overlap, and form an appealing narrative arc. Each one is also about both reading and writing. As they explore the finer details of writing -- down to the exact word, and, especially, the construction of compelling sentences -- they remind us of why we read.
Babiak sometimes gives short shrift to the role his day job plays in his successful writing, likening teacher of literature at Vancouver's Langara College to a museum night watchman or a library book shelver: "it's rewarding in an intangible way and it's always more pedestrian than provocative."; (p. 175).
As my longtime job has been teaching literature (mostly Canadian) at a university and, as I have held positions that are slight variants on the two to which he compares teaching, I feel compelled to respond. Yes, all three are in service of a greater public good and do not result in an immediate, tangible product -- in the way that my father's hobby of woodworking, for example, did.
However, the museum and library positions are limited in scope and performed at the behest of those of higher rank, which might account for them being more prosaic than electrifying. The post-secondary educator, despite working in an increasingly bureaucratized environment, still has considerable freedom and influence.
Furthermore, engaging with other human beings (even considering the deleterious effects of their online lives) about powerful words and narratives has considerable potential for invigoration, as well as being a handy connecting device for writing about writing in the twenty-first century -- as Babiak's own essays corroborate.
Garage Criticism: Cultural Missives in an Age of Distraction should be a welcome addition to the libraries of those educators, parents, students, or just plain engaged citizens interested in our complex and enigmatic relationship with popular culture.
It will also appeal to readers drawn to the memoir form. I found some of what the jacket blurb calls "memoir-based essays"; jaw-dropping in their candour.
And to those interested in the history of writing and in learning how to write, Babiak's collection will be both an exemplar and an unorthodox instruction manual.
*
Ginny Ratsoy is an Associate Professor of English at Thompson Rivers University specializing in Canadian literature.
[Ormsby Review 2017]
Articles: 1 Article for this author
Garage Criticism: Missives in the Age of Distraction by Peter Babiak (Anvil $20)
Review (2016)
By day, Peter Babiak is a mild-mannered Langara professor of English literature. Come sundown, he morphs into Garage Critic-the scourge of empty-headed, feeble-minded purveyors of what passes for post-Modern thought.
Free of any curriculum but his own, Garage Critic romps down the main drag of contemporary global culture with the irrepressible bravado of a teenage vandal on Friday night, tagging over the digital avatars many people have come to prefer to their real selves.
Garage Critic quotes the illiterate stupidity of A-list celebs like Kanye West with mocking glee, riffing on CoverGirlTM's missed-message sponsorship of an episode of The Hunger Games-(would the makers of Prozac have sponsored a film of Huxley's Brave New World?)-and trying to figure out how lame "soccer- mom porn"; like Fifty Shades of Gray, whose theme is the masochistic joy of female sexual submission, could become a best-seller after five decades of feminist activism.
Fifty Shades is just a strip-mall cover of Pauline Reage's, The Story of O, which enjoyed a brief vogue as an underground cult classic in the Sixties due to its identical subject, but faded fast due to lack of enduring literary quality or intellectual merit. Gray will fade to off-white even faster in today's faster spin-cycle.
In his garage criticism: missives in the Age of Distraction, Peter Babiak does what smart people are supposed to do-question the real meaning and implications of elements of the larger culture that permeate our lives and to a large extent determine who we are, with or without our permission or connivance.
As Garage Critic, he's taking up the scalpel wielded by the likes of Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, William Safire and Canada's own culture vultures, Mark Kingwell and the inimitable Brian Fawcett. If you haven't heard of any of these people, well, I'm sorry.
Garage Criticism recalls Sontag's eclectic now-classic Against Interpretation, published in the early Sixties, in which she stunned the intellectual community by taking a critical approach that paid lip service to academic (serious) discourse, but applied it to the analysis of popular (trivial) culture phenomena. The trick didn't always fly; Sontag's style sometimes invested subjects with an importance out of proportion to their actual significance and she had trouble conveying her sense of humour in writing.
Like Fawcett, Babiak dares to address popular culture in language it can understand. Colloquial and relentlessly funny, Babiak uses personal anecdotal hooks to draw the reader to more serious issues. His academic colleagues will probably scorn him for interdisciplinary cross-dressing or "dumbing down the discourse.";
I remember being very disillusioned at meeting many Very Smart People at UBC in the early Seventies and seeing all this insight and intellectual brilliance deliberately hidden behind masks of discipline-specific critical jargon concocted to exclude non-speakers from participating in "the discourse.";
At a time when our culture is not only communicated but actually composed of digital media, so easily manipulated by political and corporate interests, we desperately need critics who aren't afraid to call The Discourse a SnapChat.
It should be noted that Peter Babiak is an editor of Sub-terrain, Canada's most enduring and inclusive literary journal and one of the very few that enjoys no academic sponsorship, thus kisses no creative writing or English department ass. When Babiak's mini-essays preface an issue, they're invariably the first of many refreshing kicks to the synapses.
My personal favourite called "But my ideas are good, right?"; features the professor (displaying all respect due to racial, religious, gender and sexual orientations) patiently trying to explain to a student that since thinking is a function of language, if you can't speak and write coherently, then you simply can't think, so no, your ideas are totally crap.
Imperfectly expressed ideas are worse than worthless; meaningless at best, and as many demagogues of recent history have demonstrated, also often dangerous because they allow raging idiots to attach any meaning they want to them.
We need Garage Critic. He is a ruthless wrangler of sacred cows of contemporary culture, a destroyer of digital worlds, unconstrained by academic discipline or exclusive elitist jargon. Garage Critic is a man who calls an ergonomically-designed, artisan-crafted spade a frigging shovel.
978-1-77214-050-7
John Moore writes from Garibaldi Highlands, near Squamish.
John Moore