Stan Dragland, probably best known for his Duncan Campbell Scott scholarship, also published with the old Coach House Press various books as much quirky as avant-garde – Wilson McDonald’s Western Tour (1975), Peckertracks: A Chronicle (1978), Journey Through Bookland and other Passages (1984). These were deadpan books, to use a word Dragland leans on in the new one (“I only ever do deadpan” [45]) – books that seriously delayed a reader’s recognition that its comedies were, well, serious too.
Deep Too. Toronto: Book Thug, 2013. 79 pp. “Non-Fiction.” $12.00. A quirky problem in genre classification – a prose poem? a true story? A book.
Like Peckertracks, Deep Too is a penis book. In a series of collaged 1-3 page, often hilarious anecdotes it addresses, however, not the erect ejaculator but the working-class Lacanian power symbol – the one can that piss further, create a larger trouser-bulge, hang further off a bridge, and skewer more yaks than any other. Yes, those yaks are here in Dragland's book. It’s the phallus of the urinal, limerick and washroom graffiti, of those men and boys who hang pairs of brass testicles on the trailer-hitches of their pickup trucks, and who are all too eager, Dragland implies several times, to invest in that legendary pharmaceutical “Me-ga-di k.” Theirs is a developmentally retarded sexuality which he can amusingly mock and lament, while also mocking himself for being complicit in it. But, he decides, about two-thirds through this short collage, these anecdotes have not been “The Worst” of its aspects.
Curiously – or perhaps not – he seems to find more energy and wit for writing this opening section (37 of the 73 pages) than he does for “The Worst,” the book’s three remaining parts. Much of the latter, moreover is made up of
Deep Too. Toronto: Book Thug, 2013. 79 pp. “Non-Fiction.” $12.00. A quirky problem in genre classification – a prose poem? a true story? A book.
Like Peckertracks, Deep Too is a penis book. In a series of collaged 1-3 page, often hilarious anecdotes it addresses, however, not the erect ejaculator but the working-class Lacanian power symbol – the one can that piss further, create a larger trouser-bulge, hang further off a bridge, and skewer more yaks than any other. Yes, those yaks are here in Dragland's book. It’s the phallus of the urinal, limerick and washroom graffiti, of those men and boys who hang pairs of brass testicles on the trailer-hitches of their pickup trucks, and who are all too eager, Dragland implies several times, to invest in that legendary pharmaceutical “Me-ga-di k.” Theirs is a developmentally retarded sexuality which he can amusingly mock and lament, while also mocking himself for being complicit in it. But, he decides, about two-thirds through this short collage, these anecdotes have not been “The Worst” of its aspects.
Curiously – or perhaps not – he seems to find more energy and wit for writing this opening section (37 of the 73 pages) than he does for “The Worst,” the book’s three remaining parts. Much of the latter, moreover is made up of
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