Numéro Cinq

Watching movies is a sentimental education. They work through images and change the way we feel, especially if they come at an impressionable moment. Strange how, for reasons of history and empire, a boy in southwestern Ontario grew up humming an Australian bush song and learned his politics watching the Australian actor Chips Rafferty in Eureka Stockade (1949), fighting for justice in the Ballarat Goldfields on the family’s first black and white TV in the late 1950s. I don’t suppose anyone else remembers Chips Rafferty, and looking at him now he is hardly leading man material. But there you are.

Iris and Lydia are watching a divinely tasteless tourist wedding on a beach in Mexic0, the ceremony punctuated by the recorded voice of the groom singing “We’ve Only Just Begun.” Ominously, the word “narcotraficantes” floats into the conversation, not given another thought, except that the reader knows, the READER KNOWS! Something will come of this. Iris is 73 and charges through life with a certain comic grandeur, tossing off Spanish phrases as if where fluent. Lydia, her daughter, is cautious, middleclass — her husband has “escaped” her. The air is one of golden sand and indolence. And, yes, we’ve only just begun.

Anne Francey considers her artwork the visual equivalent of a diary, where spontaneous jottings of all kinds of events sketch the fabric of life. Many have long admired her love of nature, commitment to her craft, thirst for knowledge, and involvement with the community and next generation. These forces recently fused with profound strength, when her daughter, Suleika Jaouad, developed leukemia (watch the NYT Time’s video of the family’s response here). Her response, in part, when at times she could do nothing else at all, was a daily painting project titled Cariatide de Papier.

In John B. Lee’s study, there are piles of stones, cobbles to pebbles. He’s a collector, no doubt mystifying endless airport security agents monitoring his luggage. One wonders about this, except that stones are mnemonic devices (this one means a day on the beach in Korea with my son and his son). And words are like stones, bearing the same trace mineral flecks, striations, layers, conglomerates and evidence of former life. You put them together and a mysterious meaning radiates (call it a poem).

Structure is almost everything, says Peter Handke, in an epigraph to this wildly whimsical, often hilarious (“aversion” one character puns on “a virgin”), mid-life, existential love drama between a husband and a wife. Don Druick is a master of musicality. Watch the repetitions: words like scars, diminished, love. Jack comically gathers scars as he keeps reasserting that he will not be diminished. The text shimmers. Moments of horror: Jack dropping his hands into a cooking pot full of boiling water. Moments of intense comedy: Audrey misplaces a medallion in a patient’s rectum (the patient is her neighbour, perhaps a lover; the patient gave her the medallion; the medallion bears the words “The fear of everything is love”).

Peru is a compulsively “spoken,” recursive, stylized monologue that circles around and around the moment in 1940, when, at the age of six, the narrator murdered another six-year-old boy with a toy hoe in a sandbox. I give you here one of the great death/murder scenes, bizarrely dispassionate, full of a kind of schizophrenic detail and a consciousness on the narrator’s part of wanting to tell you the story correctly. So, at the outset, the first detail he tells you about the murder is that he could hear water running for the garden spigot, a detail that seems irrelevant and then compelling. We see the pitted marks the hoe leaves on the victim’s face. We see the victim getting up from his dying and stumbling around, watching his own dying.

I was always fascinated by how I had my first crush on my lovely cousin at thirteen, who turned out in her thirties to have a sex change, and what that meant about me. The real conflict, however, involved wrestling with a story about the nature of desire. Did I at any point sit there and say to myself, I’m writing a story about the nature of desire? Absolutely not. I probably would have hit myself over the head with hammer first and said get back to work, Steven! Wake up and write a story, not an idea.

I love the strange triangulations that take place on NC regularly. This time we have a Halifax librarian, Ian Colford, writing a profile about Tess Wiley, a Texas-born singer and songwriter, who makes her home and career in Germany. Ian is a longtime contributor to NC: stories, novel excerpts, profiles, and everything he writes has the idiosyncratic aura of a thoughtful outsider poking about in the culture, turning up half-hidden treasures. See this! he says. Amazing! he says. And the music? Tess Wiley? Just listen. She’s to die for.

“Ottawa Confidential” is an absolutely hilarious satire on Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Canadian politics in general (without actually ever mentioning Harper by name) written from the point of view of the Prime Minister’s “intimate confidant,” his righthand man, a failed novelist (had to be) turned political hack (with a dog named Wags). This story really is brilliant, seething with dry wit. I have a list of quotable lines as long as my arm. “Of course, the Prime Minister was not exactly an old man, or even an adult, but something more along the lines of an enlarged boy.” “The Prime Minister further confided that as a child he had an imaginary friend, but when his parents found out about it they forced him to put it to death.”

The thinkers and authors Stein and Lababidi mention become case studies for their overarching thesis about artist-mystics. For example, they see in the philosophy of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche the same anguish in the face of self-induced suffering for the sake of art that appears in the literary work of Baudelaire and Rilke among others. Lababidi talks about watching Bataille in an interview: “But there he was, this shifty, shifting creature who looked as though he could be anything from a pedophile to mass murderer.”

Former NC contributor Adam Regn Arvidson makes a return visit with some salutary advice for the beginning essayist (and maybe the not-so-beginning essayist) on where to find submission venues. The advice he gives happens to accord with my own practice in the dark eons before time, the years of my apprenticeship. The best way to give you story or essay or poem a chance at a life is to submit to magazine that are reviewed by the standard anthologies: Best American/Canadian (Stories, Essays…), Pushcart, O’Henry, etc.

The book is disappearing into the ether, becoming electrons assembled on screens, or maybe not — you never know with books. The obituaries might be premature. But the mere threat of the disappearance of books has prompted a fascinating surge of art related to books, not images in books or book cover art, but books as objects converted into works of art. All of which connotes, yes, a vast nostalgia amongst thinking people for the book and a multimedia inquiry into the meaning of the book.

It’s hard not to think of Hemingway when you read Salter, except a less vainglorious version. Whereas Hemingway wants to drink you under the table and shut down the bar, Salter wants to order a bottle of Château Latour. They both want to seduce you, it’s just that Salter will still be upright and semi-sober when he does it, and he’ll buy your breakfast in the morning; Hemingway won’t even leave a note on the pillow.It’s hard not to think of Hemingway when you read Salter, except a less vainglorious version. Whereas Hemingway wants to drink you under the table and shut down the bar, Salter wants to order a bottle of Château Latour. They both want to seduce you, it’s just that Salter will still be upright and semi-sober when he does it, and he’ll buy your breakfast in the morning; Hemingway won’t even leave a note on the pillow.

Leon Rooke has always been an inspiration and a muse. He has written some of the most delightful short stories I have ever read. Also those truly amazing novels Shakespeare’s Dog and A Good Baby, which, if you haven’t read them, you have to read (I have written an essay on the latter, which you can find in my book Attack of the Copula Spiders). And then, late in life, as if he hasn’t done enough damage already, he takes up painting and turns out passionate, sensual, witty canvasses that exude desire, subversion, and an acute adoration and attentiveness to the feminine — unapologetic, insouciant, even scabrous. Oh, Leon! A man who follows the electric current of creativity wherever it leads. A model for us all.

Like an ungainly walrus, the boat plows onward through the swell, past the fish market, some cranes, a garbage vessel. It carves a leftward swathe in the green sea near smokestacks, circles the city’s outskirts and finally, approaches those genteel structures that have entranced visitors for centuries. I spot the onion-shaped outlines of St. Mark’s five domes, off in the soggy distance. No inimitable views in my viewfinder quite yet, but as soon as I’m in the vicinity I’ll nab some. That is, rain permitting. Right now it’s lashing those of us foolhardy enough to stand in the prow. — Natalia Sarkissian

Herewith a cogent, revelatory, insightful essay on the inner complexities of novel construction, to be precise, the often ignored (unthought, unimagined) techniques of character gradation and grouping. Don’t scratch your heads and ask what character gradation is. It never fails to amaze me how few people who want to be writers have the vaguest idea of how a novel is put together. Too many proto-novelists naively assume that a novel is just a 300-page story. Character gradation and grouping is related to subplotting; it’s a technique for deploying other characters (plots) as devices that reflect the concerns and themes of the main plot characters. It’s a form that helps the novelist invent content and also create a consistence and cohesive thematic whole.

“Love bears the name of our fathers, of their leaving themselves behind,” writes Byrna Barclay in her self-reflection upon this suite of poems upon, yes, her lost father. It’s nearly impossible to go mentally from the sweet photo above — father and daughter in a hammock, a book, the daughter sleeping safely in the cradle of his legs — to the idea that Byrna Barclay never actually knew her father, that he was dead before she was three. Byrna Barclay’s poems are poignant reconstructions of absence, they are like the light from a cosmic event millions of years old, the light filters through the universe but the star is gone.

Each month I change the selection of NC pieces that go in the slider at the top of the front page. This is one way of reminding readers of the treasure trove of material that exists in the archives. Last month we had the current NC top ten all time posts in terms of reader popularity. For June we have a selection of short films and commentary taken from the NC at the Movies collection, including my favourite, Danse Macabre by Pedro Pires. NC at the Movies is Senior Editor R. W. Gray’s private fiefdom, his little world, and he has made it a truly fascinating place (a reflection, yes, of his strange and capacious mind — would we could all be this strange — and his endless love of the art).