Solitaria: Novel Excerpt — Genni Gunn

Sep 122010
 

Genni venice

Here are the opening pages of Genni Gunn‘s new novel Solitaria. Genni is an old friend of DG, dating back to the time before he had children and used to fly across the country to this or that summer workshop (the summer he met Genni, he did three in a row in New Brunswick, Ontario and Saskatchewan). Once upon a time, Genni used to tour with bands in western Canada, which always struck DG as exciting and romantic (given his own sheltered upbringing). Now she writes novels, stories, and poems and the occasional opera. She is Italian by heritage. The photo above was taken in Venice and seems to DG to be iconic–Genni in the mysterious aquatic city, only half-western, caught in the embrace of the golden and opulent east.

By way of a further introduction, here is the novel trailer.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaXiH_NSRqE]

dg

From Solitaria

By Genni Gunn

Facilis descensus Averni:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad auras,
hoc opus, hic labor est.

It is easy to go down into Hell:
night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide;
but to climb back again, to retrace one’s steps to the upper air,
there’s the rub, the task.

— Virgil

Prologue
Fregene, Italy, July 15, 2002

They navigate through thick traffic, from Rome, for an hour and a half, in stifling heat, among stalled cars and angry drivers. Finally, the Fregene exit leads them off the freeway, and onto Viale di Pineta through the ancient pinery, down to Lungomare di Levante, where they turn left at the seashore, and continue until they stop in front of iron gates, chained and padlocked. Visible through the bars, a dilapidated villa rises among pines and wild hibiscus whose magenta petals shimmer in the July heat. Yellow police tape girdles the entire area.

Once, this villa was the pride of its owners, nestled in a sprawling lot facing the Tyrrhenian Sea, surrounded by palms and oleanders on manicured lawns where children played and cats sunned themselves. Over time, the children grew and moved to the cities. When the owners died, the villa was sold to foreigners who came only in summer. In the winter months, small boys climbed over the fence and played in the tall grass no one tended. Sometimes, they built fires on the beach, and tried to pry open the green shutters. The villa was sold and resold, neglected and abandoned by owner after owner, none of whom lived there.

“This must be it,” the cameraman says, pointing to the number on a pillar whose plaster has broken away in chunks to reveal old bricks and mortar. He turns down the air conditioner.

The show’s anchorwoman sits beside him, fanning herself with a small spiral notebook. On the side of the van, the familiar logo — a large c ending in a question mark, inside which are the words: Chi L’Ha Visto? Who Has Seen Him?

A policeman unlocks the gate, checks their ids, and lets them in. While the crew unloads the van, the anchorwoman walks around, surveying the area for appropriate footage.

The villa looms over her, casting a dark shadow to the east, eclipsing the tent erected over the excavation site — a makeshift lab where forensic specialists gather specimens. She shivers under the unrelenting sun, then searches for the demolition foreman, interviews him, and jots his answers in the notebook.

The new owners want to tear it down and build something new.

We were going to take out the trees first, and that’s when we found him.

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Disperspective: Poem — William Hathaway

Sep 092010
 

William “Kit” Hathaway poem (see links at the bottom of the post for two other poems published on Numéro Cinq plus other Hathaway web presences) is an acute and generous reader. When I asked him for a new poem, he wrote back: “Here’s a poem that seems to fit with the fine Balgach poem, though I wrote it thinking about a Tony Hoagland essay in Poetry before I read ‘Fighting.'”

Just to add a little perspective, here is a paragraph excerpted from Kit’s entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

…he mixes tragedy and comedy to satirize and criticize himself, other poets, academia, and various other targets. This blending of tones and modes, along with his recent change to a more serious, wide-ranging satire, make him distinctive and may account for his high standing among his fellow poets, such as Albert Goldbarth and Norman Dubie, who have highly praised Looking into the Heart of Light (1988), with Dubie calling him “a great American poet.”

DISPERSPECTIVE

By William Hathaway

Yes, even for you
who weren’t here yet before
the traffic became too much, too always
and too loud to think, it is
what it is, even so. A saying you say
often that says no matter
what’s said nothing can change
what so relentlessly changes
and so the less said the better,
flipping open your phone,
beeping your car to life,
easing into the ceaseless rush.

A jackknife nests
in my pocket I’ve lost & found
so often for so long I’ve lost the story
of my feeling for it. When it’s lost,
nestled unbeknownst to me
in the crack of a dusty couch, is it
not lost until I miss it? No.
Yes, I’m always saying no
to you now. Look, I’ve found no
you’ll say when you listen.

There’s nothing to say
is the only thing left to say, you say.
So many amusing ways
to say this just by saying something
else before you finish saying
what you were saying. When night
falls and the road becomes
a gushing stream of light, out
creep dark creatures to eat
the dead swept up on the shores
of that river. Even without light
their eyes would blaze out
from black shapes into blackness.

— William Hathaway

See also “Bufflehead Dawn,” “Martin Points,” “Bitterness,” “Betrayal,” “The Poetry Career,” “Today.”

Author Interview with Adam Tavel in Poets’ Quarterly

Some advice

Sep 092010
 

If you find your intellect wanders,
then reading, night-time vigils, and prayer will bring it to stillness.
Fasting, hard manual work, and quiet solitude calm the fires of desire.
To calm your restlessness, sit and recite the book of psalms,
and have pity and compassion on all those around you.
If you do excessive and inappropriate exercises
it will all come to grief very quickly,
and this will cause you more harm than good.


— Evagrios of Pontus, Texts on Watchfulness, found in The Book of Mystical Chapters, translated & introduced by John Anthony McGuckin



Fighting: Poem — Martin Balgach

Sep 072010
 



Here’s a poem by Martin Balgach. He sent me a batch, but it was difficult to choose. Martin and DG met in 2008 during the Vermont College of Fine Arts Slovenia residency. Martin was a student in DG’s workshop, a mixed workshop with poets, fiction writers and nonfiction writers and no end of exuberant discourse and inter-genre translation. Martin is a great traveling companion, full of appreciation, astonishment and gentle good humour. He bought DG coffee the day the ATM ate his card in Croatia–upon request DG can supply you with a photo of the ATM machine. Martin has since graduated, lives in Colorado, and writes lovely poems. The photos DG took in Slovenia and Croatia.

dg

Fighting

By Martin Balgach



In the battle for emotional supremacy
I’ve challenged the wind to a duel
but I’m carrying an idea instead of a gun

Now I know the wind is tough and cold
and not in that romantic
this is invigorating kind of cold
but more that middle-aged guy
in baggy black dungarees
drinking alone at a dive bar cold

It’s that tough in your gut
like a memory-you-want-to-forget
cold, it’s the kind of cold
that spits in your lungs
and tugs at your heart like a kid
tugging on the tail of a pet
but the pet is whimpering
because the game went too far

And I know why the motion
of each new morning keeps teasing us—
The problem is heaven—
We have the idea of more so we want more

I’ve been considering this for days
I’ve branded the hindquarter of my brain
with the melancholy symbol of a neon duck
fucking itself with a crucifix

Yeah, there are a thousand funny things to say
but the real things get caught in my throat like paste

Either way, tomorrow will be a new massacre
I’ll be losing the fight, staring at the sky

The cosmos will look like an old string of Christmas lights,
the kind that all go out when one bulb breaks
But it won’t be Christmas as the wind keeps kicking

—Martin Balgach

 

Or think about this: Lukacs on form and soul

Sep 072010
 

Man’s form, whether as individual or as species, is the tragic defiance of which he is author and victim. Lucifer, Prometheus, Faust, the main heroes.

This is a quote from Elfie Raymond’s essay on Georg Lukacs.

See also this:

And why form at all? Why order over anarchy? Because without his soul man is not man; and the soul is but the power which must realize itself in one’s lifetime to create forms from and for life. What else does it mean when Aristotle says that the soul is man’s formal cause but that we must give form to ourselves, individually and collectively? And form is achieved when the flux is arrested, and experience is distilled into its lasting significance.

dg

Then think about this: Keats on Negative Capability

Sep 072010
 

This is an excerpt from Keats’ letter (Dec 21, 1817) to his brothers:

I spent Friday evening with Wells, and went next morning to see Death on the Pale Horse. It is a wonderful picture, when West’s age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no woman one feels mad to kiss, no face swelling into reality-The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth. Examine ‘King Lear’, and you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness-The picture is larger than ‘Christ rejected’.

I dined with Haydon the Sunday after you left, and bad a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith, and met his two Brothers, with Hill and King ston, and one Du Bois. They only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment-These men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their eating and drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter-They talked of Kean and his low company -Would I were with that Company instead of yours, said I to mvself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me and yet I am going to Reynolds on Wednesday. Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

dg

Think about this: The Not-Not Manifesto

Sep 072010
 

Some years ago I noticed, in a New York Times review of Jonathan D. Spence’s book  The Search for Modern China, a reference to the Not-Not Manifesto published in Chengdu, Sichuan, on May 4, 1986.

Here is a quotation Spence uses in his book.

Not-Not:  a blanket term covering the object, form, contents, methodology, process, way and result of the principles of Pre-Cultural Thought. It is also the description of the primordial mien of the universe. Not-Not is not “no.” After deconstructing the relationship between man and objects to their precultural state, there is nothing in this universe that is not Not-Not. Not-Not is not the negation of anything. It is only an expression of itself. Not-Not is aware that liberation exists in the indefinite.

And here is a portion of the original manifesto translated by Michael M. Day in his book China’s Second World of Poetry.

On the ruins of ancient Rome, those big, lofty stone pillars: they have always been alive, they have always been thinking – this is told us by our entirely wide open intuition – only if we are incapable of entirely benumbing ourselves, we then have no way of not deeply believing: they really are alive, without doubt they have continuously been thinking, always thinking. Up to this day, the sole difficulty has been that we have been unable to find any form of cultural artifice to “prove” whether they ultimately live in the fashion of an “animal,” or in that of a “plant.” Our present culture has been incapable of embracing them, this wondrous phenomenon of life. We also have no ready way of saying what manner of thought they ultimately follow, and what they ultimately are thinking.

So — Today we declare:

First, they live in a not-not fashion;

Second, they are not-not life;

Third, they make us feel not-not;

Fourth, they make us become not-not;

Fifth, we are not-not.

dg

#2 of The Top 10 Things I Learned This Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Sep 012010
 

Lately, NC has been overrun by some strange, possibly disturbing (disturbed?) posts.  There have been  trips to Wal-Mart, essays about dead, German philosophers, a gilded Michael Jackson and ‘Bubbles’ statue, and some impostor (or series of impostors) running around claiming to be DG.  It’s all very confusing.  It seems the perfect time to throw my “Top-10” essay back into the mix.  How could it hurt?

For those of you following these posts with bated breath (and I know there’s at least one of you out there…Bubbles is a huge fan) it began as a series of short essays covering ten of the more important lessons I learned as student working with DG last semester at VCFA.  DG approved this series and has been paying me handsomely for each installment.  (By the way, Doug, the checks haven’t been arriving.  Could you re-confirm my mailing address?  Thanks in advance.  These Talisker bills are adding up.)

I’m down to the top two.  Number two covers, quite simply, verbs.

(Please note: all quotes in this post are from DG’s essay, “The Attack of the Copula Spiders.”)

I entered last semester (my third) bright-eyed and eager.  Though tales and legends swirled regarding the dangers of the Shredder’s realm, I believed I could safely navigate the terrifying path, escaping with little more than a few scratches and cuts.  Ah, the joy of innocence!  Three steps into that primordial, Canadian forest, a sharp pain split my calf.  Toxic venom spiraled toward my spine.  Before I could hack off my own leg to prevent further injury, the face of a copula spider appeared, a spider bearing a shocking resemblance to DG.  It mocked me as it scurried back to its upstate NY home.  Arachnis copulataris.  (Confused?  Keep reading! )

“A copula spider occurs when a student uses the verb ‘to be’ so many times on a page that I can circle all the instances, connect them with lines, and draw a spider diagram on the page.”  (See exhibit A)

Exhibit A: The Copula Spider

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