March 2011 – Numéro Cinq

On the Hunt for Elusive Literary Game: the Premio Bagutta, Italy’s Oldest Literary Prize — Natalia Sarkissian

Mar 312011

On the Hunt for Elusive Literary Game: the Premio Bagutta, Italy’s Oldest Literary Prize

by Natalia Sarkissian

Last Friday night my husband and I took a cab to downtown Milan. I’d invited him out to dinner at Il Bagutta, but it was a working dinner. Once again I had my Numéro Cinq press tags clinking around my neck and was hot on the trail of Italian literati. Because Il Bagutta is where the Premio Bagutta, the oldest Italian literary prize was established in 1926 (and first awarded in 1927) and ever since, Il Bagutta has been frequented by the crème de la crème de la crème.

“Please hurry,” I said to the driver, checking my watch. We were already late for our 9 pm reservation. What if the maitre gave our table away and we couldn’t get in and observe the literati wining and dining? What would I say to my editor at Numéro Cinq who was waiting with bated breath for this insider’s view?

“It’s on Via Bagutta, off San Babila,” I added when the cabbie began thumbing through his map of Milan. “Between Via della Spiga and Via Montenapoleone.”

“Relax,” said Mauro, grabbing my hand. “We’ll get there when we get there.”

I sighed and sank back into the plaid seating. Mauro can be so Italian about being on time at times.

As we sat in a traffic jam on flashy Corso Buenos Aires and then inched along stately Corso Venezia, I inhaled and told him about Paris and compared it to Milan.

Back in the twenties and thirties famous Parisian cafés like Le Dome, La Rotonde and La Coupole had seen literary giants—Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir—come and go. In his memoir, a Moveable Feast, Hemingway describes the atmosphere, when he was young and penniless, drinking in the company of Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Maddox Ford. Likewise, Milan’s Il Bagutta, established at approximately the same time as its Parisian counterparts, offered good food, good wine and attracted home-grown Italian talents of stature; one of its first artistic patrons was Riccardo Bacchelli (a prolific novelist, essayist, playwright and librettist) who, in 1926, rounded up a group of gifted friends one night for dinner. Together they started the Bagutta literary prize at the spur of the moment. Later, Dino Buzzati, Mario Soldati, Ingrid Bergman, Lucia Bosé (Miss Italia 1947), Arturo Toscanini, Sandro Pertini (President of the Italian Republic 1978-1985) and other legends flocked to the restaurant.

Blind Spots: Essay — Richard Farrell

Mar 302011

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by statesmen and philosophers and divines. If you would be a man, speak today what you think today in words as hard as cannon-balls, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

My car has a factory-installed blind spot detector, a system that the manufacturer, Volvo, calls BLIS, or Blind Spot Illumination System. (The actual device, fortunately, works better than the acronym.) It consists of a camera mounted below the mirror that is wired to a tiny orange light inside the car. The dime-sized, triangular light illuminates when another vehicle is moving somewhere in my car’s blind spot. I’ve grown quite fond of BLIS, quite accustomed to the orange glow, especially in the dizzying commutes on Southern California freeways. It’s a helpful aid. A cheat, if you will, a machine doing the vigilant work that the driver is supposed to do. With only a quick glance at the side mirrors, my peripheral vision catches the orange light and I know that something lurks in those hidden spaces.

I wonder what it would be like to install an automated blind spot detector on myself, BLIS for the soul, illuminating the parts I fail to see. What would such a device show? Would it light up when my hot temper flares, or when I’m impatient with my kids or insincere with my wife? Perhaps it would reveal buried things about my desires, expose my snap judgments toward other people, or render visible my hidden fears and anxieties. How embarrassing it would be to have at a party, in a room full of strangers, glowing as a boorish lawyer droned on about his wonderful job, or lighting up like Rudolph’s nose on Christmas Eve as a pretty woman crossed the room. But if I’m already aware of these shortcomings, even in brief, then maybe that’s not what this blind spot detector would do at all. Maybe it would only flash on when least expected, revealing aspects of myself I can’t see, or don’t want to. How often would that little orange light glow?

For a good portion of my adult life, I’ve turned to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great nineteenth century American transcendentalist writer, whenever my vision gets cluttered . When I wonder about the world and my place in it, his writings have a restorative effect on me. I own this wonderful, worn paperback book, Self Reliance: The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson as Inspiration for Daily Living. It’s a condensed version of Emerson’s essays edited by Richard Whelan. My copy is almost twenty years old, the cover worn to a sun-bleached smoothness, the pages gently yellowed. A small part of me is ashamed that I turn to this much-abridged, ‘best-of’ version of Emerson’s work rather than reading the whole text, but the Whelan book has been with me since I was a young man more prone to short cuts and self-help aisles in the bookstore. I’ve underlined and starred dozens of the pages. In many ways, the book has been a trusted companion for most of my adulthood.

The voices which we hear in solitude grow faint and inaudible as we enter the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members, Emerson writes, always speaking directly to my heart, always illuminating the dark corners of my introverted being. He may ignore the danger of his philosophy, that tendency toward self-righteous solitude and mild paranoia that self-reliance can engender, but he reassures me. This world can be a transcendent place.

The Paris Review Interviews Amy Hempel

Mar 292011

Having the opportunity to read such an extensive interview with Amy Hempel is akin to a unicorn sighting. My fascination with Hempel’s writing is borderline obsessive, so I stopped in the middle of a packet/packing-to-move bender in order to post this link to Paul Winner’s interview with Amy Hempel on Numéro Cinq … Enjoy!

– Mary Stein

Amy Hempel, The Art of Fiction No. 176

Interviewed by Paul Winner

Amy Hempel does not enjoy interviews. She quotes her friend Patty Marx: “I’m not good at small talk; I’m not good at big talk; and medium talk just doesn’t come up.” Talking about the self is both unseemly and unnerving, she feels, and dissecting her own deliberate process of composition through, in her words, “pointy-headed questions,” tends to provoke her exasperation. This makes for an elusive interview. However, over a humid June weekend at her home last year, Hempel behaved as a polite and gracious host who pointed out the sights and chatted about movies, politics, and theories of pet care, but nonetheless wanted very much to be doing all of it away from the tape recorder. Talking about writing, in particular, meant noticing how Hempel loves to quote, at length, those friends and writers dearest to her—and how much she prefers their words to her own.

(Read the rest of Paul Winner’s Interview with Amy Hempel)

The Paris Review Essays on James Salter

Mar 292011

The Paris Review blog is running a series of essays on James Salter. Salter is this year’s recipient of TPR’s “Hadada Prize.” Past winners of this prize have included Joan Didion, William Styron, Norman Mailer and Philp Roth (just to name a few.)

–Rich Farrell

Fatherless: Memoir — Keith Maillard

Mar 292011

Here’s a gorgeous yet chilling excerpt from Keith Maillard’s creative nonfiction book, Fatherless. Keith was five when his father went to work at the Hanford nuclear plant in Richland, Washington, on the Columbia River. Originally part of the Manhattan Project (nuclear material for the bombs Fat Man and Little Boy dropped on Japan came from its reactors), Hanford grew rapidly during the Cold War. Now it is mostly “decommissioned” although vast environmental damage remains. Keith’s memoir is chilling in part because of the very ordinariness of domestic life within the immense and hugely dangerous nuclear manufacturing community but also because, to a large extent, not much has changed—the illustration of the fast breeder reactor bearing Keith’s father’s signature below is eerily like the many plant drawings the press has been using to explain the current nuclear plant disaster in Japan. All of this is aside from the poignant recreation herein of Keith’s search, as a grown man many years later, for the estranged father he never knew. Keith Maillard was born and raised in West Virginia. Currently the Chair of the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia, he is the author of thirteen extraordinary novels and one poetry collection. Many thanks to our mutual friend, Lynne Quarmby, for bringing Keith to the NC fold.

Richland

My father began working at the Hanford nuclear plant in 1947, the year I turned five. He pasted into his scrapbook only one reference to his official work—a pen and ink drawing so anomalous that it jumped right off the page. He’d made a clear, simple, easy-to-understand drawing of a “LIQUID METAL FAST BREEDER REACTOR (LMFBR),” labeled all of its parts, and signed it “E. C. Maillard.”

Within his first year in Richland, Gene Maillard had clearly established himself as the number one song-and-dance man in town. In 1948, while living in a dormitory room and composing on a “collapsible” organ, he wrote “Our Richland,” a song that told the story of the building of the “atomic city,” a song approved by the General Electric Company suggestion department.

The Richland Junior Chamber of Commerce produced a brochure to accompany the “Atomic Frontier Days” that were held during the first week in September of 1948. Celebrity guests Roddy MacDowell, the Cisco Kid, and John Wayne entertained, with Rudy Vallee as the Master of Ceremonies. The cover of the brochure is illustrated with a crude silhouette-style drawing in red and black—the skyline of a booming town with smoke rising from smokestacks, a great flair of white-out at the center, the whole works crowned with an atom, its neutrons zipping in orbit around the dot of the nucleus. The white nothingness that represented nuclear power is firing straight lines of white in all directions and hangs over rolling hills where a chuck wagon and three men on horseback are making their way across an empty desert spotted with sagebrush.

Under the heading of “Let’s Look Back,” the Junior Chamber of Commerce presents its version of Richland’s history.

In the year 1943 a group of men sitting around a table in Washington, D. C. seriously watched as one of their number pointed to a tiny spot on a large-scale map of the Pacific Northwest. Richland! Here, they decided, was the place! Thus was sown the seed from which sprouted a great plant and a thriving community.

Within a few months the pastoral quiet of this agricultural region was no more. Giant bulldozers leveled great tracts of ground, massive trucks roared day and night along erstwhile country lanes, new roads appeared and factories exploded into being from the desert sands. The fantastic barracks town of Hanford materialized to house thousands of construction workers. The nucleus of a vast, secret plant, born of wartime necessity, had been created.

The old farming center of Richland was evacuated and transformed into a modern community designed to eventually house thousands of production workers and their families.

Erection of plant and village ended; production of plutonium began. Only a handful knew “What”, and they were not talking. The village kept its secret well, so well that the nation and the world first learned of its existence only after the announcement of the A-bomb.

The Second Annual Atomic Frontier Days was held in August of 1949. The accompanying brochure was no longer free but now cost twenty-five cents; the cover had changed from red to blue, from hand-drawn illustration to photography, and featured “hard hats and assault masks in the northwestern desert.” Gene has pasted a clipping to the front of the brochure—a picture of close harmony being sung by the “Atom City Four” and a shot of himself with the caption: “A soft shoe tap in black face was an Atomic Frontier Days variety show headliner as done by Jean Millard.”

The Richland Chamber of Commerce expressed its gratitude to the people who made the 1949 Frontier Days a success, and one of them was my father. Once again, we are given Richland’s proud account of itself.

Scattered deep within this natural isolation are this nation’s most modern industrial plants. The vaunted American mass production, the assembly line method by which we lead the world in motor cars, in refrigerators, in turbines and egg beaters and pots and pans, is merely a fumbling dress rehearsal compared to the engineering know-how, the construction skill, the unusual operational methods required in this plutonium manufacturing plant.

The product itself, plutonium, is a man-made element which will be usable a thousand years from now for either war or peace. It is a packed power which will not deteriorate with time, which is a million times more powerful than any known fuel. Its manufacturing raises problems of production, storage, worker protection, national security, and world-power-plays, as no other American made package has ever done. It is owned by a free people; it bears a union label.

At the August, 1950, Atomic Frontier Days, thirty-five booths were set up in Riverside Park, offering “fun and refreshment.” Professional wrestlers went at each other in two exciting matches, and there was a fireworks display with “more than a dozen set ground pieces and bursts of two and three aerial displays at the same time.” The Queen of Atomic Frontier Days was crowned, along with her four princesses. And, of course, there was a free variety show—with twenty-three acts that included a comedy routine starring “Tony the Atomic Clown, Little Atom, and Koko, Hydrogen (H20) Bomb.” The night ended with the entire cast doing “Baked a Cake.”

Gene is listed as one of the directors and appears a number of times in the program, dancing twice with his fifteen-year-old student, Gail Muller. He’s a year away from turning fifty but in the pictures looks younger than that—a lean, fit, grinning showman in two-tone oxfords and a theatrical suit. Two shots catch each of them at the height of a “wing”—balanced in the air with arms flung outward, one foot kicking and the other striking the floor with a toe tap. We can almost hear the laughter and shouting voices egging them on, feel the electrifying exuberance of their performance.

The last photograph in the sequence shows Gene and Gail acting out the story of “Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy.” The image is so crisp that we can see every detail of Gene’s hairline moustache. Gail has one foot resting on the top of a folding chair. Gene is polishing her classic black patent tap shoe with a rectangle of cloth. On the bottom of this photo, Gail has written in a schoolgirl’s careful hand—“To the nicest and best dancing teacher anyone ever had.”

When my father was working there, Hanford’s only business was the manufacturing of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Not until 1963—when the N-Reactor added its bit to the Washington Public Power Supply System—would Hanford’s nuclear energy ever be used for any peaceful purpose whatsoever. Hanford officials constantly reassured those employed at the plant, or living near it, that they were perfectly safe, that “not an atom” escaped, but Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in North America. It had always discharged radioactive material into the Columbia River and continued to do so until its reactors were decommissioned. It fouled not only the river but the groundwater beneath it and left behind fifty-three-million gallons of radioactive waste stored in underground tanks that are leaking. Radioactivity from Hanford has been detected as far away as Oregon, northern California, and southern British Columbia. By 1951, the plant had sent more than 700,000 curies up its smokestacks, most of it in the form of iodine-131. For the sake of comparison, the 1979 Three Mile Island accident released less than 25 curies.

On December 2, 1949—in an exercise called “the Green Run”—the Hanford Works intentionally released radiation into the atmosphere so that scientists could monitor the resulting radioactive plume and apply that knowledge to the monitoring of Soviet nuclear production. My father—and anyone else living near the Hanford site—was exposed to twenty times more radiation than the limit allowed by the lax standards of the day. Readings on vegetation afterward were nearly a thousand times over that limit. The Green Run was conducted in absolute secrecy. No one was warned. The public would not know a thing about it for years. By the time that Gene could have first read a newspaper account of the incident, he would have been eighty-five years old.

On July 31, 1997, I interviewed my father’s old friend, “Brink,” and a younger man, Carl, in the Travel Lodge in Delta, British Columbia. The notes I took are sketchy, cursive. Most of what I heard about my father, I wrote down, but large chunks of the interview didn’t make it onto the page.

We sat in the room as the daylight faded away and no one bothered to light a light. The TV was on, a bunch of pros playing a game of something, somewhere—baseball? The volume was low. Carl—along with a possible shadowy fourth presence—was watching the game, but Brink wasn’t. He was talking to me. In the distorting glass of my memory, the scene is set in twilight, lit with the flickering pixels of the TV screen. Brink was friendly enough, helpful enough, but as blunt and straight as a hammer handle. Initially, I read him as a man who had reached an age from which he figured that there was no reason to speak anything other than the plain truth, and I liked him for that.

I see from my notes that Brink had been an engineer. He and his family moved to Richland in February, 1948. Brink originally worked for DuPont, but his employer kept changing names. DuPont morphed into General Electric, and there were several others—United Nuclear, Martin Marietta, Isocan Rockwell. The word “Hanford” must never have been spoken because it doesn’t appear in my notes at all.

When Brink first arrived in Richland, Gene was already there working as a draftsman. He lived alone and avoided crowds because he didn’t want to “get a bug.” Later he bought a little two-story apartment building in Kennewick, lived upstairs, called it “the Maillard building.” Brink laughed at that—at Gene’s seemingly boundless ego—and so did I.

Gene “performed tap dancing”—yes, that’s exactly what I wrote down, so that’s how Brink must have put it. He’d told Brink a story from his early days on stage. Gene was in a comic role, so he used pecan shells to make himself look cross-eyed, but the effect was too realistic. Instead of finding him funny, the audience felt sorry for him. There was nothing worse, he said, than trying to be funny and not getting any laughs, so he worked out another gag. When he made his exit, he was supposed to tip his derby. He lifted it up, and there was another derby under it. He lifted that derby, and there was another one yet—and then another one. He got a big laugh for that one.

Brink told me that he’d built a little studio in his basement for his daughter, Kippy. He had to dig out the basement first because it was only half dug when they’d moved in. He finished it and tiled it, and that’s where Gene gave Kippy her tap lessons. Gene came every Tuesday night. He charged $2.50 for an hour. Then he’d stay and eat supper with them. As Kippy got older, she gave lessons to other kids in that basement studio.

Carl joined the conversation, and for awhile the two men reminisced about Kippy. Carl was a talkative guy. He’d known my father too, had seen him dance lots of times. Richland had been packed with remarkable people like my father—interesting, talented people. It was a nice little town, a great place to grow up. I’d read a lot about Richland by then, and I agreed with him—it must have been a nice little town. Carl said that he couldn’t imagine any other high school anywhere in America that would have had as many PhDs teaching in it. Yeah, he said, it was a nice little conservative town—making sure I got the point. He didn’t need to do that; I’d got the point awhile back.

“When I was growing up,” I told him, “I imagined my father dancing like Fred Astaire.”

Carl laughed at that. “Oh, no. He wasn’t like Fred Astaire at all. He did fast tap dancing, really athletic stuff… definitely athletic. If you had to compare him to somebody, he was more the Gene Kelly type.”
I wanted to bring Brink back in. “Did Gene talk about his wives?” I asked him.

“Well, he had three wives. He didn’t talk about them too much. One couldn’t be without her mother. She wrote to her mother every day. If she didn’t get a letter from her mother every day, she’d get upset. She’d say, ‘I didn’t get a letter. I have to call her.’ Gene asked her, ‘Do you want to live with me, or do you want to live with your mother?’ She said, ‘I want to live with my mother.’ ”

That was my mother—I’d recognized her instantly. I waited to hear the rest of the story, but there was no rest of the story. Could my mother have actually said something like that—made that admission? If she did say it, maybe it had been on the day she’d left him.

“Gene knew you were a writer,” Brink said.

“Oh?… Did he ever talk about reading anything I’d written?”

“No, he didn’t.”

Before I could find another question, Brink said, “Gene had the impression you didn’t want to see him.”

“That’s not true. I did want to see him.”

“Well, that’s not the impression he had.”

I’d known right from the beginning that there was something going on below the surface, and I couldn’t ignore it any longer. I kept coming up against a hard edge in this man. Gene and Brink had worked together, had known each other for years. They’d been friends. I now read Brink as very much on Gene’s team, so what did that make me? Some unknown guy who’d arrived too late, appearing out of nowhere to ask a lot of dumb questions? It was as though Brink felt it was his duty to present Gene’s point of view as clearly and firmly as possible. “He thought your mother had poisoned you against him,” Brink said.

“Maybe she did,” I said. “I know she tried to do that, but…” I made an expansive gesture. “Here I am.”

“He had cancer, you know… testicular cancer. He had a testicle removed. The day he got out of the hospital, he got into his car and drove into the desert. His car broke down. He got stuck in the desert. He had to walk back. It was right after the operation.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“We could never figure out why he’d done it,” Brink said. “It seems like an odd thing to do… to drive off into the desert the day you get out of the hospital.”

We must have talked about other things after that, but I can’t remember them. The last entry in my notebook might have been the last thing Brink said—“Gene always talked low. I never heard him raise his voice.”

Talking to Brink was as close I was going to get to talking to Gene, and it badly shook me. For days afterward, I woke up feeling not right—a particularly nasty variety of not-right that was like waking up sickened by the stench of bad breath and realizing that it’s your own. I felt as though I had received a message directly from my father—one that predated the “fuck you” he’d sent me in his will when he’d disinherited me. If I was going to continue the conversation, what was I going to say back to him? I’m sorry about the surly letter I wrote to you when I was twenty? Gene would have been sixty-one when he got it—if he got it. He was still working at Hanford then. He might have talked to Brink about it. I hated the thought, but maybe that had been my only chance to connect with my father.

I knew why Gene had driven into the desert the day he’d got out of the hospital. I couldn’t have explained it to anyone, but I understood it because I could have done the same thing. Walking in the desert with one ball, Gene had been thinking about me, I was certain of that. How the hell do you get testicular cancer? I didn’t have a clue, but I suspected that being dosed with several hundred thousand curies of radioactive iodine probably didn’t help.

—Keith Maillard

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Escape Mushroom Style | Fiction — Trinie Dalton

Mar 282011

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Okay, brace yourselves. The dog has cancer of the penis. The dog’s name is Scruffles. (The goat in the photo is not in the story.) There is a mythic carnival ride called the Wonder Wheel. A friend runs over a woman’s leg while driving drunk and ends up in an L.A. jail. Rip Van Winkle is here. And those mushrooms. Trinie Dalton gets the conventional short story by the neck and gives it a shake. She has written and/or edited five books, and her fiction includes Wide Eyed (Akashic), Sweet Tomb (Madras Press), and the forthcoming Baby Geisha (Two Dollar Radio). “Escape Mushroom Style” will be in Baby Geisha and was previously published in the #6 issue of an Australian journal called The Lifted Brow.

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The animal hospital looked out upon the Wonder Wheel, an antique ferris wheel constructed of enough metal to build four skyscrapers. Plate glass windows in the waiting room gave the office, where Scruffles and I awaited a meeting with a soft tissue surgeon, an airy feel. But carnival views don’t make cancer fun. I stroked Scruffles, panting at my side with a golf ball-sized tumor hanging off his dong. Snake skinned ladies, men with gorilla wives, fire-breathers, poodles riding tricycles, elephantitis—it had all gone down here on Coney Island. Penis tumors were probably old hat. Made sense that a polluted beach would be a mutant culture hub. The world’s oldest roller coaster loomed three blocks away. Was this vet going to be Siamese twins? Suddenly, it was moronic instead of ironic that I had considered administering dog cancer treatment at a facility bordering a decrepit amusement park. It was more moronic that I lived nearby.

“Scruffles?” I asked, scratching his woolly, red left ear. “Will you feel like a freak if we operate?”

Scruffles wagged his tail. Any question involving upped intonation at the end of the phrase produces in him a hope for fish.

I kept this appointment because I needed a surgeon’s opinion.

The receptionist called us in. The doctor was not a Siamese twin but rather an emaciated man whose head reminded me of a calavera azucar, a Day of the Dead sugar skull. He groped my dog in a twitchy way and recommended something horrible.

“I’m not removing anything except the tumor,” I vowed, petting Scruffles as I committed to keeping his body intact.

“He’ll die,” the surgeon said. Who was he to issue the death sentence?

I slammed the office door on the way out.

Soft tissue surgeons are too obsessed with slicing to know what you do and don’t cut. It’s just not right. Amputating a dog’s penis is ludicrous, I fumed in the taxi home. Scruffs panted, which I took as agreement. What would I tell people when they ask where my dog’s organ went?

A week later, I left Scruff at home with three chew toys and took the train instead to ride the Wonder Wheel, whose cars, every quarter rotation, swing out on railings to the edge of the wheel’s circumference. These cages, called the Danglers, dangle you over the boardwalk like a hooked worm being lowered into a lake of big mouth bass. My brother and I, swinging every two minutes, questioned how long our corroded cage would hold. We needed a meaningful conversation during our limited time together, while he visited. Today, we cried a lot. Privacy was non-existent in this city, and we needed some. At least on the Wonder Wheel we had a car to ourselves.

“We’re breaking up,” he said, of him and his girlfriend. Tears welled.

“Don’t amputate,” I said, meaning, don’t cut her out of your life. “It’s not an ending, just a change.”

Break ups or terminal illness, what’s worse? Why compare? This was our discussion as our car teetered above skeeball players and kids ramming bumper cars. The toxic Atlantic was on the left, and the veterinary hospital lurked right. From up here, New York was semi-manageable, as microscopic as the toadstool world I prefer to live in.

“That’s where they told me Scruffles had four weeks to live,” I pointed down at the speck of an animal hospital, starting to cry. Wind whisked away my tears.

“That’s some sad, salty rain,” I said of my tears melodramatically falling on people below.

“Forget that vet,” Lolly said. I nicknamed him Lolly when we were kids, because he had a big head on a skinny body, like a lollipop. “Scruff’s a survivor.”

“You’ll live too,” I said.

“Have you tried natural remedies?” Lolly asked. We gripped the bars sealing our metal cage and swung.

“Next week I take Scruffles to the herbalist,” I said.

I have over a thousand mushroom photos under my belt. Last time I counted I was nearing four digits, so I began excursions to Rip Van Winkle’s home turf, the clove where Irving’s character allegedly fell asleep. Downy, purple Cortinarius, a favorite fungus, grows under hemlock between blue slate outcroppings there. I may be approaching twelve hundred shots. I take road trips to my hideaway hills upstate after heavy rains. I’ve collaged my images, written amateur essays, and attended lectures at the natural history museum about how genetic mushroom identification is outmoding Linnean taxonomic charts common to field guides. The mycological society recently performed a play there riffing on Doctor Faustus, in which nerds portrayed mushroom collectors haunting Faust, who sold his soul for a lifetime supply of morels. Now, that’s Coney.

Coney is the word I use to describe the grotesque and twisted, something so disturbing its funny. Something New York, something convoluted, something ill-flowering, like a wart. A friend who just returned from China was telling me over a shrimp salad dinner that markets in Beijing sell grubs-on-a-stick. That’s Coney. He handed me a menu he’d lifted from this Beijing restaurant called Escape Mushroom Style that listed fifteen pages of mushroom-based dishes—our collective reverie—minus one page of various sheep dick entrees. Coney.

I used to peddle organic produce at health food conventions. Frequently, my booth was across from the reishi booth, always the most sparsely attended table. Littered with finger-like, brown, red, and orange striated conchs alongside pamphlets printed in Mandarin, the reishi table was considered by most to be mysterious and sketchy.

“Is that a mushroom cult?” people whispered as I fluffed up kale bundles.

Reishi contains anti-cancer agents, and is a detoxifier that has been used in tea, powder, and extract form for thousands of years. It’s a preventative. I was confused about why people avoided eye contact with the reishi promoters, as if looking at or thinking about cancer cure would promote neoplasmic growth. Aversion to disease and the oddities surrounding it is weak. One cannot stay well without facing illness. Camped next to these mushroom enthusiasts for days straight, I read their literature, heard the miracle tales, and thanked Coney I didn’t have cancer. Chinese medicine is righteous. I stored the mushroom’s healing potential in the back of my mind, like a chestnut.

It was during this healthy period that I selected Scruffles from a box of barking pups. His spotted paws won me over. A proud new pet owner, I headed to the local new age bookstore and bought pet books with wolf covers, to study canine acupuncture and flower remedies. At the time, I lived three thousand miles away. For over ten years now, Lolly and I have taken turns parenting this dignified canine.

Thursday after the Wonder Wheel tears, I took Scruffles to a Chinese herbalist in Manhattan. She had long, black hair, and her hands and arms were ringed with silver and copper jewelry. She smelled friendly, like bok choy fried in ylang ylang.

“He looks really well otherwise,” she said. I inhaled her positivism as I would a fresh chanterelle.

“How long does he have?” I asked, grasping my tissue just in case.

“Years if the herbs work,” she said. “But you must remove that tumor soon.”

“Tuesday,” I said, committing to a date. She was the doctor to trust.

We left with a sack of herbal tinctures, a list of foods Scruffles could eat, and recipes for his home-cooked meals. Scruffles and I now eat the same stew: poultry laced with turmeric, sea salt, carrots, and other “cooling” veggies. Twice daily he gets syringes full of serums, multi-vitamins disguised as cheese powder, and Indian rhubarb extract alternating with aloe vera juice poured into his purified water. Bad tap water may have caused all this. When Scruffles was young, I put citrine and smoky quartz crystals in his water bowl, at least, and hoped for the best. Nowadays, I dose both of us with everything because it can’t hurt. We are on a permanent wellness kick.

I mediate trauma in unproductive ways. I twiddle my fingers, or apply lipstick only to immediately remove it. I cook food and forget to eat it. After deciding against radiation, which meant thousands of dollars and a month of anesthetizing the dog several times per week, all my dreams cropped up stinkhorn. Those putrid mushrooms that I most detest because they look like dog dicks, sprouted out of Scruffles’ coat, appeared in salads and stir-fries I ate. Came out in the tap with the water.

Years ago, when I toured the Kew Gardens mycology archive, the director opened one of Charles Darwin’s herbals and displayed a 150-year old stinkhorn. He told me that Darwin’s daughter considered it pornographic. Cancer is Coney porno. I couldn’t translate these stinkhorn visions. I hoped the visions meant that Scruffles’ pain was transferring into me. Healing is exorcism, a withdrawal and transference of the unwanted. I wanted to be the medicine woman who could kill, neutralize, and dissipate my dog’s mutating cells. Step one was to physically remove the growth; step two was to escape the Coney.

Two weeks after the procedure, Scruffles and I drove north to the foot of the mountain where Van Winkle passed out on ale. I called Lolly on cellular from the rock Rip might have napped on and explained a theory.

“Tie some feathers in your hair,” I said. “Crow, eagle…anything but pigeon. The feathers will fortify you.”

“You’re regressing,” Lolly said. “I haven’t heard these mystical hippie theories since you were a vegetarian ten years ago.”

“Look,” I said. “Feathers can’t hurt. Put them on your dashboard if you can’t bear wearing them.”

There’s a comical scene in I Love You Alice B. Toklas, when Peter Sellers shows up in a fringed leather jacket for his conservative brother’s tuxedo wedding. He’s covered in feathers, and the movie is one big happy ending from there.

“We’re talking on cell phones,” Lolly said. “Feathers are retro.”

“Is Rip Van Winkle too retro for you?” I asked.

I considered chucking my phone into the stream running five feet over where Scruff was drinking. A woodpecker hacked at an elm tree. I’d have to email everyone for their numbers again, plus I couldn’t talk to Lolly. The golden handcuffs.

“Your cell phone is probably giving you cancer right now,” Lolly said.

“Luddite,” I said.

“Aren’t you the Luddite, avoiding the city? Call me when you forgive civilization,” Lolly said. “I’ll be at the bar with my scotch on the rocks.”

I didn’t lodge in a tee pee. I shacked up in a Catskills dive motel. A junky walked laps around the building, and whole families manned lawn chairs on the motel room porches. A pimp ran girls between his grass green sedan and his room. I had mushroom guides sprawled out on the bed, where Scruff and I watched M*A*S*H reruns.

“Feeling okay?” I asked him, petting him beside me on the bed. Every time I looked at him my eyes went automatically to his shaved crotch, and I felt nasty. His six-inch, stapled incision looked clean and was healing properly.

Scruffles smiled and hung his tongue out. He was tired from hiking. I refilled his bowl of water and set it beside him.

Next morning, we headed out early. We didn’t see Rip as I’d hoped but it was a breezy autumn day, and planks crossed wet meadows to preserve plant life. Mushrooms sprouted on every dead tree trunk: oysters, maitake, sulfur shelf. Scruffles peed on rocks as we bushwhacked up a ravine. We shared turkey sandwiches again in that special hemlock grove.

My cell phone sounded so out of place. West coast: I answered.

“Will you accept a collect call from L.A. County Jail?” an operator asked.

Lolly was drunk driving, hit a fire hydrant and a lady at a bus stop. Luckily, only her leg was broken.

“How do you run over a leg?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” Lolly said. “She has a leg cast. I need five grand,” Lolly said.

“That’s my feather money,” I said. “I want to show Scruffles a good time instead of radiation.”

“I’m in prison!” Lolly said.

“Give me a minute to think,” I said. Scruff’s ears were perked up, ready to think too.

“Good boy,” I said. “Find some money.” Mr. Van Winkle’s buried treasure?

Money-wiring plans were made, and I folded my phone shut, slid it into my pocket. Coney phone. The woods and the city are the same some days. If bad news was bricks, I’d live in a fortress.

Scruffles licked my calf. I threw some rocks and packed it up.

On the path back, Scruffles located a shiny polypore whose skin actually reflected sunlight. It was a brown-red conch with ochre stripes edging its rim. Reishi? Different from the brown, whose velvetine skin you can carve pictures into. I snapped it off the tree trunk and carefully put it in my pack to shoot and I.D. later.

The nearest Catskills bail bonds place was across from Kozy Kitchen, a Coney diner decorated with baskets of silk flowers and gingham fabrics. I wired all the cash I had in the world and planted myself in a booth for coffee. Scruffles was tied up outside. Cranked on caffeine, I then wandered down the block to the scented candle shop, to soothe myself with the smell of beeswax until Lolly called with release news. My sibling is loveable but he gets sailor-style drunk. One D.U.I. ago, he fell asleep at the wheel and drove into some park’s tennis courts. I get jealous of people who rest assured that if they go unconscious someone will be there to help. Scruffles would rescue me, if he could.

The dog and I stopped for one more overnighter on the way back to Coney. I was broke now, and I wanted to show Scruffles one last good time. He wags his tail at motel room doors and stares at their doorknobs until I let him in. Then he jumps on the bed and readies himself for television. Knowing he truly appreciates my meager gifts brings me joy. I charged the motel on my credit card just to get this reaction out of my dog, which must say something bizarre about me.

“You’re blocking the view,” I said, on the king size with Scruffles as the sun set, watching nature documentaries. During commercials, we took turns with the remote; he can change channels if he paws it hard enough. How will I face life without this guy? I took the polypore out to identify it. It was glossier than Ganoderma applanatum, the reishi I knew. Soft, corky, flat, zoned, red-varnished cap with white to dull brown pores…in its stalked form, this is the ancient Chinese ‘mushroom of immortality,’ also called the ‘herb of spiritual potency.’ Red reishi, or Ling Chih: Ganoderma lucidum. An even better anti-cancer.

“You found Ling Chih,” I said. “Good dog.”

Scruffles licked his chops. Coneylicious. Fortified for impending night, it was back to the city in the morning with red reishi and my Frankenweenie.

—Trinie Dalton

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America’s ancient cave art: Mysterious drawings, thousands of years old, offer a glimpse of lost Native American cultures and traditions. – By John Jeremiah Sullivan – Slate Magazine

Mar 262011

DG is addicted to this stuff. The past is lost, mysterious. Especially in America where the remnants of ancient civilizations litter the landscape—all those mounds, pyramids, middens, ceremonial complexes. It’s much easier to imagine the stone temples emerging from the jungles of the Yucatan than to conjure the lost rites of the Native Americans of the great Mississippian cultures. The French encountered the Natchez before their world completely collapsed. We have their observations. But here’s an essay (excerpted in Slate from the Paris Review) on an even stranger mystery, cave art, newly discovered, left by these ancient peoples and their predecessors. DG is especially grateful for the antique phrase lusus Indorum, Indian whimsy.

We entered a large hall. The ceiling was very high, it looked a hundred feet high. It was smooth and pale gray. Simek shone his lamp up and arced it around slowly. “What do you see?” he said.

“Are those mud dauber nests?” I asked. That’s what they looked like to me.

“The ceiling,” he said, “is studded with three hundred globs of clay.”

I stared up with open mouth. I didn’t have a good question for that one.

“We said the same thing,” he said. “What were they doing?” So a researcher had climbed up and removed one of the globs and taken it back to the lab at UT. They sliced it open. Inside was the charred nubbin of a piece of river cane, like a cigarette filter. “We got a piece of cane about that big,” Jan said, indicating his little finger. The Indians had jammed burning stalks of river cane into balls of clay and hurled them at the ceiling.

“They lit up this place like a birthday cake, man!” he said.

“Was it some kind of ceremony or something?”

“Who knows!” he said. “Maybe they were hunting bats.”

“What were they doing here?” I asked, as if asking no one.

“Minimally,” he said, “making art, burying their dead, lighting it up like a Christmas tree. Maybe hunting bats.”

via America’s ancient cave art: Mysterious drawings, thousands of years old, offer a glimpse of lost Native American cultures and traditions. – By John Jeremiah Sullivan – Slate Magazine.

Shades and Mirrors: Character Gradation in the Novel — Vanessa Blakeslee

Mar 262011

Character grouping and gradation is one of the more arcane and least understood (never mind being taught) aspects of novel composition. For me, the primary source on this is E. K. Brown‘s essay “Phrase, Character, Incident” in his book Rhythm in the Novel. Brown was a Canadian academic and critic with a bent toward formalism, but he died rather young, before he could make as large an impact as he might have. His book is out of print, and it shouldn’t be. See my book The Enamoured Knight (pp. 128-131) for a succinct outline of the structure. “By character grouping I mean the composition of characters based on shared traits; these traits are varied, diminished or intensified from one character to another, that is, they are graded. Another way of saying this is to remember how Madariaga thought of Sancho as the same as Quixote only transposed into a different key.”

Vanessa Blakeslee is a former student of mine, a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts. She does a fine job here of analyzing character grouping and gradation in the structure of three contemporary novels. Vanessa’s fiction and poetry have appeared recently in The Southern Review, Green Mountains Review, New York Quarterly, The Bellingham Review, Southern Poetry Review, among others. She has received grants and fellowships from Yaddo, Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow, and the United Arts of Central Florida. She directs Maitland Poets & Writers, a community organization which focuses on expanding the literary arts throughout Central Florida.

Shades and Mirrors: Character Gradation as a Demand of Resonance in the Novel

By Vanessa Blakeslee

In my early twenties, I embarked on my first attempt at writing a novel. Loosely based on events passed down in family history, the work sprawled across several generations of Italian-American women as they struggled to overcome the trials of love and death. Key word to note: “sprawled.” As an inexperienced writer of long fiction, I sensed that what my characters suffered from most (outside of the sick husbands and dying babies on the page) were composition flaws. Workshop feedback repeatedly struck the same chord: often my female characters seemed like the same person. I gave each of the daughters distinguishing characteristics, one a love for music, the other for business and career, yet somehow these differences failed to establish sufficient motivation for subplot, unity and resonance to develop. To make matters worse, the large cast of secondary characters was comprised of relatives who seemed to pop in and out of the story at random. After much teeth-gritting, I stowed the several hundred page draft away. I simply lacked the craft technique to approach fixing the mess.

Not until I was a student in the MFA in Writing at Vermont College did my interest in the novel’s architecture resurface. One of my teachers, Douglas Glover, pointed me to an essay by Yeats, “The Emotion of Multitude.” He also suggested a somewhat hard-to-find but indispensable gem of a book, E.K. Brown’s Rhythm in the Novel, and a concept Brown refers to as “character gradation.”[1] According to Brown, graded characters share traits, attitudes or experiences with other characters to varying degrees, thereby composing structural parallels in a narrative. Such structural parallels lead to the creation of the echo effect in a novel; without the parallels and repetition in place, the narrative turns to sprawl. I found a used copy of the book online and ordered a contemporary novel Glover recommended for the study of subplots, Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist. I added to my list Glover’s own study of Don Quixote, The Enamoured Knight. The following semester my advisor Xu Xi suggested novels by V. S. Naipaul and Muriel Spark might make worthwhile subplot-studies as well. Books piled high, I began with Brown. Almost immediately my long forgotten novel draft came to mind as I hunted after the question: how does the relationship between structural parallels and the desired echo effect of resonance in a novel work exactly?

Resonance derived from an echo effect has been well-explored territory for other writers. W. B. Yeats called the effect of subplotting “the emotion of multitude” in his essay on King Lear:

The Shakespearian drama gets the emotion of multitude out of the subplot which copies the main plot, much as a shadow upon the wall copies one’s body in the firelight…Lear’s shadow is in Gloucester, who also has ungrateful children, and the mind goes on imagining shadows, shadow beyond shadow, till it has pictured the world. In Hamlet, one hardly notices, so subtly is the web woven, that the murder of Hamlet’s father and the sorrow of Hamlet are shadowed in the lives of Fortinbras and Ophelia and Laertes, whose father, too, have been killed.[2]

“Mirroring” may be a better term for how a subplot relates to the main plot, for in a mirror people and objects reflect but can appear slightly sharper. Notice that in order to achieve “the emotion of multitude” Shakespeare uses other family members or two different family groups along plot/subplot lines who then may interact and observe one another and achieve the mirroring effect. And it is this mirroring within the plot-subplot relationship that creates the echo effect because subplot allows for multiple sets of characters who share situations and traits to interact with the main plot, adding sub-stories while keeping the long narrative from sprawling.

To better pinpoint how my sprawling multi-generational novel went wrong, I took a close look at the three novels mentioned above: The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler, A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. The former two titles use family dynamics in the character gradation and subplotting to achieve resonance while the latter uses a group of schoolgirls, but the gradation works the same way.

In these novels, the characters involved in the subplots that are closely related to the main set of characters (often as other family members) contain an element of gradation. Subplot characters often mirror larger characters acting on the main plot, but can be less ardently subjected to their desires. The author may give the subplot characters the same or a similar core trait as their counterparts but “shade” its intensity, which helps push the subplot characters toward an outcome which differs from that of the main plot. As the characters of the main plot and subplot(s) interact with one another, this gradation becomes a key factor in the development of thematic complexity and resonance.

I prefer to think of the concept as “shading” and borrow from the world of visual art, perhaps because I tend to picture the novel as a grand scene akin to Renoir’s Bal du Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre with characters inhabiting the foreground, the center and the background. If we take a close look at these novels and trace the textual paths and tie-ins, we can better understand why the writers make the compositional choices that they do for their characters.

To accurately trace how a writer accomplishes character gradation or shading in a narrative and because the subplot characters are so closely related to the main plot characters, it’s important to find exactly where the subplot cuts into the main plot and out again, the points where the plot weaving occurs. Only then will the writer’s techniques of “character doubling and splitting” stand out clearly. In The Enamoured Knight, Douglas Glover explains how Cervantes uses character doubling and splitting in Don Quixote:

Note how clear it is that such structures (subplots, groups of characters, and develop through a simple doubling or splitting process. Characters in novels replicate by cell division. They split off a semblance of themselves with various characteristics shaded differently, either exaggerated or diminished. Thus the curate and the barber are a pair, though one is clearly more educated and more officially significant. The two of them spawn a younger, more energetic version of themselves in the person of Sampson Carrasco. Don Quixote spawns Sancho, an illiterate, tubbier, plain-speaking version of himself… [3]

Character gradation and “shading” ranges from a more complex system of parallel structures in lengthier works, such as in Don Quixote, above, or A House for Mr. Biswas which I will examine later. For a more basic plot-subplot-lesser plot structure using shaded family members, Anne Tyler’s novel The Accidental Tourist makes an excellent example.

The main plot of Tyler’s novel is Macon Leary’s relationship with the dog trainer, Muriel. On the heels of a separation with his wife, Sarah, every step Macon takes is in the direction of reclusive self-preservation, seeking and keeping his creature comforts. Macon’s sister, Rose, has similar neuroses about tidiness but also a desire for romance and so embarks on a relationship with Julian. So the Rose-Julian subplot mirrors the main love plot between Macon and Muriel. Both Macon and Rose share similar traits and attitudes—obsession with household order and wariness of strangers—but Rose’s homebody tendencies are even more pronounced than Macon’s. At the end of the novel, Rose is still somewhat stuck, having returned to her marriage but repeating the same caretaking routine, while Macon has broken free. Julian, the complete opposite of Macon and a cheerful, ready adapter must take on Leary family behaviors to compensate for Rose’s failure to leave the Leary brothers, Porter and Charles. A lesser plot also develops between Macon and the brothers, who are so stuck in their “Leary” family ways that they are incapable of change. As Macon and Rose find themselves in similar romantic situations, their differences place them more at odds with one another as each character’s plotline moves forward; so, too, does Macon run into more conflict with his stagnant Leary brothers as he heads in the opposite direction, and his attitude shifts from security toward spontaneity.

Tyler plants the seeds of variation in the first scenes depicting Macon and his family by comparing and contrasting characters with one another. Often one brief stroke containing a distinguishing feature is enough to shade a character and set him apart from the others in a particular way. A writer may shade an entire set of characters with an overarching common trait in a line or two. One of the first lines introducing Rose links all four Leary siblings together. “Rose had a kitchen that was so completely alphabetized, you’d find the allspice next to the ant poison. She was a fine one to talk about the Leary men.”[4] The scene gives a brief introduction to what Macon’s family is like on the whole, just enough for the reader to understand that they all share a defining trait: obsession with planning and dutiful order.

Tyler develops Macon’s character with her frequent use of doubling. Macon and his boss, Julian get described and contrasted together. The contrast in their traits creates opposition and places the characters on different plot trajectories and also functions as a continual reminder of Macon’s distinguishing characteristics and worldview: “Julian was younger than Macon and brasher, breezier, not a serious man.”[5] So the reader recognizes the two as opposites; Macon looks down on whimsy and boldness. The development of Macon’s character using doubling and contrast sets Julian on a criss-cross pattern with Macon’s main plot. As Macon moves away from his passive, worried nature to explore the world, Julian forgoes his breezy life of singlehood for home cooked meals and board games with the Leary family. This pattern is a direct effect of character shading and doubling.

With the Macon’s sister Rose, the most noticeable difference that plays an integral part in her plot with Julian is her devotion to soap operas. “While she watched, she talked aloud to the characters….’Just you wait. Ha!’—not at all her usual style of speech. A commercial broke in, but Rose stayed transfixed where she was.”[6] The phrase “her usual style of speech” refers to the Leary’s penchant for proper grammar demonstrated throughout the narrative; here Rose abandons this group attitude. Her yearning for romance sets her apart from her brothers and motivates her decision to marry Julian. Another difference which plays a factor in Rose’s subplot is that she gets lost outside of the Leary neighborhood. All the Leary siblings share this tendency—of the four, Macon is the most able to locate his surroundings, Rose the least. This intensity of shading leads Rose to a different outcome from that of Macon; getting lost in her new neighborhood is one of the reasons Rose moves back in with her brothers after her marriage. So shading plays a major role in pushing the subplot forward.

As the plots progress, we can trace the steps of the characters to the shading of their core traits and attitudes and observe how the structural parallels result in resonance.

The Rose/Julian subplot unfolds alongside the Macon/Muriel main plot, but the characters go about achieving their desires in different ways based on their shaded traits. Muriel pursues Macon but he gives in only when pressed, whereas Rose freely reciprocates Julian’s interest. This contrast develops as the subplot cuts in to mirror the main plot. When Muriel asks Macon to a movie or dinner, he backs away. This is completely opposite Rose’s speech and action in the Thanksgiving dinner scene:

‘You want to drive him off! You three wasted your chances and now you want me to waste mine, but I won’t do it. I can see what’s what. Just listen to any song on the radio; look at any soap opera. Love is what it’s all about. On soap operas everything revolves around love. A new person comes to town and right away the question is, who’s he going to love? Who’s going to love him back? Who’ll lose her mind with jealousy? Who’s going to ruin her life? And you want to make me miss it!’[7]

So Macon runs away from love while Rose runs toward it. Meaning arises out of juxtaposition and repetition with variation as this plot/subplot pattern reappears in the knitting scene. While Macon’s doubts and overprotective habits cause him to reject Julian’s different manners, Rose’s romantic streak trumps her be-wary-of-strangers upbringing to fall in love with Julian (and it’s worth noting that Julian and Muriel share similarities: stylish clothing, boldness and a positive outlook on life that drives opposition and conflict as they interact with the Learys). Rose’s disapproval of Muriel creates a parallel to Macon’s contempt for Julian, although her reasons differ: Muriel speaks sloppy English, she’s disorganized and erratic. Yet the core trait from which the disapproval stems is the same—don’t trust others. This theme emerges from the parallel structure and shading.

In the end, Macon chooses a life with Muriel because the Leary traits Tyler gives to Macon do not contain the same severity of shading as the rest of his siblings; he has changed and become more like Julian. And Rose, while she does not change, is able to return to her marriage and achieve companionship as a result of the one striking feature which separates her from the brothers—her desire for romance as a result of her devoted soap opera-watching. Her transformation is not as successful as Macon’s, but her situation has changed by her opening up to find love outside Leary walls.

Why are the family parallels so significant here, namely those involving Rose and Macon? For one, isolated neuroses would likely not supply any particular insight to Macon’s character. Without the mirror of his family, the deeper picture of Macon is blurry: what’s the context in which his personality and desires are rooted? Because Macon’s desire is the offspring of his traits and quirks, his shading causes the main plot to take the one-step-forward-two-steps-back shape that it does. Now his personality foibles could be illustrated through further sub-stories and subplots about his work, his relationship with Julian, or a neighbor, perhaps—but then the theme changes entirely. The novel would cease to be about the insular nature of family. So the structural parallels directly inform the greater purpose of the work. The larger meaning of Tyler’s novel is about the individual’s wandering away from home and into the world to find out who he really is; hence, Macon and Rose are “the accidental tourists.” That tension of the self torn between family and the outside demands the structural parallel of the character shading among family members. Otherwise, titling the work “The Accidental Tourist” wouldn’t fit the purpose—or the purpose of the title would have to mean something else.

And because longer narratives must deal with scope in a way that short stories do not, structural cohesion is vital to achieve scope (and avoid sprawl). The structural parallels mirrored in the Macon/Muriel plot and Rose/Julian subplot can be traced back to the spawning and shading of characters and the groups to which the varying traits belong: the “stuffy” Leary group: Macon, Rose, Porter and Charles, spawned from the grandparents at odds with the “fun” group spawned from their mother, Alicia: Muriel, Julian, and to lesser degree, Sarah. So the character gradation and shading cause repetition with variation between the outcomes of the main plot and subplot; the mirroring of the plotlines creates the structural cohesion necessary to build scope and unique thematic complexity. The Accidental Tourist is much more than Macon falling in love with his dog trainer; the effect of Tyler’s mirroring is that the main story along with the sub-stories woven together resonates with mysteriousness and meaning. By venturing beyond home, Macon Leary finds his true self.

V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas is also about family, and the 564 page novel is rife with parallel structures on a much grander scale than Tyler’s. The protagonist, Mr. Biswas, wants a house of his own and a life away from his in-laws, the Tulsis, and this Tulsi opposition reaches across the extended family with the techniques of character shading and sub-grouping. The Tulsi brothers-in-law are all different versions of Mr. Biswas. This distinct shading allows for each brother-in-law to share similar circumstance with Mr. Biswas (brothers-in-law living under Tulsi rule) but each has a different trajectory and outcome. Because the traits shared by Mr. Biswas and his spawned doubles vary in intensity, the shading and character grouping spurs conflict and pushes the narrative action forward. Mr. Biswas spawns another double in his son, Anand and a subplot is born from their common desire for reading and learning. In Part Two of the novel, the main plot and subplot come together with the Biswas/Tuttle/Govind family rivalry. In the tradition of the upstairs/downstairs novel, Anand and his cousin Vidiadhar have a competitive little plot that mirrors the conflict going on between their fathers. The greater breadth in narrative scope increases the demand for structural cohesion; this provides more opportunity for subtle difference in character shading. Naipaul’s novel achieves reverberating wholeness as a result.

I counted over a dozen spawned character doubles that could be isolated to make this argument, but for purpose of this essay, have chosen to cite and analyze the primary one, the shaded versions of Mr. Biswas.

One variation of Mr. Biswas occurs with Govind, Chinta’s “eager, loyal” husband. The mirror between Govind’s subplot and the main plot of Mr. Biswas develops to a greater extent from the stark differences between the two men; they share little beyond the common in-law situation. “Mr. Biswas thought of Govind as a fellow sufferer, but one who had surrendered to the Tulsis and been degraded. He had forgotten his own reputation as a buffoon and troublemaker, however, and found Govind wary of his approaches.”[8] Good-looking but non-intellectual Govind does manual plantation work, gets nervous and allows Seth to control him, then behaves obnoxiously when Seth exits. He is a variation of Mr. Biswas shaded with intimidation and cowardice, a darker, Jekyll-and-Hyde portrayal. Because of their opposite attitudes in facing the same situation, the lesser Govind plot takes on a contrasting trajectory and cuts into the main plot at the Shorthills house where he becomes “increasingly surly.”

The episode at Shorthills house is also the point in the narrative in which W.C. Tuttle and his family appear. Tuttle is yet another shaded version of Biswas who picks up some pious traits from the now deceased brother-in-law Hari and also the scheming Govind; he prays regularly and reads but Biswas labels Tuttle’s books “trash.” Yet Tuttle resembles Mr. Biswas more than any of the other brothers-in-law, such as when both men order bookshelves to be made at the same time, because both men actively pursue their desires. Tuttle’s desire to acquire a house of his own is identical to that of Biswas but not as urgent. Tuttle does not possess the same degree of obsession about his desire as his main plot counterpart; he is “Biswas Lite” if you will. So the main plot and the Tuttle subplot do not share the same outcome, although Tuttle comes closer than any of the other brothers-in-law to escape from the Tulsis.

The more alternate outcomes achieved as a result of the various Biswas doubles and subplots, the more echoes are created and the greater the resonance of the novel. Naipaul weaves all three plots together, adding more mirrors to the main plot of Mr. Biswas. In places, Naipaul describes all three men together and contrasts arise from this triple juxtaposition. The effect is a “piling on” of differences, opposition, a spike in dramatic tension:

…he (Biswas) continued to plunder, enjoying the feeling that in the midst of chaos he was calmly going about his own devilish plans. Then the news of the ravages of W.C. Tuttle and Govind was whispered through the house. W. C. Tuttle had been selling whole cedar trees. Govind had been selling lorry loads of oranges and papaws and avocado pears and limes and grapefruit and cocoa and tonka beans. Mr. Biswas felt exceedingly foolish next morning when he dropped half a dozen oranges into his bag.[9]

The difference in shading among Biswas and his two counterparts, Tuttle and Govind is revealed with the technique of side-by-side description of each man’s action in the same situation. The juxtaposition illustrates that Biswas does not share the same acute ability to deceive (though he thought he did). Govind and Tuttle are more aggressive than Biswas in their actions and conflict arises from the different shades in character. Tuttle and Govind race ahead while Biswas remains stuck, still sticking his oranges into his bag to peddle in town.

But the technique of describing characters together to heighten the different shades works in the same way to heighten focus on their sameness as in this paragraph juxtaposing only Tuttle and Biswas. Govind has been left out which in itself increases the “sameness” in the shading of the other two.

And when it was learned that some of the widows’ sons had killed a sheep, roasted it in the woods and eaten it, W. C. Tuttle expressed his outrage at this un-Hindu act, refused to eat any more from the common kitchen and made his wife

cook separately. One of his sons reported that W. C. Tuttle’s Brahmin mouth had burst into sores the day the sheep was eaten. Mr. Biswas, though unable to produce W. C. Tuttle’s spectacular symptoms, made Shama cook separately as well.[10]

This comparison helps to place the “sameness” of Tuttle and Mr. Biswas in a special light. In this paragraph, the main plot of Mr. Biswas and subplot of Tuttle come together in the description of the two men. The repetition of their situation, their desires and anti-Tulsi attitudes (with the slight variation in the mouth sore incident) continues to build unity and resonance through parallel structure.

How are these precise structural parallels important in A House for Mr. Biswas, and to what extent are they important to novels in general? Again the matter of meaning and scope requires a closer look. Like Tyler’s novel, Naipaul’s concerns family. Through the duplication of parallels the problems involve not just a single family, but numerous families. But the scope of “the family problem” and the nature of the situation itself, independence from domineering relations and individual freedom, are different than Tyler’s. And here the thematic meaning does not only apply to severalfamilies but to an entire society of Trinidad as a result of the more extensive network of shades and mirrors. Perhaps because the novel revolves so definitely about a specific place, an island set apart from the rest of the world, this determines the need for a wider scope in order for the particular meaning to emerge—that the Biswas/Tulsi struggle is not isolated to their dynamic, but is representative of vast numbers of other Trinidadian families. So the complex web of character gradation and different plot outcomes are crucial to form this wider scope and achieve this exact theme. Without the shortcomings of his doubled counterparts and their contrary outcomes, Mr. Biswas’s independence from in-law rule would not have the meaning it does—that of a rare triumph.

Thus, scope curtails sprawl. The longer the narrative, the more critical the demands; the shades and mirrors must achieve a structural cohesion that will capture great scope and theme in lieu of sprawl.

The subplots of the three men weave in and out throughout the narrative. Biswas, Tuttle and Govind all move their families to the city. Tuttle and Govind argue over the parking spaces of their cars, and this quarrel is echoed through their wives. The differences in the shaded qualities shared by the three brothers-in-law make room for opposition. Similar gradation and shading groups like characters together against the opposite pole. Here the alignment of Govind and Tuttle is against Biswas:

There was money in the island. It showed in the suits of Govind, who drove the Americans in his taxi; in the possessions of W. C. Tuttle, who hired out his lorry to them; in the new cars, the new buildings. And from this money, despite Marcus Aurelius….Mr. Biswas found himself barred.[11]

But these poles keep changing and shifting. The subplots of Govind and Tuttle take on twisting patterns in their relation to the main plot. The twists, the variations, correspond to the lessening or heightening of certain common traits, almost as if the novelist is playing with the volume using a dial. The focus depends on the juxtaposition and whether or not the characters get compared or contrasted together. Contrast sets the poles further apart and comparison brings them together to unite against an opposite pole. Because these alignments are not fixed and they “change sides” as the power struggle moves along in the novel, the character shading and gradation plays a considerable role in the plot. The reversal of fortune necessary for drama is born through the shifting poles.

Tuttle’s subplot only cuts into the Govind/Biswas subplot that ensues about school briefly; otherwise, his family all but disappears from the narrative. But Tuttle’s subplot roars back toward the novel’s conclusion with the announcement that he has bought a house. Here Tuttle’s shading and subplot push the main plot toward reversal of fortune because Tuttle’s action rekindles his counterpart, Biswas, to search for a house of his own. Tuttle’s escape from the Tulsis is through a far more underhanded action than any Biswas would attempt: Tuttle throws poor people out of a house by persuading local government that the house is unsafe. Since Biswas does not share Tuttle’s tendency toward piracy, Biswas goes about his desire through different means and is somewhat taken in by the seller. Yet the Biswas family wins. The Tuttle’s “nervous little chuckles” during the visit reveals their unhappiness about their own home. Tuttle, a more contemptuous, scheming version of Biswas, ends up achieving the same goal but with a less satisfying result.

So the Tuttle subplot has multiple purposes. It informs the action of the main plot by helping to set up the major reversal of fortune in the novel. It creates repetition with variation by means of its different outcome. And together, this less ethical trajectory of Tuttle next to the better circumstances of Biswas in the end helps generate the greater meaning of the work—freedom from tyranny.

Govind’s subplot takes a different trajectory and does not mirror the main plot about the house. Instead, Govind’s subplot weaves together with the subplot of the Biswas son, Anand, who is a more educated, stronger spawn of his father and shares a love for reading and learning. The competition between the fathers is mirrored in the school competition between their sons. Unlike the path of Tuttle’s subplot, here a multigenerational parallel structure develops to build unity and resonance through repetition and reversal of fortune.

The Anand subplot reveals a version of Mr. Biswas that is very different from the split-off duplications-with-variation in his other spawns, the brothers-in-law. Anand and Mr. Biswas share nearly identical characteristics but have one large key difference: Anand is not obsessed with obtaining a house. So his subplot is an offshoot of the core traits he and his father share, the desire to better oneself through education. As Mr. Biswas pursues his self-education by writing tabloid journalism, Anand pursues writing and learning by taking the higher road of academia in his subplot. The two mirror one another but the variation in Anand’s fulfillment of his desire will lead to a drastically different outcome. At the conclusion of the book he has left Trinidad to study in England.

Not all character doubles contain enough shading in their composition to enable subplots to emerge. Lesser doubles appear that are just brief repetitions of their greater counterparts, only with distinct twists. So the mirroring continues throughout the entire spectrum of characters. Anand spawns lesser versions of himself in the worried Chinese schoolboy (a more fraught version) and the first place Negro boy who possesses a superior knowledge of the female body (a more advanced, worldly Anand). Biswas has lesser counterparts in the co-workers he drinks with at the cafe: “three men, none over forty, who considered their careers closed and rested their ambitions on the achievements of their children.”[12] These lesser doubles are important in creating that particular effect Yeats’ called, “the emotion of multitude.” Without the shading and the doubling of characters, the mirroring of subplots and inset stories and subsequent varied outcomes, a novel like A House for Mr. Biswas would not achieve the sweeping greatness that it does by seeming to be about an entire island struggling with similar problems. With parallel structure character links to character, so the inner workings of a novel forge a network of support beams on which the unity and resonance depend.

So compared to Tyler’s novel, Naipaul’s has greater scope. Does greater scope equal greater meaning? Not necessarily. The Accidental Tourist takes on a certain scope in order to achieve particular meaning; next to A House for Mr. Biswas the scope is more limited but the story is still rich with resonance. Each novel mandates its own demands of form and content, and each arrives at a very different kind of whole. Because of the natural dynamics of families to interact within close proximity to one another a novelist can play more with the dial in the wide range of scope available. The more character shades and mirrors, the greater the scope; less and the scope takes on a more narrow, concentrated focus. Either way, in a family novel the plot trajectories that emerge from the gradation are more likely to take an organic progression with more subtle differences in shading. The technique slips by largely unnoticed by the reader.

But not all novels revolve around family groups. One novel that uses character shading in a non-family dynamic is The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. Like with Naipaul’s protagonist Mr. Biswas, the subplot characters are shaded versions of Miss Brodie with more or less exaggerated traits. Gradation, shading, doubling and mirroring devices can work with different types of tightly-knit groups who interact within close proximity to one another for an extended period of time. Spark’s use of shading and mirroring with students at an all-girls’ school in a cascade-style illustrates the range of variation in the subplot structure, but the results of this approach to the character shading technique are distinctly different from the novels of Tyler and Naipaul. While the cascade-style gradation bears correlation to scope, this composition develops less organically in order to bring the family-that-is-not-a-family into conflict. The steepness of the cascade, the narrow scope (the novel has only six chapters), gives the technique a self-consciousness not found in the other two novels.

The main plot of the book is Miss Jean Brodie’s struggle to persevere with her unorthodox teaching style against an administration that would like to get rid of her. Miss Brodie carries out her plot by cultivating her six favorite students into her confidantes—“the Brodie set”—Sandy, Rose, Jenny, Eunice, Mary, and Monica. Each of the girls turns into her own unique double of Miss Brodie in a more or less pronounced way. The special attributes, in some cases bestowed upon and then groomed by Miss Brodie herself, create subplots and lesser sub-stories that mirror Miss Brodie’s desire but with variation. Miss Brodie has a love plot with the art teacher, Mr. Lloyd, and Sandy’s subplot mirrors her teacher’s. The Sandy subplot eventually joins together with the main plot of the school’s headmistress against Miss Brodie. There are lesser subplots—Jenny, Rose, the Joyce Emily episode—but Sandy’s is the most developed. Spark uses doubling to compare and contrast the six girls to one another, Miss Brodie and her peers at the school, and repeats each Brodie girl’s trademark characteristics whenever she appears. The Panama hats and the portraits painted by the art teacher of the six devoted pupils reinforce the replication of Miss Brodie and her cascade of mini-Brodies.

The members of the Brodie set take on various shades of interest in love and sex, and this shading determines each girl’s interaction in the Miss Brodie love plot. Sandy is the Brodie girl who has the most interest in love and sex. Her friend Jenny shares this desire at first: “Jenny and Sandy wondered if Mr. Lloyd and Miss Brodie had gone further that day in the art room, and had been swept away by passion.”[13] Sandy and Jenny write a fictitious tale of Miss Brodie and her lovers. But eventually Jenny’s interest in sex wanes while Sandy’s increases. The outcome of Jenny’s love subplot occurs years later with a moment of reawakening. Sandy’s shading changes; she picks up the interest in romance shrugged off by Jenny. Sandy and Rose start to visit the Lloyd’s together, and Sandy becomes more like Rose as a result: “Rose modeled for Teddy Lloyd and Sandy occasionally joined her…”[14]

The cutting in of lesser plots and outcomes that mirror Miss Brodie’s main plot are like sign posts to the reader that character shading is being used in some way to construct opposition. Shading and doubling transcend mere description by setting up conflict on the sentence-level out of which grow the larger, more pivotal plot events. The dramatic force is heightened, and the significance of this in a longer work such as a novel is that all the characters, not just Miss Brodie, drive the conflict. When we find the place where a lesser plot cuts in, we can trace the steps backward to the distinctive brushstroke Spark gives each girl. Miss Brodie’s encouragement of Rose to have an affair with Lloyd fails because Rose does not have an interest in sex—in fact, of all the Brodie girls, she cares about sex the least.

She was the least of all the Brodie set to be excited by Miss Brodie’s love affairs, or by anyone else’s sex. And it was always to be the same. Later, when she was famous for sex, her magnificently appealing qualities lay in the fact that she had no curiosity about sex at all, she never reflected upon it.[15]

So Rose is the most opposed to Miss Brodie’s love plot desire. Instead Sandy takes up as Lloyd’s mistress because she occupies the opposite end of the “Brodie girl” cascade and has the most fervent interest in sex. The conflict grows out of all three different shadings of a common quality—sexual appetite—and Miss Brodie’s desire is denied fulfillment by Sandy’s action. The love plots collide.

But why does Spark use the more drastic cascade arrangement of character shading and grouping, and why does the cascade call more attention to itself in the text than the ways novelists use gradation in the two family novels?

The answer lies in purpose and scope. Spark intends her novel to center on the relationship of an eccentric and passionate schoolteacher and her “loyal pupils,” but the challenge of this set-up is how to construct the trajectories of plot and subplot so that they keep “mirroring” one another. In a novel about family, this is much easier because family members by nature must keep up interaction. This is why the gradation in a family novel tends to develop more subtly. But in order for the plot/subplot mirroring to both build scope with multiple entangled threads as well as launch each of the girls toward a very different outcome from Miss Brodie and one another, the shaded traits must be distinct and unmistakable.

Scope plays an important role to the cascade. The situation of Miss Brodie and her students is contained within the realms of school and does not spill over to any of the girls’ families (at the most, it dips into the Lloyds). By keeping a narrow scope, the plot and dramatic tension is focused on the nature of school and creating one’s own identity eventually apart from that institution. With a narrower scope, there is much less room for subtle variations and “lesser doubles” than in a novel like A House for Mr. Biswas. The scope is so narrow, in fact, that it makes the opposite demand of the gradation technique. The narrow scope tends to demand a sharper, instantly recognizable portrayal of each girl. In conjunction with the content, the school situation as opposed to family, the resulting gradation is even more pronounced and forms a “cascade.” As with the shades and mirrors in the other two novels, the effect of the “cascade gradation” is the scaffolding of structural cohesion out of which the deeper meaning emerges.

Because of the narrow scope and the demands for such instantly recognizable character composition, Spark’s novel stands apart from those of Tyler and Naipaul in that the text is very aware of the character shading and gradation going on. This exaggerated type of character shading pops out with the portraits and the Panama hats, i.e., every time Lloyd paints a Brodie girl, the portrait resembles Miss Brodie. The observant Sandy quips: “We’d look like one big Miss Brodie, I suppose,” after Teddy Lloyd proposes a group portrait.”[16] Spark repeats the resemblance of the portraits to Miss Brodie in every scene that the paintings appear, “a different Jean Brodie under the forms of Rose, Sandy, Jenny, Mary, Monica and Eunice.”[17] So the paintings repeat the doubling technique, along with the plot and subplot actions of the Brodie members.

Each girl’s trademark attribute appears nearly every time Spark mentions the character, and she plants these constant reminders everywhere. She brings the Brodie set together and sets them at odds simultaneously, by describing them one after the other and juxtaposing the contrasts among the characters. The nearly exact duplication of her technique in diction, syntax, and grammar makes it a great deal more obvious, as in the different way each girl wears her Panama hat. “The five girls…wore their hats each with a definite difference,” Spark writes, with “subtle variants.”[18]

Finally Sandy’s subplot leads to her abandonment of romance for religion, and she undergoes a “transfiguration” to become a nun. While Sandy undergoes a drastic change, Miss Brodie is rooted in the past, “her prime,” and wastes away a few years after her dismissal from the school. The two opposite reversals of fortune between the plot/subplot outcomes add complexity and resonance to the novel’s theme. This effect is heightened with the multiple outcomes of the other Brodie girls, adding possibilities to compound the mirror effect.

This complexity is significant in all novels, even ones with a narrower scope, because novels demand it for meaning and resonance. In a short story, great meaning can arise out of a more simple structure leading up to the “epiphany” or “reversal” at the end; there’s not as much room for extended repetition with variation, nor is there the same degree of demand for it in order for the story gain meaning. But in order to reach its resounding wholeness, a novel, because it is so much longer, must have repetition with variation. And what is the significance of the complexity here? The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is at heart about girls growing up to be individuals, about independence and finding one’s prime—and also not imposing one’s identity onto another. Miss Brodie finds her prime and then overextends herself; thus, the title encapsulates the novel’s meaning which has grown out of the multiple “mirrors.”

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is the shortest of the three novels analyzed here, and sprawl is not so much of an issue as resonance—making the story gain scope and depth, the echoing. Is the cascade inevitable to enable the work to gain its meaning, because a shorter narrative by nature has confining demands? The self-awareness of the cascade technique reveals that Spark is well-attuned to her purpose because without the cascade, her novel would risk losing the “ripple effect” to gain breadth and thematic resonance. Otherwise, Miss Brodie’s plot might just as well be rendered in a long short story. But in novel form, Miss Brodie’s story resounds as poignantly as that of Mr. Biswas. The novelist must be aware of the correlation between the character gradation and the scope of the novel because the degree to which she manipulates the technique directly links to the meaning. She must ask herself how pronounced the shading and doubling should be in the work, and how that will inevitably affect the scope and resonance. She must keep in mind that novelists must deal with scope in a way short story writers do not, and that structural parallels determine scope and defer sprawl.

Shading is hardly fixed; the traits can be more or less intensified like the colors mixed on a palette. The novelist’s shading and blending of a common set of traits in a character group is done consciously through the techniques of doubling, juxtaposition, and repetition. Only through these means can structural parallels emerge organically from the vast subject matter the novelist has at hand. From this hall of mirrors the “emotion of multitudes” is born and the narrative churns with thematic complexity and Je ne sais quoi.

Whether the novelist is working with a family novel or different closely-bound group, the various iterations of the character shading technique are vital for the novel to come together as a whole. The gradation may develop more organically, such as with the multigenerational approach, or take on the shape of a more self-conscious cascade. Great meaning is achieved either way.

But novelists must recognize the purpose in their work.

Understanding how character shading and mirroring together develop a novel’s demand for unity and meaning does diminish—if not eliminates—some of the “I don’t know what” a writer faces in the task of a putting together a long narrative, like the cast I juggled with my floundering multi-generational novel draft. Understanding how the novels of others work, opening them up and tracing all the connections between the systems of Character, Plot, and Scope will help us approach our own. Then after pouring over the innards of a handful of novels, remember to keep it simple: Structural Parallels (shading, mirroring, Brown’s “repetition with variation”) + Scope = Thematic Complexity, Meaning and Resonance.

—Vanessa Blakeslee

Notes

1. E. K. Brown, Rhythm in the Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978).

2. “The Emotion of Multitude” (1903). W. B. Yeats. Essays and Introductions. NY: Macmillan Co., 1966. 215-216.

3. Douglas Glover, The Enamoured Knight (Illinois: Dalky Archive Press, 2004), 135.

4. Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist, (New York, Random House, 2002), 12.

5. Ibid. , 41.

6. Ibid. , 159.

7. Ibid. , 64.

8. V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas, (New York: Random House, 2001), 101.

9. Ibid. , 391-92.

10. Ibid. , 404.

11. Ibid. , 421.

12. Ibid. , 467.

13. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, (New York: HarperCollins, 1999),

56.

14. Ibid. , 126.

15. Ibid. , 58.

16. Ibid. , 109.

17. Ibid. , 118.

18. Ibid. , 1.

Bibliography

Brown, E.K. Rhythm in the Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978.

Glover, Douglas. The Enamoured Knight. Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 2004.

Naipaul, V.S. A House for Mr. Biswas. New York: Random House, 2001.

Spark, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

“The Emotion of Multitude” (1903). W. B. Yeats. Essays and Introductions. NY: Macmillan Co., 1966. 215-216.

Tyler, Anne. The Accidental Tourist. New York, Random House, 2002.

Speculating on Divinity Genes, a Review by Peter Chiykowski

Mar 252011

Anonymous folk engraving of merpeople.

Speculating on Divinity Genes

A Review of Matthew J. Trafford’s The Divinity Gene

By Peter Chiykowski

The Divinity Gene
Matthew J. Trafford
Douglas & McIntyre
ISBN 9781553656036

In his debut collection of short stories, The Divinity Gene, Matthew J. Trafford pulls off a generic balancing act, suspending his swaying narrative tightrope between the often opposed platforms of “genre” and “literary” fiction. His performance is certainly captivating. Walking the line with him are rogue angels, dissected mermaids, messianic clones, Faustian e-demons, and homophobic undead (the term “zombie” is considered demeaning to still-sentient beings who have yet to gain the vote). These creatures swing the stories between scenes that are sometimes fantastically unfamiliar, sometimes unflinchingly intimate, often both.

“Thoracic Exam,” the opening act of the ten-story collection, is a good indicator of the volume’s strengths and weakness. An unnamed female narrator-nurse examines the recent widow of an old love interest. The routine check-up turns into an opportunity for the romantically unsatisfied stethoscope-wielder to investigate the body and the life she never chose. The story showcases Trafford’s writing chops (“I must eavesdrop inside of her”), but also his off-putting love of jargon (“Her lacrimal ducts are now secreting full tears”).

Public Domain Image from Wikimedia Commons. Artist unknown.

His tendency toward clinical and obscure terms, one that recurs frequently, culminates in a prepubescent narrator from a fishing village describing a cut-up mermaid using words like “striated,” “lepidopterist,” and “filigreed.” The narrator’s vocabulary asks for more suspended disbelief than the mythical sea creature around which the story revolves.

Trafford skilfully deploys the speculative elements of his fiction. Never does he let fantasy outweigh the emotional core of his plots, and crucially, he never lets the magic or technology interfere with the complex networks of desire that motivate his characters. Rather, the “genre” elements of his stories work to distil the conflicts and intensify the choices the characters have to make. In “iFaust,” a widowed grandfather wrestles with the decision to trade his well-aged soul to the devil in exchange for that of his ungrateful grandson who made a literal Faustian bargain for success as a rock musician. The conflict – the grandson’s sullen plea and the grandfather’s vacillating refusal – is served well by the supernaturally high stakes. Unfortunately, the tension is later spoiled by a last-minute decision from a secondary character who consequently trivializes the grandfather’s role in the story.

This is not to say that Trafford relies on speculation and magic to distract from narrative shortcomings. One of the collection’s most powerful pieces, “Past Perfect,” is a slice-of-life story that follows the experiences of a young man losing his older husband to aphasia. It is one of the book’s many grief narratives, arguably the most powerful. While in “The Renegade Angels of Parkdale,” the gay male narrator of a similar age is made passive by the loss of his partner, relying on friends and fallen angels to initiate the story’s significant scenes, the narrator of “Past Perfect” is admirably active in dealing with and dramatizing the gradual and thoroughly disenchanting processes of grief. The loss of partners and family members is a recurrent focus of the work, as is the nature of homosexual and homosocial relationships.

In addition to being fascinated by the classic themes of death and love, Trafford is also interested in formal experimentation. “Renegade Angels” features some two-column simultaneous narration. The gambit is a little distracting, a visual reminder that the reader is involved in the physical task of reading a page and not the cognitive task of a reading a story. The footnotes of “The Grimpils” feel less like aids for differentiating protagonists and more like excuses for the author to trot out his technique. The centre-stage action of the characters coping with the disappearance of their friends and lovers is vastly more interesting than Nick’s aromatic analysis of Ceylon tea. The opening section of the title story, “The Divinity Gene,” engages in a much more rewarding bit of play. It is formatted like a wiki entry, complete with links and section headings to explain technological advances that lead to the genetic cloning of Jesus in 2006.

Ultimately, The Divinity Gene indulges in a level of showmanship that is unnecessary, but not unappreciated. The volume is best taken in multiple sittings. The young introspective gay narrators dealing with isolation and/or grief can become a bit monotonous, even when separated by the various other protagonists (including a widowed grandfather, a thirteen year-old boy, and a bitter middle-aged nurses). Whatever their limitations, though, his stories all come from a uniquely powerful breed of conflict, one playfully mutted up with formal and fantastical experiments that continue to yap and growl in the memory after the book is closed.

Peter Chiykowski

www.rockpapercynic.com

Julian Barnes on Oates, Didion and the Memoir from The New York Review of Books

Mar 252011

Here’s a Julian Barnes essay on memoirs by Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion, both widows mourning the loss of a partner. They are a study in contrasts, and the contrasts illuminate the art of the memoir and personal tragedy.

“Yet Oates’s A Widow’s Story and Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking could not be more different. Though Didion’s opening lines (the fourth of which is “The question of self-pity”) were jotted down a day or two after Dunne’s death, she waited eight months before beginning to write. Oates’s book is largely based on diary entries, most from the earliest part of her year: so in a 415-page book, we find that by page 125 we have covered just a week of her widowhood, and by page 325 are still only at week eight. While both books are autobiographies, Didion is essayistic and concise, seeking external points of comparison, trying to set her case in some wider context. Oates is novelistic and expansive, switching between first and third persons, seeking (not with unfailing success) to objectify herself as “the widow”; and though she occasionally reaches for the handholds of Pascal, Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Richard Crashaw, and William Carlos Williams, she is mainly focused on the dark interiors, the psycho-chaos of grief. Each writer, in other words, is playing to her strengths.”

via ‘For Sorrow There Is No Remedy’ by Julian Barnes | The New York Review of Books.

Four Poems from Oz — Nancy Eimers

Mar 252011

—Photo by Carl Olsen

Nancy Eimers has been a colleague and a friend at Vermont College of Fine Arts longer than I can calculate. Very long. She has this look, when I see her, as if she’s a bit worried about me, as if there is something to worry about besides the stuff I already know. Then she smiles—such a relief. Her readings at our residencies are always occasions. Here are four Nancy Eimers poems from her hot-off-the-press poetry collection, Oz, published in January from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her three previous collections are A Grammar to Waking (Carnegie Mellon, 2006), No Moon (Purdue University Press, 1997) and Destroying Angel (Wesleyan University Press, 1991). She has been the recipient of a Nation “Discovery” Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships and a Whiting Writer’s Award, and her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary magazines. Nancy teaches creative writing at Western Michigan University and at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and she lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Four Poems from Oz

By Nancy Eimers

Confession of a Luddite

(28-hour power outage)

It had been raining, and it would rain.
Without the streetlights tending them
trees turned into a forest,

the houses had fallen back,
I found myself coveting old brass keys
to doors that are lost

and the keys to my old typewriter
for like piano keys,
when you pressed them

something pressed back.
Bill beside me, the two of us walked along
in an elder dark

though an oaf-ish light blared
in a couple of houses powered by the roar
of generators draining the dark

as if it were a basement of water.
But dark was a folk art, dark was a primitive
science composing the very wetness

of bark. No government
could have taken over0
so quietly. Without newspapers or stars.

Without the sounds of cars or shoes.
For a moment, nothing needed anything.
Every now and then we came upon candles

deep in houses
and throwing a see-through light,
light that had no argument

with the dark.

My Parents Contemplate Moving a Last Time

They speak as if they have ten thousand years

To go about recalibrating numbers,
The distance from home to church and shopping, couch to television,

Degree and slant of light in the laundry room.

Light to dark and wall to wall they have been traveling,

Years of back and forth
Between each other’s eyes and mouths,

He, asleep in his chair at night, she, riding the dip
She always rides at her end of the couch.

They seem to know time as an ordinary thing

As they sit and procrastinate forever
Over USA Today and the Arizona Republic,

Half-decaf, melon and toast.

No map of future’s day or night, the shallows marked with squiggly lines,
The depths not marked, they are that steep, will guide them;

Nor do they seek the blueprint of a wave.

More coffee, honey? Pass me the Jumble, please.

I watch them contemplate their move so quietly
It resembles just sitting there over breakfast

Talking themselves backwards, toward the smallest house in the universe–

Glacier

To watch this losing part of itself—

this frozen dash,
a sign, a pause, a being poised—

cliffhanger
at the speed of ice—

just think, says the ranger, it is made of individual snowflakes-—
I love that bend of her voice
into my head where her sentence goes on—

compressed into a vastness, making this one incredible thing
moved along by the force of its enormous weight,
finding its way down out of the mountains

in the shape of an S—relentless plurality—all those battered snowflakes—
to the sea.

At one place in its side
three ice-caverns—two eyes and a mouth—so like

—so strange—Munch’s “The Scream.”

Each calving’s a fusillade—
the sound an “outpouring of anything,”

an inner surge.

If there is a waiting, it is ours.
Watching the face change its expression

every time a chunk of ice breaks off—

and yet behind it this entirety—boundless, immense, this tidy sum—
the face forlorn—dejected—hangdog now—
our faces turned to it, our eyes and cameras trained on it

as if to document the very moment
something in us changed,
the ship turning in place—deft for so big a thing—

while all along immensity recedes so incrementally we can’t—
we just can’t
put a human face on it—

Grassland

There is something furtive about the water
here.

It is most itself at dawn or dusk.
It falls in a haze,

it speaks to the grass in a whisper.

But the outgoing, voluble grass

fills in gaps in the conversation.
There are citizens who attend to it

better than others. Grass refers to itself
or it overflows.

As a matter of policy, all it witnesses
and all you ask

the grass denies:

in the end, every lawn mower
is just a trailing off.

First there were streets and driveways,
then the houses, one by one,

amid the ploughed-up loneliness,

and the people
to come and settle it.

Only then the grass. Around. After, before.

There are over 9,000 species. The terrestrial, not to mention
the aquatic.

Its fruit is dry and dull
on stalks that bend to the shear of wind.

It used to roll and roll without impediment
and say expanse.

On a windless day it still resembles a body of water
but only

once you’ve closed your eyes.

—Nancy Eimers

(Post design by Mahtem Shiferraw)

the minnesota review interview with J. Hillis Miller

Mar 242011

Here’s a fascinating biographical interview with critic J. Hillis Miller that spans decades of the development of literary criticism in the U. S. Lovely to watch his exposure to new ideas, his growth as a thinker and reader. Especially interesting is the influence of Kenneth Burke, an American critic not often talked about these days, followed by Miller’s exposure to Derrida and the French. Also not the now laughable academic career-making activity called “indexing.”

Miller: I learned a lot from myth criticism, especially the way little details in a Shakespeare play can link up to indicate an “underthought” of reference to some myth or other. It was something I had learned in a different way from Burke. Burke came to Harvard when I was a graduate student and gave a lecture about indexing. What he was talking about was how you read. I had never heard anybody talk about this. He said what you do is notice things that recur in the text, though perhaps in some unostentatious way. If something appears four or five times in the same text, you think it’s probably important. That leads you on a kind of hermeneutical circle: you ask questions, you come back to the text and get some answers, and you go around, and pretty soon you may have a reading.

An example of that would be the color red in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. You say, “There sure are a lot of red things in the novel.” You see the red inside Tess’s mouth at some point, and the red sign that she sees painted on a barn. It says, “Thou shalt not commit [adultery],” as she has done, or, strictly speaking, fornication. Then you say, “Hmm, what do you do with all these red things?” That leads you back to the text.

via ns 71-72 (Winter/Spring 2009) // the minnesota review.

What It’s Like Living Here — Mary Donovan in Wheaton, Maryland

Mar 242011

Mary Donovan

Here’s another delightful addition to the Numéro Cinq What It’s Like Living Here series, this time from VCFA graduate Mary Donovan in Wheaton, Maryland, which, yes, goes by many names, and is thus ambiguous, until you get to the charming details.

What it is and is not

Wheaton is many things, but it is not Silver Spring. Much less Kensington. Nor (god forbid) Washington, DC. If you live in Wheaton, though, you must reckon with these.

The US Postal Service makes you say “Silver Spring” as your City. The US Census hyphenates “Wheaton-Glenmont,” though Glenmont is a crossroads of strip malls and the end of a subway line. Just across Veirs Mill Road is Kensington, where the high school blasts its Friday-night-football and half-time tubas clear through your cottage. You’re not far from the border of Washington, DC, where you likely commute to work. Although when you travel you say “from DC,” every evening you’re relieved to flee its workaholic bosses and center-of-the-known-and-unknown-universe stance. Wheaton is also not Rockville, whose shared border remains mysterious and may involve the creek; you once mailed a card to friends you knew from woods walks and guessed their address as Rockville, but it was Silver Spring, which meant Wheaton.

Although Wheaton has no formal borders, everyone knows where you mean when you live there. Ah, near Wheaton Plaza, the first “shopping mall” in the 1960s. Near vast Wheaton Regional Park — you can hike miles of trails or ice-skate year-round or ride a horse or play (or watch) baseball as the sun sets. All those tiny places to eat – Salvadoran, Peruvian, Vietnamese — and you can walk to HMart? You’ve got Wheaton Regional Library, with robust programming for children and speakers of languages other than English, who are now the majority. You signed a petition called “Don’t Move the Wheaton Library!” when council members decided to “revitalize” by razing an historic area and building a brand-new library and chain stores. (They ran out of money when the Recession hit – you win – for now.)

No one knows quite where you mean when you (must) say “Silver Spring” with its 16 zip codes. Your next-door neighbor Bernice, a stalwart, 80-something daughter of “original” residents, mails you a Christmas card with “WHEATON, MD 20902” pressed by a forceful hand. (They deliver it.)

Wheaton, MD, has a strong feeling of the late 1940s-early-‘50s, when most houses – including yours and Bernice’s — were built: small, brick homes rising and falling through rabbit-warren neighborhoods for middle-class folk with, at most, one car per. Now these streets are choked with parked vehicles and you can only drive one way at a time. You may not have a dining room, or an upstairs, but you will have hardwood floors, thick plaster walls and solid brick construction. Store signs still feature the fonts – Art-Deco-meets-Space-Age — of the ‘50s and ‘60s. People your age – and you are not THAT old – reminisce about childhood trips to Hot Shoppes at Wheaton Plaza, home of the Mighty Mo and its Special Sauce, delivered to your car by a waitress on roller skates.

Claims to fame

Wheaton has the highest elevation in the Washington, DC area, and sprouted its first radio towers. WTOP has been broadcasting since 1939; you rely heavily on its traffic reports each morning. Wheaton also transmitted the very first television in 1923. A resident named Charles Jenkins built that first transmitter and got the first TV broadcast license – and invented the television set. People in the 1920s and ‘30s watched his “radiovision” and assumed everyone in the U.S. would remember his name.

The Wheaton Metro (subway) Station has the deepest escalator in the Western Hemisphere; only Hong Kong has a longer escalator. Kensington, with its antique shops and Victorian wrap-arounds, can only dream of having such an escalator.

Chuck Levin’s Music Center in the heart of Wheaton is a legendary destination for musicians in the Mid-Atlantic region. When your band needed its sound and light equipment in the mid-80s, you drove all the way from Virginia to Chuck Levin’s. When your Dad (in Florida) threw himself an 80th birthday party a couple years ago, Chuck Levin’s kazoos, shakers and harmonicas filled your suitcase.

HMart is not unique to Wheaton. Both Gaithersburg and Catonsville (near Baltimore) have them in Maryland. But people know where you live by “that awesome Korean grocery.” You can buy 21 different (frozen) types of dried fish cake, or a set of shot glasses whose box reads “Perfect for Today’s Modern Life” or the absolute-best deals on fresh and strange produce.

Roads named “Mill”

Wherever you live in Wheaton you live on or near a road named “(Someone’s) Mill” – remnants of grain mills in operation from pre-Civil-War throughout Rock Creek, the Northwest Branch of the Anacostia River, and Sligo Creek.

Just say “I’m near” Veirs Mill, Kemp Mill, Plyers Mill, Newport Mill. People nod their heads, sure.

Flora and fauna

Your house and porch appreciate the shade of mature oaks (red, white and black). Yards feature azaleas, hydrangeas, lilacs, rhododendrons, crape myrtles, boxwoods, magnolias. These somehow survive icy winters and bloom in turn, just when you most need them. Your own vegetable yield can be iffy, but you can go to any of a dozen farmers markets on weekends. Plus HMart!

In your yard you spot raccoons, possums, squirrels, rabbits, and more rabbits. Deer venture away from the creek to eat only the heads off your tulips. Birds make the rounds of neighborhood feeders; gangs of starlings bully away sparrows, cardinals and mourning doves. Even starlings fear the iron beak of a red-headed woodpecker with black-and-white houndstooth markings, who travels solo. (You’ll hear him and his family pounding bark – like rapid-fire gunshot – while you climb the trails of Wheaton Regional.) You see goldfinches, but to date, not one oriole without cleats and a uniform.

In the Brookside Gardens of Wheaton Regional Park, you can visit the Butterfly Garden May-to-September and the “Garden of Lights” Thanksgiving-to-mid-January. Last year they began an “edible landscaping” project, foregoing flowers for vegetables and crops. Eggplants drew flea beetles but the okras were insanely happy and the sweet potatoes grew out onto the sidewalks.

Along the Park’s trails, it behooves you to look down and jump over piles of horse droppings (they have the right of way). You find it curious that you see chipmunks only in this Park, never in anyone’s yard, and you marvel how they achieve jet propulsion across your path, leaving only the after-image of black stripe on brown.

Maybe twice a month you see a fox there, and notice its vibrant red fur with ring of black on its chest — not the same brownish fox you see other times. You aren’t sure if these are differences in gender or ethnicity or family resemblance, or all three. The fox usually trots parallel to you for a while from fifteen yards away, so you can exchange glances. Once you saw a coyote, whom you didn’t register as “coyote” but “strange dog – odd-colored fox? – hey!” as you remembered reading of their increasing numbers along the East Coast. You miss your dog every day, your longtime eager companion for woodsy adventures; she would dive shoulder-first to roll around any ground cover trotted upon by fox or coyote. (Thus both of you once suffered from sarcoptic mange.) She is buried in Rockville, your ex’s choice and his to make; she was his mother’s dog first.

Speaking of dogs

Since you miss your dog every day but adopting one would be unfair with your DC commute (11-12-hour days R/T) you may arrange your activities around chances to encounter them. Your own corner lot has much more lawn than house and seems a message board for Wheaton dogs. (You may not be fully aware of this paw traffic until it snows.)

Loiter outside. Sophie and Billy, Springer Spaniels, live just across the chain-link fence. There has never been a creature – not a lover, nor niece or nephew, nor your own Cocker – ever happier to see you than goofy Sophie. Billy is geriatric with a fraction of her energy, but his tail whirrs just as fast. Catty-corner lives Bentley, a white dreadlocked Komondor, and further down Allison the elderly Basset and Christopher the Terrier mix. Out on the trails you’ll likely be rebuffed by Nellie (unless you’re wearing strawberry lip gloss) but met with enthusiasm by the King Charles pack (Kallie, Ottie and Netta) and their Golden Lab companion, Cozy, with a sinus tumor. You hope their humans don’t expect you to know their names.

Now and then you hear cats wailing at night below one of your windows. Neighbors have guessed they’re feral. One gray cat has tried to get through your front door twice (you are allergic). S/he is breathtakingly beautiful and wears a collar.

Water features

Along with the creeks and branches that promoted so many Mills, streams run under or along roads and provide a soothing sound when you pass by.

In the summertime, sudden violent storms can move in from the west. They are strong enough to down trees and knock out power and even issue “microbursts” of rain (2-3 inches in 30 minutes). These can overwhelm your back stairwell drain and soak your basement. After the sun comes out, your neighborhood fills with vans of ServPro folk hauling industrial de-humidifiers and fans inside, while other folk haul carpeting and laminate out to the curb.

If you sold your Rockville condo and bought your Wheaton house in August of 2008, you would’ve treaded water through the crash of the housing/financial markets in September/October. With enough homes in foreclosure or bought vastly undervalued, your own cottage is now “underwater.”

The Corner of Collins and Ivydale

In Wheaton, just for showing up you benefit from the spectacular hearts of your neighbors. You know the names of the humans across your road, next door and behind, at least. Only a few remain of “the originals” – first occupants like Bernice’s parents. (You will hear the term enough that it insinuates your dream, reminiscent of TV’s “Lost” – murky group called “Originals” — but it was only a dream.)

Don’t worry about going out of town for a few days. Without your asking, your neighbors will look out for pamphlets stuck in your storm door or newspapers delivered contrary to your stop request. They will take in a box from Amazon on backorder. You will do the same during their upcoming trips to Italy and Ocean City.

You catch up with news of life on any day warm enough for yard work, and you talk again about getting a list-serve going for yourselves. You should really have a block party or something. And you stop raking to visit with Allison or Christopher or Buddy or Moose from blocks away, but you forget again to ask the humans their names.

And they won’t know your name. But it won’t matter. You all know where you live.

—Mary Donovan

The Blue Guitar: Novel Excerpt — Ann Ireland

Mar 232011

Ann Ireland is an old friend and a brilliant novelist. I knew her novels long before I knew the author. I recall reviewing her first book, A Certain Mr. Takahashi (winner of the $50,000 Bantam-Seal First Novel Award), a brilliant, comic and poignant tale of two teenage Toronto girls smitten with an exotic, foreign symphony conductor who happens to move into the house across the street. Her second novel, The Instructor, was nominated for Trillium Award and Barnes and Noble’s Discover These New Writers Award, and Exile was shortlisted for a Governor-General’s Literary Award and the Rogers/Writers Trust Award for fiction. Ann lives most of the time in Toronto (not far from where my brother lives); she is a past president of PEN Canada and coordinates the Writing Workshops at The Chang School of Continuing Education at Ryerson University.

This chapter is taken from a brand new novel called The Blue Guitar. Much of it takes place at an international Classical Guitar Competition where (mostly young) musicians come from around the world to compete for a grand prize and career liftoff. Ireland is interested in examining the reasons why musicians put themselves through this grueling event and how they hold up. Or don’t. This section introduces Lucy Shaker, the oldest competitor, as she does her level best to make time to practice her instrument – despite domestic distractions – in the lead up period to the contest.

A Chapter from The Blue Guitar

A Novel by Ann Ireland

NINE

Mark’s uncle has finally pushed off. Out the door he goes, spry as a bird, tossing his vinyl suitcase down the front steps, not bothering to thank Lucy or Mark for their hospitality, nor to offer a farewell to the boys who’d already left for school. His forehead shines as he smiles; in his mind he’s already disappeared from this sorry excuse of a city. The limo idles curbside, plumes of exhaust meeting autumn air while Uncle Philip’s suit jacket whips in the wind.

He wears no overcoat, having left this bulky item stashed in the cupboard down the hall; it is an unnecessary burden in the torrid climate that he is about to enter. He will return in six months to reclaim it. Mark’s uncle insists on limousine service to Pearson International because he likes plenty of leg room before the arduous flight to Southeast Asia. Of course he was too cheap to pitch in for food or wine when he stayed here, en route.

Lucy feels a faint spasm of guilt on thinking these thoughts for it was Uncle Philip, music lover extraordinaire, who quite unexpectedly mailed her a cheque last year with the note: ‘If you’re going to enter this competition, you’ll need an excellent teacher. I hope this will help.’

Thanks to him, she’s been working with the divine Goran.

Lucy watches the driver fit suitcase into trunk then hold the passenger door open for Uncle Philip who, once settled, rolls down the window and calls out in his sunny voice, ‘Back in the spring, dear.’

As if she’ll be counting the days.

She shuts the front door, twists the lock and breathes clove – scented aftershave mixed with breakfast bacon, a now – familiar brew. With luck, there will be no interruptions until four o’clock when the twins amble home from high school. Her husband, Mark, works as a security guard at the Art Gallery of Ontario and doesn’t get off shift until supper time. It’s his dream job, or so he claims. He loves standing in the 18th century room, surrounded by lacquered paintings by little – known artists, making sure school kids don’t jostle or touch anything, or some jackass doesn’t take a knife to the brittle canvases. He claims to thrive on the long stretches of nothing, punctuated by bursts of activity. It gives him time to think – about what, Lucy has no idea. She pictures him standing guard in front of the portrait of some long – forgotten Cornish merchant whose manicured hand rests on a globe.

Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India

Mar 232011

We live in one of the periods of great extinction. Species and languages are disappearing. There is something poignant and touching about this; though nature is merciless and appears not to regret previous losses and only responds to loss by refilling the gaps with myriad new species (um, after a while). But it makes you think, doesn’t it? A language, a whole way of thinking, a mass of knowledge, lore, legend, myth–pffftt! GONE. Listen to the recording of this woman’s voice on the BBC page.

The last speaker of an ancient language in India’s Andaman Islands has died at the age of about 85, a leading linguist has told the BBC.

The death of the woman, Boa Senior, was highly significant because one of the world’s oldest languages, Bo, had come to an end, Professor Anvita Abbi said.

She said that India had lost an irreplaceable part of its heritage.

Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa. Some may be up to 70,000 years old.

via BBC News – Last speaker of ancient language of Bo dies in India.

Mary Ruefle wins Poetry Society of America William Carlos Williams Award

Mar 222011

What a civil, undomesticable, and heartening poet is Mary Ruefle: fond of experiment, but just as pleased to write of tilapia or county fairs; always novel, but never pandering to a mode; refusing neither the absurd nor the sublime. Any Ruefle poem is an occasion of resonant wit and language, subject to an exacting intelligence. For more than thirty years, she has freshened American poetry by humbly glorifying both the inner life and the outward experience. Her Selected Poems, like the work of William Carlos Williams, is a testimony not only to the power of artfulness, but to human empathy.via Mary Ruefle – Poetry Society of America.

The Dayroom: Essay — Inmate #6666666Z, Texas Department of Corrections

Mar 202011

The Dayroom, a personal essay,

by Inmate # 6666666Z, Texas Department of Corrections

Contributor’s note: This essay was recently forwarded to Natalia Sarkissian by its author.

In this prison, there’s a small room, the size of an average living room, called the dayroom. With brown vinyl paneling on the walls, a few grimy windows that don’t open, twenty red plastic seats arranged in rows and a small black-and-white tv set mounted on a bracket high up in the corner, the dayroom is the best room in this place. We watch movies here, listen to the news. And every Sunday at least one hundred of us watch sports. Well before the event begins the room fills beyond maximum capacity—all the seats occupied, all the standing spots with good views taken—and gives a whole new meaning to the expression “packed like sardines.”

Every Sunday during football season I get to the dayroom earlier than most, snagging myself a choice spot, and sit waiting, filled with excitement. It’s that season again. Soon everyone’ll be in here, eating bowls of nachos, frito pies, cookies and popcorn. We’ll be betting on our teams with whatever we’ve got of value. Some of us will win big; others will be wiped out.

Since the stakes are high, people cuss the tv out. “Ho ass bitch, mother effer, can’t you catch the damn football?” they scream, their hearts and emotions running wild. Most times I get caught up in the spirit and forget I’m not in a real stadium. The noise, the hollering, the fried food smell of fritos, and I transcend these fake wood walls. Sometimes though, the magic doesn’t work and I remember. What it was like to be outside in the freeworld. How I used to run on the field. Bull, they called me then.
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Excerpt from Trail of Breadcrumbs: Why I Joined and Left the US Navy — Memoir by Christy Clothier

Mar 192011

Christy Clothier is one of my former students and a dual-genre graduate from Vermont College of Fine Arts in fiction and nonfiction. A small, feisty woman, Christy taught me more about the nature of the military, returned soldiers, trauma and its aftermath and life than perhaps I wanted to know. Her memoir is riddled with sadness, injustice and innocence betrayed. Just to give you a taste: there is an incredibly telling moment in an early chapter when she realizes she feels safe amid the horrors of boot camp because no one is allowed to hit her. The chapter I selected is perhaps one of the most benign. Another chapter, the one dealing with her near-rape by a Navy Seal, has been published elsewhere (see below) and turned into a play. Christy served in the US Navy from 1997-2003 as an air traffic control tower supervisor. She writes short stories, research articles and essays that connect childhood abuse with military service and trauma. Christy’s writing has appeared in Inquiry and Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq, from which her essay “The Controller” was adapted for the play Coming in Hot, currently touring the United States through 2011. Christy lives in Colorado with her dog, Jauss, named after a famous author.

Excerpt from Trail of Breadcrumbs:

Why I Joined and Left the US Navy

A Memoir by Christy Clothier

From the air, Naval Air Station San Clemente Island resembles a malignant mole on the skin of an ocean freckled with small islands. Twenty-five sinewy miles of salt and rock, San Clemente rose nearly 2000 feet above the sea after tectonic shifts deformed the region. The sea continuously feeds on the island’s borders and leaves behind erosion’s bite marks. Large sections of earth are left to hover over the water like a ship’s plank before breaking off daily into the sea.

A small military community works on top of this unstable foundation. Where untouched sand dunes named Castle Field once lied, the Navy took over. First, they covered the area with white rocks and small shells and used the makeshift airstrip for emergency landings only. Today, the runway sits on land renamed Sherman Field and paved over with a 9,300 foot concrete runway capable of supporting the heaviest warcraft. That was where I was headed.

A one-way flight from the Naval Air Station North Island, Coronado, California, to Naval Air Station San Clemente Island takes approximately 30 minutes. The refitted Orion P-3 levels just above the first cloud layer, skimming the frothy blue-white haze as though it were riding the crest of a wave. I do not peek out the oval windows. I shut the plastic screen. The familiar scent of industrial fabric on the seat back in front of me lulls me into an uncomfortable sleep, until the P-3 plunges into the froth of clouds on final descent. I ride the white rush until I land with a hard screech on the rocky surface below.

On the tarmac, the view gets only flatter. Aluminum buildings still look as they would from the window seat on a plane, all sides and roof. The island is the shape of a landfill. Dust settles in thin coats on the World War II relics, tanks that mark the fields like billboards. Macadam Road snakes six miles along sharp cliffs and deep canyons from the airfield down to the pier at Wilson’s Cove. The remainder of the island is sectioned off, either unused by the military or inaccessible to individuals without prior authorization. The entire island sits beneath an invisible barrier, airspace designated as Warning Area 237. Dangerous flight activity occurs from the surface of San Clemente Island up to 5000 feet in the sky and for 10 nautical miles in every direction. Without authority, no one flies in or out of San Clemente’s airspace.

I had been in the Navy for a year and a half, all of that time spent at Chicago’s boot camp and Pensacola’s Air Traffic Control School. I was an E-1, the lowest rank in the military. I knew my official title was Air Traffic Controller Airman Recruit (ACAR). I knew to dress properly in my uniform, how to pass military inspections and ATC exams. I knew not to do anything without being told. I stood alone outside the airport terminal and waited for someone to claim me.

Now the Green Blade Rises: Sermon — Maggie Helwig

Mar 192011

Maggie Helwig is an incredibly gifted novelist and poet and an old friend dating from the early 1990s when for four years (1991-1994) she and I edited the annual discovery & showcase anthology Coming Attractions published by Oberon Press. Among the new writers we discovered were Lisa Moore, Caroline Adderson and Elise Levine (who subsequently got her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts). Maggie lives in Toronto, and is the author of six books of poetry, two books of essays, a collection of short stories, and three novels. Her most recent novel, Girls Fall Down, was shortlisted for the Relit Award and the City of Toronto Book Award. She has worked as a human rights activist with organizations including the East Timor Alert Network and War Resisters’ International. Maggie is currently completing a Master of Divinity degree at Trinity College, and will be ordained in the Anglican Church of Canada in May.

Now the Green Blade Rises

By Maggie Helwig

A homily preached at Trinity College Chapel, Toronto, Easter Sunday, April 12, 2009

And at the beginning of everything, a garden.

Two people in a garden, and in this place the whole human story begins; begins and begins again, new, utterly changed.

John Donne wrote, “We think that Paradise and Calvary, Christ’s Cross and Adam’s tree, stood in one place.” We knew this, two days ago, our failures and petty evils, our violence and greed, converging on that terrible death, all our sins wrapped up in the torture and murder of a man on a tree.

But this place, this day, is more than that, it is all places; it is the cross and the grave and the place of rebirth all at once, it is paradise and Jerusalem, the city and the garden, and in the meeting of these two people are all people, all of us falling at the feet of the unknown and so deeply known Resurrected One.

And Mary Magdalene in the garden, the last one left, pathetically stubborn, unable to let go, unable to accept the inevitable loss and move on; she is the first to know, and she is the first to tell the story.

But she begins with a mistake – or not a mistake, perhaps. Perhaps something more. The man approaches her, and she takes him for a gardener. It isn’t that surprising, really, that she doesn’t recognize Jesus right away. How could she have expected this? How could any of us expect this?
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The Soul’s Habitation: Emotion and Writing — Richard Farrell

Mar 172011

The Soul’s Habitation: Emotion and Writing

By Richard Farrell

Contributor’s Note: This essay is based on my graduate lecture delivered at VCFA in January, 2011.

When I was eight-years-old, I started hanging out with the older boys in my neighborhood, many of them already teenagers. They nicknamed me ‘Head,’ because I had, or rather I have, a large head. At eight, I also had a tangled mass of blonde wavy hair, hair which made my already considerable melon twice as noticeable atop of my scrawny body. Today, my son is likewise afflicted. But getting a nickname in that world was also a sign of acceptance. I was the only boy under the age of ten so honored in my neighborhood.

One summer day ‘Bessie’, who was fifteen at the time, who lived next door to me, and who hung himself five years later, suggested that we go behind the Doherty’s house and throw crab apples at a nest off field mice. The mice had been recently discovered by my twelve year old neighbor, ‘Burger.’ A hunting party formed. Six or seven of us set out for the field, armed with fistfuls of crab apples and barbaric energy.

We found a piece of plywood lying flat in a field of summer grasses. We circled round it in a phalanx, armed and angry, our eyes brimming with the thrill of the hunt, our weaponized apples cocked and at the ready. Bessie reached down and lifted a board of rotting plywood from the matted rectangle of bleached yellow grass. A second later, half a dozen mice scattered in every direction. Apples flew like arrows. Someone whooped as the fruit ricocheted off the dirt. Boys jumped. The mice darted between our feet. Dozens of apples pummeled the ground, but the mice evaded them, scurrying into the grass and safety.

Somehow, I ended up holding the last apple. And somehow one tiny mouse kept running around in circles, spiraling around the center of the flattened yellow grass, dazed, while I took aim. It circled once more. I clenched the spotty apple in my hand, then I chucked it with everything I had.

My shot pelted the mouse square in the head and it flipped in the air. The boys screamed and laughed. The mouse flopped on its side, a streak of blood leaking from its mouth, which hung open in a grim smile. Its legs twitched, then went still. Bessie raised my hand in the air as the boys howled their approval, but I stood there, frozen, staring at that dying mouse.

Much of my desire to write seems to stem from that moment, if not directly, then at least indirectly, at least in the sense of my need to reconcile that act with all that has followed it. That mouse still haunts me, even after so much time. I’m neither a pacifist nor a vegan and I still love football. I know that many worse things have happened in the world than the death of a tiny mouse. But the emotional core of who I am has not strayed very far from that eight year old boy standing in a summer field. It’s not just that single incident, clearly, but all the things which have followed, all the joys I’ve felt, the sorrows, the loves, the passions, the rages, the tears. When I stop and analyze what I love about good writing and why I want to be a writer, it strikes me quite plainly that writing retains the ability to express profound emotions through language. I should broaden the scope a bit. Art does this, not just writing, though I can’t paint and I can’t make music, so I struggle to sing on the canvas of the page. And it’s not intellect, though clearly good writing does challenge my brain. The intellect is necessary to take something as abstract as an emotion and to convey it plainly. But my desire to write seems tied up with a deep need, with a desire to express that swirling, muddied mess of interior emotions.

Margot Livesy

Margot Livesey says that “one of the main ambitions of art is to depict and evoke emotion.” At its best, a work of art furiously explores, conjuring and capturing the full palate of human emotions with unflinching honesty. A well-written story guides us toward thought, compassion, and insight; it points the way toward wisdom. Good writing does not teach by brutalizing the intellect, or by subduing the spirit or proselytizing to the uninitiated, but by finding a way to make contact with another soul. Art teaches emotionally.

An object of art is a negotiation, the artist bartering with the observer, the transaction conducted between song and ear, between painting and eye, between story and reader, and the primary currency of these transactions is emotion. We write, because through the act of exploring our ideas conceived in words, we stumble toward meaning, toward a deeper, more complex understanding of ourselves and of others. Through writing, we radicalize the emotional core of life, which for me is the sacred center. Poet Pattiann Rogers echoes Bertrand Russell when she calls for us to build the ‘soul’s habitation’ in our work, a place we write from and towards, a place of exile and yearning. In the end we attempt to create an enduring object through writing because this remains one of the few affirming ways left to communicate our unadulterated selves: our fears and desires, our grief and hope, our love and our desperation. The artist speaks, first and foremost, from his soul’s habitation, which for me has a secular but no less powerful meaning. It can be touched only within the emotional transactions of art.

Jane Kenyon offers this:

Why do we want to write? What is behind this crazy impulse? The wish to connect with others, on a deep level, about inward things. The pressure of emotion, which many people prefer to ignore, but which, for you, is the very substance of your work, your clay. There’s the need to make sense of life behind the impulse to write.

But how? How do we transform these ideas, these feelings, into stories, essays and poems? This exploration, this journey in, must have techniques, right? There must be clues.

In fiction, at least, it begins with characters. The fiction writer must put characters into dramatic situations and figure out how those characters will feel things, how they will explore their world with action and thought, but with the emotional baggage always in tow. Only after this can the writer consider how that depiction will conjure a response in the reader. John Gardner says,

The first business of the writer must be to make us see and feel vividly what his characters see and feel. However odd, however wildly unfamiliar the fictional world—odd as hog-farming to a fourth-generation Parisian designer, or Wall Street to an unemployed tuba player—we must be drawn into the characters’ world as if we were born to it.

The first step, then, is to build a world that characters can experience through their senses, actions, thoughts, and memories. A world we construct, word by word, image by image, on the page.

Before a writer can evoke any emotional response in the reader, she must give her characters their due. And characters demand to be heard; they insist on feeling things deeply—to laugh, cry and punch holes through the page. Only then can the reader be drawn in. Only then can the reader hope to feel something too.

This is an area where I struggle in my writing. I have a difficult time entering my characters’ space. I don’t dwell in their soul’s habitation. I’m not experiencing the emotions first-hand, but through the filtering lens of my intellect. And this holds my writing back. It prevents my stories from conveying emotion because the initial, primary depiction is off. I’m like an actor dutifully memorizing my lines, but unable to inhabit my characters, unable to make my characters believable.

Before emotion can be conveyed to a reader, it must be authentically, honestly depicted within the story.

Yet none of this should take on the appearance of dogma. This is not an argument for strict realism. The artist doesn’t gerrymander emotions. She doesn’t manipulate, she explores. The outcome is never certain, and the pathway often less so. And technique alone is never enough. Depicting emotion in a story a certain way can arouse strong feelings in one reader and none in a second. Every person brings his or her own emotional histories to their reading. And the emotions portrayed and evoked can often be unpleasant, disturbing, even downright brutal. Also, the feelings we experience as readers are often very different than those characters feel within the story.

Dostoevsky’s murderous student, Raskolnikov, evokes a powerful reaction in me, but I don’t share his emotions as he bashes in the skull of his pawn broker and her sister. So why do I identify with him? Douglas Glover once said in a workshop that we don’t identify with a character so much as we do with their desires. To wit: I feel the restrictions of Raskolnikov’s life; I feel his desire to break free; I have sympathy for his desire to make something out of his life. I might even understand his murderous impulses at times. I can feel these things in myself because Dostoevsky depicts Raskolnikov’s desires so vividly. But as the axe blades shatters the skulls of his victims, I feel very differently than the character does. What’s depicted and what’s conveyed are almost diametrically opposed, but it is effective because Dostoevsky paints such vivid interior details of his characters.

The day I slaughtered that mouse, I also slaughtered the first innocence of myself. I spent the next twenty years trying to prove that what I felt that day was not weakness. I spent most of my life bound to male rituals, to contact sports and the military and the systematic suppression of my emotions. I hoped, like many men and women, that the rituals would toughen the core of me, would harden the exterior and overcome what I perceived to be softness. Because I couldn’t celebrate with those other boys, because I couldn’t share their mutual joy at my kill, I spent twenty years distancing myself from the pain of watching that mouse die at my hands. I ran away from my soul’s habitation.

I’d like to think that I’ve stopped running, and I’ve spent the last ten years trying to figure out how to render the complexity of emotions that life can evoke. I’ve tried to express that through writing. In part, this is why I want to write. I want to time travel and tell that little eight year old boy that what he’s feeling is okay. And while I can’t do that, I can hope to reconstruct in my stories a place where my characters, my readers and my self can feel things without worrying that what we feel is wrong. I haven’t accomplished this yet, but it’s a long race back to that summer field. Sometimes, the only guides I have are other writers who’ve succeeded.

In the end, we are bound to structure and ritual in writing. But as Bob Vivian once eloquently stated, structure, technique, grammar, words, even genre, only provide only the vessel, the container which holds the water. And though we need the vessel, and we struggle so much to build it, what we desire is the water inside. We desire not the walls which make up the soul’s habitation, but the fire burning in the hearth inside those walls.

I don’t know if anything I write can ever heal that first wound. But maybe healing isn’t the goal. Maybe the goal is not inward, but outward. Maybe the goal is discovering ways to express the internal, to share it, and not hide it away. Maybe that’s what all good stories do.

—Richard Farrell

An Insider’s Look at Book Publishing Then and Now

Mar 152011

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBztGX-2i1M&feature=related]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ78WHpGZ1o&feature=related]

In the grip of archaic paradigms

Mar 152011

This morning I was thinking about the difference between thoughts and attitudes. Attitudes are semi-conscious tilts toward or away from ideas that somehow also precede ideas and condition our acceptance or rejection of ideas. Attitudes seem to exist prior to ideas, with feelings attached, and make the acceptance or rejection of ideas easier. Attitudes are the emotional or psychological structures attached to schematic world views that are somehow absorbed prior to critical thought. Even a predisposition to critical thought is an attitude.

In my lecture at the residency last January, I talked about the metaphysical two-world paradigm that has dogged human thought for thousands of years. There are two basic paradigms in this regard: the Platonic two-world paradigm and the Aristotelean one-world or scientific paradigm. These are very old ideas, ways of thinking, ruts, that people fall into repeating without thinking. And even after thinking about them, people still fall into them (this is the history of western philosophy). We spout fragments of these ideas unknowingly every day of our lives; they somehow live in the discourse of our culture.

Another ancient paradigm we tend to adopt without thinking is the Great Chain of Being which creates a hierarchy of existence, a graded system of value with humans on top and rocks at the bottom, a pretty comforting world view for humans. The Great Chain of Being is basically an outgrowth of the two-world metaphysical paradigm. You can look this up in Arthur Lovejoy’s book The Great Chain of Being. E. M. W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture is good, too.

Frank E. Manuel’s little book Shapes of Philosophical History is a like-minded historical analysis of the two basic time paradigms: the cyclical view of history and the linear view. Like the two-world paradigm, the cyclical paradigm is archaic, a vestige of oral cultures (and humans inhabited an oral universe for perhaps 100,000 years; literacy has been around for only a couple of thousand—old ideas die hard). Temporal shapes such as birth-maturation-death, primitive-classical-decadent, the rise and fall of civilizations, etc. are examples of cyclical thinking. The linear view is seems to start with Christianity with its Apocalyptic notion that the world is coming to an end after which some of us will rise again and go to Heaven. Augustine, a Berber tribesman from what is now Algeria who became a Christian bishop, saw history as a progress toward the City of God, the new Jerusalem. Later on, French Enlightenment philosophers invented the modern notion of “progress” which is the idea that science will invent more and better ways to make humans comfortable and happy faster and faster. Evolution itself is an application of the linear paradigm to biology. We “think” fragments of these two ideas every day of our lives as well. Every time you think that culture is in decline, you are mouthing one paradigm. Every time you notice how much cheaper and smarter computers and cell phones are, you’re modeling the other paradigm. The emotional attitudes attached to these paradigms are nostalgia and hope. We moderns are caught between nostalgia and hope, with nostalgia (for a better, simpler, more primitive and virtuous existence) probably predominant. Heidegger’s “forgetting of Being” is a philosophical expression of nostalgia.

These shapes or paradigms are ways of giving structure and meaning to the mega-data of existence. They beg the question as to whether or not the shapes bear any relation to existence. They make humans feel better. A distant alternative to cycles and lines would be Democritus’s idea of time as “whirl” which doesn’t seem nearly as appealing.

The trick is to try to catch yourselves thinking in archaic paradigms and then ask yourselves what is real.

Many years later he will understand

Mar 132011

Juan Jose Saer

“Many years later he will understand, from the overwhelming evidence, that the so-called human soul never had, or will ever have, what they call substance or essence, that what they call character, style, personality, are nothing but senseless replications, and that their own subject–the body where they manifest–is the one most starved of their nature, that what others call life is a series of a posteriori recognitions of the places where a blind, incomprehensible, ceaseless drift deposits, in spite of themselves, the eminent individuals who, after having been dragged through it, begin to elaborate systems that pretend to explain it; but for now, having just turned twenty, he still believes that problems have solutions, situations outcomes, individuals personality, and actions logic.” –Juan Jose Saer, The Sixty-Five Years of Washington.

-Quotes brought to you by Rich Farrell, with the help of his exhausted, post-half-marathon-running wife, who read the sentence to him while he typed it. All errors are hers.

The Second Annual Numéro Cinq Aphorism Contest

Mar 132011

Last year's aphorism contest finalists in the deciding match (computer generated simulation)

The Second Annual Numéro Cinq Aphorism Contest

The wheel of the year has turned and once again we find ourselves facing the daunting task of writing aphorisms for BIG PRIZES. The “wheel of the year” is a reference to the ancient cyclical view of time, that is, time viewed as something like a gerbil’s exercise wheel—the Wheel of Ixion of myth or Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence. At NC, as in the Universe as a Whole, if you wait long enough everything happens again. In this case, it’s time for the second annual Numéro Cinq Aphorism Contest.

Submissions March 15-31.

Submit by entering your aphorism in a comment box beneath this post.

Submissions must be no more than 150 words in length.

Do not enter a submission unless you have figured out what an aphorism is first.* But once you have figured it out, you can enter more than once.

Wit and arrogance appreciated.

Contest open to absolutely everyone including employees of Numéro Cinq, their significant others, children, and small pets.

First Prize — Instant Worldwide (e)Publication w/ commentary.

Plus honours & laurels.

*If you’re stuck, look aphorisms up on the web. Generally speaking, they are terse, pointed sayings meant to provoke thought and argument. There are several basic types, but they often set up as definitions or clever balanced antitheses or even puns. Here is a page called Aphorisms of Famous People. Here is one called Aphorisms4all. Identify different forms and try them all.**

**If you’re really, really stuck, just copy and paste from last year’s contest. The Official Judges’ Long List is here. The People’s Choice Winner is here. And the Official Winner is here.

Sometimes desire is just a caper-fruit after all

Mar 122011

Here’s the TLS review of 400 Years of the King James Bible. It toucheth on many topics including translation and mistranslation and, here, yes, even on Robert Alter, critic and translator, whose formalist approach to the Bible (and the novel) dg hath always found revelatory. This little bit is quite funny.

The liveliest essay in the volume is Robert Alter’s “The glories and the glitches of the King James Bible”, in which he matches wits with the KJB translators. As the editor-translator of The Five Books of Moses (2004) and The Book of Psalms (2007), Alter is well qualified to appreciate not only the skill of the translators, but also their mistakes. After reading Alter’s essay, it is hard to feel quite the same way about the KJB’s rendering of the final chapter of Ecclesiastes, which many Anglicans of a certain age can still recite by heart: “the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets”. Alter is justly admiring of this “great sombre poem on mortality and the decay of the body”, but also points out that some of the poetic effect is actually the result of mistranslation. The Hebrew word hagav, which the KJB translates as “grasshopper”, may refer to the locust-tree; the word aviyyonah, which the KJB translates as “desire”, is probably another plant, the caper-fruit.

via 400 years of the King James Bible by Arnold Hunt – TLS.

The Infinite: Poem — Giacomo Leopardi Translated by Richard Jackson

Mar 122011

Here is a Richard Jackson translation of an ever so slightly upbeat Leopardi poem. Giacomo Leopardi was one of the 19th century greats, an Italian patriot and a great pessimist in the Schopenhauer mode. Rick Jackson is poet, translator and teacher at Vermont College of Fine Arts and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. You might want to read this Leopardi poem in conjunction with Rick’s terrific essay, “Translation, Adaptation and Transformation: The Poet as Translator,” published on Numéro Cinq earlier this week.

The Infinite

By Giacomo Leopardi

Translated by Richard Jackson

Always dear to me was this hermit’s hill,
And this hedge that always separates me
From looking at the distant horizon, but
Seated here and lost in an endless meditation
Which discovers a vaster space within,
Boundless silence and deep inner quiet,
My heart is nearly overcome. And like the wind
Murmuring among the leaves to which I compare
Its beating, this infinite silence, this inner voice
So with my mind I encompass an eternity,
And the seasons die, and the present lives
In that sound. And in the middle of all that
Immensity, my thought drowns itself:
Sweet to me, to be shipwrecked in this sea.

—Leopardi, translated by Richard Jackson

Let’s See Them Top That (And Other Neat Things To Do In Las Vegas): Essay — Brianna Berbenuik

Mar 112011

Here’s a second Las Vegas essay from NC’s intrepid observer of all things Nevadan (from the unique perspective of a 24-year-old Canadian Russian and Slavic Studies grad student). In her first essay, Brianna shot a Glock and an AK47. In this one, she visits the Atomic Testing Museum. In two short essays, she somehow manages to go straight to the heart of American strangeness, at least from an outsider’s point of view. Brianna Berbenuik publishes the blog Desire Machines and writes occasional film critiques here.

Let’s See Them Top That

By Brianna Berbenuik

I’m pretty disappointed that I don’t get to see the nuclear test sites out in the Nevada desert. Being a Canadian citizen, I am required to go through extensive paperwork that takes up to 6 weeks to clear in order for me to be able to see radiated holes in the ground. This is a letdown, because I hear that parts of the desert have turned to glass in the wake of the testing. I imagine this and think that there is, somehow, a morbid, unshakable beauty in this. The aftermath of great destruction: quiet and delicate. However, just up Paradise Boulevard off the Strip, there is the Museum of Atomic Testing. My consolation prize.

We walk there, which is a fucking mistake because it takes forever and by the time we actually get there my legs and feet are sore and I kind of feel like strangling something. The museum is a boring cube of grey concrete passing as a building. It resembles a bunker in some aspects, and maybe that’s the point. I buy our tickets, sign a guest book, and walk through the museum, which is essentially full of dismantled bits of the nuclear test stations that once were out in the Nevada desert. Everything is educational, scientific and at times hilarious. So much of the American zeitgeist of the 1950’s and until the end of the Cold War was illustrated by videos and documents “preparing” people for a nuclear attack. Incidentally, I read somewhere that less than 1% of the American population, during the Cold War, had fallout shelters.

But, because it is America, within all this educational material and nostalgia there is a lot of propaganda: videos of veterans of nuclear testing extolling the virtues of having nuclear bombs and how it truly does protect the country and the greater good in the end. No regrets. But the war is over.

Weathers and Places: Essay — Sydney Lea

Mar 112011

Sydney Lea gave the best poetry reading I have ever had the pleasure to attend—this was in the Noble Lounge at Vermont College way back in my first teaching residency, yea, these many years ago, mid-1990s. It was a long poem about a chainsaw accident that nearly cost him a leg. But it was also about friendship, the passing of the generations, the loss of the old north woods culture, about death and memory. It was the dead of winter outside, hot in the room, the chairs packed, people standing along the walls, damp condensing and dripping down the windows. Syd gripped the podium as the emotion rose. He began stamping his foot rhythmically, partly for the poem and partly, it seemed, to keep his own rising emotion in check. There were tears in the audience. The mood was electric. And when he was done there was a spontaneous ovation, people ran up, crowded up the aisles to embrace him, clap him on the back, make contact. I remember that, of course, and, of course, Tang Night: every residency the male faculty would adjourn one evening to the House of Tang for the All-You-Can-Eat buffet. Mostly this involved Syd and the other senior faculty, all VC veterans, regaling the newcomer with ribald tales of legendary teachers and students, also the famous Florida residencies when (long ago) we fled Vermont winters en masse. Which is to say, that I remember Sydney Lea and my early days at Vermont College with vast affection and nostalgia.

Besides being a wonderful poet and fiction-writer, Syd is a master of the personal essay, often combining his love of the woods, dogs and hunting with a passion for the laconic wisdom of northeastern oldtimers in a way that puts him among the best nature writers in American today.

Sydney Lea’s ninth collection of poems, Young of the Year, has just been published by Four Way Books, which will issue his tenth, I Was Thinking of Beauty, in 2013. Lea founded and for thirteen years edited New England Review. He has just retired from Dartmouth College, after four decades as a professor there and at several other colleges and universities. The current essay is part of a collection he has all but completed, celebrating the men and woman of pre-power tool times in a logging community in northern Maine. Lea is a trustee and capital campaign manager for the local land trust there, which has conserved 350,000 acres of woods and waters.

Weathers and Places

By Sydney Lea

— in mem. Creston MacArthur (1919-76)

Wherever you may be, if you are capable of memory there, can you fetch that dawn on Freeze-to-Death Island, the sleet slamming at our faces like some archaic dentist’s tool? A flock of geese drops in among the decoys, and without so much as a word between us, we let them paddle around unharmed on the riddled surface. There’s something so elegant about the birds that we just can’t fire on them. At length you rise from behind the rock we use for cover to shout, unaccountably, “Off to Cuba, baby ducks!” You pronounce it Cuber, like JFK. October of ‘62. The geese flush in a tumult of sound.

What elegy can there be?

As a young man, I had a real knack for remembering weather like that, or any. I can still tell you, say, that the winter of ‘81 brought virtually no snow to the northcountry. Several days in April of ‘73 were unseasonable, to put it gently; they got hot as a flatiron. My son, your namesake, was two, and I still see that chocolate Easter bunny liquefying in his tiny hand as we stood together in the dooryard. That seems sad now, which is odd. He wasn’t the least bothered himself. The sweetness remained; he simply licked the dark streaks from fist and forearm.

That power of recalling a day’s or season’s conditions, along with a few other endowments, is about gone. I am apter to summon the elements from a morning fifty years back, like that one on Freeze-to-Death, than from fifty hours. But whatever gifts I own or lack, I’ll never forget how the day shaped up at your funeral: it was very like that hour of the geese, but this time the perverse conditions, rather than seeming apt to a moment of glory, seemed equally fit for an opposite one. The day for me marked the end of a crucial discipleship, friendship, even sonship. I watched the frosty, wet earth close over all that.

The old saw claims that time heals our wounds, but it’s not so much that we’re healed by its passage as that the wounds become parts of us, along with the joys and frustrations and pleasures of any life. They sink deep inside, components now of what people describe as our characters.

What or whom, really, might I have elegized then? What or whom now?

In some sense, the day of that service in ‘76 seems a perennial today, all full of sideways sleet and wind. We mourners dodge strips of shingle and bright can torn by the gale from roofs of the Passamaquoddy shacks. Sand and salt blow off the road and sting our eyes as we file into the reservation’s small Catholic chapel. The congregation is about half tribal, half white.

It’s February, but Big Lake is pocked with open water. A strange winter thaw: whitecaps show in the gaps, sloshing up and over the ice. Skinny dogs hunker against the leeward wall of a maintenance shed, from which a poster flaps. I can’t read it in the blow, but I know what it says: KEEP MAINE’S FORESTS GREEN. It doesn’t seem possible they’ll ever be that again.

The power has failed clear to the coast.

Though I don’t know her, an old Native woman limps to my side and tells me she can’t remember anything like this in late winter. She grimaces, sneaking a tea bag under her lip against the pain in a dark tooth, which she keeps touching, as if she had a tic. It’s just that she’s nervous, as we all must be, at least in some measure.

Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, & More: Author Photos — Dan Wilcox

Mar 102011

Allen Ginsberg, QE2, Albany, NY, 11/29/90

Dan Wilcox is an Albany, NY, poet and photographer who claims to have the world’s largest collection of photos of unknown poets. But many of the poets he has photographed over the years are, in fact, very well known. Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Quincy Troupe are among the illustrious authors who have found their way to Albany. Also pictured here are dg’s friends, the novelist William Kennedy who, as director of the New York State Writers Institute, hosts many of the visiting writers, a young Pierre Joris whose translations have been published on NC, and Susan Novotny, owner of the Bookhouse.

I started taking photos many years ago of poets & writers reading their work & my photos have been used for the cover of poetry chapbooks, for publicity & author’s photos, in poetry magazines & online. Before digital cameras, I was often the lone photographer in the audience. I estimate to have approximately 10,000 photos, many of famous poets & writers, but mostly the unknown community poets who read at open mics in the Capital District area. You can many of my photos at www.flickr.com/photos/dwlcx. —Dan Wilcox

Author Photos

By Dan Wilcox

Allen Ginsberg adjusting his camera, QE2, Albany, NY 112/29/90

Allen Ginsberg & William Kennedy, Half Moon Cafe, Albany, NY 11/30/90

Shooting Guns: Essay — Brianna Berbenuik

Mar 072011

Here’s an outrageously subversive essay from Las Vegas by Brianna Berbenuik, a grad student in Russian/Slavic culture and English & Russian literature at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island. DG discovered her by stumbling on her Tumblr blog Desire Machines where she goes by the name Superfoo. Beyond this, dg knows nothing about her except that she writes with audacity and says what she thinks and has an instinct for cultural truth, troublesome as that might be.

Shooting Guns

By Brianna Berbenuik

One of the things on the top of my list of things to do in Las Vegas was shoot guns. I had heard legends of places you could go and for $100 shoot whatever weapon of destruction you chose. As I am an avid student of war, apocalypse and humanity’s unending and impressive ability to continually invent new and exciting ways to demolish itself, shooting guns had not only its historical appeal, but also a pop-culture appeal, and personal appeal. To be, at least for a little while, part of this culture that loves to bear arms and imagine blowing away wrongdoers was exciting. I guess it’s kind of like a kitschy power-trip. When in Rome. Americans love their guns.

The Gun Store is about a 10 minute cab ride from the main strip, and it costs around $20 to get there. We enter the store and I sign a sheet of paper already almost full of other signatures, that declares with far too much ease that I am mentally sound enough to wield a gun, and that I understand I could be grievously injured or killed due to stray bullets, ricochets, malfunctioning of the weaponry, and everything else that goes along with toting a killing machine. I read this and of course my standard reaction is to smirk and laugh a little at the absurdity and redundancy of what I am signing, but my gut ties itself in a little knot and I think about how pissed I’d be if I died shooting an AK47 in some shit hole in Vegas because the dude next to me decided he didn’t like my face. Or worse yet, just a stray bullet. I mean, how pointless. Not that life isn’t pointless in the first place, but putting yourself in a situation where the pointlessness is magnified if you happen to be killed due to your own compliant stupidity is a little frightening. I guess you’d also call that the American Dream. Continue reading »

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