A collection of stories contemplating the vastly different types of love. Don’t expect soppy sentimentality: These wildly creative tales reflect the ferocity of love, how the unexpected, forbidden, illicit and illegal play out on our psyches, how love begins and what is left when it abandons us.
via Chatelaine Book Club: Best books of 2013 by Books Editor Laurie Grassi.
Natalie Helberg is joining the Numéro Cinq masthead as a contributor. Wonderful to have her (along with the two other recent new hires, Gerard Beirne and Adam Segal). Natalie’s first contribution to the magazine was the deliciously smart review of Adrián Bravi novel The Combover in the current (November) issue.
It’s worth adding that not only does Natalie join the masthead, she joins the extended NC community of editors and contributors, a cadre, so to speak, of alert, intelligent, creative, bookish, adventurous individuals who, despite living at the far corners of the continent (and beyond) manage to commit to the magazine, form friendships, foster an esprit de corps and, often, be very funny communicating with one another. It’s a little world, highly entertaining and inspiring.
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Natalie Helberg is from Edmonton, Alberta. Some of her experimental work has appeared on InfluencySalon.ca and in Canadian Literature. She recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing with the University of Guelph.
Okay, for sheer outrageous panache (“the Gordian Knit, the Holy Trinity…” and me) this might be one of the best sound bites so far. Re. my obscurity: Luckily, I am not alone in the world. My dog still recognizes me. Although, okay, she is not much of a reader. Her favourite character in literature is Spot.
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Certain mysteries abide in this world: the Gordian Knot, the Holy Trinity, and the literary obscurity of Douglas Glover. Over the course of a career spanning three and a half decades, Glover has produced some of the most stylish, adventurous fiction this country has ever seen, and yet he seems to be continually passed over for recognition (a 2003 Governor General’s Literary Award for his historical novel Elle notwithstanding). The reason for this oversight is frankly inexplicable, outside of a general nervousness when confronted with technically brilliant fiction.
Read the rest at Quill & Quire » Savage Love by Douglas Glover (Goose Lane Editions).
I particularly like “not for the squeamish.” There should be a Surgeon General’s Warning label on my books. “The book may be injurious if taken in large doses. Keep out the reach of children and small furry animals. May cause irreparable psychic harm if you don’t have a sense of humour.”
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Glover is a frank and bold writer. His stories are not for the squeamish and can be difficult to read at times but if a reader wants an honest understanding into the dark elements of the human psyche, he is the perfect writer.
via Review: Savage Love by Douglas Glover. (2013) Goose Lane Editions
“Oh yes!…The sweet summons of God to man. That’s when He calls you up to His arms. And it’s the most beautiful thing, a rebirth, a new life. But, just the same I’m in no rush to find out.”
― Oscar Hijuelos, Mr. Ives’ Christmas
Oscar Hijuelos, an old friend, died in October. I knew Oscar mostly through his visits to Yaddo, just down the road from where I live, and through mutual friends. He and Steve Stern and I had some uproarious times, not to be forgotten. I also interviewed him for the radio show I used to produce in Albany — this was in 1995 when he published the novel Mr. Ives’ Christmas. He was a generous, gentle man, also very funny, and a passionate, brilliant writer, best remembered nowadays for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Mambo Kings Plays Songs of Love.
Philip Graham knew Oscar much better than I did. And he has written a very personal and poignant elegy that you should all read. Then you should all go out and buy Oscar’s books and read them.
Thanks, Philip, for this.
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Of all the photos taken of him, the image above captures best, I think, the man who was my friend for thirty-eight years. Oscar Hijuelos and I met in graduate school at City College in 1975, two young writers in Frederick Tuten’s fiction workshop. Oscar was shy, even deferential to the other writers in the workshop, but when he first read his work to us in class, his head bowed over the pages on the desk, his voice low, everyone recognized his enormous talent.
We became friends, visiting each other often in his apartment on the Upper West Side or the house I was renting with old college friends north of the city. We read each other’s manuscripts (and continued to do so over the years), discovered that we were born within two days (and only a few miles) of each other, and we talked about our life-or-death love of literature, drank and joked and ate at any Cuban-Chinese restaurant we came upon in New York. To say Oscar had a good sense of humor is not quite right—he had a great sense of amusement, about everything in the world (and he also had a great curious appetite for everything in the world), and when I hear Oscar’s voice in my mind (and I listen to him a lot these days), I can hear his restrained chuckle, or the casual bemusement in the very tone of his speaking. That slight, gentle smile in the photo says it all.
Read the rest at Philip Graham » Blog Archive » My Mambo King.
Filmmaker and author Julie Trimingham’s new book, her debut novel, Mockingbird was recently released from MP Publishing.
You might remember Julie from my Numéro Cinq at the Movies post on her gorgeous triptych of films Beauty Crowds Me.
Aritha Van Herk describes the book as
“teeming with yearning, with the indescribable smells and tastes of Cuban ardor. This tale of passion and its smudged fate, its undeniable allure, intensifies with each improvised move, so that readers have to gasp for breath, yet cannot help but follow this impossible seduction, and the center of gravity that shapes the beauty known as longing.”
You can see a trailer for the book here:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgpsKTNWK9s[/youtube]
Congratulations, Julie.
— R . W. Gray
Gerard Beirne is joining NC as Contributing Editor. Gerry is going to curate a new special feature called Uimhir a Cúig, which is Irish for Number 5. Uimhir a Cúig will showcase the finest in Irish literature and culture; from now on there will be a little corner of NC that is Irish. The first item, in the December issue, will be a gorgeous hybrid piece: text by last year’s winner of the Dublin IMPAC International Literary Award, Kevin Barry, and the Galway video and installation artist, Louise Manifold.
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Gerard Beirne is an Irish author who moved to Canada in 1999. He is a past recipient of The Sunday Tribune/Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick 2008-2009 and continues to live in Fredericton where he is a Fiction Editor with The Fiddlehead. He has published three novels, including The Eskimo in the Net (Marion Boyars Publishers, London, 2003) which was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2004 for the best book of Irish fiction and was selected as Book of the Year 2004 by The Daily Express (England). His poetry collections include Digging My Own Grave (Dedalus Press) which was runner-up in The Patrick Kavanagh Award. His personal website is here.
“One of Canada’s best writers, Glover returns with a brilliant story collection…”
Click the image to see the Globe and Mail 100, or click here.
I was 20 and in Paris, Christmas, 1969, and I remember a fire-eater walking up and down the street across from La Coupole in the evening blowing flames out of his mouth and the smell of roasting chestnuts in the street and drinking hot grogs at the Select. The musical Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris had come out the year before in Greenwich Village and I liked the title without knowing who Jacques Brel was and I seem to recall seeing posters in Paris and wondering what he was doing there and why we were worried about him being alive and well (but perhaps this is a backward construction). Later when I was working at the Evening Times-Globe in Saint John, I would borrow LPs from the library. I borrowed a Rod McKuen record with this song on it and fell under the spell. I was young and a guy and it captured something of the self-dramatizing melancholy I was sure I felt most of the time.
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[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N0KLu4vfkE[/youtube]
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfziQHKQpfc[/youtube]
In Ryan McGinley’s short film “Varud,” a young woman dressed for backyard summer play with a t-shirt as a dress and a gold lame wig skips through New York, altering the city as she goes. The film’s simple repetition and its dream-like collision between youthful exuberance and the mundane design of the city is perfectly captured in the slow skipping of the young woman down yellow meridian lines, among the gentle yellow taxis of New York traffic. It is both sublime and common, unspeakable beauty with a cheap wig, t-shirt dress, and bare feet.
The simplicity of the film makes the experience a more poetic than narrative experience. McGinley in his own words describes his intent:
“this piece is my poem to new york city. i wanted to bring a childhood innocence to the streets, through a character whose own light and wonder effects (sic) the world around her. i’m always interested in an atmosphere where dreams and reality mingle on equal terms.”
As the film unfolds, small details gather around the wonder: the orangey gold wig, as cheap as it might be, sheds bits of sunlight; pedestrians turn and watch her go by; she traverses even more extreme concrete and empty spaces like the highway off-ramp.
If McGinley had stopped there, with just the intervention of the young woman skipping through the city, that might have been what this film was about: a simple, sepia-with-joy filter to see the city through anew. But this city, McGinley’s city, is altered, ruptured. As the film progresses the city starts to seize up mid breath as though the young woman’s skipping, her strange combination of joy, youthfulness and alarming play, stop time. These pauses, these cessations, we can read as moments of reflection where the city’s denizens pause to glimpse some wonder among the asphalt, the crowds, the day-to-day.
Yet these are not simple pauses. They do not end. The only pause that ends is the final one where the girl fades into the sepia long light of the end of the day, and, ever so slowly, the frozen pedestrians find their stride once more.
Until this final moment of the film, the people she has passed have all remained frozen, caught, as though she has put the kingdom to sleep. And though there is a beauty in that, in this reflection, there is also something ominous and a little apocalyptic in it. As each street falls to silent pause, after pause, the film’s images recall the horror of other film cities left in stillness, like at the start of 28 Days Later and in the psychological twists of Vanilla Sky.
She leaves the city, as these other films do, not resembling itself, lacking its bustle, fury, and perpetual motion. It is the end of things, heralded by an innocent in a sparkly wig. Could there be a more grace-ful way to go?
What does it mean that the skipping girl not only stops time but does so repeatedly? There is something here of Sigmund Freud’s repetition compulsion: “an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things.’ Each repetition, each frozen moment she creates has her skipping past what might have been momentary encounters with wonder and towards an absence of time, and the philosophers will tell us that without time there is no being. Block after block she freezes the city. But this is what we expect from wonder. Beauty that potentially annihilates the self.
The music, with its indecipherable lyrics and at times choir-like arrangement, encourages a heightened emotional engagement. The film is # 6 in Sigur Ros’s The Valtari Mystery Film Experiment, one of the sixteen films that were made with the support of the Icelandic band. The sixteen were chosen from almost 800 entries. The press information for the project notes that
“valtari was sigur ros’s last album as a four-piece. An elegiac work; they didn’t feel much like talking about it, and so, instead asked a bunch [of] talented directors to make whatever they felt like making to go with music. These 16 films are the result. Sad, funny, beautiful, and, occasionally, plain bewildering, they represent just some of the available emotional responses to this most contemplative of sigur ros (sic) album.”
Sigur Ros’s atmospheric music inspires each of the directors to move to more poetic and less narrative pieces (though the Valtari film already analyzed by Nicholas Humphries for Numero Cinq at the Movies, Dash Shaw’s “Seraph,” is significantly more narrative). This poetic atmosphere of the music and the overall project makes it possible for “Varud’s” repetitions and slow, unfolding, and makes it possible for us to submit to its unspeakable and breathless wonder.
— R.W. Gray
Do we forget that Chaucer learned his chops reading the French and the French were writing what? Little poems about ass-kissing, cuckolds and powerful women! Wait a second!
It’s late. I’m tired. I have to take the dog for a walk. It’s dark. If you get the pun in the title and connect it to the poem, you win two NC bonus points toward the Grand Prize. If you can write an essay in which you reveal the christological allegory in the subtext of the poem, you get three NC bonus points.
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“Young man, my name will never be concealed;
But such a name was never found;
None of my family bears it but me.
I am called Bèrenger of the Long Arse,
Who puts all cowards to shame.”
I just discovered the post and this site through the good offices of Judith Stout on Twitter (@judithstout1). The blogger is Genese Grill, author of The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities: Possibility as Reality, and the site is full of fascinating items. And this is just a taste of what Grill has to say about Musil and stupidity; she has written a full length paper which you can read here in the journal Studia Austriaca.
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While looking for images of Death I discovered that not only is stupidity often a woman, but death (which is not a feminine noun in German) often is too. In this image (Totentanz by Karl Ritter, 1922) she may merely be death’s lure, if not herself the one condemned to die. Well, woman, at least, is effective, rousing to life, to frustration, to anger, challenging passive man to sin, to madness, leading him to distraction, destruction, eventually to death.
Read the rest at Robert Musil: “Attempts to Find Another Human Being”: Stupidity, Being Towards Death, Art (on Dostoevsky’s Idiot).
Hmmmmmm. My kind of event. I hope I get past the beer tasting to my reading. It’ll be touch and go. It could be a wild reading. I’ll have to get someone to point me toward the audience (but who knows what condition the audience will be in?). So far I have not yet been asked to sit in with the String Quartet, but I expect an invitation at any moment. I don’t know what Beethoven is going to do, read from his new book? I hear he brings his own stein to these events and gets morose and quiet near the end and needs a cab ride home.
Actually, it will be fun to return to Saint John, scene of many youthful hijinks (I taught philosophy at the university campus there when I was 22 and then worked at the city daily, the Evening Times-Globe).
I used to haunt the great old Andrew Carnegie public library when I lived in Saint John, not the same building as I am going to read in unfortunately. But there is a ultra-brief sex scene snippet in my story “The Obituary Writer” that takes place in the stacks. You might want to look it up; it’s in my book A Guide to Animal Behaviour. Perfectly tasteful and not auto-biographical, I might add, as are all the scenes in my books. All I did at the library was read. That story, “The Obituary Writer,” is set in Saint John; the city becomes a character in the story in a sense. And also, of course, the name Numéro Cinq comes from that story.
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Saint John Free Public Library, 1 Market Square, Saturday November 30
7:00 pm. An after-hours event. Words and music in celebration of the Library’s 130th anniversary. The Saint John String Quartet will be playing, Governor General Award winning author Douglas Glover (and Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick) is booked to do a reading from his new story collection Savage Love, and Big Tide is set to cater and supply a specially crafted beer. Tickets: $10 and include one drink and snacks. There will also be a silent auction. Tickets are available at Central, West, and East Branches of the SJFPL.
Self Portrait as a Dead Man, 2011, oil on board, 16 x 13.5 in., collection of the artist.
I am always alert to what artists have to say about their work. They are thoughtful, patient people who spend a lot of time by themselves working with their hands (something that always promotes a kind of detachment — you think with your hands and the rest is a kind of meditation). I first met Stephen May 25 years ago when I was writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick the first time. Stephen, despite the title of the painting above, is manifestly not dead (see the photo below), but still alive, painting and asseverating. When Stephen writes, he writes with passion and a style that rises here and there to the aphoristic; when he paints, his work shimmers with a kind of classic beauty. Herewith a sample of both, painting and text — the measure of the man and artist.
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This is about how inadequate logic, reason, passion, intelligence and imagination are in art. It’s about how reasonable it is to accept that. It’s about how misleading and misguided the word creativity is. This essay is not meant as a spiritual work, but it necessarily enters territory that sounds spiritual.
I want to make good paintings. Sometimes when I’m painting something good happens. I remember not the first time it happened, but the first time I realized what was happening. The words that came into my head were, “Oh, all I have to do is tell the truth!” or “Oh, all I have to do is put down what I see!” (It was a long time ago).
In the late 1800’s a critic named Albert Aurier reviewed an international exhibition of contemporary art in Brussels that included the work of Van Gogh. He singled out Van Gogh as a leader and praised his work in terms of its form, the way he used colour. Van Gogh wrote letters to friends in response. In one of them he wrote, “Aurier’s article would encourage me if I dared to let myself go, and venture even further, dropping reality and making a kind of music of tones with colour, like some Monticellis. But it is so dear to me, this truth, trying to make it true, after all I think, I think, that I would still rather be a shoemaker than a musician in colours.”
Van Gogh loved truth. He is not famous because he cut off his ear. He is famous because his paintings are good. His paintings are good because of his relationship with truth.
What is truth anyway?
I’ve painted good paintings and bad paintings, which is to say beautiful paintings and banal paintings. I’ve reflected on both experiences. I want to understand what it was that seemed right with me when the paintings were beautiful and what seemed wrong with me when they were banal. My experience has brought me to an understanding of the way my art relates to my life and how what is good in art, what is meant by good art, relates to what is good in life in general.
Beauty is just a word. There are many claims on it. Something is happening, though, in the art of Bach, Tolstoy, or Manet, for example, that is unpredictable and mysteriously complex. I use the word beauty to serve that phenomenon.
Artists sometimes say beauty is truth, and people sometimes say God is truth or truth is God. I tend to say those things now. When John Keats and Emily Dickinson equated beauty with truth, and when Gandhi and Simone Weil said truth is God, I don’t think they were using the words as a slogan for an intellectual position. I believe the words occurred to them the same way they occurred to me. And they occurred to me as a revelation but only after many experiences of the difference between true and false, beauty and banality. It is reasonable to be skeptical about the expression beauty is truth, but, ironically, skepticism led me to the expression.
Simone Weil describes prayer as paying attention. I thought I stopped praying when I was a teenager, but now I think perhaps I’ve continued to pray all along.
Painting is an act. Painting is living. The problems of painting — the problem of whether to paint or not, how to paint, what to paint — are the same problems we all face in just being human. They are the problems we have figuring out what to do with our lives, figuring out what’s possible. A person acts, and we find out what’s possible.
L & A’s Garden with Neighbour’s House, 2010, oil on board, 24 x 24 in, private collection.
Shakespeare wrote plays.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
So Shakespeare is possible. How did he do that? We want some explanation for his power and the continued effect it has on us. The only thing we can see and hear is the form, so we look for the secret there. Did Shakespeare have a secret formula? Did Bach and Beethoven? Did Manet and Monet? Did Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?
What allows some people to leave us better off than we would have been without them? Those who do that sort of work are, invariably, un-secretive, and the infinite variety of the forms their actions (art) take suggests that there is something very un-formulaic at the root of their work. The root of whatever it takes to do something good outside the art world might be the same as within it.
Our ego lives behind our eyes and the world pumps it up to blind us. Our bitter disillusionment (those lines of Macbeth’s) steals upon us concealed behind the blind of illusions created for us, within our ego, behind our eyes.
A beautiful painting is never simple. It’s never just some canvas with colours on it, never just the image, what it may or may not symbolize, never just an artist’s diary or an artist’s taste and opinions, and never just a reflection of the artist’s culture either. We all tend to be distracted by the specifics of our lives, our passions, etc. Socrates is supposed to have said the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing. And Einstein once said there are only two ways to look at the world. Either nothing is a miracle or everything is a miracle.
I need to use the word truth. Like the word God, it is a metaphor. I don’t think you can say God without imagining something like lord or father, something understandable. But if you use metaphor it moves mystery in the direction of non-mystery, and you undermine the significance, you undermine the psychic weight of mystery. You undermine the useful purpose of the word.
The thing about being human that makes me need to use the word truth is the hardest thing to put into words and the thing that if I could put it into words, might be the best use I could ever make of words. I am. I know I am because I experience. I know something else exists because I experience it. It’s a circular knowledge. There is no proving anything about myself, no proving anything about what I experience. One defines the other. There is no going outside that circle to see what’s outside it or to look back and see what that I really is, or what experience really is. It’s not even worth saying I know I experience as I can’t define either of the words I or experience other than in terms of the other. All our acts are acts of faith. Lived experience is normally so consistent it allows for a deep faith in nature and science, but as the Buddhists say, all is illusion.
I could ignore Socrates’ or Buddhist wisdom. I could ignore Keats’ revelation (my own) and call what happens within that circle knowledge. But it would be the first selfish act, the first subjective act that sanctions all subsequent selfish acts. It would be the end of wisdom. It would be the end of loving truth. It would be the end of true love. It would be the beginning of cowboys-and-indians. It would be the beginning of the presumption of knowledge and the sanctioning of all acts of relative good. It would be the end of goodness and love. It would be the end of beautiful action. It would be the end of beauty in my life. I wouldn’t paint anymore, or at least I hope I wouldn’t.
Truth is beauty is God. But I can only say that in the sense that I accept that all three words reflect an understanding that we really don’t know anything, that reason is limited. Beauty is mystical. It can’t be made un-mystical by social science or neuroscience (and yet it accepts those sciences). It accepts everything without judgment or fear or contempt. It isn’t fragile so requires no soldiers to protect it, nor rites to keep it holy.
We’re simply invited to fall on our knees. All our assorted lives and deaths lose all their gravity, they melt into air. We’re released from grasping, striving and collecting. Our fists are opened. We accept the ants on the kitchen counter, the dandelions in the lawn, our own nature, too. Poetry begins where separation between what’s solid and what’s mysterious melts away.
In Grace and Gravity, Simone Weil gives us an apt analogy. She describes a space normally filled up with our self, a space filled up with logic, reason, passion, intelligence and imagination. It’s only if we can remove our self from that space that there will be room for beauty or truth or God to arrive (she used the word grace). When we fill up the space again, there’s no longer any room for beauty. Reason and passion etc. are all manifestations of self love and they leave no room for beauty.
The mystical root of beauty and wisdom is in loving truth. Buddhist wisdom, Christian wisdom, and the wisdom of great art begin there. To love truth means knowing you know nothing. It means only accepting and accepting and accepting. It means being without agenda or prejudice. It means being without pride.
Egocentric taste is what is in the eye of the beholder. That’s not what I mean by beauty. I am not strictly speaking a religious man, but there’s no separation for me now between art and religion, painting and prayer, beauty and truth/God. If you consider aesthetics as philosophy of art, then for me aesthetics and ethics have merged.
View through the Studio Window, 2013, oil on canvas, 36 x 54 in., collection of the artist
I don’t know
A beautiful painting is not a representation of something you think is beautiful. If you see an image of an attractive and healthy young man or woman, or a sympathetic portrait of a beloved personality, a saint for instance, or an image of some idyllic setting, a place you’d like to be in, you have to be extremely wary. All of us involved in art have to make ourselves aware of the seductive power of imagery. What goes for art often fails to be more than expressions of taste or pandering to taste. Art very often fails to be more than seduction or manipulation.
You see, hear and taste, you feel beauty. How much do we miss though? Two people might be smiling at you, while one wishes you well and the other wishes you ill. Those smiles might look the same but they are different. It is a dangerous misconception that beauty is what something looks like. Beauty is what something is. Ugly, distorted, or plain things reveal themselves to be golden. Glittery things disappoint.
My struggle to come to terms with experience is the same as anyone else’s. We’re raised on illusions and comforted by them. My moments of disillusionment were unpleasant and life changing. We’re all taught by experience (or should be) the danger of mistaking illusion for truth. Some people wear blinkers their whole lives, loving escapism. Some people get cynical and don intellectual armour. Some love truth.
An old commandment, “Thou shalt make no graven image”, doesn’t make much sense to us at first glance. But if we make images of God from imagination, in words or pictures, and then love those images, it is really ourselves that we love. We create God in our image. We get what we want. We enter the brothel of illustration.
This isn’t new, nor will it ever grow old. It is in establishing whatever relationship is possible with truth that we begin to be beautiful, that our actions begin to be beautiful and the results of our actions, the traces we leave in our wake begin to be beautiful. Without that relationship all form is normal, banal. Within that relationship any form is beautiful.
In the pursuits of science, philosophy, theology, art, and in our everyday lives, truth is beautiful. Artists are prone to getting distracted from this no less than others. When I was young I liked art class best. When it came time to choose a career all I wanted was to play for a living, as opposed to work, so I chose art. It wasn’t too long though before I realized the only worthwhile thing an artist can do is love truth. I believe it’s the same for any career. I wonder what it does to a person’s soul if his career is ugly (spin doctors, etc.). In loving truth, the apparent incompatibility between our pursuits, between science and religion for instance, disappears.
I’m not suggesting we forsake intelligence, but beauty is not a strictly intellectual pursuit. You don’t need to be Plato to be beautiful. Being smart can just as easily get in the way. Maybe you need to be smart to realize that or to be able to put it into words (maybe it’s stupid to try to put it into words). A beautiful intellectual argument would be one free of rhetoric in the sense of persuasion. The rhetoric of persuasion is banal. That banality is an invitation for realities much worse than simply banal. We are attracted to intelligence for its own sake, to rhetoric and sophistry. But is leaves no room for love of truth. The rhetoric of persuasion is dangerous. It’s a truly ugly idea that if you’re better at persuasion than anyone else in the room, you win and truth is yours. Intelligence is for safe guarding ourselves against cleverness, distinguishing the difference between truth and rhetoric.
View from Jenn’s House, 2007, oil on board, 28 x 31 in., private collection
Elements of art
We can’t talk about art without talking about form. Art always takes a form, but the form that art takes isn’t what matters in art. The derogatory term academic art is reserved for art where form matters too much. It matters too much if you’re searching for new forms just as much as if you’re trying to conserve old forms. There is something more crucial than innovation. The painters Manet and Picasso are famous for breaking old forms and inventing new ones. That’s the orthodox story of western art. Really though they are famous because they are good, just like Van Gogh. Rembrandt was no breaker of form. All four of them are good in that they take form out of the precinct of words. Those who find refuge in form, the progressive and conservative alike never escape history, never escape their own time. Oscar Wilde asks us to be kind to fashion because it dies so young. I can’t muster much sympathy.
Manet’s contemporaries were offended by his lack of respect for what they considered to be the serious concerns of art. Things don’t change much. We get so caught up in our moment. Manet’s early paintings were designed as signposts, as if to say, “If you want to understand what I’m doing, just look at Velazquez (for example).” Manet’s painting, far from merely being a precursor to the triumphant art that followed, actually makes most subsequent painting look like window dressing and doodles, just as it made most of the painting of his contemporaries look like huge bags of brownish wind.
Sometimes when a person associates himself with the word realism it is meant to reveal their desire to dismantle false hierarchies. It is meant to express a willingness to accept all that is seen even though it may undermine the romantic/idealist notion that we are individually or collectively somehow the figurative center of the universe. It is meant as an acceptance of the fact that we are not the purpose or goal of existence. There have been many painters willing to put us in our place but none who have done it with such gentle humour, intelligence and kind sympathy as Manet.
Manet understood as well as anyone the potential of looking at something and painting a picture of it. He was reported to have said that a painter can say all he needs to say with fruit or flowers or even clouds. We can be moved generation after generation by paintings of nothing in particular, a glass of water, an empty field…by music without words. Manet’s perfect advice to artists: “If it’s there, it’s there. If not, start over.”
Chardin painted a picture of a brioche. He said you use colours but you paint with feeling. There’s a long list of great painters who looked at things and painted pictures of them, a long list of great paintings done that way. If sophistication prevents anyone from doing it today, there’s something wrong with sophistication. Van Gogh stuck candles to his hat so that he could see what he was doing when he painted outside at night. The French artist Marcel Duchamp called that stupid painting. The question of futility is empty. We are and so we do things. We can draw a moustache on the Mona Lisa or we can paint The Night Café, one or the other. The sublime and the ridiculous are Siamese twins. It’s a bit of good fortune if you don’t mind looking ridiculous.
We can’t talk about art without talking about media. There are practical advantages and disadvantages with respect to each medium, degrees of suppleness, degrees of ease of dissemination, etc. Ultimately though, we are the message. It is ourselves who are being delivered. We must tend to ourselves first. Our instinctual egoism is embodied in any new form and delivered by any new medium as naturally as in and by the old ones. That the delivery is increasingly more efficient is no great comfort.
A new medium is not necessarily a better medium. As a medium or technology becomes more complex, McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message” becomes truer. Love and empathy disappear within the complexity. We need to be careful that the increasingly complex media we adopt don’t cause this we that’s being delivered to become we-the-machine.
Painting most likely persists as a medium because of its infinite suppleness. It always bends to the force of the person who paints and makes it impossible for that person to hide. Anything that is good about them is plain to see. It’s almost as simple and obvious as singing or dancing. Less machine means less machine. It’s for those who love a person.
Hummel Figurine, 2011, oil on canvas, 56 x 57 in., private collection
We can’t talk about art without talking about content (or substance). The word content is an acceptable word to stand for what matters in art. Whenever something gets formed (by humans or otherwise) all the causes, the obvious and the mysterious, of its being formed are contained within it. Content might be a word that denotes the limits of our understanding of what is there in the form, the limits of our ability to read it, to perceive it, as in, content is what I see, or content is what I know. Content might also be a word to denote all that is contained in form, independent of our ability to perceive it. When we form something we could define content as what we meant by forming it, or we could define content as what we are, as the force that determines the form. We don’t know what we are. We say intellectual content without knowing exactly what a thought is, what consciousness is.
If it’s true that the universe is in a grain of sand, that the content of a grain of sand is the universe, what then distinguishes a beautiful man-made form from a plain or ugly one, or nature from art? If content is what matters, what is the content in Bach’s form that distinguishes it from all other form in his time or before or since? What constitutes its value to us, if all sound, every sound, any sound holds truth in it? I would say that art is a human affair. A communion occurs. The origins of Bach’s music are mysterious. Bach willingly collects us within this mystery. It’s a kindness, a generosity on his part. When the sun shines, or the rain falls, or the volcano erupts, we can’t be sure it’s a kindness. A grain of sand isn’t kind.
We seek knowledge. We seem to be offered it but beauty takes it away again. We are stripped of the urge to be assertive. Maybe the beautiful thing about beauty is that no one knows how to do it, that no one ever has or ever will. We only know little pieces of a puzzle that keeps expanding in unimaginable dimensions beyond our potential and when we look again at that piece of the puzzle we thought we knew, that we so carefully and assuredly put in its place, it’s no longer what we knew it to be. I don’t know why Bach is so good. I don’t know how he so consistently avoids failing when it’s so easy to fail. I borrowed a Maria Callas CD from the library of her first recording when she was in her early twenties. The person who wrote the commentary for the CD ended with, “Listen to it on your knees.” It’s of crucial significance when one of us fails to fail.
There is a potential for art beyond metaphor. It would be better if people would understand that the value of art comes not from the nature of it being about something crucial and important, but from the nature of it actually being something crucial and important. Its value is not as illustration or documentation or story or metaphor, but as the embodiment of what is valuable. Imagery and symbols come naturally to painting which makes it particularly susceptible to this perceived limitation. 20th century painters abandoned the image to declare an understood kinship to music’s intrinsic abstract qualities. The same is true in modern dance and literature when they abandoned plot. There are no formal safeguards against failing to be beautiful, no formulas, but one understands the motivation.
I’m beginning to get angry at images. They seem to have an innate tyranny to mislead. When you see, when you feel with your eyes it happens in colour patches, in light and dark shapes. We respond to it in all the ways we respond to it ever since we’ve been human, by backing away, by approaching, in fear, in wonderment. But culture turns images into symbols that have meaning. The tyranny of the image is that it distractw one from realizing that the paintings aren’t symbols first, they are art first. They are embodiments of the painter, hopefully embodiments of feeling. For every painter who feels as Rembrandt feels, there are 100,000 painters whose symbols are the same as Rembrandt’s. For every painter who feels as Tom Thomson feels (in his plein-air sketches), there are 100000 painters whose symbols are the same as Thomson’s. This is the tyranny of the image.
Vegetable Garden and Phlox, 2010, oil on board, 26 x 26 in., private collection
Critical thinking
My best paintings were done by putting dark paint where it looked darkish, light paint where it looked lightish, like some glorified, faulty camera with two eyes instead of one and self-awareness instead of none. Cézanne said of Monet that he was “only an eye—yet what an eye!” I love Monet’s late paintings of the Japanese footbridge, when his eyes were ruined by cataracts and the operations to fix them.
I want so much to trust somebody. All I have is my eyes, ears and time to find out who I can trust, to discriminate between who might care and who might be looking out for themselves first. I think much of what is admired in the world is admired for being great examples of people overpowering other people. It’s taken it as a license to do the same. Hell is other people.
I’m searching for something and am compelled to walk away when it doesn’t appear to be present. If I can separate the good from the not so good, the difference between them becomes much clearer. The success of this phenomenon might be why there are long line-ups to get into the Musée D’Orsay every day.
There is an idea in vogue right now of artist as critical thinker. There is a relationship between art and philosophy, but they aren’t identical. Matisse said if you decide to be a painter you must cut out your tongue, you give up the right to express yourself by any means other than painting. He didn’t cut out his tongue though, and his art didn’t suffer. It’s good to hear it from the horse’s mouth. It would be even better if the horse could be as articulate as the horse experts. One tries.
Marcel Duchamp was a competent painter with interesting ideas. He stopped painting. He eventually ended his involvement with the art world altogether. He probably noticed the difference. Faithless action is impossible for a sincere person to sustain. Dadaism as it is manifested in his art—great art by function of its influence on later artists—reflects a strange cynicism with respect to the possibility of a person doing anything beautiful. Goodness saves each one of us at every turn. Disillusionment is with ideology. To abandon the cynicism that accompanies disillusionment means abandoning ideology. Icons are ideas. Marcel Duchamp has become an icon of iconoclasm. He’s his own mistake. When you destroy something, unless you arrange otherwise, the vacuum will be filled up again with normal things.
You can’t make anti-art. If you make it, it’s art. If you persist after realizing that, then you kind of need to accept that you’re the type of person who likes a joke at another’s expense. Duchamp kept attempting to present an art without value, anti-art, suggesting that the value we place on art is false. Every time he made something though, he realized he failed. The thing became art. By having been done, it inevitably participated in the phenomenon that is art and was valued as such. He realized that the only way this wouldn’t happen was if a thing remained un-done, un-made, that the idea remained unrealized. An unrealized idea, though, isn’t anti-art, but rather the absence of art.
The term conceptual art is a classic oxymoron. Conceptualism was still born. Art-as-idea has evolved from an absurdity to a concept of art reduced once again to illustration and documentation. Research, the collection of facts, has replaced perception, replaced feeling. Duchamp’s cynical act of pointing at a urinal and calling it art has spawned the current fashion of pointing. The art in this situation is not what is pointed at but rather the act of pointing and the implicit declaration. It is more vapid than the more traditional and self-centered pointing at yourself, drawing attention to yourself when you have nothing to offer, no beautiful intentions.
Duchamp was the first artist to gain a history book kind of success because he had nothing good to offer. The root of his powerful influence on today’s art world lies in the hope he gives to so many artists with ambitions for a similar kind of success, who, despite reasonable intelligence, like Duchamp have nothing good to offer. It is a telling fact to consider that some of the greatest paintings ever made were painted by Monet with his coke-bottle glasses in his garden in Giverny years after Duchamp pointed at a urinal. The history of what matters is more like a pulse than a march.
It’s in the nature of institutions to be conservative. Institutions must hold on to the ideas of themselves to exist. As we are in the era of art-as-idea, there is institutionalized sanctioning of cleverness within the contemporary art world that looks suspiciously like the 19th century Academy. It’s what happens when ideas replace feeling. There is a work of conceptual art that consist of a panel that has the words on it (in French) “Art is useless. Go home.” Without beauty, without feeling this is more or less true.
All artists, great and small, make things that aren’t beautiful. Sometimes some of them make things that are. A thing shouldn’t be held sacred just because Leonardo painted it or Mozart composed it. We’re allowed to walk away from art, even great art, if we find we can’t trust it.
Making beautiful things is beyond me. If it was just a matter of sincerity or intelligence or skill the world would be full of beautiful art. If it happens for me I’m never sure where it came from, or why it happened. It has many of the characteristics of accident. I realize I’m not controlling things. Simone Weil talks about waiting for God. All I can do is wait and hope for the beautiful thing to happen.
There was hope the industrial and technological revolutions would give us the opportunity to become our best selves but we sit in cars at drive-thrus and in chairs staring at screens and allow the means to become the end, the medium to become the message. We never seem to be up to our dreams, our utopias. We always imagine things that need us to be better than we are: Camelot, Star Trek, socialism, democracy. Occasionally a person saves us though, for a while, by disappearing, by being disinterested, by being selfless.
Watermelon Rinds in a Bowl, 2012, oil on board, 19.75 x 20 in., collection of the artist
I have my moments
William Blake wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see everything as it is, infinite.”
As the best musicians listen, so the best painters look.
I’ve been trying to figure out the word tactile with an artist friend of mine. It’s one of those words, like beauty, used to denote something crucial in art but difficult to define. My daughter is a performance artist, a dancer. She uses the word presence in a way that I think might stand for a manifestation of the same crucial quality of art. When you stand in front of a painting, often you read the image as a few symbols and that’s all that’s there. You run into the end of the art quickly and moving up close to it or remaining with it for hours is fruitless. If a work is tactile, if a work has presence, you are rewarded by any kind of closeness.
When artists look, when that word means something, they can’t avoid seeing themselves there, present in their art action. Our undeniable and mysterious presence is inseparable from our experience (what we’re seeing when we’re painting) and our action (painting). It is one thing and it is the connection. As E.M. Forster said, “Only connect.” The eternal and universal miracle of realness is what connects us. When I paint a picture, if I’m looking, I am the man in the cave scratching on the wall. I see myself living and already being gone.
When I started out as a painter I emulated my heroes in a superficial way. Eventually I realized their paintings all had something in common that couldn’t be attributed to style or technique. The mechanics of painting never change much. We all use our hands and eyes and some painting supplies. Most artists are happy to share their methods. My method is pretty simple. I put green or red where I see green or red, dark or light where I see dark or light and make lots of corrections as I go. The results are predictably ordinary much of the time. The alchemy that occasionally happens has something to do with looking and feeling. Occasionally an image results that wasn’t imagined. A painting becomes that mysterious truth that is infinitely close and at an infinite distance.
Manet, Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso, and Lucien Freud all lived in the era of the photograph. The unimagined image is, as are we, embedded in a miracle.
What it feels like when I’m painting is that I’ve gotten into a very small boat by myself and pushed off land out into a vast ocean where there are no fixed points to navigate by and everything’s constantly changing. I’m searching for an island in the middle of that ocean where there’s a spring with regenerative waters. It is only by being quiet that I can see and feel the subtle signs, the quality of the air and light, the push of the currents on the boat in order to sense where the island lies. The clumsiness of a large boat and the distraction of ideas would blind me. I wouldn’t be able to find the island.
I very often fail to find it anyways and return with nothing more than a documentation of facts I encountered on the way (stupid paintings). I can’t take anyone with me and I can only bring a small amount of water back. The only proof that island exists is the water I taste and bring back for others to taste. The water does what it does for those it works on. My responsibility is just to get into the boat and push off away from land and try to be quiet.
But for the water on that island I’d have no reason to get into the boat. I get to taste it too. All I know is how I am different as a result. Once you’ve made a good painting, a beautiful painting you’re driven to do it again. All arguments against beauty carry no weight against experience of it.
My most recent good painting happened this way. I was fearless, which isn’t normal. Usually I’m lucky if I become fearless along the way. Maybe I was fearless because I began by destroying a painting I’d been struggling with for years. I scraped and sanded something mediocre. I had no clue what the new painting would end up being. I didn’t think much about composition, the kinds of marks that I’d make, or the image that would result. I set the easel up facing a window I’ve painted countless times, something handy, and then the painting just sort of fell on to the canvas. I was in a wonderfully submissive state of acceptance of everything. I felt weightless. The ultimate form the painting would take wasn’t my concern. It felt like everything that I did, or might do, would be OK. There were no weighty decisions that were mine to make.
The Oxford dictionary defines grace as (in Christian belief) the unmerited favour of God; a divine saving and strengthening influence. It defines nirvana as perfect bliss and release from karma, attained by the extinction of individuality.
I don’t like to talk about technique. I feel like it would be misleading to talk about technique after realizing that I can make something beautiful with just a fat charcoal stick on a plain piece of paper. Though inferior tools and materials and clumsy and inefficient technique can frustrate an attempt, ultimately we can’t be saved by what colours we have on our palette or what brushes we use.
I have a number of techniques in my bag of tricks, all of them impatient. There are many painting techniques I don’t know, the patient and careful ones. Sometimes I find myself hopping from one technique to another in a short space of time during one painting session. I do that, not because I’m searching for the right one for that particular situation but because I’m trying to trigger the escape from technique. Things aren’t going well. I’m mired in knowledge and I want to get out.
In my bag of tricks there’s only one that matters. It’s not a secret and it’s supremely simple. Stop looking for your voice. Stop trying to distinguish yourself. Give up.
View from Everetts, 2011, oil on board, 12.75 x 21 in., private collection
It’s simple
There is no substitute for feeling in art. Logic, reason, passion, intelligence, imagination, skill, maybe even what we call talent, are all realities of self. There is no beauty without their surrender. Feeling may not be all that’s required to be an artist, but it’s all that required to be beautiful. If you want art to be worth something, you need to know that it’s only beauty that saves the world, grace our reconciliation with gravity, love our relief from futility.
There’s a relationship between creation and destruction and a point at which the two seem to become one. Or perhaps neither exists except as different perspectives on change. In the fearless state of art, things are constantly being “created” and “destroyed,” constantly changing. Sometimes very good art will be perceived as irreverent and destructive, punk. It wasn’t their intention, but Manet and Van Gogh probably seemed like punks at the time. We trust them now. How do you distinguish between the good people and bad people when both ignore the laws? The question can make a conservative soul feel uncomfortable, mistrustful, angry and at sea. Beauty is found in realizing that we’ve never been anywhere other than at sea.
Great creators realize they are merely instruments. We place them on a pedestals and aspire to be there ourselves. Leonard Cohen once said something to the effect that he didn’t write his songs but he’s really glad we think he did. What’s rare is the understanding that none of us are creators. There are countless artists with Rembrandt’s or Manet’s skill but the skill is almost always wasted on inventions and opinion, on presumptions of knowledge. We’re all guilty of such waste. Rembrandt often was. Rubens was especially.
Their ability to find detachment for short periods of time doesn’t make saints of my painting heroes. Humans are clever, aggressive, territorial animals and are driven for the most part by biochemistry and overpowering social and survival instincts. Selfless detachment is difficult to maintain in the everyday world. I feel like I get to take little vacations from myself. Tolstoy said, “The one thing necessary, in life as in art, is to tell the truth.” In life, though we’re all aware of the risks of telling the truth.
The art history books are filled with art that flatters our species, magnificent follies, conceits of the intellect and imagination…pyramids and urinals, but there is no better reason for making art than being able to do for people what beauty does for people. On a number of occasions I’ve ended up weeping at the experience of beauty. I ask myself why I’m crying. It seems to be from some deep and unexpected sense of relief. I feel delivered from banality, from the sense that no-one cares, or from the sense that people’s concerns are exclusively worldly. It ends some kind of loneliness. It is redemption from narrowness and subjectivity.
Thomas Mann’s novel Death in Venice is a cautionary tale about confusing two types of beauty. At the end of the story he points us in the right direction. Attractiveness-type beauty leaves one with an ache to possess the object, the form. Truth-type beauty is only ever joyful. Whoever owns the object or form is irrelevant as beauty is not the form itself but what is manifested in it. In the experience of beauty, it is yours. It takes possession of you, it breaks your armour, and you expand into it. You participate in the artist’s expansiveness. It is unrestrictedly generous.
I want to do this, I want to make beautiful paintings, but I realize you can’t get there from here. You can’t try and make one. Striving to be great doesn’t help. You just need to do your job and hope for the best. Sometimes, strangely enough in telling yourself you’re going to make a bad work on purpose you can trick yourself into avoiding pretentiousness. The best thing an artist can be is nothing in particular; the best thing an artist can do is disappear. What’s left is infinite.
There’s a category in the thesaurus: artlessness. Under it you find ingenuousness, simpleness, naivety, innocence, unguardedness, unpretentiousness, sincerity, trustfullness, openness… reminds me of that lovely Shaker song.
In Shakespeare’s The Tempest Prospero the usurped Duke/magician has, in his daughter, one gift to bestow. This gift is “plain and holy innocence”. Prospero’s one great fear is that this gift won’t be received with respect. It is a gift that when respected “will outstrip all praise”, a gift that if held at an impossible distance by disrespect will issue nothing but “barren hate, sour-eyed disdain and discord”. Plain and holy innocence is the sine qua non of good art. With The Tempest Shakespeare passes the torch, and includes instructions.
Though we often reject critics and scholars as popes of culture, they often do what they do out of love and they’ve likely seen things we haven’t yet. But to love something does not necessarily mean you have insight into what makes it possible. Northrop Frye seemed to think that what enabled great art and made it special and valuable was what he called imagination. He also confessed to being unable to write a work of fiction.
I think most people assume that a work of art is a product of imagination, that Bach and Shakespeare had great imaginations. This idea implies that the work of art is generated within. Imagination is but a useful tool. But there’s a force to which it must surrender. It can provide situations but must surrender those situations to the infinite which the imagination can never be. Imagination gives us pictures of where we want to be, mythological gardens, things to strive for. We’re never up to our progressive ideas, our dreams. Everywhere we go, there we are. Without beauty life is nasty, brutish and probably too long.
I’ve condemned imagination’s role in the search for beauty. Perhaps others have a broader understanding of the word. Perhaps I should use the word fancy. Yet the root of imagination is the word image. It’s what our minds are limited to. Cézanne said, “I should like to astonish Paris with an apple.” As with Chardin’s and Manet’s, his paintings of apples continue to be astonishing. It doesn’t take much imagination to put an apple in front of you and paint a picture if it. Simone Weill wrote in Gravity and Grace, “The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”
We need to acknowledge that our understanding is limited, yet our condition is a consciousness of limitlessness. In loving truth we have to accept paradox. If you acknowledge that agenda, prejudice, preconception and conceit are facts of life and therefore facts of art and then decide that your conceit is an art without agenda, prejudice, preconception and conceit, that’s quite the paradox…sophisticated innocence. No wonder it’s so normal to fail.
Apples in Glass Bowl, 2008, oil on canvas, 43 x 56 in., private collection
All you need is love
We’re proud of artists like Picasso. Some are even proud of people like Napoleon, all that strutting and fretting we do. The history of humans is the history of the failure of ideas. In studying history we hear the haunting refrain “never again,” “never again,” “never again.” The critical stance we adopt with respect to what we perceive as wrong is born of the conceit that we know better, the same conceit that gets us in to trouble in the first place.
The ambition to be beautiful is really an anti-ambition. It is the ambition to de-create the self, using Simone Weil’s expression.
In his play Antigone, Sophocles warns us to beware of hubris and to always hold the gods in awe. John Keats tells us in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” all we need to know on earth is that beauty is truth. The hardest thing an artist can do, the hardest thing a person can do, is act without self-interest. Once you have come to know that beauty is truth, you realize that any step away from beauty is the greatest danger we face. Perhaps this is what Dostoevsky meant when he said that beauty saves the world.
The last lines of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch describe the selfless character Dorothea:
But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
The absence of beauty in a person is the root of callous indifference. The presence of beauty is the proof of love. The presence of it in what we’ve done is the great value of art.
Nobody can be good all the time, but if I can be good while I’m painting, at least that’s something, a few shining moments.
—Stephen May
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Stephen May’s canvases have been collected by prestigious corporate and private collectors for over three decades and are included in the public collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the New Brunswick Museum, the New Brunswick Art Bank, the University of New Brunswick, l’Université de Moncton, the New Brunswick Department of Supply and Services and the Department of External Affairs. The Beaverbrook Art Gallery presented a solo exhibition of May’s work entitled Embodiments in 2006 and the following year he won the Miller Brittain Award for Excellence in Visual Art. May graduated from the fine arts program of Mount Allison University in 1983. He lives in Fredericton.
The Combover
Adrián N. Bravi, translated by Richard Dixon
Frisch & Co.
137 pages, (eBook) $7.49
ISBN 978-0-9891267-4-8
Adrián Bravi insists you look over your shoulder and squint until your eyes bleed. His most recent novel, The Combover, originally published in Italian as Il riporto (2011), is a swamp—its narrative at once as rich, as eldritch, as pedestrian and unspectacular—whose subtle, insidious suck will have you half-metabolized before you recognize it for what it is. Its gutters, its digressions, are quick, bright black, flaring, and, like a mix of flies and charading fireflies clustering over a corpse, if not easily missed, then perhaps too easily dis-missed: They are the crux of this work’s mesmerism, mechanism and generosity.
In The Combover, a compromised hairdo is enough to catalyze damnation. The work is ironic, hyperbolic, and asymptotic in its reach for the absurd. In fact, several of Bravi’s protagonists have a knack for fixating on minutiae, for blowing what most would consider inconsequential out of proportion, for getting hung up, in fact, emotionally strung up, on bagatelles. In La Pelusa (2007), a librarian’s unremitting perseveration on the dust that accosts his library lays the ground—or the patina—for all-out psychic chaos; in Restituiscimi il cappotto (2004), a would-be suicide begrudgingly defers his departure because someone—how audacious?—has borrowed his coat, thereby spoiling everything. Arduino Gherarducci, The Combover’s bitter, neurotic anti-hero, exhibits a logic that is sometimes equally difficult to sympathize with and understand.
In the character of Arduino, Bravi mobilizes a psychic world premised on complicated forms of hostility, dissatisfaction, loneliness, and pent-up rage, a world which, for all that, remains fixed on hair: on ‘lack of hair’ and ‘styles of lacking hair’ as moral categories, and on the fact that Arduino’s preferred style of lacking hair, a comb-over, has been skewed: One of Arduino’s side-burned-yet-serious students approaches him inexplicably one day during a lecture (Arduino is an expert on bibliographic data-exchange formats), and, with a gesture exuding both grace and necessity, exposes his pate. A prank? Or perhaps—as Arduino thinks, toting about Spinoza’s Ethics, pursuing his own half-baked, deliriously caustic line of reasoning—this student came into being for the exclusive purpose of bringing him to shame. The text leaves the imagined impetus for the act as ambiguous and incomprehensible as Arduino’s response to it: fugue. He quits civilization. Intending to make it to Lapland, he finds himself instead in northern Italy, dwelling in a cave.
Though he believes he is removing himself from a world of potential hair-rufflers, Arduino is in fact only exchanging one set of hair rufflers for another, for the wilderness, with its winds, rains and branches, is itself an antagonist, and, beyond this, its woods are teeming with ‘the sick and infirm’: a band of elderly and other aspiring convalescents who flock to the anchorite Arduino, much to his snowballing chagrin and horror. They bring jams and lasagna, tribute in the form of munitions; they perform, as Arduino cowers, cornered, a paradoxical form of apotheosis, executing ritual violations (stroking his head from back to front) so as to better exploit his comb-over, which, is (treacherously, he thinks) curative.
Arduino’s exploitation reaches nearly corporate extremes: he is buffeted about like an inadvertent pop-sensation: The old, cloyingly virtuous, formerly ailing Giuseppina takes it upon herself to manage his client-base and make his schedule, all the while in the vexing, metaphysical thick of Bravi’s wilderness, home of the red roe-buck, entwined snakes, locus of apparitions, staged evasions and disembodiments, Arduino cedes to the idea that he might learn to live “without getting too fucked up about [his] hair and those [data] formats.” That or else, spurred by his burgeoning hatred for the sick and infirm, might end up adding circles to a Dante-esque hell.
There are many caves in this story: wells imbued with spectral, melancholy voices, empty, naked centers, glabrous, or glabrating heads. It is clear that, within Arduino’s male-centric reality, baldness is a state laden with significance: it is a wound, a void: “every man in the world has a bald patch hidden within him”; it is, like the more explicit skull, a memento mori: bald men “reconstruct on [their] scalps the landscape which all men, sooner or later, will see snatched from them.” Arduino casts his combover with an additional moral valence as well: it is a way of being honest, a way of emphasizing by concealing baldness and thus implies that he is far more virtuous than the deplorable ‘shorn head,’ Costantino Toldini, who, by shaving his scalp conceals the fact of what it lacks naturally. Arduino’s comb-over is, additionally, a way of situating himself with respect to his paternal line, a homage to his deceased father (his best friend and the subsequent hub the novel’s nostalgic lucubrations), and a defiant, even proud recapitulation of his father’s suffering: he, too, was tormented because bald.
The father’s suffering is only alluded to, and, like Arduino’s suffering, which, in the game of show versus tell, is stated more than textured, lends itself to allegorical reading. Perhaps because of the seemingly trifling nature of its purported source (baldness), and because of the strange mesh Bravi has managed to confect with the text, using strands of humour which are variously light, ironic, wicked and dark, it becomes possible to reconfigure baldness and whatever social ridicule is directed towards it as viable stand-ins for deeper sources of anxiety, or for alienation itself. The various meanings with which Arduino invests baldness and comb-overs put him at odds with the social world: The text’s ‘barber’, its ‘janitor,’ its ‘barroom habitué,’ each of these characters is simply a version of the Joe Schmo who would insist, over and against Arduino, that he would look good shaved.
These characters place him in the same position as any person consciously practicing a ‘style’ (construed broadly) against the norms of the day: Arduino sees the outside world as “a constant series of traps”; he feels that he has spent a lifetime locked in a fight against those who would invalidate his enterprise, a lifetime like his father, sheltering his comb-over, dueling with metaphorical winds. These winds, in turn: the barber, the janitor, even Arduino’s wife, encounter him with blank bemusement: they cannot digest him. Arduino has clearly, though, to some extent internalized the social pressures that afflict him: he feels real shame when his comb-over is lifted, despite the fact that he is proud it emphasizes his baldness by concealing it, and despite the fact that a lifted comb-over would presumably be even more effective in accomplishing this emphasis.
Arduino’s obsession with his hair floats on the rest of his conscious experience like a cataract, shifting around, sometimes allowing a reality beyond what we are given access to (despite the fact that the work is written in the first person) to come into sight, though more often occluding it. His seizures, his nightmares, his depressed wife, his marital troubles, a lingering memory of a father warped by filial brutality (by Arduino’s brother, the bully), these are never dwelt on as extensively as the comb-over issue, unless they are auxiliary to it; instead they pepper his ruminations as a series of asides. As a result, the book has a kind of writhing unconscious, a peripheral vision that sees in colour as Arduino’s mind strays to his past (distant and recent), often alighting on its most violent or lugubrious details:
We lived in a first floor apartment close to the main square in Recanati. Below it was a take-away shop that gave out a terrible stink of grilled meat. The owner was a man who smoked a cigar that he always kept in one corner of his mouth. He roasted pork by the shovelful, and as time passed, he began to develop pig-like features, as if the spirit of the pig had left its body just as he was putting its flesh on the grill and had gone and attached itself to the first bastard it happened to come across…I couldn’t open the window without breathing in a stink of putrefaction.
These digressions lend an emotional depth to the novel that would otherwise be lacking. If Arduino’s physical and other outbursts at times seem mysterious, or seem insufficiently motivated, it is at least possible to suspect that there are valid causes for his rage strewn about the novel’s obstructed depths. After a seemingly benign phone call devolves into a cruel attack on his wife—really just a misdirected attack on his mother-in-law, who has, apparently outrageously, borrowed a book—Arduino states: “I don’t know what she said in reply. Once I’d put the phone down I felt much relieved. There was not much else I could say. If she couldn’t understand, it was hardly her fault.”
The cataract hovering over the text as Arduino streamlines his vision toward matters of hair places a reader of his overreactions in essentially the same position as his wife. For some readers at least, desire (wanting to know the ‘why’ of an outburst) and pleasure (wanting an answer to exist, but not wanting it: in truth wanting only the sense of textual depth that is its insinuated existence) might issue from the confusion.
Arduino’s escape from civilization, combined with his repeated insistence that one cause leads to another, that his student could have done nothing other than humiliate him, and that escaping civilization is his only viable response to humiliation, makes The Combover a variation on themes in Bravi’s earlier work, namely ‘displacement’ and ‘determinism’ as nested concerns. ‘Displacement’—specifically in the form of expatriation—has a privileged place in Bravi’s imaginary, perhaps because the native Argentinian has opted to base himself in Italy, and perhaps because he is one of those writers who chooses to move, always with incomplete comfort, between linguistic bases as well (he works in Spanish and Italian). ‘Determinism,’ in his work, lurks forever behind the will, a nag that assumes various narrative forms in order to better harass it:
In Río Sauce, Bravi’s protagonist abandons his birthplace because it is besieged by flood-waters, an act that is both impelled and willed: the fact of the flood impels it, but some of his relatives remain behind, carrying on with their lives as much as possible (the need to leave, then, was never absolute). In The Combover, alternately, as Arduino makes his way north, he becomes increasingly callous, in spite of several moments that smack of redemption, that nearly insinuate he has a choice in the matter of his own becoming.
Redemption, in this book, is a tease. Cruelty is reality, and Arduino’s trajectory—the line that connects early Arduino, the hostile, but merely petulant melancholic, to Arduino, the crazed assaulter of later pages (oh yes, the mother-in-law gets it, but only because Arduino would like to prove himself a healer)—seems, perhaps because it is too baffling, too absurd to admit of alternative explanations, fated, inexorable.
It is difficult to put your finger on just what The Combover is. The work has one foot in what is not quite the banal and another in what is not quite the metaphysical. Some of its tropes seem drawn from a twisted fairy-tale, as when Arduino severs his pigtail-like comb-over with a hunting knife. It is funny. It is not slapstick. It seems to vacillate between darkness and a lightness which some readers might equate with superficiality and which still other readers might simply insist is aesthetically valid entertainment (‘Why should it all be grim and heartbreaking?’).
Bravi’s book is quizzical in the best sense of the word; its intrigue as a novel lies in its un-decidability: it is both light and grim. Its sheer neuroticism and darkness are sometimes masked by its humour, but if they are behind trees on your first read, they will surely trail you out of it, loop back, snarl, and stalk you brazenly in the second.
—Natalie Helberg
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Natalie Helberg is from Edmonton, Alberta. Some of her experimental work has appeared on InfluencySalon.ca and in Canadian Literature. She recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing with the University of Guelph. She is working on a hybrid novel.
Douglas Glover always pushes the envelope. Every story in Savage Love is outrageous, creating farce – and something beautiful – out of human foibles….
This is the kind of audacious work our literary juries should be acknowledging. Where were they on this one?
Read the whole review at Savage Love | NOW Magazine.
Photo by Hank Lazer
Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary
Harryette Mullen
Graywolf Press
120 pages, $15
ISBN: 978-1-55597-656-9
Walk, don’t run, or you’ll miss it—Harryette Mullen’s feat of taking to her feet to capture the hum of bees in the botanical garden, droning of news headlines, and blare of vuvuzelas, all within 31 syllables. In Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary, Mullen’s daily discipline of walking and writing tanka poems blossoms page-by-page into this reflection on nature and human nature.
Born in Alabama, Mullen grew up in Texas, and received degrees from University of Texas and University of California at Santa Cruz. She published her first book, Tree Tall Woman, in 1981 and went on to write several more including Trimmings (1991), S*PeRM**K*T (1992), and Muse & Drudge (1995) (Graywolf collected these three books in Recyclopedia in 2006). She is a language poet, influenced by Gertrude Stein among others, also known for her wit and humor and her interest in social activism. Mullen is now an English professor at UCLA, teaching creative writing and African-American literature. A decade has passed since her collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, which was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
In the introduction to this new work, Mullen claims to be engaged with merely taking walks and writing poems, on a mission of personal health, mind-body alignment, and closer observation of human-versus-nature duality. This book doesn’t flaunt her wondrous powers of poetic play, punning, and language games, which are showcased in her previous collections. The real accomplishment of this collection occurred to me while I spent a couple of days without my car, walking my usual school-home-work circuit after hitting a high-bouncing soccer ball on a six-lane highway. Urban Tumbleweed offers up the beautiful heartbreaks of encounters in an urban ecosystem. Mullen’s skillful subversion of stereotypical thinking has merely taken on a stealthier strategy in her diary of 366 days of walking and writing.
In Urban Tumbleweed, Mullen uses her own variation on tanka, which is a Japanese form traditionally written in a single line with a syllabic pattern of 5-7-5-7-7. When translated or written in English, the poems usually take line-breaks at the end of each syllabic unit. Mullen’s variation adheres to the 31-syllable limit but uses a three-line format. Throughout the book, a consistent layout of three poems per page promotes a sense of conversational tension across the gutter of every page-spread. An example from early in the collection of two poems directly facing each other:
Flowers of evergreen tree called bottlebrush,
not stiff bristles but velvety filaments,
leave fingers brushed with yellow pollen.
Flame tree, I must have missed your season
of fire. All I see are your ashy knees, your kindling
limbs, branches of extinguished blossoms.
The images of pollen-dusted fingers and ashy knees overlap subtly across the page, bringing into focus the conversation between human and nature. In other instances, poems contrast sharply with each other, as in this example of facing-page poems from near the middle of the book:
These colorful little stucco houses in
Sunkist Park don’t look so bright today
beneath this overcast sky of cloudy gray.
We’re jerked awake as helicopter blades beat air.
Light glares from above. An amplified shout
orders a fleeing suspect to halt.
Darkness in the middle of an ordinary day versus blinding brightness in the middle of the night sets up the scene for the two poems beneath each of them, which push and pull against each other with complaint, image, and specific observations.
A shivering dog left out in the rain,
dripping wet and cold as a miserable
werewolf, each raindrop a silver bullet.
My usual half-hour ride to work took
two hours today because the president
returned for another fundraiser.
Expressions of complaint and keenly observed natural detail define Japanese poetic diaries, including classics as Matsuo Basho’s The Narrow Road through the Provinces and Masaoka Shiki’s A Verse Record of My Peonies. Ki no Tsurayuki, an acknowledged master of the tanka form and one of the compilers of the first imperial anthology of tanka poetry, invented the Japanese poetic diary with The Tosa Diary (935 CE), a fictional account from a female protagonist’s point-of-view based on his own travel experience with a group returning to Kyoto from a distant province. The discomfort of travel by boat, unfavorable weather, and her recent loss of her young daughter set the scene for many poems of longing, hope and sorrow. Different characters compose and recite tanka poems, which Tsurayuki varies according to their roles and personalities in the story. The overlaps and contrasts seen in Mullen’s collection are abundant in this and other Japanese poetic diaries. A short excerpt from Earl Miner’s translation of The Tosa Diary:
The 4th
The captain said, “The condition of the wind and the sky is extremely unfavorable,” so that it has not been possible to put out the boat. All the same, neither the wind nor the waves rose so high. This captain really seems unable to tell anything about the weather. On the shore of this harbor there are many beautiful little shells and pebbles. For all their beauty, because they are just the sort of thing she would have liked to gather, they remind me of my little girl who has passed away. I made a poem.
Beating upon the shore,
O waves, I wish that you would bring
Shells of forgetfulness
That I might pick a shell of comfort
From the heavy thoughts of her I love.
When I spoke the poem, there was one with us who was unable to remain silent and made a poem on the sufferings of our voyage.
Shells of forgetfulness—
Not they the things I shall take up,
But pretty pebbles
To remind me of a precious child,
To be a souvenir of her I loved.
Mullen also shares a little of this collaborative effect of writing tanka:
After hearing that poem from my tanka diary,
you handed me a smooth and pleasing stone
shaped like a lopsided heart.
A kind friend sent me a hastily scribbled note,
inquiring about my “tanka dairy.”
I wrote back to say, “I’m milking it.”
Because her poetic has tussled directly with identity politics throughout her work, I was surprised to find so little obvious sign of it in her approach in this collection. From her poetic statement in American Women Poets in the 21st Century:
My desires as a poet are contradictory. I aspire to write poetry that would leave no insurmountable obstacle to comprehension and pleasure other than the ultimate limits of the reader’s interest and linguistic competence. However, I do not necessarily approach this goal by employing a beautiful, pure, simple, or accessible literary language, or by maintaining a clear, consistent, recognizable, or authentic voice in my work. At this point in my life, I am more interested in working with language per se than in developing or maintaining my own particular voice or style of writing, although I am aware that my poems may constitute a peculiar idiolect that can be identified as mine. I think of writing as a process that is synthetic rather than organic, artificial rather than natural, human rather than divine. My inclination is to pursue what is minor, marginal, idiosyncratic, trivial, debased, or aberrant in the language I speak and write. I desire that my work appeal to an audience that is diverse and inclusive, at the same time that I wonder if human beings will ever learn how to be inclusive without repressing human diversity through cultural and linguistic imperialism.
The following consecutive poems veer toward explanation of Urban Tumbleweed’s method:
This curly cloud don’t grow straight or need
straightening. It takes rough wind to wreck the ‘do.
To some, when brushed and combed it still looks tangled.
You could say I am borrowing light
from the moon when I write my tanka
after reading translations of Princess Shikishi.
Toward the end of the collection, the cross-talk between tanka poems increases as does the musicality of the individual poems. These two poems across the middle of their pages speak of “head” versus “heart”:
At first, the dog walker mistook it for a horror-
movie prop—that severed head found in the park,
beneath the HOLLYWOOD sign.
The heart of a saint, stolen from a church
in Dublin. Thieves leave golden chalices,
costly art, choosing this most priceless relic.
Some of my favorites from the collection accomplish together the inclusiveness that Mullen strives for with a touch of humor, especially where nature turns around and examines the poet. In one a hummingbird momentarily mistakes the poet in her red dress for a giant flower. And much later in the collection:
“Who do you think I am? Tippi Hedren
in an Alfred Hitchcock film?” I wondered,
when that flying object pecked me on the head.
Another represents Mullen’s intent throughout the collection with this:
TUMBLEWEED, name in black letters
on the side of a bright yellow bus
delivering students to open gates of Windward School.
Mullen mentions in her introduction that she leads students on tanka walks in the botanical garden where she teaches. This glorious discipline of the mind and body moving through poetry is better experienced than explained, and Urban Tumbleweed offers a moving invitation.
—A. Anupama
Final photograph of the New York Botanical Garden’s 2013 exhibition, Kiku: The Art of the Japanese Garden, including the drummers from Taiko Masala, and poetry displays co-presented by the Poetry Society of America and curated by Jane Hirshfield.
References:
Rankine, Claudia, and Juliana Spahr, eds. American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
Miner, Earl. Japanese Poetic Diaries. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969.
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A. Anupama is a U.S.-born, Indian-American poet and translator whose work has appeared in several literary publications, including The Bitter Oleander, Monkeybicycle, The Alembic, Numéro Cinq and decomP magazinE. She received her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. She currently lives and writes in the Hudson River valley of New York, where she blogs about poetic inspiration at seranam.com.
There is a style of writing novels that is not style; I call it novelese. The language skitters along the surface of things in a lively pastiche of known phrases and ideas and reference without plumbing the depths. There is even novelese for “plumbing the depths” in a superficial, unadventurous, non-threatening way. Depth that only vaguely looks like depth, Ideas that look like ideas but aren’t. Tim Parks doesn’t give it a name, but his idea of contemporary non-style is similar to mine.
Read this essay next the two Andrew Gallix essays on the tired conventions of literary realism: “The End of Literary Realism” and “Of Literary Bondage,” and read my essays “The Novel as a Poem” and “Difficulty and Revolution,” and you’ll begin to see a density of argument and a critical vector that should lead you to consider or reconsider your approach to writing and reading.
dg
Such is the future of literature and literary style in a global age: historical novels, fantasy, vast international conspiracies, works that visit and revisit the places a world culture has made us all familiar with; in short an idea of literature that may give pleasure but rarely excites at the linguistic level, rarely threatens, electrifies, reminds us of, and simultaneously undermines the way we make up the world in our own language. Perhaps it is this development that has made me weary with so much contemporary fiction. In particular I have started reading poetry again. There indeed things can still happen with the language, and writers are still allowed to produce texts that are untranslatable and for the most part unprofitable.
via Literature Without Style by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.
“Night Vigils” comes in the middle of Albena Stambolova’s new novel, Everything Happens as It Does (Open Letter Books). This chapter is a sample of Stambolova’s idea-rich and scintillating prose. The reader doesn’t need to know much context to make this chapter complete, save that Margarita and her father have not seen a lot of each other lately, and, for the most part, she is a rather odd young woman. I think my favorite aspect of this chapter is the way Stambolova can write about such commonplace scenarios and make them sound surprising and intimate (perhaps even intrusive). Through the eyes of Margarita, Stambolova manages to convey the authentic nature of experience as a surprising and unsettling encounter with otherness.
— Jacob Glover (see NC’s review of the novel here)
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25.
Night Vigils
Margarita tiptoed between tangled legs and arms, tilted lamps, overturned glasses and all kinds of remnants from hours of sitting, smoking, talking and listening to music. She saw a couple kissing, their lips sunk into each other with such riveting force that she could not take her eyes off them. Worn-out desperate things had a strange effect on her. A threadbare blanket, for example, or this hopeless kiss, beautiful like a dead rose’s petals dripping with their scent of hysteria. She decided to walk around them, bumped into a sleeping body and the solid surface of an armchair, finally reached an emptier space with enough room for both her feet and managed to steady her step. Where could she have left her coat, her oversized, long black coat and her gigantic bag? They must be here somewhere. The figure of a man holding a candle appeared out of nowhere. Nothing ever happened the way one anticipated it. Come to think of it, even tonight, earlier in the evening, she had tried to explain that she didn’t have the time, but it turned out that she did have the time, she had lots of time. And what birthday were they talking about, no one had a birthday. At least she couldn’t see anyone who had a birthday.
For the first hour or so, it had been only the three of them—the boy who had brought her and who seemed to know her very well, and the girl she had assumed was the hostess, as she had changed into different clothes at least twice. They had all been sitting around a low coffee table when the girl had stood up and walked away, and just when they had almost forgotten about her, she reappeared wearing something like a transparent nightgown over her naked body. She looked beautiful in the dim light. Then more people came and Margarita lost sight of the girl, only to see her later in a different outfit, which made her doubt for a moment that it was the same person.
Now she was looking for her coat and her bag, and she was starving. Finally she stepped into a room with piles of coats thrown on a bed, and she buried her hands to search for hers. She recognized it by the touch of her fingers, like a blind person, and pulled it out, overcoming the resistance of the soft mass of clothes around it. Her bag was on the floor and she almost tripped over it. She flung it on her shoulder, continuing to tread carefully toward the exit.
Once outside, she could see only machines; there were people, but the people were all inside machines—trams, buses, and cars. She didn’t feel like going home, and decided instead to visit her father. The trams’ jangle and dazzling threaded lights did not seem inviting, so she headed there on foot, her heavy bag on her shoulder.
Walking gave her the satisfaction of work well done. Work that was pleasant and amusing, squeak-squeak-squeaking feet on the snow. Gliding, slaloming between the parked cars, stopping at traffic lights, standing upright like a soldier.
At night the city looked like a picture. Spaces look indistinct, the houses are surprising. At night the city lets you be; it lets you in, in all of its places, which, you then realize, belong to the city and not to you, a passerby. If you are brave enough, it will let you in even deeper, to places invisible in daylight no matter how hard you look for them. Night people in the city know this, they belong to the city, and that’s why they are scary and others are frightened by them.
Margarita was not thinking about these things. She never thought about anything at all. Thinking for her was like floating down a babbling stream, gently propelled by the drift of her unusual perceptions, until someone broke the spell by speaking or asking for something. No one had ever heard Margarita herself ask for anything. If she happened to feel like “asking,” what other people would call “asking,” she just let her feet take her to a place where whatever she needed simply happened to her. If she ever felt scared by something, she would run away and no one could stop her. She had thus gone through a number of schools, special schools and ordinary ones, she had started many classes and abandoned many, until one day Maria decided that she deserved some peace. Margarita read books, children’s stories and other books, she went out with people, to the cinema or elsewhere, but how far her knowledge of things extended was a mystery. She did not seem depressed about not fitting into a normal category, and the doctor, Mr. T., whom she was seeing about once a month, had himself come to a standstill in observing her perpetual state. Valentin would sometimes drag her with him for weekends or holidays with friends, and Margarita would blend in, in her own dazed way. At the same time, she never forgot faces or people in general. Her memory, free as it was from all other things, recorded words, faces, situations—gathering an endlessly abundant material that would make quite a few film directors happy.
Now she strolled about the city and registered no signs of danger. Every once in a while she felt the weight of her bag and moved it to her other shoulder. What was in that bag, only she knew, whatever to know meant for Margarita.
The window of her father’s apartment gleamed like a beacon. He answered the door almost immediately, dumbfounded to see her. So much so, that for a moment he did not invite her to come in, but let the smell of something burning reach her nose in wafts through the open door.
Are you alright?
Margarita smiled at him happily and he stepped back. He knew that she perceived things differently, but all the same he felt uncomfortable that she could see the remains of his lonely midnight dinner in the black frying pan. He chased away the thought of Maria’s ability to prepare something tasty out of anything, her oven turning out unbelievable dishes as if by itself.
Margarita looked at the piano, but her father waved his hand—not now, people are sleeping.
I’m hungry, dad.
Straight away he put a plate and some bread on the table, poured her a soda drink and took a salad out of the fridge. Margarita began to chew heartily, while her father wondered how he could possibly tell her that he was worried about her.
He asked about Valentin, but quickly hit some barrier and concluded that he needed to find out what was happening at his wife’s house.
Margarita finished eating, suddenly looking sad. He shouldn’t have spoken to her about Valentin. He took a sip of his beer and asked her about the baby. Margarita’s reaction was calmer, her mother and the baby were fine. And dear Boris? She hadn’t seen him for a while.
Her father felt anxious, the way he did every time he received news from Maria’s house. Margarita stirred from her seat like a restless bird before a storm. She wanted to go to bed and her father drove her home. He kissed her goodnight, lightly, as if this was something he did every night.
When she climbed into her enormous boat of a bed, her grandmother’s lamp was still lit. She couldn’t tell if there was anyone in the house.
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Excerpted from Everything Happens as it Does by Albena Stambolova
Trans. Olga Nikolova from Bulgarian
Pubished by permission of Open Letter Books
Or “Fuck Realism” as he says on his blogpost linking to the essay, which, yes, is an impassioned cry against the reductive, prosaic monotony of the what Northrop Frye called “low mimetic” realism, the realism of the middle of the road, market driven, read-and-toss, consumer fiction of our day (and days before). Gallix is a leading new Modernist (I keep trying to come up with a tag that will fit the bill—this one is provisional), founder of 3AM Magazine in the UK, and contributor to Numéro Cinq. Put this new essay from the Guardian together with his essay “On Literary Bondage” from our August issue and then throw in my essay “The Novel as a Poem” and figure out where you stand.
dg
Literary fiction is dead – or if not dead then finished, according to the Goldsmiths prize-shortlisted writer Lars Iyer, who argues it has become a “repertoire, like The Nutcracker at Christmas” and suggests that novelists should spread the word that “the time for literary novels is over”. But literary fiction has always been dead, has always needed the mould-breaking writing which the Goldsmiths prize celebrates.
Ever since its birth, writers have been suspicious of the novel, reaching for the authenticity of the real – often presenting their work as memoir, à la Robinson Crusoe. For Scheherazade, storytelling is, literally, a stay of execution. For the rest of us, it is merely a pastime; a distraction from our ultimate destruction. Ashamed of its frivolity, fiction drapes itself in the gravitas of non-fiction.
If literature needs to be something more than just storytelling, then perhaps one could argue with Maurice Blanchot that it only truly becomes grown-up when it “becomes a question” hanging over the space separating it from the world. By showing its sleight of hand, the novel can live up to Adorno’s definition of art as “magic delivered from the lie of being truth”, but it loses its innocence in the process. No longer is it possible for a serious novelist to go back to the “good old days” when – as Gombrowicz put it – one could write “as a child might pee against a tree”.
Everything Happens As It Does
Albena Stambolova
Translated by Olga Nikolova from Bulgarian
Open Letter Books
120 Pages, $10.16
ISBN 978-1934824849
.
Everything Happens As It Does by Albena Stambolova is a 120-page novel broken into 54 short, individually-titled chapters. The title of the novel comes from a quotation from Wittgenstein that Stambolova uses as an epigraph: “All propositions are of equal value. The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.41). Though the novel is not simply an exploration of this utterly Wittgensteinian sentiment, we ought to take note of this idea as we dive into this rich and intellectually dense world Stambolova has created.
In a way, Stambolova invites us to begin her novel by not ascribing value to anything, or by ascribing equal value to everything. She suggests: “This story considers itself the story of everyone… It is simply the story of women and men who are mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, loved ones and friends… or, in a nutshell, of people who are tigers and lions, oranges and lemons. This story is neither funny, nor sad. It is simply a story that takes place somewhere on the border between the world we know and the world we are no longer very sure about”
Most importantly, this novel is a story. Structurally speaking Stambolova has no less than eight major characters from whose perspective we get a glimpse of the world. Or, put differently: she presents us with eight different worlds contained by individual, yet occasionally overlapping, perspectives. The story of the novel seems to exist somewhere in the midst of these eight characters. In a way, the meat of this story or narrative comes out of the concatenated life-worlds Stambolova presents us with. I’m tempted to use the word weave here, but really the suggestion that Stambolova “wove X with Y” detracts from the real artistry of her play with presence. She is presenting us with these lives, which happen, as any two or three lives will do, to be mingled, mixed, or articulated together. The narrative begotten out of this articulation renders but a snapshot of these lives proper, yet it is only within the articulated whole that we find our story.
Now: What story? We begin and end with Boris, but Boris is by no means the main character or the protagonist. He is a strange child with a predilection toward what smacks of existentialism but often comes out as boredom. We stay with Boris until he is a young adult just delving into the world of computers. Then, Stambolova switches gears and introduces Philip, Maria and their twins Margarita and Valentin. We get a glimpse of this family for a few chapters until Philip leaves, and Valentin begins to date Raya and gets her pregnant. Then Valentin gets himself kicked out of Raya’s house. He goes back to his mother Maria’s home only to find Boris there and Maria pregnant with Boris’ baby. It turns out that Maria is getting divorced—from Philip. The lawyer is named Mr. V., and we now begin to follow his life and meet his family. Fanny is his wife’s daughter, but not necessarily his daughter.
By the time we meet Mr. V’s family, all of the characters have been introduced. What follows is a series of descriptions of the same Christmas Eve from different perspectives (all third-person limited). It is possible to say this series of descriptions constitute the climax of the narrative, however it would be a slippery argument because it is only in retrospect that this appellation would make sense. We get a description of three or four or five even Christmas Eves—depending on how you count them. Fanny, Valentin, and Margarita are all together, but Mr. V joins them. Boris is unaccounted for. Philip is depressed and drinking. Maria and her baby are driving to Boris’ parents’ home in the country. And Mrs. V is home alone waiting for Mr. V. These Christmas Eve scenes are quite beautiful and, I think, set out important ideas in the novel. They are about human interaction and the way we live together.
Fanny’s kitchen was busting with life. The spell was lifted from the appliances, pots and pans chittered on the hot stove, cabbage was being chopped on thick wooden boards and sprinkled with paprika, platters were being arranged with pickles and dips, glasses were being passed hand to hand, drinks were being poured generously. All guests, feeling truly welcome, had an air of devotion, regardless if their work was contributing to the common good.
After Christmas Eve, there is a lull of sorts, but we are aware that something has happened to Maria. Christmas morning she walks into the woods in the deep snow, but we are not sure if she makes it back. By New Year’s Eve forces have assembled, and it is confirmed within a couple of days that Maria is dead. This death which just barely happens on-screen is the climactic point of the novel.
The rest of the novel seems to resolve in some way after Maria dies, but it is important that we notice how much of the resolution is not directly related to Maria dying. Valentin, Fanny, Mr. V and Mrs. V, Philip, and Boris all in some way have a resolution prior to the discovery of Maria’s death. But in the chapter Philip tells Valentin that Maria is dead, we get this exquisite passage:
While [Maria] was still with them, her absence, which kept everyone at a distance and made her different, used to scare them.
Now, when she was no longer with them, they had to somehow domesticate her absence. Now the three of them had to make it — Maria’s life.
And maybe there were other lives to make, too.
So Valentin and Margarita and the baby have to learn to live without the oddness of Maria, which somehow grounded their worlds for them. Stambolova plays with this Derridean idea of presence and absence more than just in relation to Maria’s death. And it seems telling that Maria is often emotionally inaccessible, yet she remains defined fully in her presence or in her absence. There is a sense in which Stambolova’s novel is an experiment in presence vs. cognition/conceptualization. Even objects remain mysterious and enigmatic, e.g. Boris’ tapes, Margarita’s bag, even the baby.
Maria is somehow central, but she is also the character we know least. One is tempted to compare Maria to God. Possibly this is ingenuous or reductive or both, but Maria is intentionally complex, and her similarities to the divine are narratologically relevant. And this characterization of the divine Maria over-flows with a beautiful sort of mystico-biblical reference.
It was impossible to say “no” to this voice, which was now calling to him [Philip] from the receiver. Why him, and not someone else, he never understood. Here I am, Lord.
We first meet Maria on the day of Boris’ christening, though we don’t really know it’s her til later. Boris walks into the chapel as a young boy and sees “a tiny woman in black, whose eyes he was to meet again years later.” This is a fascinating moment for us as readers because it is explicit foreshadowing. But of what? Maria’s eyes, her gaze, become a motif throughout the novel. Boris doesn’t encounter Maria in the chapel as a person but as her awareness of him; he encounters her only as her gaze upon him. This image comes up again later when we read Philip’s first encounter with Maria:
Philip met Maria at a friend’s house. Although he never liked to admit it, he failed to notice her at first. She had been sitting in some part of the room, watching him. He had felt her gaze, though without being able to identify where it came from.
Maria’s name, of course, echoes both the mother of Jesus and the temptress-turned-apostle Mary Magdalene. And, in the language of the novel, she seems to conceive the twins immaculately: “She became pregnant almost by magic.” Her very presence seems to explode experience and stop time.
But [Philip] could remember situations in which her presence or her voice obliterated everything else.
And:
[Philip] proposed to her almost immediately, not knowing what he was doing. He knew only that he could not have done otherwise. [Maria] nodded, as if she had foreseen long ago that this was bound to happen.
And yet again:
The woman, having emerged from the numbing cold, sleeping baby in her arms, simply sat next to [Mr. V] as if her place had always been there. [Maria’s] presence, impossible to reference or classify, transfixed him.
Maria resists worldly definition because her presence is only determined in her absence. That is, only after Maria dies do we clearly see just how she wove meaning and cohesiveness into the stories of the other characters. In the chapter of Maria’s death, the only chapter from her perspective (again, third person limited), we get this revealing line: “Maria was not thinking about it, she was watching it. She was watching the world, and it was watching her.” Maria represents a way of relating to the world that neither assigns value nor conceptualizes (thinks), a way perceiving that simply happens without the distinction of subject and object (and thus, in the discourse of religion, is an analogue of the divine).
Everything Happens as It Does is a novel which operates under the maxim: “The world allows descriptions. And resists thought.” We should remember that in this world of happenings, we are part of that happening; we occur alongside every other occurrence; and our value and significance only comes out of these happy moments when on Christmas Eve, for example, we happen to be happening together.
—Jacob Glover
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Jacob Glover is a pursuing an MA in Classics at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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You have to click through to the fourth page to find Savage Love.
Performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky went to Moscow’s famed Red Square on Sunday during lunchtime, stripped, and nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones. He was taken to the hospital an hour later but declined to be admitted, and was subsequently taken to the police station. As Buzzfeed noted this is not Pavlensky’s first performance that involves self-harm—he previously sewed his lips together after the jailing of two members of Pussy Riot and wrapped his naked body in barbed wire.
This is an extremely brave woman, and the more people who know she is missing, who know the story, the better off she is. One can only hope that world public opinion can still have some effect in the new/old Russia.
dg
On Wednesday morning, Petr Verzilov, the husband of Pussy Riot’s most famous member—Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, nicknamed Tolokno—finally heard about his missing wife. A source called him from the depths of Siberia with news that Tolokonnikova, who has disappeared without a trace in the country’s prison transportation system for 18 days, was being transferred the IK-50 women’s prison, a jail in the remote region of Krasnoyrak.
via Is Pussy Riot’s Nadia Tolokonnikova in a Siberian Gulag? – The Daily Beast.
Charlie Tallulah is on the run, has always been on the run. He left Ireland to escape his family, now he is on the run across the Canadian prairies from a man named Krotz after, um, losing $40,000 (Charlie is possibly not the most dependable of men). The locale of this particular novel segment is woodland near a Cree reserve, the borderlands as it were, where there is precious little law and people live as in a slum except that you can walk out of your hovel and shoot dinner. Charlie has a girl named Cindy and a Gila monster (nameless) when they drop in on his old friend John Lee who lives in a hut and deals guns and homemade whisky.
This is from Gerard Beirne‘s new novel Charlie Tallulah, out imminently with Oberon Press in Ottawa. The language is sharp and precise, the dialogue is punctuated à la Joyce using em-dashes instead of quotation marks (see also Robert Day’s serial novel on NC). Two things to note especially: 1) Having lived in the Canadian north by a native reserve for several years, the Irish-born author knows whereof he speaks; and 2) the author’s way of patterning his text with luminous phrases that reach out of their context toward some larger and more mysterious meaning.
He saw her eyes drift towards the open door. John Lee stood there watching them.
-Sorry. I was just passing. But he did not go anywhere.
– What is it you can’t see? Cindy asked.
– A way out, John Lee replied.
And there is a great scene with a girl and a bear skin (as you all know, this is right up my alley).
dg
—
Somehow the stories of Charlie Tallulah’s life never seem to add up, are always less than the sum of their parts, amount to nothing in the end. In this particular story, Charlie is on the run, not only from his past – a previous life and identity in Ireland – but from Krotz who believes Charlie has stolen money from him. Charlie believes otherwise and is surprised when Krotz gives chase – across the Canadian prairies. Charlie meets Lucinda working in a liquor store in Brandon, Manitoba. She too is unhappy with her life and when Krotz shows up, Charlie and Lucinda both take to the road together – in the back of the truck, beneath a tarp, a large glass tank with a Gila Monster Charlie bought, from a store dealing in illegal exotic animals, as a gift for both of them – in the glove compartment, a gun. With nowhere better to go, Charlie follows the back roads to where an old acquaintance of his hides out in a cabin in the woods – John Lee Harper, a gun-runner who had finally stopped running. John Lee now brews illegal alcohol which he sells up North on a ‘dry’ Cree Indian reserve.
—Gerard Beirne
§
The cabin was set back in the trees, impossible to see from the road. It took five kilometers of dirt to drive there and then a five minute hike in. The structure was small. Three rooms and an outhouse. Water pulled from a well a hundred yards behind. Even at this hour of the morning Charlie and Cindy were sweating from the walk and the sun.
– How do I look? Cindy stopped at the edge of the clearing. Her hair needed washing. Her clothing was stained from dirt and sweat.
– You’re good.
– Well, Charlie, you look like shit.
She carried her soiled jacket in her folded arms. Charlie carried his over his shoulder. He climbed up the steps, opened the screen door and knocked hard on the inner one.
– This place doesn’t look lived in, Cindy said. Are we chasing wild geese?
Charlie knocked again. The thin shredded bark of paper birch lay scattered on the ground. Pine trees and Quaking Aspen. Charlie saw a patch of garden to the side, tall stalks of fresh corn, green potato leaves.
– Somebody’s living here.
He knocked again, called out John Lee’s name. He waited, then heard the sound of something striking wood, the squeak of door hinges. Cindy pulled at her grimy blouse, tucked it into her skirt.
A tall thin man, with a long down-turned moustache and stubble opened the door, looked out at them through the screen.
– Well fuck me!
He wore a red tee-shirt and blue and white striped boxer shorts. He opened the screen door which creaked.
– Charlie-fucking-Tallulah!
He took a double take on seeing Cindy, ran his hand through his swept back greasy hair.
– Can we come in?
John Lee shook his head in mock self-disgust.
– Forgetting my manners, Charlie.
He stood back to let them in. The room was bare except for an armchair, an old pioneers’ pine table and dresser, four mismatched chairs and two propane lanterns on the window sill. Magazines and newspapers were spread at the base of the armchair.
– You’re lucky. I usually greet my guests with Old Bess. He nodded to the shotgun leaning against the wall inside the door. Take a seat. I’m going to make some coffee.
Charlie and Cindy sat at the table. They heard him fill the kettle. He came and stood in the doorway of the kitchen and scratched at the back of his boxer shorts.
– I ought to dress.
– It’s your home, Charlie said.
– I’m not used to ladies here is the thing. Like to say I don’t have much need for them, but that would not be the truth. He pulled at the side of his moustache. As a race we’re a fucking mess. Slaves to our desires, you’ve heard it before. He turned back into the kitchen. My bedroom’s through this way, he said. I will dress for the occasion.
– He’s okay, Charlie reassured her when he was gone.
John Lee came back a few minutes later wearing the same tee shirt, a pair of blue jeans and green socks. His hair was wet where he had thrown water on it. He carried a pot of coffee and three chipped mugs.
– So to what do I owe the pleasure? It is pleasure, isn’t it? He pulled at his moustache again. I don’t do guns anymore.
– I know, Charlie said. I know that.
– Just so’s you know.
– This is Lucinda.
John Lee nodded.
– You must be hungry, he said. I’ll cook you up my special.
Cindy and Charlie watched him cut up sausages, bacon, tomatoes, and potatoes. Then he fried it all up in beaten egg with shredded cheddar and mozzarella cheese, a little salt and pepper.
– Man! Charlie said when they had finished. It was worth travelling all the way for that.
John Lee opened the curtains a little. A shaft of light fell across the table. Their stomachs were full now, it was time to talk.
– All what way?
– Vancouver, Saskatoon, Brandon, I don’t know.
Cindy heard what sounded like children fighting outside. Neither John Lee nor Charlie seemed to notice.
– Sounds like you’re running, John Lee said.
The noise got louder, clearer. Geese. Cindy could see them through the gap in the curtains.
John Lee went over, picked up his shotgun and walked outside. The geese sounded excited all talking at once loud and unstoppable. Then the gunshot and the shocking momentary silence which followed as though even these basic animals were capable of recognizing their mortality and were stunned by it in turn. The silence that ended as suddenly. The scattering and screeching.
Cindy looked at Charlie. He held his mug, gave nothing away. They waited there until John Lee returned carrying a goose by its neck. He placed his shotgun back against the wall, then threw the goose on the table.
– Dinner. He washed his hands in the kitchen, came back in and sat down.
Cindy saw the red stained feathers. Its large limp body. Its dark grey head and neck, its soft white cheek and undertail, its gnarled webbed foot. She couldn’t look it in the eye.
– Who are you running from?
Charlie leaned back on his chair, watched the random motion of the specks of dust trapped in the shaft of light.
– A guy named Krotz, you know him?
John Lee nodded.
– Yeah, I dealt with him in the past.
– Maybe Lyle.
– Lyle? John Lee sounded surprised. Toque Lyle?
– He’s with Krotz now. They both came bursting in on me in Brandon. I was out at the time. Lucinda took the call.
John Lee looked at her with what could be mistaken for concern.
– Did they harm you?
She shook her head.
– I don’t know about Krotz, John Lee said. I don’t really know how far he would take it. I sold him two .375 magnums. What he does with them is anybody’s guess. I don’t want to be the one to find out.
Charlie took in John Lee in his home, this cabin of plywood and metal siding which contained him, his sparse room, bare floor boards, white and green cotton print curtains, stubble, drooping moustache, Old Bess. He didn’t seem happy or unhappy. He had a small garden, a dead goose on his kitchen table. There was a still, moonshine hidden away someplace.
Cindy looked at the two of them. She wondered how far back they really went. She was wedged in between them, stuck somewhere in the middle of Charlie’s life, caught up in her own.
– Do you have soap? The words just came out, almost unintended.
– Do I look unwashed?
– Not you, me, Cindy said. I haven’t had a proper wash in days.
– I have a tub out back. No hot water I’m afraid. But yes I do have soap.
John Lee brought her through the kitchen and out the back door. An old aluminum tub stood on a rectangle of dirt reclaimed from the wild grasses. A black plastic pipe ran from the faucet to a water tank perched on a plinth above it. The plug hole led directly to the ground where a channel covered in gravel drained the dirty water away.
– It’s the best I got to offer. He looked around at the grass and tall trees. Can’t ask for much more privacy than this. I got towels inside.
He brought her some towels and went back inside with Charlie. He knocked on the kitchen window. Cindy looked in at him.
– We’ll be up front. Take all the time you need, John Lee said bending down to open the cupboard beneath the sink. He took out a four litre milk container filled with a clear liquid. What time of day is it? he asked
– Time enough, Charlie said emptying the remains of the coffee from their mugs and washing them under the tap.
John Lee brought the container into the front room and sat down. Charlie put the washed mugs still dripping with water on the table beside him. John Lee filled them half-ways up.
He banged his mug against Charlie’s. Charlie took a sip.
– Jesus H!
John Lee laughed.
– Who buys this stuff? Charlie asked.
John Lee swallowed, savored the taste still fused to his throat.
– There’s a line. This is good, trust me.
– I do.
– 65 proof. That, he said pointing to the four liters, sells for sixty bucks.
– You’re joking.
– I kid you not.
Charlie took another drink and lit a fuse all the way to his stomach.
– It’s the fourth of July!
– I sell most of it to the reserves.
– So that’s your business.
– They’re good customers.
– What about the law, are they onto you?
– They don’t care. It’s like the good old days. Fire water. Keeps the natives distracted while the government shits on them more. Colored beads, that sort of thing.
– Doesn’t it bother you? Isn’t that why you gave up the guns, the unpleasant outcomes?
John Lee fiddled with the cap on the milk container.
– Maybe you’ve got me there, maybe you haven’t. The way I see it this stuff is in their own hands, under their control. Criminals always abuse guns, that I should have known, but people don’t have to abuse this. John Lee stood up, did not seem convinced by his own argument. Now, I could say I need to do something in the kitchen, he admitted, but if you don’t mind I would like to look at my tub. I have never seen it with a woman bathing in it before.
– What if she minds?
John Lee raised his eyebrows.
– Maybe I should go and ask her.
He stood to the side of the kitchen window and looked out. Cindy was stretched in the tub, her eyes closed, her shimmering breasts floating on the top. Beneath the water the sheen of her stomach perhaps, maybe the shadow of her thighs. He would like to have seen her turn over, or for her to stand up and dry herself off. He came back in and sat down, pushed his lips together, twisted the ends of his moustache.
– I ought to feel ashamed, he said, be saddened by my behaviour. He took a drink, wiped his lips. I am unworthy of her, that much I know.
Cindy lay back in John Lee’s tub unaware of his eyes upon her. The grass grew wild around her. The trees quaked in her presence. The cold water lapped at her body. She watched a blue jay fly overhead, perch on the nearby branch of a pine tree. Perhaps this was all it took, a chance encounter. Relationships were fraught with risk. When the fear subsided Cindy was happy to be with Charlie, happy to be on his arm. She closed her eyes, breathed in the fresh air. Her job in Brandon was tedious, her life uninteresting. Charlie was not the answer, but it felt to Cindy as though he was part of the solution. The problem was not so clear. It certainly had something to do with her father’s death and her absence. It was accentuated by this, amplified. But it had not begun there, had been at hand as far back as Cindy could recall. She had always felt absent as though her place in her family eluded her.
Cindy’s sister, Jackie, had phoned her shortly after she had moved out to complain.
– I thought you were supposed to be taking care of Father.
– Where are you? Cindy asked.
– You know I can’t come back. I am already obligated. But you had no reason to leave.
– No reason?
– He’s ill for heaven’s sake. I can’t believe you left our mother to mind him on her own.
– You left me on my own with them.
– You’re being unreasonable, Lucinda. He wasn’t ill at the time. There was no need for me to stay then. But you were needed. What were you thinking of?
My life, she should have replied.
When he died her sister called again to tell her what her own mother would not.
– Daddy died, Jackie simply said. You didn’t even know did you? Well I am here with her now. She says there is no need for you to come.
– Of course I’ll come, Cindy said. I’d have come sooner if I had known. Why didn’t you call me as soon as you heard?
– If you had been here, you would have known.
I’m not the only one at fault here, Cindy wanted to tell her. Yet I’m the one bearing the faults of all.
Throughout the time of the funeral her mother barely looked at her, speaking only when necessary.
– You can go now, she said the day after he had been buried. You have been here long enough.
Cindy returned to Brandon. She talked to her mother a few times on the phone, but her mother made it clear that she did not wish her to call anymore, made it clear she was not welcome anymore in their home.
How little it takes for a life to fall apart. Cindy lay in the tub with her eyes closed and listened to the songs of the birds, the rustle of the tall grasses. Despite all that had occurred she felt strangely at peace now. Such things were possible it seemed.
– So tell me, why is Krotz on your tail?
– He thinks I let him down.
– And did you?
– I don’t know. How do you know when you’ve let someone down?
– They tell you, I guess. In words or other ways.
Charlie put his hands flat on the table and held them there as though he could make it levitate.
– He wanted something I couldn’t give him.
– What was it? John Lee watched Charlie’s hands as though he thought levitation was entirely possible, could happen right before his eyes.
– I could say it was money, but that would not be entirely accurate. Charlie seemed to give up. He took his hands from the table, looked at them forlornly. He wanted a part of me, he said.
– Doesn’t everyone? John Lee looked disappointed as if Charlie had somehow let him down. So how much money?
– Forty thousand.
– That is by no means a small amount.
– It was not my money, Charlie told him. I was merely the delivery boy, but in the end I failed to deliver. Charlie folded his arms in front of him, trapped his hands beneath them.
– How wise was that?
– I know.
– So what did you do with it? You didn’t bring it here did you?
– The thing is, I lost it.
John Lee looked at him in disbelief.
– You lost forty thousand dollars?
– In a manner of speaking.
Cindy came back in the room wrapped in one of John Lee’s towels. They both glanced up at her, distracted now from Charlie’s tale.
– I washed my clothes out, she explained. They’ll soon dry in this heat.
John Lee grinned.
– I’m not complaining.
– I feel much better, thanks. I feel like the dirt of the world has been lifted off me.
– Another illusion, Charlie said.
Cindy made a face at him.
– Don’t be mean spirited.
– Speaking of mean spirit, John Lee said, fetch yourself a mug.
Cindy pulled the towel more tightly around her, twisted it under her arms. She turned around to enter the kitchen, the towel adhering to the line of her buttocks. John Lee glanced at Charlie forlornly.
– It’s early for me, she said, bringing the mug back in.
– It’s early for us all. John Lee unscrewed the cap and poured them a drink.
– Be warned, Charlie told her.
– I hear a voice, John Lee said.
Cindy took a cautious sip.
– Whoh!
John Lee looked at her, smiled. He had seen beneath her towel. Be warned, the voice repeated. Whoh! John Lee answered.
He was happy with them here. He hadn’t had company in quite some time.
– You can stay here as long as you need to, he told them. It’s no Super 8, but hey the liquor’s good.
– Appreciate that, Charlie said. Just until I get a plan, do some logical thinking. We’ve been running blind.
John Lee thought of Cindy’s clothes drying outside, felt oddly pleased.
– You two can take my room. I’ll make up something here on the floor.
– We’re good here, Charlie told him.
– This is the way I’d prefer it, John Lee said. It’d give you more privacy, me more peace of mind.
Charlie remembered Gila.
– There’s something else. Another guest.
John Lee looked uncertain.
– What are you springing on me now?
– Don’t you worry about it. He’s a man after your own heart. Charlie left the two of them there and walked back for Gila.
– So how long have you known Charlie? she asked.
John Lee scratched his head.
– I can’t say I’ve ever known him. We met in Vancouver about six years back. Moved in the same circles. John Lee laughed, showed teeth that were going yellow. We hung out together sometimes. He helped me, I helped him. Mostly we got drunk together. John Lee shrugged with one shoulder. Even then Charlie was not entirely committed. What about you? How long have you known him?
– A few days.
John Lee’s lips drooped like his moustache.
– That figures. So what do you think?
– About what?
– Charlie, you both? I don’t know.
Cindy laughed.
– I don’t know either.
– And Krotz, what did you think of Krotz?
– He scared me. I thought he was going to do me some harm.
– He still could. You running with Charlie and all that.
– I know that. Cindy felt her fear return.
– Just so’s you do.
– I took off with Charlie because of Krotz. He knew where I worked. I was afraid he would come after me if he couldn’t find Charlie.
– It’s not unlikely.
Charlie came back in a short while later with Gila. He put the tank down on the table. John Lee squinted into the tank, screwed his face up in disgust.
– Jesus, Charlie, what is that?
– Gila monster. Sort of like an overgrown lizard.
– Is he safe? He doesn’t look safe.
– You’ve got to be careful. Can’t get too close. He must be starving though. We haven’t fed him more than a couple of mice in days.
– He’ll do alright then. We’ve got plenty of mice around here, rats too. Don’t worry, he told Cindy, they don’t usually come in the house.
John Lee fixed up the room for them, moved his belongings. Cindy was tired, woozy from moonshine. She excused herself to rest up a while. The room was small. Apart from an old double bed there was a chest of drawers with a propane lantern on top, a trunk, and a wooden chair. Traps hung from one wall, a large fish stuffed and mounted on another, and a bear-skin lay on the wooden floor as a rug. The window had the same cotton print curtains as the front room. Cindy pulled them over and stepped out of the towel. She lifted up the bear-skin and wrapped it around her, covering her head with its head. Then she turned the skin around and wrapped in its fur climbed into bed. She was losing track of the days already. She tried to trace them in her mind but soon drifted off to sleep.
John Lee told Charlie he’d bring him out to show him his still. He took his shotgun and walked with Charlie back out onto the dirt road where Charlie had parked. He walked over to the trees and moved some heaped up branches to disclose a hidden track. About fifty yards into the forest John Lee stopped and pulled away more branches to reveal a tarp covered truck.
He winked over at Charlie.
– I’m not at home if I don’t want to be.
He got in and started the engine. We can drive some of the way, but after that we’ve got to hike. They drove through dense forest hacked back to make way for a vehicle. They bounced over tree roots and rutted ground. Low branches scraped against the roof and windows. Sunlight filtered through the treetops. Wood pigeons flew from above. After about fifteen minutes of driving, John Lee abruptly stopped the truck.
– Road’s run out, he said taking his shotgun from the rack. We got to hoof it from here.
A small foot-worn trail led through the trees. John Lee whistled as he went.
– This is bear-country, need to let ‘em know we’re coming.
A grey squirrel ran up the tree-trunk to Charlie’s side. John Lee raised his shotgun, got the squirrel in his sights.
– Boom! He laughed, lowered his gun. Haven’t eaten a squirrel since I was a kid. You ever eaten one?
Charlie shook his head.
– Where’d you grow up anyway? John Lee swung the shotgun over his shoulder.
– I never grew up, Charlie replied.
– I guess not many of us do. You sound like you come from out east.
– Further east than you think.
John Lee lifted up a low lying branch and ducked his head under it.
– Are you telling me you weren’t born here?
– That’s right, said Charlie sidestepping the branch as it swung back at him.
– So where were you born?
– That’s a long time ago.
– Not so long you can’t remember.
– This is between you and me.
– Right.
Charlie saw a yellow and black ladybug land on his shoulder. He placed his finger in its path so that it walked on it. He held it out in front of him examined the frail shell of his spotted wings.
– Ireland.
– Ireland!
Charlie flicked the ladybug off his finger, saw it fall then fly to safety onto a branch. Charlie had never told anyone this before. He was on the run from his past. If he hadn’t been laden with John Lee’s moonshine, he most probably would not have told him either. If he hadn’t been running from Krotz. He regretted it immediately.
– Listen John Lee, I don’t want to talk about this.
– Well fuck me, Charlie, there’s a lot of things we don’t want to talk about. I mean I don’t want to talk about this moonshine, and yet here we are. They stepped into a small man-made clearing. John Lee pointed with his shotgun to a small wooden shed.
– Welcome to my world.
Charlie heard the whir of a pump. John Lee opened the lock and pushed the door inwards. A large steel barrel stood in the middle of the floor with a long copper pipe extending upwards from it. Clear plastic tubing attached to the pipe connected into a cylinder and out the bottom into another barrel. Eight ten-gallon oil drums were stacked to one side and a row of plastic containers on the other.
– Bush whiskey, John Lee said.
– How does it work? Charlie asked.
– A little bit of chemistry, nothing more. He pointed to the containers. That’s where I make my mash from. Cornmeal, sugar, yeast, malt, water. You just mix it and let it ferment in the boiler. He kicked at the base of the stainless steel barrel. You heat it up until the mash vaporizes and then condense it. I just keep it pumping around. Fractional distillation if you remember anything from your school days. Separates the different substances. The water boils off at 100 degrees. The stuff you and I want is Ethyl-Alcohol. That separates out at 78.8 degrees. After that it’s Methyl-Alcohol, turns your brains to jello. That stuff I keep for fuelling my truck.
John Lee started the boiler up. Charlie watched as he fiddled with the faucet and thermostats adjusting the flow until a clear liquid trickled into the barrel. John Lee poured them off a sample in two tin cups. They brought them outside and sat down with their backs against the shed.
– A fucking Irishman! John Lee grinned over the top of his tin cup.
Charlie looked up at the sky through the gap in the trees. A large black mushroom cap cloud had blown in. Cream colored light played at its lower edges.
John Lee took a drink, tasted its rawness on his throat. So why did you leave?
– I needed a break.
– How long ago?
– Fifteen or so years.
– That’s a long break, Charlie. You ever been back?
Charlie shook his head.
– But you still got family there, right?
– I don’t know.
– You don’t know?
– I never got around to telling anyone I was leaving. Charlie stared into his cup, leaned back against the shed. I needed to start over, he said. Take another shot at it. Turn into the person I wanted to be, not the one everyone else thought I should be.
John Lee nodded in agreement.
– I had a family who drove me to distraction too. A father who drank himself to death and a mother who followed him soon after just so’s she could watch him rot in hell. A sister who disapproves of my lifestyle, and well who can blame her? I do of course, so we hardly ever see one another. It’s possible for years to go by.
Charlie looked around at John Lee’s hiding spot. Another alternative. To clear a path into the heart of the wilds, cover your tracks, stay put.
– Who else knows about this place?
– It’s not a place I bring people to. This is my own illicit part of the universe.
– You’ve got it made.
– You know, Charlie, I believe I really do. He drained the rest of his cup. I’ve got a run to do tomorrow. You want to come with me, bring Lucinda too? There’s a reserve I got to deliver to. We just head north ‘til the road disappears. It’s gravel after that. It’ll take a good four hours to get there. I know a lady there. I sometimes stay a day or two then head back down.
– So there is a lady in your life?
– I wouldn’t put it like that. I see her on occasions. That hardly constitutes my life. So what do you say, Charlie, d’you want to come?
– I would like to go, he said. I believe I really would.
Charlie looked in on Cindy when they returned. He saw her tucked beneath the blankets. He went over and climbed in beside her. As soon as he did she shucked the blankets off them and leapt upon him covered in the bear-skin, growling hungrily.
Charlie wrestled her down on the bed, rubbed her furry rump. She dug the bear claws into his chest, tore at him. He pushed hard and turned her over on the mattress. The bear-skin fell free of her naked body. Cindy’s arms were raised in the air holding Charlie’s strong wrists.
He saw her eyes drift towards the open door. John Lee stood there watching them.
-Sorry. I was just passing. But he did not go anywhere.
– What is it you can’t see? Cindy asked.
– A way out, John Lee replied.
/
Cindy said, why not, when asked about the trip north.
– You mean it? Charlie asked still recovering from their lovemaking. In the midst of her passion she had bitten him hard on the leg. Charlie screamed with the pain, almost kicked her in the face as he freed his leg from her bite.
– Have I complained this far?
– I just wanted to be sure.
– Well don’t count on that. I’m not sure about anything.
– You’re in good company, Charlie told her. He squeezed her bare shoulder, saw the flush of their passion on her neck and upper chest. He heard the geese again outside. The continual migration.
– What’s up with John Lee?
– Lonely, I guess.
– Aren’t we all, but we don’t go peeping in at other people.
Charlie looked up at the stuffed walleye. It stared back uneasily at him. A different fish entirely than the one John Lee had caught. Its innards removed, its painted skin, its false eyes which stared down at them. Trophy. The traps on the walls looked ready to spring.
Charlie and Cindy arose later that evening. The smell of goose cooking drifted in from the kitchen. John Lee had scalded the goose in boiling water, plucked it on the table. He fed Gila now the gizzard, heart and liver.
– So you guys finally got done. Come and join me.
– We were almost going to say that to you, Cindy said.
John Lee looked embarrassed, wiped his hands on his jeans.
– I’m not used to company.
The black clouds continued to blow in from the east. Thick rolled-over swathes of darkness folded towards the earth. Flat harvested fields, broken-down homesteads, lone trees, ancient machinery. The tireless steel wheels of early tractors, the rotted remains of fencing, loops of unattached wire, giant cylinders of pale nicotine fingered hay, torn strips of clear sky. The humid air was laden with heat, tension.
– It’ll break soon, John Lee said.
As he spoke the trees began to sway, and the forewarning winds swept through. A metal bucket rolled across the yard. A door slammed repeatedly on its hinges. A yellow fork of lightning flashed in the distant sky. Cindy waited for the sound of thunder which never came. The sound of rain, maybe hail, on the roof. Beating against her bedroom window. Huddled into her sister for comfort. Another flash.
– The last storm started a fire a few miles west, John Lee said. Lightning hit a tree. It was so dry the whole thing went up. They had to fly water bombers in, dropping thousands of gallons on top of it, took a couple of days before they got it under control. If the winds had changed, I’d have been out of here for good.
The door rattled and the flaps on the air vents outside smacked down. Gila looked uneasy, his eyes flicked back and forth.
– Had a dog once that would have spent the day howling, John Lee went on. When it finally came he would run and hide beneath the table. There are things those animals can intuit we cannot. A portion of our senses we have forsaken for consciousness. It’s a raw deal when you think about it. Just watch two dogs humping. Going at it as if nothing else mattered, then moments later not giving a fuck about that either.
He spoke now to Cindy as though to explain something to her that would make her feel better about his life.
-That’s why I am alone out here. I’m trying to regain my senses.
A purple sheet of lightning flashed through the window. Cindy felt the flesh of one thigh touching the other uncomfortably. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. A rumble of thunder, ongoing like simmering anger. Charlie remembered the gun in the glove compartment. Telling John Lee where he had come from had unsettled him. For the first time since he had left, he began to doubt if there was any such thing as a clean break.
Another flash and a louder roar. The world a little edgy. These were the moments of bar room brawls, unprovoked attacks, inexplicable violence. John Lee tapped his feet on the wooden floorboards. Cindy shifted in her seat. Her recently washed clothing already damp with sweat. Charlie’s face unshaven.
John Lee challenged him to an arm wrestle. Cindy watched their gritted teeth, the hard lines of their tensed jaws, the clenched whitened hands, the thick veins of their forearms, the bulge of upper-arm muscle. She recalled the innards John Lee had torn from the plucked goose, how he had dropped them into Gila’s tank, slimy and red raw. Gila devouring them as John Lee devoured Charlie’s strength and resolve, slamming his arm to the table, the bones of his hand cracking down on the wood.
John Lee grunted, let go Charlie’s hand with no expression of pleasure in his friend’s defeat.
– The goose, was all he said and stood up to go to the kitchen.
Charlie looked at his hand and arm as though they were detached from him, and then across to Cindy as if to ascertain that she was not likewise removed.
– You put up a good fight, she said.
Charlie lifted his arm from the table, clenched and unclenched his fingers.
– You cannot depend on me, remember that.
Cindy walked over to the window. The dark cracked open into light. The loud retorts. Charlie looked at Old Bess lying against the wall beside her. Loaded, ready for action. John Lee came back in with the cooked goose on a large wooden breadboard. He laid it in the center of the table. Cindy sat back down. And as lightning flashed around them and thunder roared, they tore pieces off the goose’s plump body with their sweaty fingers and greedily ate the greasy flesh.
—Gerard Beirne
—————————–
Gerard Beirne is an Irish author who moved to Canada in 1999. He is a past recipient of The Sunday Tribune/Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick 2008-2009 and continues to live in Fredericton where he is a Fiction Editor with The Fiddlehead. He has published two previous novels including The Eskimo in the Net (Marion Boyars Publishers, London, 2003) which was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2004 for the best book of Irish fiction and was selected as Book of the Year 2004 by The Daily Express (England). His poetry collections include Digging My Own Grave (Dedalus Press) which was runner-up in The Patrick Kavanagh Award.
My favourite line from a review so far: “…positively sick with the imagery of lust unfettered…” That’s exactly what I was aiming for, more or less, almost, sort of, well ballparkish.
dg
“Shameless” touches upon the ways children diverge from expected paths in life, and the different ways love and lust can and will shape one’s experience. (The story also includes an incredible six-page paragraph positively sick with the imagery of lust unfettered, unsatisfied, having taken over and been taken over by the mistakes in one’s past.) It’s the final story, however, that proved to be my favourite in the book. “Pointless, Incessant Barking in the Night” is perfunctory in its absurdity, like a mid-life crisis bottled and vigorously shaken with an unhealthy dose of spunk (yes, that). By the end of this story, reflecting on The Comedies in its entirety, it feels as if Glover has addressed the ridiculousness of love and connection from all possible angles, thus clearing the table for something new.
Read the rest at Review: Savage Love, by Douglas Glover | backlisted.
Timothy Taylor (a terrific writer whom I put in Best Canadian Stories when I was editor) chaired one of the panels I was on at WritersFest in Vancouver last month. As I was jetting away on Monday, he emailed me saying that he’d had his advance fiction class at the University of British Columbia read “The Sun Lord and the Royal Child” from Savage Love and would I care to add some thoughts to the discussion preemptively by Wednesday. (He didn’t use the word “preemptively,” but he did say it was an “insane” request since I was in a jet and he needed the comments the next day.) In particular he was interested in the way I comically torqued the idea of celebrity around my rock star forensic archaeologist character and my use and abuse of history.
So I wrote the following:
A quick note then: That story in part comes out of my fascination with the part of southwestern Ontario where I was born — history, geology, prehistory.
Here’s the link to a collection of quotations selected from my research in general.
Some of the items here feed into the story directly including the probably apocryphal Neutral oral history pieces by the McMaster University scholar named Noble. The Southwold Earthworks have always fascinated me (though I have never driven over to see them, just keep saying I am going to every time I am on the farm — thus they are much bigger in my imagination than they are, no doubt, in reality).
I am also very interested in the uses we make of the natives and their prehistory, such that pretty much most of what comes out as history, especially what is commonly understood as native history, is already wrong and spinning off in some over-romanticized, hygienic, idealized image of natives, who, after all, are just people, too.
Thus the forensic archaeologist in question is a celebrity because he is wrong.
One of the patterns of the story, aside from the irony of celebrity, is the inner corruption of contemporary Ontario (which is about the same as Texas sometimes in my mind in terms of Tea Party politics and philistinism). Although, of course, that’s a joke as well and doesn’t represent a thoroughgoing attitude or belief on my part, a bit of whimsy based on impressions that are always countered by other impressions, as I am sure you know.
And then there are doubles, double betrayals, a pattern of plot multiplication, the webbed toes (which go with my ongoing thoughts on mermaids–there is another southwestern Ontario mermaid story in the book).
Hope this helps the class
—Douglas Glover
Ah, such lovely words. Though most of my time is spent teaching English, I also coach Varsity Girls basketball, and it was with dismay and wry pleasure that I received this excuse from a player who would be missing practice Sunday:
I can’t make basketball practice because of Proust.
That was it—no elaboration. Not exactly “my dog ate my homework.” Seriously, could there be a better excuse? What has Proust done?! It turns out, some of my students from the French-American School of New York will read during “Swann’s Way: A Nomadic Reading,” a week-long homage to the French writer’s sprawling In Search of Lost Time (a.k.a. A Remembrance of Things Past), published Nov. 14, 1913.
The novel’s long, complex, sinuous sentences will surely challenge the 120 or so readers recruited by the French Consulate to celebrate the centennial. For example, count the commas in this rumination on the tasting of a madeleine:
Mais, quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir.
In French, we don’t really have “run-on sentences.” Proust’s dense prose style possesses a poetic rhythm (note the runs of parallel constructions in the passage above, the calmer bits, and then the insistent repetitions). It’s syncopated and jazzy, like Ella Fitzgerald. The kids and other readers will be up for the challenge, provided they’ve practiced!
So if you want to bail on your plans this week, just blame Proust. And yes, there will be madeleines.
—Tom Faure
I have a weakness for the smart girls of history, and Diane Lefer has invented an amazingly smart, innocent (yet bold) 18th century Italian girl, a mathematics prodigy, hidden away in her father’s home till Balsamo, the spiritualist fraud, comes to rescue her (sort of) and wrest from her the occult numerological secrets of the ancient Jews. Just out with Loose Leaves Publishing, Diane’s new novel The Fiery Alphabet is a road book, a little tour of the esoteric philosophies of the age, and a peek into a young woman’s heart — presented as a faux document discovery the author made in her research (see author interview here). The excerpt presented here plays a bit on the combination of Daniela Messo’s naïveté (she offers herself to Balsamo but doesn’t quite know the “form” of seduction; she mis-identifies Jesus as the old man who pooped on the floor) and her brilliance with tenderness and a gently comic irony.
Diane is a dear, old friend of mine from the days when she taught with me at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She as a multiple recidivist, having contributed over and over — works of beauty, passion and commitment — to the pages of Numéro Cinq; she is one of the old guard.
dg
If I had not been raised to be a genius and if Pope Benedict had lived a few more years, my father would not have suffered a stroke on the afternoon of April 14, 1760, my thirteenth birthday. If not for the events of that day, we would not have cut ourselves off from the world, here behind these walls.
If Papa had been in good health four years later, when you first asked to be admitted to our home – a stranger, a Sicilian, without introductions or name – I suspect he would have said no. Instead, he heard your request and looked up for a moment. “Library?” he repeated. “Uh, yes,” and returned to his breakfast, a mush of bread and eggs.
If we had not been trying to save my father’s life and restore his lost youth, we would not have stood before one another naked. Perhaps I should never have reached the point of knowing I would do whatever you might ask.
“Give yourself to me,” you said, and it was as though one of Leibniz’s monads, independent and oblivious to every other monad moving through space – unaware that Pope Benedict and my father, the integral calculus, the deadly man in scarlet cap were all part of the harmony – should suddenly step back and see the entire pattern that brought you to me and made you my destiny. Balsamo.
Give yourself to me, you said. But how is it done? I am willing, don’t you see? I stepped into your arms as easily as I would hand Fiammetta a shawl, and yet I saw you weren’t satisfied. How does one give?
You can give someone a plate of noodles, but then the noodles must be eaten. It is not enough for the gift to offer no resistance – I offer none to you – but it must be offered in a form in which it can be consumed.
The problem: I am not a serving of pasta, nor a pair of lace cuffs that I can give you and even help to fasten at your wrists, an ornament to accompany you in the world.
The solution: I give up my suspicions, I hold you first in my heart and in my mind. I have entertained your friends and I have trusted you with my father’s life. Yet none of this is useful, none of it in the proper form. I have failed you.
This morning, I went to your room.
So much has happened in these short months since you first appeared. I remember you, a slight figure in threadbare clothes, a Southerner, and not quite civilized. Your dark curling beard, your hairy frame made me think of a malnourished satyr. I felt sorry for you then, you were so ugly.
This morning I sat on the edge of your bed. “I love you, Balsamo.”
“Dani,” you said, “you are so innocent.”
“Ignorant.”
“No. Innocent,” you said. “Who are you, Daniela? I want to know you.”
And I started to cry, because you do know me. No one knows me as well as you.
“You keep your secrets, Daniela.”
I have no secrets. I stood before you naked. Not even I have seen myself as you have seen me. I have looked at my arms, my thighs; I studied my breasts as they grew. But I have never seen myself whole. Only these fragments, this part, that. My face in the mirror. Balsamo, no one but you.
No, this is all wrong. I sound like a silly girl and that, above all, is what I am not. Try again.
* * *
God may not watch the world from on high, but I do. A third-story window leads onto the roof and I have scrambled over the tiles to my flat and secret hiding place and I have looked out over Rome. Here, from our house on the hill, while I look down on the church of Santa Francesca and the convent, the bell tower rises in the distance, almost on a level with my eyes. The ruined arch at the near end of the church seems to be getting higher, growing up to poke through the screen of trees. If the arch means something – and Balsamo says it does – I swear I know nothing about it.
Daniela Messo was my mother’s name and what they called me at birth. But I have no mother. I am Minerva, sprung forth with a yell from my father’s skull. He raised me to be a genius, though I have been called other things. Now, at seventeen, I cannot be counted a prodigy anymore, so what am I to be?
I am what I know. So put it all down, Daniela. Then mystery must yield to study, and fears to facts.
“When I think of all I tried to create in this world,” my father once said, “your mind is the one unqualified success.”
That mind has conquered Latin and Greek, chemistry, the integral and differential calculus. I have never before turned it to look at my life.
* * *
My father, Don Michele Messo, is a very good looking man – slender, small and well-defined. His nose comes to a sharp point and his eyebrows form two straight silver lines. His eyes glinted like metal when we bent our heads together over the secrets of algebra and geometric forms, but now those eyes are nearsighted enough to be gentle and dim. My father has always been a non-conformist – perhaps because his only child is a daughter and not a son – yet his bearing is – was – that of, I imagine, a military man. Before his health failed, he had the most wonderful way of standing up from his chair. He never unfolded his body the way some, especially taller, men do. Counting on nothing but the strength of his thighs, he would push himself up, without effort or hurry, his back absolutely straight.
Even before his stroke, I can remember, now that I think back, his memory had become confused. One day, in the spirit of radicalism, he told us – the servants Carlo and Fiammetta, and me – that we were to call him “Michele” from that day forth. We were embarrassed, but he insisted and so we agreed. “Michele,” I said, trying to get his attention. “Michele?” But perhaps he had not heard the word spoken without its preceding respectful Don since he was a boy. At any rate, he had forgotten the sound of it and no longer answered to his name. “Father,” I said at last, and then he looked up and scolded me for my formality.
Papa taught me at home. By the age of seven, I was fluent in Latin and French and could read and translate from Hebrew and Greek. I learned philosophy, and so I could have reminded my father that matter is neither created nor destroyed. He has not made me – at most, he has recombined my elements.
In those early years, I wasn’t kept here at home. I was free, or so I thought. I made my own choices though, now I see, all with the aim of pleasing him. My ignorance of Art is an echo of Papa’s disdain. We agreed that busts of the Emperors glorified tyranny; graven images of saints, gods and angels sprang from disordered minds. In the old days, by which I mean before I was thirteen, my father would call for the carriage and we’d visit his friends – priests, mostly; most every man in Rome is either a beggar or a priest. To dress respectably, even my father often wore a black cassock, and we would go and visit somber homes and palaces, vast, ill-lit and dreary, with bloody crucifixes on every wall, tables covered with bric-à-brac and pretty clocks and stones, and prayer stools arranged so cunningly that a child couldn’t help but trip over them in the dark.
Once, at a time when I could not have been more than two or three, I remember a room where murmurous women petted me and made me stand before the crucifix, looking up at the ragged, punished man upon the Cross. “And you know who He is, don’t you?” they asked, as they kissed me and fussed. I’d had no religious education. The only Cross we had at home hung over our door so that men relieving themselves in the street would show respect and squat a little further down the road.
“She doesn’t know,” the women murmured. “She’s just a baby, a tender babe.”
Even at that age, I was used to being praised for giving answers and didn’t like being treated as a child. “I do know!” I cried. “I do!”, and guessed: “That’s the dirty man who made caca on the floor.”
I can remember quite clearly the women’s shock and my own feelings of shame, but I only know the words themselves because my father loved the story and repeated it many times, but only to the most discreet and trusted friends.
—Diane Lefer
————————————–
Diane Lefer is a playwright, author, and activist whose recent books include a new novel, The Fiery Alphabet, and The Blessing Next to the Wound: A Story of Art, Activism, and Transformation, co-authored with Colombian exile Hector Aristizábal and recommended by Amnesty International as a book to read during Banned Books Week; and the short-story collection, California Transit, awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize. Her NYC-noir, Nobody Wakes Up Pretty, is forthcoming in May from Rainstorm Books and was described by Edgar Award winner Domenic Stansberry as “sifting the ashes of America’s endless class warfare.” Her works for the stage have been produced in LA, NYC, Chicago and points in-between and include Nightwind, also in collaboration with Aristizábal, which has been performed all over the US and the world, including human rights organizations based in Afghanistan and Colombia. Diane has led arts- and games-based writing workshops to boost reading and writing skills and promote social justice in the US and in South America. She is a frequent contributor toCounterPunch, LA Progressive, New Clear Vision, ¡Presente!, and Truthout. Diane’s previous contributions to NC include “What it’s like living here [Los Angeles],” “Writing Instruction as a Social Practice: or What I Did (and Learned) in Barrancabermeja,” a short story “The Tangerine Quandary,” a play God’s Flea and an earlier “Letter from Bolivia: Days and Nights in Cochabamba.”
André Marois
The ten-year-old narrator of André Marois’ new novel 10 ans, pas méchant (published by Éditions La courte échelle in Montreal) starts out by pushing a friend into a thicket of brambles — “It was very bad, holes like a colander” — turning him into “a perforated kid.” He doesn’t know why (a bit like Meursault killing his Arab in Albert Camus’ The Stranger but with a juvenile lead). But our narrator, yes, is not really evil, mischievous perhaps, a bit ADHD perhaps, given to perpetrating serial indiscretions and acts of violence. He likes to “get the villain out” as his mother says, so he can calm down. The story is told deadpan, the tone is mordant, black, and insistent.
Marois was born in France but lives in Montreal where he has published a long list of novels, story collections, crime novels and books for young adults. The text is in French; that’s not a new thing; longtime Numéro Cinq readers know that we do publish occasional untranslated works in French. We even have a Special Feature page for this called Numéro Cinq | En Français. Get out your translation dictionaries. It’s not so hard. It will sharpen the mind.
Also, perhaps it does not need pointing out, but Marois sent in the best author photo ever published on NC.
dg
J’ai dix ans.
Je ne suis pas méchant.
En tout cas, quand ça m’arrive, je ne le fais pas exprès. Je suis un enfant normal, mais je n’aime pas toujours jouer comme les autres. Je m’en suis rendu compte la fois où je parlais avec mon copain François. Nous étions dans la descente de la voie David, une petite rue près de chez moi. Il tournait le dos au gros buisson de ronces et moi, sans aucune raison, je l’ai poussé dedans. François s’est retrouvé au milieu des ronces, transpercé de partout par les aiguilles. Il a hurlé. Il avait très mal, troué comme une passoire. Philippe l’a aidé à sortir de là. François est parti chez lui en pleurant. J’ai regardé le sang qui coulait sur ses jambes. Je ne comprenais pas ce que j’avais fait.
Mes bras avaient bougé sans que je le décide. Il fallait que je le pousse dans les ronces. C’était sa place, même si je ne savais pas pourquoi.
François n’est pas mon meilleur copain, mais quand même. Il est gentil. Pas le genre à faire de mal à une mouche. Il ne m’a jamais fait de mal. Je n’avais aucune raison d’être méchant avec lui.
Pourtant, je l’ai été.
Je suis rentré à la maison, je n’ai rien raconté à ma mère. Un peu plus tard, celle de François a sonné chez nous. Elle criait. Elle tenait son fils par la main. Il avait du mercurochrome un peu partout, ses yeux étaient gonflés d’avoir beaucoup pleuré. Sa mère a expliqué à la mienne ce qui s’était passé. Elle m’a engueulé comme du poisson pourri. Ma mère lui a dit de se calmer le pompon. Elle me protégeait. François se planquait derrière sa mère. La mienne a dit qu’elle allait régler ça avec moi. Elle s’est excusée aussi. François et sa mère sont repartis. Elle parlait fort dans la rue, en agitant les bras en l’air. Comme si elle voulait gifler les nuages. Je crois que François a recommencé à pleurnicher.
Ma mère m’a dit qu’elle avait honte de moi et que j’allais voir ce que j’allais voir. Pour me punir, elle m’a envoyé dans ma chambre. Je me suis endormi sur mon lit, alors je n’ai pas vu grand-chose.
Elle n’a pas pu me priver de télévision, comme le font les mères de mes copains, parce que nous n’en avons pas. Ma mère m’a privé de bandes dessinées et de dessert. J’ai été obligé de lire un roman pour passer le temps et oublier l’odeur de la tarte aux pommes.
À l’école, tout le monde a entendu parler de l’affaire des ronces. Il faut dire que l’arrivée de François transformé en gamin perforé n’est pas passée inaperçue. Comme s’il avait la varicelle juste en arrière du corps. Il jouait les martyrs. Il m’énervait.
Les filles me regardaient bizarrement. On aurait dit que j’étais un monstre échappé du zoo.
François me tournait le dos dès qu’il me voyait.
Une fois, il faisait ça et il s’est retrouvé avec la face à trente centimètres du mur de briques dans la cour de récréation. J’ai eu très envie de le pousser dessus. Je suis allé vers lui. J’ai sorti les mains de mes poches. J’ai fait un énorme effort pour me retenir. J’aurais pu lui casser les dents de devant ou le nez. Je voulais vraiment le faire, mais j’ai fermé les yeux et j’ai passé mon chemin.
Ce n’était pas un accident, le buisson.
J’ai le droit de m’amuser, c’est tout.
Mes meilleurs copains s’appellent Jean-Marc, Philippe et Stéphanie. Nous nous connaissons depuis notre naissance. Je sais tout sur eux, parce qu’ils habitent à côté de chez moi. Ce sont mes voisins. Nous jouons tous les jours ensemble dans la rue, nous allons à l’école ensemble. Je regarde la télévision chez eux. Nous nous prêtons des bandes dessinées.
Mes copains ne m’ont jamais rien dit sur l’histoire du buisson de ronces. Ils n’ont pas rigolé non plus. Ils ont juste fait comme s’ils n’avaient rien vu. Ils avaient envie d’oublier ma mauvaise blague. Moi aussi.
Nous jouons avec des karts dans la voie David. Ce ne sont pas des vrais karts de course avec un moteur et tout. Nous n’avons pas d’argent pour acheter ça.
Nous fabriquons chacun le nôtre avec une grosse planche et des roues de poussette fixées sur des barres en bois à l’avant et à l’arrière. À l’avant, il y a un axe vertical dans un trou percé au centre de la planche pour la direction. Nous posons un pied de chaque côté de la barre et, quand on la pousse du côté gauche, on tourne à droite, et le contraire quand on la pousse du pied droit. Il y a aussi un siège avec un petit coussin et un dossier, une sonnette de vélo, des accessoires. Nos karts sont peints avec des gros numéros dans des ronds et nous y ajoutons tous les autocollants qu’on peut trouver. Comme si c’était une voiture de course.
Le plus dur à trouver, c’est les roues. Parce que des planches, tout le monde a ça chez soi. Quand t’as des bonnes roues avec des bons roulements à billes qui ne font pas de bruit, tu vas beaucoup plus vite que les autres. Moi, je n’ai pas de très bonnes roues. Elles grincent un peu, même quand elles sont bien graissées.
Le début de la voie David est en pente, après c’est plat. Nous partons d’en haut en courant, nous sautons sur notre bolide et nous faisons la course à fond jusqu’en bas.
Nous avons le droit de nous rentrer dedans et de faire des queues de poisson, mais pas trop fort. Je suis le champion là-dedans. Les autres essaient juste d’aller le plus vite possible. Ils se penchent pour que l’air ne les ralentisse pas. Et moi, je fonce dans leurs roues arrière. Ça les bousille.
Je n’ai pas le choix, je ne suis pas grand. Ceux qui prennent le plus de vitesse dans la descente, c’est les plus lourds, comme Philippe et Jean-Marc. Moi je suis maigre, alors je dois piloter avec ma tête.
Comme eux, je veux arriver le premier.
Quand je leur rentre dedans, ça les énerve.
Il faut remonter nos karts en les poussant jusqu’en haut de la côte. C’est super fatigant. Chacun de nous souffle et transpire et se jure de mieux réussir la course suivante. Alors, quand nous repartons après une descente où j’ai heurté Philippe ou Jean-Marc, ils disent qu’ils vont me percuter à leur tour. Mais ils ne le font pas souvent.
J’adore quand ça arrive.
C’est ce que j’ai découvert.
Quand je suis méchant avec quelqu’un, ça le rend méchant à son tour. Ou bien il a peur et il s’enfuit, mais ça n’a aucun intérêt. Alors quand l’autre devient méchant à cause de ma méchanceté, je suis content.
Je ne suis plus tout seul, ça me rassure.
Nous finissons par avoir un accident, mais comme nous n’allons pas très vite, nous nous faisons juste des écorchures aux genoux et aux coudes. Pour les mains, nous portons des gants sans doigts. Ils ont ça, les pilotes de Formule 1. Nous avons aussi des vieux casques de motos. Il fait chaud là-dessous.
Je rentre chez moi en nage, calmé. Le méchant est sorti, je peux aller dîner sans agacer ma petite sœur.
C’est ma mère qui dit ça : il faut faire sortir le méchant. Je ne l’ai pas inventé. Ça veut dire qu’on a du méchant en nous. Tout le monde.
Je le fais sortir le plus que je peux. Par la bouche, en disant toutes les choses qui me passent par la tête. Par les mains, en poussant du monde dans les ronces, par exemple. Par les pieds, en donnant des coups dans les tibias de ma petite sœur sous la table. Par les yeux, en lançant des regards bizarres à plein de gens. C’est tout ce que je sais faire pour l’instant.
Le méchant sort, mais j’en ai encore dedans, c’est ça qui est bizarre. Il se reconstitue.
Ce n’est pas toujours facile, surtout avec les adultes. Ils ont vite fait de vous donner une claque si vous les embêtez. Je commence à mieux m’y prendre avec eux. Je les surprends en faisant des choses qu’ils n’attendent pas. Je leur lance des œufs sur la tête, par exemple. Ça les énerve beaucoup. Ils ont du blanc et du jaune plein les cheveux. Ça dégouline sur leur col de chemise, dans leur cou. Ils sont furieux.
Je m’arrange pour qu’ils ne me voient pas. Je les bombarde depuis l’arbre qui monte au-dessus du poteau de l’arrêt d’autobus. Aussitôt que j’ai atteint quelqu’un, je saute par terre et je pars en courant. Je cours plus vite que tous mes copains. Je suis le meilleur en sprint à l’école.
Des fois, ceux que j’ai touchés me poursuivent en criant. Des fois, même pas.
Il faut aussi s’entraîner au tir. Je lance des cailloux de la taille d’un œuf sur une boîte de conserve dans la voie David. Je commence à être très adroit.
Le plus dur, c’est de voler des œufs sans se faire attraper. Au début, je les prenais à la maison, mais ma mère a commencé à s’en rendre compte. Maintenant, je les vole dans le frigo des parents de mes copains. Un œuf par ci, un œuf par là, ça ne se remarque pas. Je dois juste faire attention à ne pas en casser un dans ma poche.
Ça m’est déjà arrivé.
Ma mère m’a demandé ce que j’avais fait, et j’ai répondu que c’était François qui m’avait fait une blague pour se venger du buisson de ronces. Elle a trouvé ça bête, mais elle n’a pas eu envie d’aller crier après la mère de François. Pour un œuf, ça ne vaut pas le coup de se déplacer, même si un œuf, c’est de l’argent. Et chez nous, on n’a pas beaucoup d’argent.
Mon père est mort dans un accident de chantier. Il est tombé d’un échafaudage en recouvrant une maison de crépi. Il était maçon. C’est chouette comme métier, maçon. La bonne nouvelle, a dit son patron à ma mère, c’est que mon père n’a pas souffert. Il est tombé sur la tête et PAF ! Mort.
C’est arrivé il y a quelques mois, alors je me rappelle bien de lui, mais des fois, je l’oublie un peu.
Ma mère, elle travaille. Elle n’a pas le choix, comme elle dit. Elle fait des réunions Tupperware pour vendre des boîtes en plastique à d’autres dames. Elle en a une valise pleine. Elle dit qu’elles sont incassables, pas comme les œufs. Elle les laisse tomber par terre pour prouver que c’est vrai. Les dames trouvent ça drôle et elles lui achètent plein de boîtes vides avec leurs couvercles. Il paraît que c’est la meilleure vendeuse de la région, mais nous sommes quand même très pauvres. Je me demande comment font celles qui ne vendent pas autant de boîtes que ma mère. Elles doivent avoir encore un mari vivant.
Mes copains non plus ne sont pas riches. Personne ne l’est.
Si leurs mères apprennent que je jette leurs œufs par les fenêtres, je vais me faire disputer.
Mais c’est plus fort que moi.
Ma mère trouve que j’ai beaucoup d’imagination, surtout pour les mauvais coups. Mais souvent ce n’est même pas moi qui les invente. Je fais des trucs que j’ai entendus, des trucs que tout le monde fait.
Par exemple, je coince une épine d’acacia entre mes doigts. On ne la voit pas. Puis je serre la main de mes copains. Ça leur fait mal. Ils crient, retirent leur main, et moi je rigole. C’est juste une petite piqûre de rien du tout, pour rire.
Je sais bien que la méchanceté va continuer. Si je pique Philippe, il va piquer Jean-Marc, qui va piquer Stéphanie, qui piquera François. Ça s’arrêtera là, parce que François n’osera jamais me piquer. Il sait de quoi je suis capable. J’aime ça, savoir que je lui fais un petit peu peur.
Une autre qui me dérange, c’est ma sœur. Elle m’aime tout le temps, même si je ne suis pas gentil avec elle. Elle me regarde avec des yeux de biche, elle ne comprend pas pourquoi je suis méchant avec elle. Comme quand j’attache les lacets de ses chaussures sous la table, et qu’elle tombe en voulant marcher.
C’est ça que j’aime le plus, quand ça me fait rire.
Quand on est juste gentil, on ne peut pas rire autant. Si je cache un caillou dans une boule de neige que je lance à Jean-Marc, il va être surpris, et sa tête en sang fera rire tout le monde. Il aura un peu mal, bon, mais pas vraiment. Et pendant ce temps-là, les autres et moi, nous rirons comme des baleines.
Surtout moi, je sais.
Ma mère dit que je ne suis pas toujours drôle.
Les parents, ils ne rient pas des mêmes blagues que les enfants. Ils disent des choses entre eux et ils nous bouchent les oreilles et ils pouffent. On entend quand même. On dirait qu’ils ont honte de rire. Moi, je ne me cache pas, je n’ai pas honte. Je ris si c’est drôle, c’est tout.
Tout le monde n’est pas drôle, c’est vrai. Moi, oui. Stéphanie rit quand je raconte une blague. Je sais ce qui la fait rire et j’aime voir ses dents. Je n’ai jamais été méchant avec elle. C’est comme ça, allez savoir pourquoi. Stéphanie, elle a une tête de plus que moi. Si elle voulait, elle pourrait me donner des coups de poing très forts. Mais elle est trop gentille pour ça.
Je ne lui fais pas mal, pas parce que j’ai peur qu’elle m’assomme, mais par principe. On ne frappe pas les filles, c’est comme ça.
Même si des fois on en aurait envie.
Il y a plein de filles à l’école qui m’énervent beaucoup, mais je ne les touche jamais.
Ce que j’aime le plus, c’est quand je trouve une nouvelle idée. Je suis excité comme une puce. Je veux essayer mon tour le plus vite possible.
Comme dévisser la chaise du professeur pendant son absence.
La dernière fois que j’ai fait ça, monsieur Laporte, qui nous enseigne la musique le mardi matin, est tombé de l’estrade sur le plancher, et son front a frappé le pupitre de Jean-Marc. Jean-Marc est au premier rang en classe, sinon il parle tout le temps avec ses voisins.
Monsieur Laporte a eu très mal. Ça se voyait. Il a crié des grossièretés en me regardant, comme s’il n’y avait que moi qui pouvais être le coupable. Il était super impressionnant, avec du sang qui lui coulait au milieu du visage, un peu comme Dracula. Je ne riais pas avec ma bouche, mais en silence dans ma tête.
Le directeur est venu dans notre classe. Il a demandé qui avait fait ça. Tout le monde m’a regardé. J’ai dit que je ne le referais plus.
Personne ne m’a cru. J’ai été renvoyé de l’école pendant deux jours. C’est une très grosse punition dans notre école.
Ce midi-là, Jean-Marc, Philippe et moi, nous avons beaucoup ri. Ça aussi, c’est un truc que j’ai remarqué : on peut rire plusieurs fois du même tour, juste en le racontant encore. On peut même rire de plus en plus fort.
Jean-Marc a expliqué qu’il y avait du sang de monsieur Laporte sur sa trousse à crayons. Un peu dégoûtant, mais marrant.
L’après-midi, ma mère n’était pas à la maison à cause des Tupperwares. Je m’ennuyais pendant que les autres étaient à l’école. Moi j’étais puni chez moi.
On ne peut pas faire une course de karts quand on est seul. Ni pousser un copain dans les ronces.
Je ne peux quand même pas me taper dessus pour faire passer le temps.
À force de m’ennuyer, je cherche de nouvelles idées.
— André Marois
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Né le 21 mars 1959 à Créteil (France), André Marois étudie deux mois en arts plastiques et cinéma à l’université Paris VIII, puis deux ans par correspondance pour obtenir le brevet de technicien supérieur (BTS) en publicité, en 1981. Il effectue ensuite son service militaire comme dessinateur chez les pompiers de Paris, puis démarre une carrière de concepteur-rédacteur publicitaire en 1982, dans diverses agences parisiennes. Il émigre à Montréal en 1992 avec ses deux enfants, pour travailler comme publicitaire pigiste jusqu’en 2006. Il y habite toujours, en plein cœur du Plateau-Mont-Royal.
Depuis 1999, il publie des romans noirs pour les adultes, des romans policiers et de science-fiction pour les enfants et les adolescents, ainsi que des nouvelles pour tirer sur tout ce qui bouge. En 2013, son roman Les Voleurs de mémoire a gagné le Prix jeunesse des Libraires du Québec. Depuis, 2006, il donne des ateliers / conférences auprès d’étudiants de primaires, secondaires, cégeps et universitaires sur l’écriture, le polar, la nouvelle noire : Edmundston, Gatineau, Montréal, Vancouver, Winnipeg, UQAM, Bordeaux (France), Sudbury, Gatineau, Québec, Toronto, Windsor, and Calgary. Depuis 2010, il est chargé de cours à l’Université de Sherbrooke : créativité et rédaction.{{1}}[[1]]
Bibliographie
Romans
2013 – 10 ans, pas méchant, Éd. la courte échelle
2013 – La Fonction, Éd. la courte échelle
2010 – 9 ans, pas peur, Éd. La courte échelle
2010 – Sa propre mort, Éd. La courte échelle
2008 – Passeport pathogène, Éd. Héliotrope
2003 – Les effets sont secondaires, Éd. la courte échelle (Édition de poche 2006)
2000 – Tête de pioche, Éd. Les Allusifs
1999 – Accidents de parcours, Éd. la courte échelle (Édition de poche 2006)
Recueils de nouvelles
2013 – Santé !, Éd. L’Atelier Mosécu, France (coauteur)
2012 – Printemps spécial, Éd. Héliotrope (coauteur)
2011 – Petit Feu, Éd. La courte échelle
2010 – Tab’Arnaques, Éd. Québec Amérique (coauteur avec Luc Baranger)
2008 – M.O. Crimes of Practice (Crime Writers’ Association Anthology), Comma Press, UK (coauteur)
2006 – Du cyan plein les mains, Éd. la courte échelle (Édition de poche 2006)
2005 – Boucs émissaires, Éd. Les 400 coups (coauteur)
2001 – 38 morts dont 9 femmes, Éd. Trait dʼunion
1998 – Circonstances particulières, Éd. L’instant même (coauteur)
Romans et albums jeunesse
2013 – Petit Pat tome 1 : Tout le monde dehors !, Éd. la courte échelle
2013 – Les voleurs de mémoire, Éd. la courte échelle
2012 – La Forêt des insoumis, Éd. Boréal
2011 – En mai, fais ce qu’il te plait, Éd. Boréal
2010 – Mesures de guerre, Éd. Boréal
2010 – J’aime pas les mascottes, Éd. Les 400 coups
2008-09 – Les Allergiks, feuilleton en 13 épisodes, Éd. la courte échelle
2008 – Papy, où t’as mis tes dents ? Éd. Les 400 coups
2006 – La main dans le sac, Éd. la courte échelle
2006 – Au feu!, Éd. la courte échelle
2005 – Vol à l’étalage, Éd. la courte échelle
2004 – Avis de recherche, Éd. la courte échelle
2002 – Meurtre à l’écluse 50, Éd. la courte échelle
2001 – Les voleurs d’espoir, Éd. la courte échelle + réédition en janvier 2013
2000 – Blanc comme la mort, Éd. Boréal
2000 – Tueurs en 4×4, Éd. Albin Michel (France)
(trad.allemand, Mürder im Geländewagen, Éd. RoRoRo)
1999 – Un ami qui te veut du mal, Éd. Boréal
1999 – Le Chat botté à New York, Éd. Les 400 coups
1999 – Riquet à la Houppe, Éd. Les 400 coups
– Les Voleurs de mémoire, Prix jeunesse des libraires du Québec, 12-17 ans, 2013
– Mesures de guerre, finaliste au Prix jeunesse des libraires du Québec, 9-11 ans, 2011
– Sa propre mort, finaliste au Prix Saint-Pacôme du roman policier 2010
– Les effets sont secondaires, finaliste au Prix Saint-Pacôme du roman policier et au Prix Arthur-Ellis Crime Writers of Canada en 2003
– Mon œil, Grand prix des Magazines du Québec, catégorie Chronique d’humeur, 2008 et 2010
– Petit feu, 2e prix au concours des prix Littéraires Radio-Canada, catégorie ouvelles, Montréal, 2006.
– Le tueur autodidacte, gagnante du concours de nouvelles policières de Ligny, Belgique, 1999.
– Belle mort, gagnante du concours de nouvelles de la revue Stop, Montréal, 1995.
– Dialogue de sourds, gagnante du concours de nouvelles de la revue Nouvelles Fraîches, Montréal, 1994.
– Van Gogh a encore frappé, gagnante du concours de nouvelles policières du journal Voir, Montréal, 1993.[[1]]
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