Feb 092017
 

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Elle, the play based on dg’s novel, just opened in Vancouver last night at the Firehall Arts Centre after a two-week run in Waterford, Ontario. I was there. I have more to say but am processing. I saw the play several times last year when it premiered at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto. It was stunning then, better now. Mesmerizing, magical, mythic. Severn Thompson looks eight feet tall on stage. Subtle changes in the script and staging and music have clarified and strengthened the production.

But here is what The Georgia Straight had to say — more anon.

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It’s been almost 500 years since Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, a French noblewoman, was abandoned by her colonizer uncle, Jean-François de la Rocque de Roberval, off the coast of Newfoundland. Her crime? Being a wild woman—the kind of wanton lady who dared take a lover on a transatlantic journey in 1542.

Her story of survival became the stuff of legend, and has inspired numerous artists over the years, including Canadian writer Douglas Glover. His book, Elle, a fictionalized account of de la Rocque de Roberval’s time marooned on the so-called Isle of Demons, won a Governor General’s Award, and it’s also the basis of Severn Thompson’s Dora Award–winning stage adaptation of the same name.

Read the rest at The Georgia Straight.

Jan 142017
 

Here’s a brilliant lecture by the late Mark Fisher. Pre-Brexit and Trump, I take it. But predicting the breakdown of things. It explains the demise of the heady ideas of my youth in ways I had not conceived before.

Jan 102017
 

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The Burning Air, Hutchinson, London, 1960
The Way In Viking, New York, 1968
No Resting Place Viking, New York, 1972
The World at Noon, Guernica Editions, Montreal, 1994

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Eugene Mirabelli has written four novels which form a significant oeuvre. They are not singular, but interrelate in complex and delightful ways to form a unique (and, one assumes, unfinished) collectivity connected by a set of thematic concerns: family, marriage, Italian heritage, Cambridge, mutability and death; and structural articulations: the dominant male point of view that modulates briefly into the female at climactic junctures, the subtle fracturing and dislocating of time, and the interpolation of what Milan Kundera calls novelistic essays.

Literary comparisons are often invidious, but the names that come to mind as I read Mirabelli’s work are Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. The Burning Air is very much an Italian American “Goodbye, Columbus” and also reminds one of Bellow’s brief, tightly controlled early novels. Almost immediately, though, this comparison breaks down: Roth and Bellow share an era and a set of social concerns with Mirabelli, but their work falls into a Jewish American tradition (with roots in Yiddish literature) which is male-oriented, materialistic (i.e., of this world), intellectual, and comic. Mirabelli’s Italian American mental syntax is quite different: he builds his literary universe around an Augustinian dichotomy. His books are like long, careful sessions in the confessional, talking to God, enumerating small and large sins. His protagonists have one eye on the woman (wife and lover — Mary and Mary Magdalene) and one eye on death. He sees this world as an anxious and frustrating place, a place where his protagonists vain attempts at control are always being defeated by their own sinfulness and the fleeting nature of existence. Redemption comes only in the chaotic embrace of the family, the constricting yet reassuring bonds of love. A Mirabelli character may crack up and take anti-depressants, but one could never imagine him taking Roth’s detour into psychoanalysis or filing for multiple divorces as in Bellow.

Reading through Mirabelli’s novels in sequence one also begins to admire his technical ingenuity. He does lovely things which might not be noticed unless one treats the books as an on-going production. For example, he links his novels by taking a thematic note or plot segment from one and using it again in the next. The Burning Air is about a man who proposes to a woman and then never sees her again. In The Way In, the next novel, Frank Annunzio has proposed to a woman named Alba and then lost her. The Way In ends with Nancy’s premature and difficult delivery which is echoed darkly by Marianne’s miscarriage at the opening of No Resting Place. And, of course, Marco’s affair with Carol Crispin in No Resting Place is echoed in Nicolo’s affair with Roxanne in the last novel, The World at Noon.

Beginning with The Way In, Mirabelli also makes telling use of the novelistic essay. In The Way In, this takes the form of background essays on the Puritans who built New England and on the Shakers who built the school at which Frank begins his teaching career. The latter — mystical, other-worldly craftsmen — become a moral-spiritual counterpoint to the sad emptiness of Frank’s life before marriage and career. In No Resting Place, the device ramifies and extends itself into interpolated essays on Brook Farm, a running Sacco and Vanzetti sequence, and a tiny chapter on historic Albany. And in The World at Noon, the novelistic essay and family history combine and foliate in a delightful series of comic-mythic stories about the ancestors of the Cavallus. These interpolated essays and stories function like classical epyllions (one of Marshall McLuhan’s hobby horses) and give Mirabelli’s books what Yeats, in his essay on sub-plots in King Lear, called “the emotion of multitudes.”

This repetition of technical and thematic elements results in the odd sense one has reading these novels that the twenty-year gap between the publication of No Resting Place and The World at Noon ceases to exist in the experience of the reading. Mirabelli’s novels seem to form a perfectly logical sequence of growth, mutation and expansion. Each novel has been an advance in terms of technical virtuosity, thematic complexity and, for want of a better phrase, metaphysical accommodation. The Burning Air is taken up with George’s failed effort of control over the mysterious and fearful Giulia Molla. In The Way In, Frank Annunzio’s existential emptiness is the aftermath of that kind of loss of control (over women and/or the dark, shiftingness of things in general). Briefly, Frank is reprieved through marriage to Nancy and the community of friends he finds at the (Shaker) school (note especially the wonderful and redemptive chapter on kite flying), only to be plunged back into insecurity by the difficult birth of his child.

In No Resting Place, Mirabelli’s Manichean tour de force (the light of Brook Farm warring with the darkness of Sacco and Vanzetti), Marco Falconieri almost drowns in the slough of mid-life (and post-1960s) burnout which, really, is nothing but the final realization life itself will never redeem us, that things will not miraculously get better: “All our desire has been to carry through time, to stand on firm ground, reach out and stay the changes. Love leads us from ourselves to the things of this world, but in time these same things alter and pass away, no matter how much we cling to them. Here is no steady place.” In No Resting Place, Mirabelli grants us for the first time full access to the mental states of his protagonist as befits the overtly confessional mode of the narration. Mirabelli, as author, is himself beginning at this point to move deeper into his unique Italian-Catholic-American psyche, turning away from the vaguely modish, existential angst of the first two books toward a more chaotic (less controlled) vision of worldly and domestic uncertainty (the sinfulness of the flesh).

This is a dark, brave book which, in many ways, points toward its successor The World at Noon while yet not preparing us for the surprising shift of tone, the operatic and magical comedy of this most recent Mirabelli production. The World at Noon, as I have mentioned, replicates some of the plot articulations of No Resting Place — the extramarital affair, the reconciliation at the end. But the material is handled in a completely different way. It is as if, in delving always more deeply into who he is, Mirabelli has reinvented the peculiarly Italian, extravagantly melodramatic and often comic vision — the opera — in the novel form. By fusing the tale of American mid-life domestic woe with the mythical family histories of the Cavallus, he has created a wonderful interplay of now and then, this and that (the epyllion structure again). And he has coupled this complexity with a new sense of tranquil acceptance; not a superficial shrug but a genuinely comic (loving) accommodation. When Nicolo Pellegrino calmly invites his wife’s naked lover to climb down from the tree where he is hiding we know we have arrived at a totally new (for Mirabelli) and special literary place. And at the end of the novel, the double wedding of Gina and Aurora echoes the wedding at the close of The Tempest when Prospero throws his books of magic away and the world is renewed in the ritual sanctification of love and sexual regeneration.

—Douglas Glover

This essay originally appeared in Italian Americana Vol. 13, No. 2 (Summer 1995)

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Dec 122016
 

Here’s the new trailer for the Waterford production of Elle, the play based on my novel, which is actually the Theatre Passe Muraille touring production, bound later for Winnipeg and Vancouver. But the Waterford performance is first on the tour, my home town, champagne extravaganzas on the first and last nights. I will be there, possibly not standing upright.

In other news, it turns out Goose Lane Editions, Elle‘s publisher, is rolling out a new print run to keep up with demand. Nice news.

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Elle by Douglas Glover

Nov 302016
 

piratesSome of NC’s staff seven years ago, l-r Jason DeYoung, dg, Natalia Sarkissian, & Rob Gray.

Jonah put this song in my mind; now it won’t go away. Recalls to me the piratical impulse that led us to start the magazine in the first place. And then, yes, after seven years — a broken, lonely man on a Halifax pier. Ah me.

Maybe it’s not that bad.

With this in mind, knowing full well the catastrophe that awaits you, I want to remind one and all that we still need production editors. We found one very competent person (soon to be announced) last week, but we’d be more comfortable with another (spreads the work around and provides reserves).

Here is the HELP WANTED PAGE. Please take a look and throw your bodies onto the pyre.

Also let it be noted that the SUBMISSIONS PAGE for Childhood, My First Job, and What It’s Like Living Here essays has been reopened for a while. We got a gorgeous Childhood piece this morning from County Mayo in Ireland.

dg

Nov 202016
 

CaptureSevern Thompson as Elle in the original Theatre Passe Muraille production.

More exciting news about Elle, the play (based in my novel Elle). If you have been tracking this you are aware that Severn Thompson and Theatre Passe Muraille are taking the play on tour this winter (tour details here). But it’s just been announced that this tour will actually start with performances in my home town of Waterford, Ontario, at the Old Town Hall Theatre, under the aegis of the most charming artistic director ever, Claire Senko (passionate, fierce, scarily competent, friend of Fred Eaglesmith).

I went over to meet Claire Friday afternoon and wander around the place. All strangely familiar because I grew up just outside of town, and once even strummed a guitar with my brother’s band during a rehearsal on the theatre stage in the early 70s.

There will be performances on January 26, 27, 28 and 29, and on February 2, 3, and 4.

There will be an opening night champagne gala and a talkback session with the playwright and actress Severn Thompson and Theatre Passe Muraille’s artistic director Andy McKim (who fed me incredibly intelligent questions about the novel and play when we did an onstage interview together last January).

And closing night (February 5, Saturday) there will be ANOTHER! champagne gala and a talkback session with me after the show. (Amber Homeniuk will be the facilitator, as they call it.)

You can buy tickets here.

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This video slideshow was produced by an old friend, Alison Bell. (Her brother Ian Bell has appeared in the magazine.)

 

Nov 152016
 

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DG and his intrepid close relative RG, who has appeared earlier on these pages, went for their usual pre-winter canoe trip on Big Creek (see Google map above: southern Ontario where Long Point juts into Lake Erie). RG fell in first unwisely trying to clear a snag. Then they went to another put in spot and realized they’d left the paddles back at the first put in. RG made DG stay with the canoe in the mud while he drove in his warm car (with heated seats) back for the paddles. DG, the creative mind behind NC, passed the time taking selfies. Then RG rammed DG into a thorn bush and his hand was bleeding. When they got back to the landing DG’s bare feet were so cold he fell over.

Actually, it was quite stunning (aside from the nature and brother-on-brother violence). Immense labyrinthine marshlands, many threatened species holding out there. Fascinating to me because in 1670, on Easter Sunday, two Sulpician priests, François Dollier de Casson and René de Brehant de Galinée, were struggling to cross Big Creek in flood when they heard above them the shrieks of horses, the jangling of harness, war cries and the sounds of battle. According to their journal, they knew exactly what it was, King Arthur’s Hunt. King Arthur’s Hunt is one name/a version of the legend of the Wild Hunt (also Charlemagne’s Hunt), which John Irving used in the short story “The Pension Grillparzer” in the The World According to Garp. Ghostly, wraithlike warriors riding and battling endlessly in the sky. Terrific to be in exactly that spot.

I have an anthology of quotations about Long Point and Norfolk County, including that journal entry, which you can read here.

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DG intrepidly negotiating hazard.

RG after his dip.

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DG selfie.

—Photos by dg, rg & google maps

Nov 022016
 

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Still tracking threads from German Sierra’s essay “Deep Media Fiction” I came upon a series of lectures from this symposium on the inhuman. This one was absolutely riveting, not the least because the phrase “pesky women” echoes the “nasty woman” crack in the last presidential debate. Difficult women, women and work, women’s work and the replacement of women by machines. You have to watch this. Helen Hester takes stray trends and lines of thought and makes them fit, makes the world a little bit clearer. Brilliant mind. Just fun to watch her make sense.

dg

Nov 012016
 

 

You must read Walter Johnson on slavery, capitalism & American history. Here’s a new essay in Boston Review teased below by way of introduction. But read his books River of Dark Dreams and Soul by Soul. Change your life.

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Indeed, the history of capitalism makes no sense separate from the history of the slave trade and its aftermath. There was no such thing as capitalism without slavery: the history of Manchester never happened without the history of Mississippi. In Capitalism and Slavery (1944), Eric Williams gives a detailed account of the supersession of British colonial interests by manufacturing ones and the replacement of cotton with sugar as the foundation of capitalist development. Williams argues that Great Britain freed its slaves, but did not free itself from slavery. British capitalists simply outsourced the production of the raw material upon which they principally depended to the United States. 

Source: To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice | Boston Review

Oct 282016
 

The morning started like this: Views from the NC Bunker.

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Then I slid my car down the back hill to Barre to get it undercoated at a place called Yipes. Went to Espresso Bueno to write then slipped down Granite Street, over the railway tracks, to visit the Socialist Labor Party Hall (aka the Old Labor Hall). Hallowed ground. Emma Goldman used to live on Granite Street.

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Big Bill Haywood who led the IWW spoke at the hall. He’s the big guy below, leading a strike parade in Lowell, MA, in 1912.

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Also the legendary Red Flame, Annie Burlak (National Textile Workers Union).

burlakvia Five College Archives

The great Anarchist Luigi Galleani lived a block or two away on Blackwell Street and published his internationally influential newspaper Cronaca Sovversiva (The Chronicle of Subversion). How I love that name, Chronicle of Subversion.

galleanivia Wikipedia

And the young brilliant stone carver Elia Corti was famously shot to death (by another Anarchist) on the front doorstep in 1903.

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It did me good walking there. I felt the hairs go up the back of my neck a bit. I was more moved than I care to talk about. I think I fell in love a little with the Red Flame. I could feel the big hall packed with voices.

And yet it’s a functioning community hall and social centre. I went back to Yipes to get my car and the woman at the counter told me how she has a small foster child who had never had a birthday party in his life. So she rented the Socialist Party Labor Hall and threw him the biggest party ever just a few weeks ago.

It did my heart good, as I say, — in the midst of this tawdry election cycle — to find myself suddenly in the presence of such kind, dedicated, hearty people (the current ones and the ghosts).

Nice day.

dg

Oct 122016
 

Douglas Glover, Theatre Passe Muraille

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I have an essay in the new issue (July/August — just out though) of American Book Review. It’s called “The Literature of Extinction” and in something like 1,500 words covers the entire history of experimental literature to the present. One of the fascinating things about writing this essay was the insight I derived from Germán Sierra’s essay “Deep Media Fiction,” which we published here in the magazine in January. I keep going back and rereading that essay. It has driven a good deal of my current reading.

American Book Review is a print publication. You’ll have to buy a copy or find it in your library or download, if you can, from Muse. But here is a short passage.

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We see the world more clearly now (we think). It’s very small, dirty, crowded with people, and heating up. The Anthropocene is the new name given to the period of time (roughly beginning with the Neolithic) human beings have had a significant impact on the environment. Now we know there is no free lunch, and the hubris of our assumption that the earth was an infinite, free resource specially catered for us by the gods is beginning to look like a monumental gaffe.

Nor are we essentially different from the other orders of being (say, trees, rocks, newts); consciousness may be a neural anomaly, or as the A.I. researchers like to say, an emergent property, that is, a side effect of our neural interaction with whatever we are interacting with (just as the colour of an object is not a property of the object but a side effect of the wavelengths of light interacting with eye neurons). Not a self, a soul, a ghost in the machine, but a whisp of smoke, dream-like and temporary.

from Douglas Glover “The Literature of Extinction” American Book Review, Juy/August 2016.

Sep 172016
 

Douglas Glover photo

Left the NC Bunker today to check out the Tunbridge Fair. Was persuaded against better judgement to go on rides. First took pictures of this thing, which I think of as The Claw, and then rode on it. Feel much better now. But cannot write complete sentences yet.

Douglas Glover photo

Then I went on another very fast whirling gyroscopic orgasmomegatron ride (which I did not photograph) and with four tickets left got onto the Zero Gravity machine with Matt Monk (dg dressed in dark clothing, Matt in white). I recall Matt saying, as we entered the big kids’ ride enclosure, “Now the shit gets real!” Needless to say someone else took these pictures.

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What you see here are the faces of men who have faced Death in the Zero Gravity ride (along with 12 small children).

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Aug 022016
 

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Douglas Glover, Theatre Passe MurailleShelagh1

 

 

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Click the link below to listen to the spectacular Shelagh Shapiro interviewing the irrepressible (irrendentist, irresponsible…) Douglas Glover, editor at NC, about the magazine and various and sundry topics guaranteed to trigger his loquacious streak.

Douglas Glover/Numéro Cinq – Interview #410: A conversation with Douglas Glover, founder, publisher and editor of the online magazine Numéro Cinq.

Link: Write The Book » Douglas Glover/Numéro Cinq – Interview #410 (7/25/16)

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Jun 052016
 

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The Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver has announced its 2016/17 season, and Elle, the play adapted from dg’s novel by Severn Thompson, will be there.

From Toronto, Theatre Passe Muraille’s Dora Moore Award nominated ELLE, adapted from Douglas Glover’s award-winning novel, tells the story of a French noblewoman abandoned on the Isle of Demons (off the coast of Newfoundland) in 1542.

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May 232016
 

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Okay, this is one of those, you know, things that come out of the blue. Tom Greene, VCFA’s president, called me from his car this morning to tell me they had launched a new Vermont College of Fine Arts Artists Development Fund based on a $1 million donation from the Martin Foundation. Part of the fund, a fund within the fund for writers, authors, and publishers, is named after me.

Douglas Glover Fund

The announcement just went up on Friday. You can find the relevant VCFA web page here. And you can download Artists Development Fund brochure here.

Naturally, I am nonplussed, amazed, bemused, and touched. I am grateful to the Martin Foundation for singling me out like this. It’s a terrific honour. I hope the fund inspires and supports many, many great writers in the future.

There is, of course, backstory here. But so far the donor wishes to remain anonymous, and I won’t blab.

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May 152016
 

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Micheline Lanctôt and Le Rédempteur, image via Radio-Canada

Actress, director, writer, translator Micheline Lanctôt picked my novel as one of the indispensable books last month on French language CBC Radio. The word they used on air and on their website is “incontournable.” The novel in question is my book The Life and Times of Captain N., first published by Knopf in New York where Gordon Lish was my editor. The French version was published under the title Le Rédempteur  (the redeemer, which was its working title most of the time I was writing it, oddly enough). The translator was the redoubtable Daniel Poliquin who went on to be a prolific novelist himself (this was back in the early 1990s).

Micheline knows my work intimately. She translated my book of stories 16 Categories of Desire into French. It was published as Seize Sortes de Désir. She’s a wonderful actress and director. Long before I actually met her, or even thought of meeting her, I knew exactly who she was, having been entranced with her performance on the screen in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), where she played the French-Canadian love interest opposite Richard Dreyfus.

View the complete list of indispensable books @ Ici on lit at Radio-Canada.

dg

Apr 232016
 

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All good at Numéro Cinq Magazine. We’re still at zero for security issues on the Google Search Console. I have updated the magazine security software and we have a new caching engine.

The new security software delivers email alerts when someone tries to sign into the site, and so I see all the IP addresses for people who don’t have a correct username. It’s a bit chilling sometimes. My username was pretty generic and somehow someone guessed it or found it out. And last night there were over a hundred attempts to log in with that username (now defunct) without the correct password, of course. These attempts came from all over the world (so you know it’s a bot, not likely a real person). They started in Saint Petersburg, Russia, thence to Uruguay, then South Korea. Then they just came up everywhere. I am told that this is what’s called a brute force attack and is part of the background noise of the Internet.

Pretty soon I am going to turn off the email alerts. They are a bit too unnerving to watch. Truth is this has been happening all along and I just never noticed.

The good news is that the security software locks each one of these IP addresses out.

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Apr 202016
 

Looks like we might be clear. The site redirect malware is gone. And the Google security alert now reads:

Security Issues

Currently, we haven’t detected any security issues with your site’s content.

I am redoing our internal security setup and that also includes changing the site’s caching software. So please bear with us if the site seems a little slow. We should have everything ironed out by next week.

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Apr 172016
 

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The bad news is that NC is still hacked. Google Search security is showing three infected pages; Jonah (our tech team) has found another suspicious file.

My moment of bravado yesterday was misplaced. We found one piece of malicious code, not the whole lot.

It’s detective work. Funding the infected spots in the code and also finding out how they got there.

Jonah is our Hercule Poirot.

On the other hand, we can go nuclear. The good news is that we pay for daily backups. Our latest hunch is that the infections started April 5 when I got horribly efficient and updated three plugins. I could roll the site back to April 1 or so and get rid of all the infections in one fell swoop. We would lose the April issue, but we can reconstruct that.

Apr 062016
 

glo logoClick on the logo to read the article.

Twitter fame (sort of) is the gift that keeps on giving. Russell Smith wrote a piece for the Globe and Mail about my sudden ascension to viral idolatry. I especially like it that NC “is also well-known for being intellectual and deep, in other words obscure.” I can only offer that NC is not so obscure, tweet-resistant, for sure, but not obscure. We hover around the half-million mark on Alexa.com, well ahead of Asymptote, Full-Stop, The White Review, Quill and Quire, Quarterly Conversation, Berfrois, River Teeth, Rain Taxi, and many, many notable sites/magazines. But “intellectual and deep” I’ll take.

He [Glover] himself is amused by this surge. He does, after all, like to say that he is legendary for being unknown. Maclean’s magazine once called him “the most eminent unknown Canadian writer alive.” Although he has won the Governor-General’s Award (in 2003, for the ambitious and playful novel Elle), his work is a little too elegant and clever for the book-club crowd, or for Canada Reads. He single-handedly created an online literary and philosophical magazine called Numéro Cinq, that is also well-known for being intellectual and deep, in other words obscure. The essays in Numéro Cinq are tweet-resistant: In the latest issue an entire book is posted, a six-chapter tome on contemporary U.S. policies as seen through the poetry of W.B. Yeats.

Read the whole piece at the Globe and Mail — Russell Smith: Easy inspiration in an age when everyone is a storyteller.

Apr 042016
 

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This has been gathering momentum. I don’t know when the first person tweeted this quote — “A story consists of someone wanting something and having trouble getting it.” A year or so ago. Then it would bubble up occasionally. Some online writing coach would send it to subscribers and students. Then a month or two ago someone made an image out it. And then today some marketing content provider got hold of it, and suddenly it was all over Twitter on health, fitness, and, yes, weight loss Twitter feeds.

Obviously I have missed my calling. But now I see the light and NC is going to turn into a health & fitness advice and product site. We are already in the design phase for a line of clothing, also exercise devices, and sex aids. (The Numéro Cinq Midnight Rider is being tested as I write this. The ad copy will read something like: “Orgasmic bliss with the new Midnight Rider. A story consists of someone wanting something and having trouble getting it — but no more! Also helpful for losing weight and general cardiovascular fitness.”)

I’ve even forgotten where the quote comes from. Either The Enamoured Knight or Attack of the Copula Spiders. So I had to look it up. And there it was on page 11 of The Enamoured Knight, in the section called “Love and Books, an Introduction”. It is possibly the shortest sentence in the book. Here is the whole paragraph so you get a sense of where the quote fits. The paragraph also contains a lovely aphorism on the difference between literature and pornography.

The Greeks called their novels tales of suffering for love. If they weren’t about suffering for love, they wouldn’t be tales. A story consists of someone wanting something and having trouble getting it. There are no stories about people who start out happy and contented, remain happy and contented throughout, and end up happy and contented. Imagine the phrase “tales of not-suffering for love” or “tales of having fun for love” or “tales of finding pleasure for love.” The difference between pornography and literature is that in pornography everyone has orgasms all the time. There is no gap between desire and consummation. In literature there is always an element of frustration, displacement, delay and incompleteness (even if someone does eventually manage to have an orgasm). Don Quixote is the quintessential novel because it’s about a man in love with a woman who doesn’t exist. At the outset, Cervantes invents the limiting case.

There are some long sentences here, not suitable for Twitter. I am going to have work on style.

dg

Mar 242016
 

Click on the image to read the first couple of paragraphs.

Just out, the new Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro (Cambridge University Press, March) with an essay by me. It’s called “The Style of Alice Munro.” Go buy the book and have a look. Just be to clear, this is not the other essay I wrote, “The Mind of Alice Munro,” which is in Attack of the Copula Spiders. That essay deals with Munro’s story “Meneseteung.” This is brand new, never before seen by anyone but the editors and my dog (who really liked it). The stories in reference this time are “Lives of Girls and Women” and “Baptizing,” which appear in Munro’s book Lives of Girls and Women.

Click the image at the top to see a snippet from the opening.

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Mar 122016
 

CaptureSevern Thompson as Elle in the original Theatre Passe Muraille production.

Exciting news about Elle, the play, (um, you know, based in my novel Elle) is beginning to emerge. Even when I was in Toronto for the world premiere in January, there were quiet whispers about taking the play on tour. Very sotto voce because theatres are a difficult market; they schedule far in advance and prefer their own productions (I was told). But Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg just announced their 2016-2017 season and Elle is going to be there. And Severn Thompson tells me other productions are in the conversation stage.

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A historic play set before Canada was a country, Elle (Feb. 22-March 12) is a sesquicentennial-ready adaptation of a novel by Douglas Glover mostly set in the year 1542. It follows an unmanageable French noblewoman named Marguerite de Roberval who’s sent to the wilds of the New World in Jacques Cartier’s time and abandoned on the Isle of Demons (now known as Hospital Island, off the coast of Newfoundland) by her uncle. Actress Severn Thompson both adapted and stars in the play, which played earlier this year at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto.

“It’s a great story of her survival,” says Metcalfe. “In the usual literary Canadian narrative, people come over and the harshness of the land is tamed and the beauty is discovered. But she doesn’t tame the land, she learns to live inside it. It takes the usual Canadian narrative of our colonization of the land and actually flips it on its head.”

Read the rest at the Winnipeg Free Press.

Feb 022016
 

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Just back from my crash course in theatre at the premiere of Elle, the play, in Toronto. But a lot is happening. There is more. Canadian Notes & Queries, that redoubtable Canadian literary magazine that published my essay on Camus in its last issue, has just published a new essay “The Arsonist’s Revenge” on David Helwig’s little masterpiece, the novella The Stand-In. I love that book. Many of you know who David is because he has published here often, beginning with his translation of a Chekhov short story in our second issue, March, 2010. This essay came about when Ingrid Ruthig (who has also appeared in NC) asked me to contribute to a book she was editing on Helwig’s work. Then CN&Q picked up the essay ahead of book publication. (I know, complicated.)

Here’s a photo of David Helwig and a few paragraphs of the essay:

David Helwig

The Arsonist’s Revenge

David Helwig’s novella The Stand-In came to hand first when I was asked to write a cover comment for the book, yea, these many years ago. I read it, was entranced and enchanted by its incendiary delights. It presents a man, a wounded lover, a long-suffering husband, a bird watcher, a university professor (that most careful and restrained of professions), in extremis, who explodes decorum, wreaks revenge (mayhem and insult), and becomes utterly and gloriously himself (apotheosis). This is what art is best at, giving us the moment we all wish for but can never achieve. To somewhat embellish what I wrote at the time: The Stand-In is a comic gem, by turns mordant, witty and wise. It’s a delicious novella of friendship, marriage, infidelity, plagiarism, and sly revenge. But it’s also a fascinating meditation on irony, biography, badminton, the great Canadian painter James Wilson Morrice, also Flemish painting, mirror imagery, Ernest Thompson Seton and animal painting (especially birds and horses), and the self. David Helwig is a master of thematic weaving. His timing is impeccable. One has the impression of a ferocious intelligence at play – the effect is gorgeous, seductive, compelling and liberating.

The Stand-In isn’t a long book (I am working from the 2002 Porcupine’s Quill edition), about 80 pyrotechnic pages after you subtract the blanks and section titles, separated into three chapters. It’s a dramatic monologue, three lectures delivered extemporaneously by an unnamed retired humanities professor, a last minute replacement for the famous Denman Tarrington who has mysteriously succumbed the week before on the green-tiled floor of a hotel bathroom in New York. Our narrator has gone over the edge, abandoned circumspection and control; he has the podium, his ancient rival is dead (he and Tarrington were, for years, colleagues at the hosting institution), he will joyfully and maliciously set the record straight. Tarrington goes up in flames, demonstrated to be a plagiarist (he wrote his essays off the narrator’s ideas), a wife-beater, a compulsive and boastful seducer (the narrator’s wife ended up running away with him), and a flawed badminton player.

The governing principle of composition is digression and recursion. One amongst the digressions that keep popping up is the story of the story, or the history of two mismatched academic couples whose marriages exploded one summer, “that summer,” the one of crucial memory. Denman Tarrington (DT, aka Delirium Tremens) was married to a tall, slightly awkward woman named Madeleine; the narrator’s wife was Anne, a quick, pink-skinned woman who kept her secrets and made a smashing doubles badminton partner (Anne and the narrator would invariably trounce the Tarringtons on the court). Tarrington pilfered the narrator’s ideas and wrote them into sensational essays that secured for him an academic career far beyond the local horizons. The last summer, the summer before Tarrington left for a big job in the States, he and the narrator met in Paris. Infidelities were revealed. On his return to Canada, the narrator finds his wife away on an extended trip (that she keeps extending, never to return); questioned by Madeleine, he tells her the truth about her husband. Madeleine disappears; Anne goes off with Tarrington: and the narrator lives on in the old house by the salt marshes until retirement, when, finally he too leaves town.

CN&Q is a print journal with a small online presentation. You’ll have to buy the magazine to read the rest of “The Arsonist’s Revenge” by Douglas Glover at Canadian Notes & Queries.

http://notesandqueries.ca/number-94/