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Epic of a Little Man: John Berger’s Novel Corker’s Freedom — Douglas Glover

Sep 202014

John Berger

Here’s a review I wrote of John Berger’s early novel Corker’s Freedom 20 years ago, rescued from an old disk. The novel was first published in the UK in 1964 and was finally published in the U.S. in 1993 by Pantheon Books. This review appeared in the Washington Post in February 1994. Berger, as you all know, went on to win the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel G. and became a famous BBC TV art critic. An amazing, knowing writer. Get the book.

The Verso edition.

Corker’s Freedom
A Novel
By John Berger

Dostoevsky once said we all came out from under Gogol’s overcoat by which he meant that the roots of modern storytelling all trace back to Nikolai Gogol’s tale of a humble clerk whose great adventure was buying a brand new overcoat which someone immediately steals.

John Berger’s novel Corker’s Freedom is contemporary masterwork in precisely this Gogolian mode — the old-style noble hero is dead, and in his place we have the drama of a little man who throws all his passion and yearning into some minor, shopworn achievement and inevitably fails.

First published in England in 1964, Corker’s Freedom took almost thirty years to cross the Atlantic Ocean, a slow passage by anyone’s reckoning. I won’t say it was worth the wait because a delay like that is unconscionable, though not inexplicable.

Berger went on to win the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel G., but he also has an immense reputation as a (Marxist) art critic and avant garde film maker, a reputation sure not to make the hearts of commercial publishers flutter with anticipation.

Corker’s Freedom is about the 64-year-old owner of a grubby little London employment agency who one day decides to leave the home he shares with his invalid sister Irene and set up house in the empty flat above his office. William Corker is humble clay. He and Irene are emotionally pinched — what everyone today would instantly recognize as co-dependent. The single relationship that Corker can recall in anything resembling warm tones is his brief childhood acquaintance with a Viennese nanny.

The move from Irene’s house to the agency flat is the great adventure of Corker’s life, his last, desperate bid for freedom before the long night falls. In the midst of rearranging his mother’s old furniture to make a bedroom, he pictures himself as Lancelot holding the Grail. He thinks he has struck a blow for “The right of a man to be himself, the right of a man to find a way out of his suffering, the right of a man to live where and as he wishes — eager, curious, hopeful, experimental — the right of a man to say: I wish to begin again.”

These are brave, rousing words uttered in the cause of personal transformation in a godless modern world. But they come to nothing. In a horrifyingly comic climactic scene, a drunken Corker discourses on the meaning of life, liberty and art in the midst of an ill-attended church hall slide presentation on his recent holiday in Vienna. His sister sits in the audience tapping her canes irritably. His agency assistant Alec fondles his girlfriend. And a pretty young woman with whom Corker thinks he has fallen in love watches cagily while her burgler lover breaks into the employment agency and makes off with the company safe. Ruined, Corker ends up making crank speeches from a Hyde Park soap box and conning tourists for his lunch.

Berger pushes against the constraints of the novel form, using passages of screen-play dialogue and parenthetical stage directions as fictional shorthand to stand for everyday narrative machinery (set-up and background) that might take pages and pages in a normal novel. This is so that he can pay attention to what he wants to pay attention to, which is the gap between the inner thoughts and public statements of his characters, the tragic and ironic distance between what they know or feel and what they can say.

The drama of the book, in Corker’s case, is the gradual narrowing of this gap — at the end of the church hall scene he is saying what he thinks and knows, which, as Berger sees it, is a kind of folly bordering on madness and leads directly to Corker’s downfall. (Hence the irony of the final pages with Corker endlessly exercising every Englishman’s right to free speech to a sparse gathering of unemployed hecklers and baffled tourists.)

Corker is already done for when he announces to his slide-show audience: “To the best of our ability we must choose happiness. That is my choice. I may be interrupted, prevented or defeated by circumstances but at least I know what I want and what I am doing. I am making myself happy.” The final sentence is, of course, untrue, which makes the speech achingly tragic and absurdly funny at the same time.

Berger writes with amazing aplomb, packing his pages with pyrotechnic ethical wisdom, trenchant social criticism (couched dramatically in the life stories of a succession of deftly sketched secondary characters), and sly comedy (Corker getting progressively drunker on Austrian kummel while reflecting on the glories of Vienna and his long-lost nanny).

Corker’s Freedom is an exhilarating achievement, wise, unsettling, and alive with a sense of humanity that is flawed, doomed, yet oddly indomitable.

—Douglas Glover (Originally appeared in the Washington Post, February 27, 1994)

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Scotland the Brave, Bonnie Prince Charlie & Why I Can’t Watch the News Today

Sep 182014

Bonnie Prince Charlie bidding farewell to Flora MacDonald on the Isle of Skye after the Battler of Culloden, from the London Illustrated News.

Okay, the referendum is today. A brief memoir: I have Scottish blood, McCall and McInnes. On the McCall side, there was a Scottish soldier who fought with Wolfe at Quebec and then came west along the Lake Erie shore during Pontiac’s Rebellion. He was demobilized in New Jersey, but left the United States after the Revolution and ended up in what became known as the Long Point Settlement in what is now southwestern Ontario. On the McInnes side, there was a fatherless boy, taken up by Sir Walter Scott, educated and sent on the Grand Tour, who then inherited slaves and a tapioca plantation in Curaçao. Later he became the youngest slave owner indemnified by the British government for giving up his slaves. He took the money, moved also to southwestern Ontario, and never worked again. The two families eventually intermarried and my great-great-grandfather Daniel McCall ran a store in St Williams, Ontario, on the Erie shore. At some point, someone in the family cut this illustration from the London Illustrated News, framed it, and hung it in the outhouse (posh outhouse). Later, my grandmother, who grew up with it, took the illustration to live with her. Now it lives with me, hangs above my desk. So now you know which way I’d vote. On the other hand, these things always have a way of disappointing romantics, so I can’t bear to watch the news today.

Insomnia Dreams: The Hanging of Amy Spain

Sep 182014

Amy Spain was a 17-year-old slave who, mistakenly thinking that Union troops had liberated her, looted her master’s house, taking some household goods and clothing. Her master defended her in court, but she was hung anyway. This was in Darlington, South Carolina. Oddly serene drawing for such a horrific act, a little girl waiting for the drop. Only a couple of white guys in front seem excited.

One of the martyrs of the cause which gave freedom to her race was that of a colored woman named Amy Spain, who was a resident of the town of Darlington, situated in a rich cotton-growing district of South Carolina. At the time a portion of the Union army occupied the town of Darlington she expressed her satisfaction by clasping her hands and exclaiming, “Bless the Lord the Yankees have come!” She could not restrain her emotions. The long night of darkness which had bound her in slavery was about to break away. It was impossible to repress the exuberance of her feelings; and although powerless to aid the advancing deliverers of her caste, or to injure her oppressors, the simple expression of satisfaction at the event sealed her doom. Amy Spain died in the cause of freedom.

Read the rest at RUINS: The Hanging of Amy Spain.

A Hopeful Monster: Nicholas Mosley’s Autobiography Efforts at Truth — Douglas Glover

Aug 292014

Here’s a review I wrote nearly 20 years ago, published in the Chicago Tribune at the time. Efforts at Truth deserves to be remembered and reread, as does its author. God loves the outliers and eccentrics, his hopeful monsters, too.

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Efforts at Truth: an autobiography
By Nicholas Mosley
Dalkey Archive Press 1995

Nicholas Mosley is a rare beast — a reactionary revolutionist, what they call in Canada a Red Tory. He is an English lord, son of an infamous fascist anti-semite, a one-time Church of England apologist, and a writer for decades of highly regarded experimental novels in which he explores the ideas of consciousness and responsibility as a way of critiquing what he sees as the victim ethic of liberal modernity.

At first glance, he looks post-modern or avant garde, but he is not. He is just the opposite — pre-modern, if you will, the voice of an older tradition. Mosley is the champion of an heroic Christianity which reflates the Kierkegaardian ideas of paradox and the romance of risk. Not for him the Christian Coalition brand of weak religiosity with its emphasis on being saved — God’s version of Social Security.

Mosley places humans in the center of a mystery, with a duty to spend their lives paying attention, learning, experimenting — their reward being not safety but the chance of discerning a pattern. “To discover what is hidden,” he writes, “you have to go on a journey; what uproar, indeed, before you arrive at what is there!”

The author of thirteen novels and numerous works of non-fiction, family memoirs and screenplays, Mosley is best known in this country for his novel HOPEFUL MONSTERS which won the 1990 Whitbread Award in Britain and capped a brilliant sequence of books collectively called CATASTROPHE PRACTICE begun in the 1970s.

In CATASTROPHE PRACTICE, the same six characters weave through a series of stories dealing with contemporary issues of love, marriage and the upheavals of history. The books are difficult and unfashionably didactic — demonstrations of the paradoxical questing Mosley posits at the center of existence. But they are also immensely interesting, dense with a sardonic self-honesty, humane and accepting.

Now Mosley has written EFFORTS AT TRUTH, a magnificently idiosyncratic autobiography, in which, with characteristic tenacity, intelligence and decency, he tries to picture the patterns that have informed his own life and work.

Sir Oswald Mosley, the author’s father, was the dashing, charismatic, philandering leader of the Black Shirts, British Fascist sympathizers during World War II. Faced with the paradox of loving his father and hating his ideas, Mosley quickly learned to walk a tightrope between admiration and criticism. While his father languished in a British prison, Nicholas Mosley was in the army fighting Hitler. And amidst the fighting, he found time to exchange loving, deeply intelligent letters with his father.

This ability to hold contradictions suspended in thought, to walk psychic tightropes (Keat’s called it Negative Capability), with minefields on either side, is one-half of the Nicholas Mosley equation.

The other half has to do with the Bible, the Church of England and old-fashioned goodness. Mosley’s dissatisfaction with the traditional novel form stems from a commitment to a literal Christianity, the kind that explores earnestly what is meant by goodness, God and grace in worldly and up-to-date terms. Mosley is no born-again tub-thumper — he is the sort of Christian writer who can write, in his inimitably droll fashion, “For the experience of making patterns the word ‘God’ is useful, but not imperative.”

According to Mosley, modern novels portray characters as victims, with no room for assigning or accepting responsibility for actions. “The literary world seemed to have been taken over by a vast army of contemporary fashion in which freedom was denied and ideas of dignity and redemption mocked.” He set out to write books which, in his words, related the inner (thought) to the outer (actions).

This was no easy task. A new form had to be invented. Mosley’s prose style has a functional awkwardness built in (Mosley himself has always stuttered — he speculates upon the relationship between trying to see the world clearly and his inability to speak). He mixes together letters from lovers, wives and friends, excerpts from his essays and biographies, and passages that are formal pastiches from his novels.

One of Mosley’s favorite devices is the rhetorical question, which gives the narrative a questing quality, an open-endedness. Frequently, his syntax stretches for a kind hypothetical uncertainty — “And at the center of the paradox, should it not indeed be something about sponteneity that is learned?” Sentences like this read strangely at first, till the reader begins to see them as tied perfectly to the author’s project: the careful dissection of thought and action in an effort to reveal some central pattern whose nature may be inexpressible in ordinary expository terms.

Mosley’s rhetoric, like that of Jacques Derrida or Ludwig Wittgenstein, has the quality of seeming to teeter at the very edge of language. Those questions, the sudden twists of self-doubt, the leaps of understanding, the conditional hypotheses — have the effect of drawing the reader’s attention to something that is not quite being said or understood.

EFFORTS AT TRUTH weaves back and forth between Mosley’s life and the life of his books, showing how the one influenced the other. The discovery that, in his earlier books, he has repeated the self-sacrificial hero motif, leads him to shake off a post-combat depression and locate an unexamined yen for the Church of England. (What, after all, is Jesus but a self-sacrificial hero?)

He befriends a monk, suspends his novel-writing and takes over an Anglican magazine called PRISM from which pulpit he blasts the church for moral complacency. This wild turn into Anglicanism happens just as the Angry Young Men, writers like John Osbourne and Kingsly Amis, are storming the bastions of English letters and is an example of Mosley’s sturdy inability to stay with the crowd. Modishness is a vice to which he seems singularly, and sometimes comically, immune.

Meanwhile, Mosley has married, had children, and become willful philandering skunk like his father. At one point, father and son meet accidentally while chasing women in the same London dive. But Mosley’s monk-friend takes him aside and gently suggests there is something wrong in his family dynamic, especially in regard to children.

Till then Mosely has taken forgranted the upper class English notion that children should be raised by someone else. Author and wife energetically fire their nanny and begin to teach themselves how to take care of children, how to love them. Later on, he even figures out about the philandering mess — but not before his willfulness has ruined his first marriage.

Mosley has a fling with screen-writing when two of his novels sell to the movies. He suffers a terrible car accident from which it takes him a year to recover. He goes into analysis and marries a fellow analysand, both of them embarking on this venture in the charmingly naive belief that they have achieved wisdom enough to assure a problem-free marriage. “Here were Verity and I intending to be model spouses and parents in some psychoanalytically re-cycled Garden of Eden. Oh dear!”

Mosley is unsparing of himself, exploring his own smokescreens and cruelties, detailing the awful consequences of his infidelities. One woman has a nervous breakdown, another an abortion. In a letter, his first wife writes: “We are beastly when we are together, but I like you when you’re away very much.” One gets the impression of a creative volcano, an immensely intelligent and self-willed personality, guaranteed to give a rough ride to whoever comes within reach.

EFFORTS AT TRUTH does not set out to be a popular autobiography. There is no name-dropping, little inter-twining of current events (surprising for an author who, in HOPEFUL LOSERS, wrote a masterful historical novel). Mosley sticks with his work and his family, knowing that within this narrow ambit most of the great mysteries of life are played out.

All this is told with infectious brio. Despite the in-built difficulty of the argument, EFFORTS AT TRUTH radiates a cheerfulness, a curiosity about life that is fundamentally healthy and humane. Mosely marks his sins but does not compound them by wallowing in guilt; he does not present himself as a victim of his own faults.

EFFORTS AT TRUTH is an antidote for those who feel the current debates between the right and the left, the Moral Majority and the advocates of a social safety net, have bogged down in stale rhetoric and endlessly circling arguments. It is a brilliant work of literary artistry and an act of faith — a message of mysterious complexity that goes straight to the heart of existence.

—Douglas Glover

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Lost from Memory: William T. Vollmann’s Butterfly Stories — Douglas Glover circa 1993

Aug 082014

Not to be too confusing, but this is a review of Butterfly Stories, written eons ago in the time before time (1993 to be precise) for Boston Globe Books. It came up in conversation just now, and I looked to see if I still had a copy. It was on a disc of old files in my safety deposit box. Go figure. I liked what I wrote. So here you go.

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Butterfly Stories
A Novel
By William T. Vollmann
Grove/Atlantic Press
200 pp.; $22

William T. Vollmann is a certified literary phenomenon. In his early thirties, he already has seven books to his credit, including two installments of a multi-volume fictional history of the North American continent. His journalism appears in high profile glossies like Esquire magazine. The Review of Contemporary Fiction recently hailed him as a writer destined to “eventually achieve historical importance.” He even runs his own publishing house, specializing in limited art editions of his work selling for thousands of dollars.

Vollmann’s latest novel Butterfly Stories — not part of the projected continental magnum opus — harks back to the author’s earlier and continuing obsession with prostitution. In The Rainbow Stories (1989), for example, Vollmann wrote about hookers and hangers-on in San Francisco’s slums. The Review of Contemporary Fiction spread features photographs of the author with assorted prostitutes — in one the author has his hand up the skirt of a black prostitute identified as an AIDS victim. His self-published The Convict Bird sports a bookmark made with a lock of a prostitute’s hair.

This time Vollmann, or Vollmann’s fictional alter-ego — identified as “the journalist” — ranges through Thailand and Cambodia with a photographer accomplice, flitting like a butterfly from one prostitute to another, tubes of K-Y jelly in one hand and packages of (mostly unused) condoms in the other.

The journalist catches an amazing array of sexually transmitted diseases. He worries about Pol Pot and the terrible things some of his whore-lovers and their families have suffered. He falls in love with a Cambodian hooker named Vanna who vanishes. Then he returns to the United States so haunted by Vanna’s disappearance that he divorces his wife and devotes himself to tracking down the missing prostitute. He also discovers that he has won the STD lottery and is carrying the HIV virus.

Butterfly Stories is a startling amalgam of self-destructive behavior, seedy detail (so much as to raise the issue of puerility, though perhaps this is a reaction the author intends), arcane philosophizing, and over-ripe prose that works by virtue of its very strangeness. Butterfly Stories reads like a cross between Henry Miller, Hunter Thompson, William Burroughs and something written by a kid with a green mohawk, EAT MOMMY tattoos, and nails in his ears. Or it reads like one of those postmodern art installations — chaotic, temporary, challenging in its bad taste, and riddled with scattershot culture-bashing.

“The journalist never tried the photographer’s condoms,” writes Vollmann, “because he didn’t even use his own as much as (to be honest) he should have; but the photographer, who tried both, decided that the journalist had really made the right decision from a standpoint of friction and hence sensation; so that is the real moral of this story, and those who don’t want anything but morals need read no further.” [p.26]

This is interesting, this is new, this is weird. No doubt about it. This is the death of modernity with a vengeance. And what we are left with, Vollmann seems to say, is not Nietszche’s Superman or existentialism’s romantic loner but a kind of Judeo-Christian moral sludge. This moral sludge, with its self-absorbed pop spirituality, neo-racism, platitudinous liberalism, and open acceptance of violence as a form of human interaction, is the dominant philosophical system in America today.

The argument of Butterfly Stories is rigorously logical. Pol Pot persecutes prostitutes (Vanna wears the scars of her persecution on her back). America persecutes prostitutes. Therefore, America and Pol Pot are identically tyrannical, fascist, and genocidal. This simple syllogism turns all our cultural assumptions upside-down, and wanting to catch AIDS from a Thai prostitute named Oy or Toy becomes an acceptable ethical choice. The homely little HIV virus becomes the Holy Grail of an inverted universe of values. (It is important to note that these prostitutes are not real characters. Nor is this book titillating or even informative about prostitution. Prostitutes are simply Vollmann’s shorthand metaphor for the mudsill, bottom-level victims of society.)

In this new universe, words like “love” begin a strange migration. Thai chambermaids say, “I wuff you.” Having sex with a sick partner without a condom is love. A prostitute allowing a john to kiss her on the mouth is love. Trying to get an erection, despite debilitating illness and lack of interest, so you won’t hurt a prostitute’s feelings is love. Buying a prostitute drink after drink so you won’t have to sleep with her and be unfaithful to another is love. And, conversely (since, in the world of moral sludge, consistency is a fascist value), being unfaithful, sleeping with another prostitute, though regretting it, is love.

Butterfly Stories ends up being a parody of the traditional romance novel in which the knight errant-journalist falls chastely in love (love is just wanting to hold a prostitute without having sex) with an unreachable, ideal woman who becomes the goal of his adventures. Vanna disappears only to become Western man’s traditional absent love object (the fantasy wife as opposed to the real wife at home doing the laundry). The fact that she may just be hiding out from a tiresome john is heavily ironic, even comic.

The joke, finally, is on the journalist-hero who wanders through Butterfly Stories sick and sick at heart, toiling in the coils of romantic calf-love, and spreading disease in the name of sexual adventure. He doesn’t even have a name. He is Graham Greene’s ugly American and he is Everyman. He is the new hero, the epitome of moral sludge, a walking, talking, self-incriminating critique of the Western world.

Vollmann goes farther than any American writer in expressing his national self-disgust. He consigns his readers to a region of despair where even the hope of hope is lost, where even the consolation of some fragmentary beauty is denied. Butterfly Stories is one long, intricate and disturbing epitaph on a dying civilization.

—Douglas Glover

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Consciousness & Masturbation: A Note on Witold Gombrowicz’s Onanomaniacal Novel Cosmos by Douglas Glover @ 3:AM Magazine

Aug 012014

Here are a few paragraphs from the opening of my essay on Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Cosmos. The essay was just published this morning at 3:AM Magazine. A great magazine, a pleasure to appear there.

Note my amazing coinage “onanomaniacal.” I was asked to explain what the word meant. I wrote:

Onanomaniacal is my coinage. It combines Onan (Genesis, Chapter 38) and “maniacal”. God smites Onan for “spilling his seed” on the ground. This is most often construed as masturbation (although some biblical critics are more precise and suggest it might just be coitus interruptus). In any case, Onan is the great masturbator of the Bible and hence Onanomaniacal means something like the adjective form of frenzied masturbator. So it’s a joke, of sorts. And there is quite a lot of talk of masturbation in Cosmos.

I used to drive by a warehouse in Guelph, Ontario, which bore the sign “Onan Generators” — this always seemed hilarious to me.

In Cosmos — the title makes it obvious — Gombrowicz is satirizing the phenomenology of world creation, the mental process by which we construct a frame of meaning for ourselves. Not the world (whatever that is), my world. Both inside and outside the novel (that is, in so-called real life), the modus operandi of consciousness is comically super-rational and simultaneously self-defeating (Husserl demonstrated that reason was never going to get where it said it was going). You (a subject, a consciousness) begin to notice hints of repetition and pattern; you look for other instances of the pattern in the chaotic flux of sensation; and eventually you decide the pattern is real. This is the procedure of reason and science. But, of course, in Cosmos what seems real to the narrator is in fact utterly contingent and often ridiculous or even murderous.

Form cannot enclose reality, but form always threatens to become reality. That is the antinomy of the novel: you can’t fit the world into a book, and yet form (read: custom, tradition, ideology, inter-personal expectation, etc.) is always threatening to derail the life of the individual, that is, there is always someone or some thing trying to fit you into his book. Cosmos is, in part, a horror story in which the monstrous evil is a form (in this case, a literary device) that haunts the narrator and eventually takes over his life. Instead of Godzilla or the mad slasher moving ineluctably toward its victim, the villain of Cosmos is an image pattern.

There are two other forces working on the human mind besides reason. One is the dark and unknowable current of desire; the narrator, whose name is Witold, can’t sleep with the girl he’s attracted to so he suddenly and incomprehensibly kills her cat (it’s a sick joke, right? He orgasmically strangles her pussy). The other force is the desire or gaze of the other. As soon as you enter a relationship (however trivial), you begin to bend yourself to fulfill, oppose or circumvent the desire (expectation, form) of the other. Even if you resist, the purity of selfhood has been corrupted. So you construct another self in secret, the masturbatory self, the self who doesn’t have to relate or unmask himself before the eyes of the other (but who is corrupt, seedy, infantile, trivial and evasive in any case).

Out of this triangle of forces, Gombrowicz creates a truly awe-ful, hilarious novel. The narrator discovers patterns and deduces meaning; his own sexual violence betrays reason; he discovers that the secret life of the adult male patriarch is one of chronic secret masturbation (the creation of private, obsessive cosmos).

Read the rest at Consciousness & Masturbation: A Note on Witold Gombrowicz’s Onanomaniacal Novel Cosmos » 3:AM Magazine.

Out & Back: DG on the Farm, Episode 893 — The Adventure Continues

Jul 222014

DG (right) and Lucy (left) on the farm (art shot — yes, I know it’s annoying).

DG and Lucy were just on the farm in Ontario, you know, for a brief visit, a drug intervention with his mother, a fight with a young gun investment advisor trying to get his hands on his mother’s cash, a movie with Jonah (we went to see the latest Planet of the Apes extravaganza; very funny since he is moving to San Francisco in the fall and dg would keep saying, See, there’s your BART station and there’s your apartment without a roof), flea bombing the tenant house, and dinner with a dear old friend who had a heart attack a month ago and was put in an induced coma and quick frozen, apparently, with no ill effects. (The part about the drug intervention is a joke. Do I have to tell you everything?)

Jean communing with her hens.

He found a treasure trove of old negatives and discovered that you can make pictures from old out-size negatives by using a laptop screen as a light box and taking a picture of the negative. Then he used photo software to invert the negative to a black and white photo. You should be impressed with his ingenuity.

So….

Jean somewhat earlier in life.

The nearest town is Waterford, where dg went to high school, about two miles from the farm.

Alice Street, Waterford, rush hour. DG’s bank since childhood on your immediate right.

Here’s one of the town appliance stores. What’s interesting is that this used to be a movie theater. You can tell by the shape of the building. DG saw his first ever movie here, a documentary about Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. The fact that this was the first movie he ever saw and that it is burned into his memory tells you a lot about what is wrong with him.

After it was a movie theater, it was a pool hall, den of sin (according to Jean). Nothing but failed individuals and juvenile delinquents frequented pool halls. Then it was a lunch restaurant where farmers used to convene to drink coffee and talk about bad weather. DG can remember going there with his father and having hot turkey sandwiches with french fries and chocolate milkshakes. No better food has been invented since (he avers, nostalgically).

The old movie theater.

Another major landmark, sign of long gone industrial prosperity, is the old knitting mill (underwear factory), now given over to antiques.

Alice Street runs east-west. The movie theater was at the east end and the knitting mill was at the west end hard by the train station. The train from New York to Detroit used to run through Waterford parallel to Alice Street behind the bank and the theater. Now the former rail line is a hiking trail, and next to it is a rather peaceful series of ponds and lakes.

About 100 yards from the knitting mill.

While dg was taking pictures he ran into a nice, depleted young man in a black leather pants, a Harley t-shirt and a black leather vest who opened up the conversation by saying he had a brain tumor but that his life had turned around recently when he began seeing UFOs. Apparently, crowds have gathered to watch the fiery lights go up and down the Grand River in Paris, Ontario, a nearby town. But even Waterford has had its visitations. (DG has always had a suspicion that he is not of this world. They are sending ships back for him.)

A recent local sighting.

New word learned on this trip: earthing. It means to walk barefoot.

Field of tomatoes on the farm.

One of the chickens, looking a bit like an alien.

Lucy.

Tomatoes.

DG with the chickens (photo by Jean; this is her first photo credit, a milestone at 93).

—dg

For Obvious Reasons: I Wanna Be Sedated — The Ramones

Jul 132014

Tommy Ramone

A Note on Jacques Callot & the Miseries of War

Jun 222014

The Hanging

This has nothing to do with the mood I’m in, no. Well, you can decide for yourselves. I’ve been uploading images for the wonderful new Genese Grill essay (on Primitivism) in the July issue, and what with one thing and another (insane art, degenerate art, the news from Iraq, etc.), I was reminded of Jacques Callot’s etchings, his series on the Miseries of War (1633). Part of this comes from the fact that I am doing another interview (I am being interviewed), and, yet again, I have been asked to explain the violence in my stories and novels. The perennial question, right next to why there is so much sex in what I write. I don’t know! But I love these images. They delight me. Some deep, deep irony here about the human race, that noble, rational species created in God’s image. (Note the upside-down man cooking over the fire in the farmhouse scene, or the hanging corpse way at the top of a very tall tree in the peasant scene.) And I suppose it’s also true that there is hardly a work of art that depicts the gruesome quality of war with as much cynical detail. Makes you wonder why we keep doing this, what strange martial avidity compels us.

Click the images to make them bigger.

The Stake

The Wheel

The Strappado

The Firing Squad

Plundering a Large Farmhouse

Plundering and Burning a Village

The Peasants Avenge Themselves

Jacques Callot Title Page (1633)

Getting a little serious around here: Time to shake things up…

Jun 212014

Normally, in this state of mind, I put up a little merengue. But tonight it’s Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, 1978, the year I was, er, researching events that went into my novel The South Will Rise at Noon, the good old days. We shall not see their like again.

Francis Carco: A Song & A Novel (Or Two)

Jun 062014

Francis Carco via Wikipedia

I’ve been tracking Francis Carco on and off since I read his novel Perversity, translated into English by Jean Rhys (yes, yes, really), but published in America as a mass market pulp novel, a very dark story of the Paris demimonde, violent, sordid, and sexual, a story of doomed people, doomed by desire, by social and economic situation, by the bizarre power dynamics of their relationships. Very real, very naturalistic and intense, tight psychological focus. Did I mentioned doom? Other Carco novels include titles such as Depravity and Frenzy.

Carco (a pseudonym) was an amazing character, brilliant, protean, creative and yet also sucked into that underground world of Paris. He was a painter, a brilliant writer, a lover and a composer and singer. But doomed and not well remembered.

Below, a song, his voice & words.

Chanson tendre

Francis Carco

Comme aux beaux jours de nos vingt ans
Par ce clair matin de printemps
J´ai voulu revoir tout là-bas
L´auberge au milieu des lilas
On entendait sous les branches
Les oiseaux chanter dimanche
Et ta chaste robe blanche
Paraissait guider mes pas

Tout avait l´air à sa place
Même ton nom dans la glace
Juste à la place où s´efface
Quoi qu´on fasse
Toute trace
Et je croyais presque entendre
Ta voix tendre murmurer
“Viens plus près”

J´étais ému comme autrefois
Dans cette auberge au fond des bois
J´avais des larmes dans les yeux
Et je trouvais ça merveilleux
Durant toute la journée
Après tant et tant d´années
Dans ta chambre abandonnée
Je nous suis revus tous deux

Mais rien n´était à sa place
Je suis resté, tête basse,
À me faire dans la glace
Face à face
La grimace
Enfin, j´ai poussé la porte
Que m´importe
N i ni
C´est fini!

Pourtant, quand descendit le soir
Je suis allé tout seul m´asseoir
Sur le banc de bois vermoulu
Où tu ne revins jamais plus
Tu me paraissais plus belle
Plus charmante, plus cruelle
Qu´aucune de toutes celles
Pour qui mon cœur a battu

Et je rentrai, l´âme lasse,
Chercher ton nom dans la glace
Juste à la place où s´efface
Quoi qu´on fasse
Toute trace
Mais avec un pauvre rire
J´ai cru lire :
Après tout,

On s´en fout!

http://en.lyrics-copy.com/francis-carco/chanson-tendre.htm

Out & Back: DG On The Farm

May 252014

Peripatetic dg has been to the farm in Ontario again, with his dog and ancient mother.

Douglas Glover: The Wordfest Interview

May 082014

Here’s a little onstage interview I did at Wordfest in Calgary last fall when I was out promoting Savage Love. As you can clearly see, I got myself into trouble talking about copulas and copulate. Sometimes, I think I shouldn’t be let out of my cage and allowed to roam at will. It’s not safe. But the interviewer’s reaction when I start to talk about sex is priceless. One of the disappointments is that you can’t hear the audience laughing. The audience had a good deal of fun with this.

Out & Back: The Return — DG Ends Gig as Writer-in-Residence

Apr 182014

DG is on his way home, though at this stage of life home is a moving target, indeterminate and scattered, more like a field of destinations than a particular place. Let’s just say he gets mail at a lot of different addresses.

But his sojourn as Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick is over and on April 16, as new snow blanketed Fredericton and the St. John River continued to rise across the street from Mark Jarman’s house, he left town (and was subsequently nearly swept away outside of Lancaster, NH, where the Connecticut River had flooded over Bridge Street in two places).

Last events included a reading at Odd Odd Sunday’s on Friday at Molly’s (postponed from the week before due to a blizzard) on April 11 and another reading at the Qwerty Reading Series at the Grad House Pub (which used to be Alden Nowlan’s house where dg, in a different incarnation, went for dinner a couple of times in the early 1970s) on April 14.

Most fun in the last weeks? Shoveling water with Mark in the flooded backyard where the cars were parked. Yes, shoveling water. Don’t ask. Just think: a couple of guys, estimable writers, trying to avoid work, shoveling water and drinking beer in the sun. Clarissa’s response? Irrepressible disbelief and glee at the strangeness of men. Rob’s response? This will go away if I ignore it.

What does dg feel like leaving? Time to move on but lots of regrets. What does Lucy feel? No, I don’t want to go. This is the best place ever. I have friends. I have put down roots. You can’t make me leave.

For anyone wishing to review the whole unseemly chronicle of events since last September, you can click through the Writer-in-Residence Blog.

Jack, Lucy and Fifi

Mark on top of the snow mountain in the backyard, April 3

Mark Anthony Jarman

DG’s last reading as Writer-in-Residence at the Grad House (formerly Alden Nowlan’s house), April 14 (Photo by Stephanie Doucette)

Lucy and Clarissa go for a last run together

Backyard from second floor window, April 16

Lucy refusing to get in the car, tucked in her favourite spot on the loveseat, where she spent many happy hours watching television, reading and offering editorial advice to Mark and Clarissa

A Sentimental Education: Words To Live By, or Not—

Apr 112014

So this is one of the movie scenes that gets to me. It’s from the film A League of Their Own about a women’s professional baseball team in the 1940s. Tom Hanks is the alcoholic former big leaguer, Jimmy Dugan, called in to manage. Geena Davis is Dottie Hinson, the female lead, the team’s catcher. Jimmy (“There no crying in baseball“) Dugan at first ignores the team, then pushes too hard. Dottie decides to go home to Oregon. Then we have a scene culminating in Jimmy’s unforgettable speech. Jimmy is trying to get Dottie to stay. Dottie says, “It just got too hard.” Jimmy turns away, then swings back. “It’s supposed to be hard,” he says. “If it wasn’t hard everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.”

Um, DG Now Recognized as an Eminent Zoologist. Who knew?

Apr 072014

Here’s a screenshot from the current Indigo Books page for my book of short stories A Guide to Animal Behaviour. See the highlighted tags under the menu bar. The book is being marketed as “zoology” thus demonstrating a COMPLETE LACK OF IRONY in the data input department (I restrain myself from accusing Indigo as a whole, though if the shoe fits…).

Why do I find this hilarious? Perhaps it’s the total naivete. At Indigo, you CAN judge a book by its cover.

Kurt Cobain’s Favourite Book & More | Are You Surprised?

Apr 052014

Kurt Cobain died 20 years ago today. Here’s a longish interview with him. In the opening, he talks about his favourite book and how it influenced him — Patrick Süskind’s 1985 novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Actually, a surprisingly thoughtful and amiable interview. Aura of sadness. Poverty at the back of story after story. I’ve never noticed this interview before. So it startled me.

His song “Scentless Apprentice” came from the novel.

Below are the trailer and the birth scene from the movie based on the novel (not for the faint of heart).

Put this all together and what do you have?

Snowing Outside Again! Somehow This Fits The Mood |The Most Haunting Abandoned Places On Earth @ Distractify

Apr 052014

Turned cold, started to snow last night, huge feather-shaped flakes falling in the pools of water, deep pools of slush, am not going outside ever again, all is lost, moribund and obscure. Then I found this post at Distractify (am reading student manuscripts so naturally anything with the word “distract” in it distracts me.

View the rest of the images and text @ Distractify

Harvard discovers three of its library books are bound in human flesh @ Roadtrippers

Apr 032014

Okay, not to be morbid, but this is a hoot. Now I have a plan for rebinding my collected works after I am gone (note to self: rewrite will, inform sons). So much better than a jar of ashes.

The book’s 794th and final page includes an inscription in purple cursive: ‘the bynding of this booke is all that remains of my dear friende Jonas Wright, who was flayed alive by the Wavuma on the Fourth Day of August, 1632. King Mbesa did give me the book, it being one of poore Jonas chiefe possessions, together with ample of his skin to bynd it. Requiescat in pace.’

via Harvard discovers three of its library books are bound in human flesh | Roadtrippers.

New Douglas Glover Interview Up @ nineteenquestions

Apr 022014

What does a typical day look like for you? How much time you spend writing? Do you have any routines that you find help foster productivity?

I am not an ideal writer, I’m afraid. I live pretty much like everyone else, well, everyone else who doesn’t have a day job. Put the dog out, coffee, look at the news, do some work, put the dog out, coffee, run some errands, talk to my mother, go to the gym, walk the dog, talk to my girlfriend, talk to my sons, put the dog out, more coffee, scotch, and a book at bedtime. Up until recently, my two sons were living with me and my day bent around them, their needs and schedules. But they are both away at university now. None of this is noteworthy or mysterious. I am an intermittent writer, which is fine with me. And, aside from the annual virgin sacrifice in the woods behind my house, I don’t do anything to foster productivity.

Read the rest @ Douglas Glover – nineteenquestions.

Out & Back | DG In the Region of Rock-Ribbed Ice

Apr 012014

About midnight, I went to let Lucy out and realized that in the past couple of hours we’d had nearly a foot of new snow. This after two days of steady sleet and snow mixed. The plow guy came twice over the weekend. He’ll have to come again in the morning. In the kitchen just now, Mark looked at me and said, “This never happened before you came to live here.”

The light is terrible and I can’t take pictures, but I wanted you to get a sense of what being a Writer-in-Residence is like, the stark grandeur of the elements, the threat of imminent death by exposure and starvation. I ate my last can of Irish stew tonight. There is nothing left to eat but banana bread Clarissa brought home from a wake Saturday. Rob has a half-eaten carton of Gelato. We’ll be fighting each other for that soon enough.

It’s now officially April 1.

—

Waterloo Row from the front second floor window.

Out the back door.

Walking out toward the street.

The front of the house.

Lucy waiting by the backdoor.

Mark finishing his book. This is the literary part of the post.

Out & Back: The Savage Love Spring Mini-Marathon (Another Interim Report)

Mar 242014

DG & Lucy at Lawrencetown Beach outside Halifax. Photo by Jacob Glover.

DG has been on the road for eons, it seems, reading from Savage Love, being a Writer-in-Residence. He has finished many books along the way including Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (very long) and three Evelyn Waugh novels, hitherto kept on hand for emergencies. A new essay is forming: “Novel Structure Lite” (more on this another time). We were in Halifax for the March 13 reading at the University of King’s College, which I’ve already written about). But then we stayed on and went to the beach (yes, Halifax, compared to Fredericton, is positively sub-tropical).

Savage Love Cover

Here’s another picture (bad lighting, I know) from King’s, Jacob introducing dg.

Then dg and Lucy at Lawrencetown Beach again. She gets very excited about surf. Note dg’s trademark camo cargo pants and baseball cap purchased at a high-end art boutique in Venice.

Then home to Fredericton briefly and on to Saint John. My hotel room gave onto the harbour (when I was extremely young, I covered the port for the local daily newspaper — I was there when the first container cranes started working).

And here is the Martello Tower in West Saint John (behind the container terminal), which figures prominently in dg’s short story “The Obituary Writer” from which the name Numéro Cinq is taken. It was cloudy, rainy, windy — everything looked a bit, well. forsaken.

The port in Saint John is at the mouth of the Saint John River (which goes by Mark Jarman’s house where I live in Fredericton). In Saint John, the river flows one way part of the time and then it flows the other way (hence the famous Reversing Falls just upstream from the port). Just above the Reversing Falls is the giant Irving paper mill.

As a cub reporter, dg once helped police snag a drowned man out of the river on the rocks just across from the mill. The man had been in the water for a very long time, and parts of him were falling off as he came to shore. This, too, became a short story with the gruesome title “Floater,” one of those stories that got published in a magazine and then never reprinted (for really good reasons not to be dwelt upon).

And here’s the newspaper building where dg worked. It was then called The Evening-Times Globe (I took this picture through the car window at a stop light — a noble genre).

DG worked here for a year. There was a printing press on the lower floor, a lovely old thing with bells and the smell of lead and oil. Now it’s no longer there. The newspaper is printed in Moncton. The building backs onto Courtney Bay with the huge Irving Oil refinery and docks and transshipment terminal.

All this is kind of dull as imagery, but somehow it wreaked of old excitement and familiarity to dg (despite the wind, rain, sleet, etc.) who was something like 23 at the time (and, yes, dreamed of sailing away on a steamer).

Friday (March 21) was the Moncton reading, at the Aberdeen Cafe, hosted by Lee Thompson who took pictures. (Note dg’s beer strategically placed on a spare baby’s highchair within reach of the microphone.)

For the Saint John-Moncton epic, Lucy stayed home.

Last stop, a reading at Odd Sundays at Molly’s in Fredericton this coming Sunday.

Out and Back: DG Reading at University of New Brunswick-Saint John Campus

Mar 152014

I know you are all breathless keeping up with my meandering ways. Some clarification follows.

I’m reading at the University of New Brunswick’s Saint John campus Wednesday night, a return visit, not sure, in fact, if I’ve been there since I taught philosophy at in the early 1970s. I am wondering if the place has changed, though I remember this building (Ganong Hall), named for a New Brunswick chocolate-making family. I may have said this before, but when I taught Schopenhauer to undergrads at UNBSJ, I had the longest hair on campus. Those were great times. I sometimes held classes in my apartment, which I shared with a guy named Wolfy (who had no teeth) and which contained no furniture (we all sat around the living room parquet drinking wine and burning holes in the floor with candles listening to Carole King’s Tapestry — I dunno, I was about twelve at the time). Once a student of mine, returning from a class, was discovered by police asleep in his car parked on a railroad crossing in the early hours of the following morning. (Should I be saying this before my reading?) As I recall, the police were very understanding and followed him home.

The next evening, Thursday, I’ll be giving my generative workshop (lesson, prompts, exercises — everyone will come out writing like Leo Tolstoy or James Joyce).

And the evening after that I read at the Attic Owl Reading Series in Moncton.

Then I will go home to Fredericton and rest for five minutes.

Out and Back: DG Reads at University of King’s College — A Significant Passage in the Writer’s Life

Mar 142014

So dg read from Savage Love at the University of King’s College in Halifax last night, hosted by the King’s Co-op Bookstore. DG’s son Jacob did the introduction, a first, a sweet & unsurpassable moment not vouchsafed many writers (or fathers). The lighting was a bit dim, but here is a photo, just for the record.

On the Road: Douglas Glover Appearing at the Attic Owl Reading Series in Moncton, NB, Friday, March 21

Mar 112014

Savage Love Cover

New event, just arranged: Attic Owl Reading Series event in Moncton, New Brunswick, on Friday, March 21. Moncton has a major airport so we are arranging charter flights from large cities across the continent for fans, also special buses and trains from the eastern seaboard down to Key West. This is a late-breaking appearance for dg, so possibly only the most devout readers and party animals will manage to get there in time. (Let me just say that some of you are in danger of having your fan club cards revoked for non-appearance — really, we don’t care if it’s winter and you have infants and a job.)

Actually, the Attic Owl Reading Series is an ancient and well-loved event. There will be music as well, though dg won’t be singing “songs from the Sixties” as some reports have suggested. He might hum a little if pressed.

There is a Facebook event page here.

Details: Douglas Glover at Attic Owl

Time: 7pm.

Place: Café Aberdeen, 140 Bostford Street, Centre culturel Aberdeen, Moncton, New Brunswick.

Out & Back: DG-in-Residence | The Ice Age (Interim Report)

Feb 282014

Lucy and dg are still in residence at the University of New Brunswick, though it’s become increasingly difficult to, you know, actually find the university. So far there have been no reports of looting or shooting at the grocery stores. And now that the strike is over a few humans have returned to campus.

We persevere.

Out the back door at midnight

Out the front window at midnight

Bald eagle in front of the house overlooking the river

What the eagles are looking at (usually they would be fishing in the river)

Waterloo Row

University Avenue

University of New Brunswick

Lucy, Dog of the North (we’re working on her colour coordination; I told her she couldn’t wear the plaid with the blue boots, but would she listen?)

Video produced when the weather was still warm and one could be optimistic.
At this time, one did not realize that most of the Writer-in-Residence job
would involve shoveling Mark Jarman’s car out.

If You Missed It, You Can Find Douglas Glover’s SEX CITY Interview Here

Feb 122014

Louise Bak interviews Douglas Glover about his new book Savage Love on SEX CITY. The interview can be found at the SEX CITY Dropbox site HERE.

p.s. DG selected the music for the show.

Teaching Art — From The Lord Nelson Tavern

Jan 312014

Whiling away some hours in the library, I started pulling down works I loved in the days of my youth. This is from Ray Smith’s novel The Lord Nelson Tavern.

—

…When the course began, Ti-Paulo said:

“I am serious painter and this is a serious course. I don’t give a sweet fuck about your souls or how much you want to express them. Each drawing is a work of art. It is a complex problem of form, tone, composition, line, volume. You will learn to see these problems; you will learn solutions. The more solutions you learn, the better you will be able to express yourself, maybe.”

To the model, he said:

“Take off.”

The model took her robe off.

“Assume a pose.”

To the students he said:

“That is a nude woman. You will get something of her and of yourself onto the piece of white paper which is before you. For the next two hours that paper contains your heaven and your hell. You will therefore treat it with due respect, firstly by addressing it properly, so….”

He held out his pencil toward it at arms length and said, “Hello paper.”

The students addressed their papers. Ti-Paulo grunted his approval and the course was launched.

—Ray Smith, The Lord Nelson Tavern.

Just the thing to lift the heart on a cold Sunday morning — Milenita

Jan 262014

When I took Lucy out for a walk this morning, snow had blown up against the railway bridge across the frozen river. Sun behind me, white/gray clouds beyond the bridge, and the bridge appeared as a criss-cross of bright white bars outlined in black.

Milenita is a Bulgarian singer/actress, born in Havana, Cuba. The first song is “Piya za Maria.” Then just below, a song in English, “Sitting on the Fence,” delightfully mischievous, goofy, amoral, cheerful. And below that is her first hit, “Black Cats.” I dunno. I just like this stuff. My new plan is to retire to Bulgaria and learn to play the piano.

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2014, NC Blog, Out & Back

Out & Back: Writers on the Picket Line

Jan 212014

Len Falkenstein & Mark Anthony Jarman

The University of New Brunswick faculty strike is still on! Jeff Picka of the Mathematics Department took this photo of NC multi-contributor Mark Anthony Jarman (my roomie, with the beard) and playwright Len Falkenstein in the English Department. This was over the weekend. Much colder now. I was talking to guys on the line this afternoon; they had icicles hanging from their beards. No negotiations; nothing new.

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