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.

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.

dg

Waterloo Row from the front second floor window.

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Out the back door.

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Walking out toward the street.

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The front of the house.

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Lucy waiting by the backdoor.

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

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Mar 242014
 

Lucy & dg in the surfDG & 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.

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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.

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dg and Lucy Lawrencetown Beach

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).

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.)

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

Fifi and Lucy

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

dg

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.

dg

DSCF7203Out the back door at midnight

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DSCF7207Out the front window at midnight

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eagles2Bald eagle in front of the house overlooking the river

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAWhat the eagles are looking at (usually they would be fishing in the river)

DSCF7154Waterloo Row

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DSCF7179University Avenue

DSCF7182University of New Brunswick

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERALucy, 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.

 

Dec 072013
 

Heading home after the first semester as Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick. I’ve been living at Mark Anthony Jarman‘s house just across the street from the Saint John River in Fredericton, about a 10-minute walk from the campus, also a 10-minute drive from the university’s research woodlot where I walk the dog often. R. W. Gray lives just down the third-floor hall from me. Both Mark and Rob have new books of stories coming out. According to legend, the house is built on property once owned by Benedict Arnold. Photos by dg, maj & ch.

dg

DSCF6934From the back

DSCF7031Up to the third floor where dg lives

DSCF7028Third floor sunlight, R. W. Gray’s door on left

DSCF7030Second floor landing looking out on Waterloo Row and the river

More dawg (Lucy) 087The house dawg

DSCF7032Second floor hallway

DSCF7037Living room and TV room beyond, new pellet stove at far right

Lucy & ClarissaLucy and Clarissa

Lucy and FifiLucy and Fifi

DSCF6893MAJ and Clarissa

DSCF6880Lu in the university woodlot

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Clarissa and LucyLu and Clarissa’s shoes

Sep 232013
 

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Moonlight illuminates the dancers
and the whitewashed concrete birdbath by the standpipe
and coiled green garden hose and the liquid amber gum tree
and the tree nursery under the chicken-wire frame
that keeps out rabbits and deer.

— from “Dancers at the Dawn” in Savage Love

Here is a picture of the birdbath that appears in Savage Love. You can’t see the standpipe, and the tree nursery is gone, but the liquid amber gum is behind the birdbath. I’ve probably said this before: the farm is in southern Ontario, about 20 miles north of Lake Erie just outside a little town called Waterford.

DSCF6715From the garden.

DSCF6760Red dogwood osier

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DSCF6756Hives are brought onto the farm during the growing season.

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DSCF6737Field tomatoes, note the wastage, a fact of modern agriculture — many of these are perfectly good tomatoes that can’t be sold in the current market.

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DSCF6771Cherry tomatoes

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—dg

Sep 172013
 

.

This is the beginning of things, the Ur-essay, the thought-lode out of which most everything else I have written about literature has evolved. It was written in the late 1980s and so, to an ever so slight extent, is a period piece. It forms the centre piece of my book of essays and memoir Notes Home from a Prodigal Son (Oberon Press, 1999). The ideas here expressed evolved out of my philosophical background, long reading, and the lessons I learned during my time at the Iowa Writers Workshop. I mention specifically the novelist Robert Day (who now contributes mightily to NC), but I would be remiss if I didn’t also recall the influence of the late Claude Richard, who was a visiting professor from the University of Montpellier at the time.

I reprint the essay here because the book and the essay were both published long ago; such is the nature of readership that older things fall out of the line of vision. But in fact this essay (and Notes Home from a Prodigal Son), along with The Enamoured Knight and Attack of the Copula Spiders and my long essay “Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought” form a consistent, coherent and elaborated system of thought about writing, criticism and philosophy.

dg

…there is an other [irony] besides the irony of the learned man; there is the poem, in the sense that it is rhythm, death and future.

— Julia Kristeva

1

The best writing teacher I ever had was a Kansas cowboy named Robert Day who showed up at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a last minute, one-semester replacement for a sick colleague in January, 1981. The first day of classes he strode into the room wearing Fry boots, jeans and a checked shirt. Without saying a word, he picked up a piece of chalk and wrote across the full length of the blackboard in huge looping letters: REMEMBER TO TELL THEM THE NOVEL IS A POEM.

At the time, Day had only published one novel, a book called The Last Cattle Drive. He was a tenured English professor at Washington College in Maryland. He was a past president of the Associated Writing Programs. As a young man, he had worked at G. P. Putnam’s in New York and could recall for us the excitement over the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Summers he went back to western Kansas where friends ran a borderline ranch. He kept a horse there, a horse which at various times had eaten loaves of bread through the kitchen window, or Day’s hat. All summer long he would hand out with his friends, their cattle and his horse.

That semester we read Queneau, Musil, Rulfo, Achebe, Nabokov, Tutuola, Abe and Marquez. Day did not tell us what he meant — REMEMBER TO TELL THEM THE NOVEL IS A POEM. Maybe he forgot. Half-way through the semester he read the second draft of my novel Precious, three hundred typed pages of plot, dialogue and scene that stubbornly refused to come alive. I still have the notes I made during our conference, fifty-four words. It took less than fifteen minutes. But like a skilled surgeon he had opened the novel up for me and shown me its heart still beating, its bones, nerves and veins.

He taught me four basic devices. The first  was what he called the language overlay. My first person narrator was a newspaperman, he had printer’s ink in his blood. Day said I ought to go through the novel, splicing in words and images, a discourse, in other words, that reflected my hero’s passion for the newspaper world. So, for example, Precious now begins: “Jerry Menenga’s bar hid like an overlooked misprint amid a block of jutting bank towers…” Or, in moments of excitement, the narrator will spout a series of headlines in lieu of thoughts.

Second, Day taught me about sub-plots. The main plot of a novel, he said, is like a pioneer wagon train moving across the prairie. The sub-plot is like the Indians coming in out of the hills to attack from time to time. The pattern of the sub-plot must reflect or parallel the pattern of the main plot, Day said, just as the gene inside a cell contains the pattern for the whole body.

Third, he showed me how to use background and revery. My protagonist must have been somewhere before the novel began, he must have a story to tell that will give texture and depth to his thoughts and, by extension, to the narrative. In Day’s words, he wanted me to “give the novel a memory.” Once again, the background must reflect or parallel or bear the seeds of the main action. A revery that does not bear a relation, in pattern, to the main plot is wasted. It diffuses the reader’s attention. It makes the book foggy and boring.

What this means in practice is that far from being “loose and baggy monsters,” to use Henry James’s phrase, in which the author has room to digress, expand or linger, a good novel is a tight, formal production with very few wasted words.

Finally, Day told me how James used the confidante device to modulate the weight of a given speech. In Precious, I had two secondary characters who were both close to the hero. What if I created a pattern of giving and withholding information? What if I made one of the secondary characters the hero’s confidante, the person to whom he told his secrets? He could then maintain an ironic distance from the other, giving opportunities for lightness and humor. The reader would sit up and pay attention when the confidante was on the scene.

Day then lied and told me I could splice all these changes into the novel in three weeks. Actually, it took me five months, and I rewrote the thing from beginning to end. I remember those months as being the best time of my life; the woman I lived with then says otherwise. She says she never remembers me being more miserable. What that means, really, was that the work was hard but also amazingly exhilarating.

What I had learned was far more than a collection of four devices. I had learned a secret about writing stories, novels and poems. Also painting pictures and composing symphonies. I had learned that a novel is not a string of seventy-five thousand words, all different, all pressing the plot forward. If you think about it, the stories of most novels can be told in a page or two of summary. Then imagine me trying to stretch that summary over another two hundred and ninety-eight pages.

Or, to use an image I had carried in my head through two earlier failed novels, think of a novel as a bridge thrown across a bottomless gorge with nothing to support it from one end to the other. In my mind I had to get a running start and write fast for fear of not making it across. I wrote my first novel in six weeks in a state of terror. As a bridge it was a shambles.

What I had learned was that besides story, plot and characters, the novel needs patterns. That in fact the story, plot and characters don’t begin to come alive until they are submitted to a pattern. I had made a common mistake. Before Robert Day, I had assumed that a novel’s “aliveness” depended upon its verisimilitude, i.e. how closely it resembled what we call real life, whereas in fact it depends upon patterns. I think this is what Day meant when he wrote REMEMBER TO TELL THEM THE NOVEL IS A POEM. He meant for us to notice that, like a poem, the novel should be seen as an arrangement of materials of which one, but only one, is the story. This patterning is the poetic quality of prose.

2

In a poem it is much easier to see the patterns. We’ve all had to map out sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables, the ABBAs of rhyme, the internal rhymes of alliteration, the surprising anti-patterns of sprung rhythm and free verse. We’ve all dissected extended conceits, noted the effects of diction and imagery. These are the things we focus on in a poem. Narrative, story and verisimilitude are secondary to the poetry of poetry, by which I mean the effect of patterns.

With novels and stories, the reverse is true. We tend to read a novel first for plot and character and the narrative’s relation to reality, what post-Saussurean critics call its “aboutness,” and only secondarily, if at all, for pattern. This is a little like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit argument. You know how you can draw a little circular figure with an elongation here and a dot there. If you squint your eyes one way, you can see it’s a rabbit with long ears. But if you squint another way, it becomes a duck with a protruding beak. With poems and novels, you can read for pattern or you can read for aboutness, depending on how you squint your eyes.

It happens to be the case, though, that we rarely read novels for patterns. One reason for this is that the novel’s very aboutness gets in the way. It is the easiest and most natural thing in the world to read a novel for plot and character. In fact, in most cases you have to read for plot and character in order to situate yourself, as an observer, in the world of the novel. The shift of focus, the new squint, if you will, from plot to pattern only happens on rereading. A good reader, as Nabokov wrote in his essay “How to Read, How to Write,” is a rereader.

When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and the artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have one in regard to the eye in a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy the details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave toward the book as we do toward a painting.

When Nabokov makes a distinction between “what the book is about” and our “artistic appreciation” of the book, he is separating our reading of the subject, story and characters — the book’s aboutness — from our appreciation of the book’s so-called artistic qualities, the details we would notice if we looked at a novel the way we look at a painting.

Nabokov assumes that we all look at paintings for more than the resemblance they bear to old dead people in funny clothes, for more than romantic seascapes and sunsets. He assumes that we see, for example, Whistler’s mother as something other than an elderly lady in a plain black dress and that we know, perhaps, that the painting of Whistler’s mother was originally titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black” and that when Whistler talked about painting he would say, as he did in a letter to his friend Fantin-Latour:

…it seems to me that color ought to be, as it were, embroidered on the canvas, that is to say, the same color ought to appear in the picture continually here and there, in the same way that a thread appears in an embroidery, and so should all the others, more or less according to their importance; in this way the whole will form a harmony.

Whistler is talking about patterns, patterns of color that exist over and above and through the subject of the picture, its aboutness. And when Nabokov talks about “artistic appreciation,” he is talking about appreciating the patterns of the novel in the same way, the repetition of certain verbal events or structures in a novel like the colors in a painting. This is precisely the way we appreciate poetry, where it is, as I have said, much easier to see that sounds and words are like oil paints or, for that matter, like notes in a piece of music.

3

Other ages and times have provided writers with pattern books, with instructions on rhetoric and composition. They put names to commonly used devices: paronomesia, periphrasis, prosopopoeia. Even in the 1920s at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College, my aunt was taught to write, to compose sentences, by translating back and forth from Latin to English. But no one teaches composition any more except in remedial programs to students who patently can’t write at all.

Instead we teach creative writing with the emphasis on “creative” (which, I guess, implies that there is “uncreative” writing as well, though I have never seen it). At Iowa, outside of Robert Day, teachers tended to urge us to “write what you know.” If we managed to do that, they said, whatever we wrote would come out all right. Ernest Hemingway, that most brazen of liars, once wrote, “All you have to do is write one true sentence…,” sending generations of his competitors chasing vainly after a will o’ the wisp reality. Why people choose to believe what he says about writing and not what he says about his manliness is a curious instance of intellectual willfulness and self-deception.

In university English departments, on the other hand, students are taught criticism — Arnoldian, Freudian, New, Structuralist and Post-Structuralist, etc. Archetypes, symbols, influences, foreshadowing, metaphor and theme. Academic critics tend to see a novel as full-blown, not something built; as something found, not constructed. Academics are romantics — they see, or prefer to think they see, romantic intention in a novel as opposed to the bricks and mortar. I tried to tell a friend of mine, a person partway through a PhD. in English, what I meant by a pattern in a novel. She said, “Well, we call that recurring imagery.” A singularly bloodless phrase. But fair enough. Yes, that is sort of what I mean.

But why does it recur? And who made it recur? And is that all there is to it? Does the phrase “recurring imagery” help a writer? Academic critics generally see recurring images as evidence of a point the author is trying to make, part of the aboutness of the work. Deconstructionists, on the other hand, look for recurring images that the author may not have intended so as to “deconstruct” the aboutness of the work. In either case, they are wedded to thematics, to aboutness, to truth. Write what you know, throw in a little recurring imagery, and it’ll come out right. That’s what the creative writing schools and the English departments teach us.

In general it’s not terribly bad advice. Many writers get by with no other. Every writer borrows to a greater or lesser extent from the real world the images which he or she deploys in his or her novel. Every writer who has read significantly has an instinctive feel for rhythm, pacing and the repetition of images. But to go through life believing “Write what you know and throw in recurring imagery” is like going through life believing in God and free enterprise — it leads to a conservative and narrow view of life and art.

4

Pattern is an ambiguous word and I want to keep it that way. Writing a novel, Faulkner once said, is like a one-armed man nailing together a chicken coop in a hurricane. It helps to be open-minded and undogmatic about the rules of the operation.
Experience itself rests on our ability to recognize patterns — Forms Plato called them — in the sensory flux. A pattern that does not repeat itself is not a pattern, it is chaos, or it is something like God, or it is nothing. And the ability to recognize patterns is tied up with out ability to remember. Pattern, repetition and memory are the foundations of consciousness.

The same happens in a novel. On a very rudimentary level the author depends on pattern, repetition and memory to give the reader confidence in the world of the book, what we call verisimilitude, the quality of seeming to be real. In Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Anna appears on almost every page. Anna is a pattern, a group of words and characteristics that repeat. If Tolstoy had changed Anna’s name, age, hair color and social background every chapter or so, we would throw the book down in disgust.

Pattern can mean a model or design upon which something else is constructed. Or it can mean the systematic repetition of certain design elements as in the pattern in wallpaper.

Pattern can, for example, refer to something large such as a plot.  All romances are based on, say, the model boy meets girl, boys loses girl, boy gets girl. We also say there are no new plots under the sun. And we refer to coming-of-age novels, which have plots based on myths and rites of passage, or adventure novels, which are based on the quest model. What we call genre is a sort of pattern.

But pattern can also refer to something minute, a device such as, say, the list or the epic simile or even the structure of a sentence. Here is Nabokov talking about Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:

Gogol called his Dead Souls a prose poem; Flaubert’s novel is also a poem but one that is composed better, with a closer, finer texture. In order to plunge at once into the matter, I want to draw attention first of all to Flaubert’s use of the word and preceded by a semicolon. This semicolon-and comes after an enumeration of actions or states or objects; then the semicolon creates a pause and the and proceeds to round up the paragraph, to introduce a culminating image, or a vivid detail, descriptive, poetic, melancholy, or amusing. This is a peculiar feature of Flaubert’s style.

Now, though the actual number of usable patterns may, for practical purposes, be infinite, we always choose to use a finite number in any given piece of writing. This finite number of further reduced by the fact that many of the patterns are repeated throughout any given work. The more patterns a writer knows, however, the better his or her chances of being published, being read, or of writing a masterpiece that will endure. The way a person learns patterns is by reading; literature is an encyclopedia of patterns and devices.

Though it is possible to invent a pattern that no one has ever used before, originality in a writer generally amounts to an ability to vary the pattern in fresh ways. One might, for example, decide to use Flaubert’s semicolon-and sentence pattern in a contemporary rites-of-passage novel set in Montreal’s Jamaican emigre community. The pattern would be Flaubert’s, but the variation, the unique application, would be the author’s own.

Repetition, as I have said, is also a pattern. But it is a pattern of a different order, perhaps the pattern of patterns. To me, it is the heart of the mystery of art, of novel-writing. Without it, the novel becomes a strung-out plot summary.

I have tried to think out why repetition is appealing, why it is aesthetically pleasing as a pure thing. I think there are two reasons, or sorts of reasons. The first is essentially conservative — repetition is allied to memory, to coherence and verisimilitude.

The second is biological or procreative or sexual. Repetition creates rhythm which on a biological level is pleasurable in itself, the beating of our hearts, the combers rolling up on a beach, the motion of love. This is the sort of thing Lyotard is talking about when he writes about “intensities” or patterns of intensities in his book Économie Libidinal, or what the Spaniard Madariaga meant when he talked about the “waves of energy” in Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador de Seville.

In Anna Karenina there are two sub-plots: Levin’s marriage and Anna’s brother’s marriage. The novel actually begins with a sub-plot scene — Anna’s brother banished to sleep in his study for having an affair with a maid. These subplots are not simply tacked on. They repeat the marriage theme of the main plot, Anna’s marriage. Anna’s brother’s marriage is, like her own, a marriage on the rocks because of infidelity. Levin’s marriage is, by contrast, dutiful and steadfast.

Tolstoy created three identical patterns which twine and leapfrog and reverberate through the novel. Of course, the details, the contents, are different (this is one sort of variation); and, in the case of Levin’s plot, the structure, the pattern, is inverted, a positive to the negative of the other two plots (repetitions of abstract structures such as plots or relationships can vary in three ways — congruence, contrast or inversion, and the tree in the seed).

References to plot and subplot form a kind of rhythm in the novel. This rhythmic repetition of structures has something to do with what we call pace. As each plot comes round again for scrutiny by author and reader, it is like a new wave of energy, a drum beat. Anna’s story is the melody; Levin’s is a kind of booming base note thudding in counterpoint to Anna’s; Anna’s brother’s rhythm is lighter, more frenzied and comic. Or they are like Whistler’s colors, threading through a painting, darker, lighter, heavier, fainter.

There is another sort of repetition in Anna Karenina, one more mysterious yet. Just after Anna meets Vronsky, there is a train accident. A station guard, either drunk or muffled up too much against the cold weather, fails to hear the train approaching and is crushed to death. This station guard returns in Anna’s thoughts over and over again. He begins to inhabit her nightmares. He even migrates into Vronsky’s nightmares — transformed now into a dreadful-looking little man with a bedraggled beard, bending over a sack, groping in it for something and talking in French about having to beat, to pound into a shape a piece of iron. At the end of the novel, Anna sees him again just as she throws herself beneath the wheels of the train: “A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her.”

Obviously train imagery is repeated as well, at the beginning and the end. Why? Coincidence? Or is Tolstoy telling us something about the 19th century Russian transportation system? Of course not. Is it foreshadowing? Well, sort of. But foreshadowing is a word I don’t trust. Does this mean Tolstoy is telling us ahead of time that Anna is going to die in a train accident? I think not. I think there is some other motive at work, that the repetition of trains and bedraggled peasants, this bookending of image and incident, the beginning and the end, has a pleasing quality all its own, symmetry, if you will, a rightness, that is felt and appreciated, not “known.” Overture and coda, rather than prediction. A symmetry that would be lost, say, if Anna drowned herself or beat herself to death with a hatchet.

As a pattern, this terrifying little peasant just seems to pop up. He is just there — and there and there and there. He “means” nothing, except insofar as he is associated by juxtaposition with a larger pattern of trains, death, dreams and Vronsky. Somehow he manages to accrue all the potential horror of that pattern. He reminds us, not of the end to which Anna journeys, but of the beginning; so that when she dies, her end is freighted with a kind of fatedness that makes it all the more horrible and pathetic. The peasant is a tiny thread in the tapestry of the novel, a hint of color in the painting, a grace note in the symphony. Nothing more. Yet without him, how much shallower a book Anna Karenina might be.

It is worth noting that certain kinds of patterning, e.g. the repetition of character traits, enhance verisimilitude, while others, e.g. Anna’s peasant, work against it. We might distinguish between these by calling the one sort patterns of verisimilitude and the other patterns of technique. Every novel uses both, so every novel is a little balancing act between the two, or a war. John Hawkes, the experimental novelist, for example, says that “plot, character, setting and theme” (which are generally what I mean by patterns of verisimilitude) are the real enemies of the novel. “And structure,” he adds, “–verbal and psychological coherence — is still my largest concern as a writer. Related or corresponding event, recurring image and recurring action, these constitute the essential substance or meaningful density of writing.”

But, oddly, though patterns of technique and patterns of verisimilitude tend to destroy one another, like matter and antimatter, both are necessary to the work. Depending on how heavily the author plays up one or the other, his or her novel will be more or less “realistic” or more or less “experimental.”

Getting the balances right in any given work is part of the art of art and its mystery and is a skill that cannot be taught. It leads to the feeling, a feeling I have had twice, once with each of my novels, of submission, of loss of freedom, of loss of expressiveness. Because there is a point in the process of writing a novel at which you must submit to the strictures of pattern that you have chosen. All of a sudden, there are things you can no longer fit into this novel, things you must cut, and other things that you must put in. And, of course, with something as complicated as a novel, you never get it right. And you end up wanting to slash your wrists.

As Paul Valéry once said, “A work of art is never completed, only abandoned.”

5

I have already noted that some patterns in novels, those patterns which tend to create verisimilitude, are like the patterns of experience in the world. This is as much as to say that a conventionally realistic novel reflects a certain metaphysics or philosophy of being and knowing. Modern novels of a less conventional sort also reflect a metaphysics, but it is a new metaphysics, a radically new way of talking about the locale of existence.

Vladimir Nabokov, whom I have quoted extensively and who has influenced a whole generation of North American writers (in Canada, at least two Governor-General’s Award winners, Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man and Hubert Aquin’s Trou de Memoire, owe huge debts to the structural and verbal pyrotechnics of Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire), was an intellectual heir of the Russian Formalists. Formalism was an aesthetic and critical movement that thrived in St. Petersburg and other eastern European cities early in the twentieth century. The Formalists pegged a whole philosophy of language and literature on the split between meaning and signifiers, between aboutness and pattern.

What they did was put a theory to the things painters like Whistler and, soon after, the French Impressionists, and Surrealist poets like Breton, Eluard and Ponge — all the way back to Mallarme (Nabokov sneaks Mallarme quotations into his novels) — had been doing ten, twenty, thirty or more years before. They simply recognized that aboutness and pattern were two aspects of the things we call art and language, and that you could, in fact, have pattern without aboutness.

Since it seem impossible to have aboutness without pattern, a corollary of this is that aboutness is somehow secondary, a poor cousin, on the aesthetic scale of things, to pattern. Nabokov again:

There are…two varieties of imagination in the reader’s case… First, there is the comparatively lowly kind which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature… A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or knew. Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past. Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use.

This is what the post-Sausurrean critics, recently so popular in Europe and on American university campuses, are saying. Aboutness is old-fashioned, authoritarian, and patriarchal. Signs — read, pattern, poetry — are playful, subversive, and female. How a thinker can jump from a purely logical incongruence — the fact that, apparently, you can have pattern without aboutness but not vice versa — to these strings of value-loaded predicates is marvelous indeed and evidence that the instinct for narrative and romance has not died behind the ivy-covered walls of academe.

Another corollary of splitting the categories of pattern and aboutness is that there is a sense in which pattern itself creates meaning. Or to put it another way, the novel is about its own form. Or every book is about another book, or books. And every work of art is a message on a string of messages which begins nowhere and ends nowhere, to no one and from no one, and about nothing except the field of pseudo-meaning created by previous and future messages. It is all a game of mirrors and echoes. A little dance of images, words, and patterns. The of the Hindus, or all is vanity, all is dust, sure enough.

Keats wrote, “A man’s life is an allegory.” Nothing else. Or conversely, Korzybski says, “The map (read, the allegory, the pattern, the words) is not the territory.” Which is to say, as Jacques Lacan does, that all utterances are symptomatic and that the real is impossible.

6

Form (or pattern) and aboutness (or content, or reality) are the binary opposites of thought. The stance of the modern, whether he or she is a novelist, critic, theologian, or psychologist, is that ontology begins and ends with the former, that so-called reality is a highly suspicious article.

We are pressed back to a position of washed-out Cartesianism: I think, therefore, I think; or more precisely, I think, therefore something is thinking. Structuralists like Levi-Strauss say things like, “There is a simultaneous production of myths themselves, by the mind that generates them, and, by the myths, of an image of the world which is already inherent in the structure of the mind.” Linguistic philosophers like Wittgenstein say, “The world is my world: that is shown by the fact that the limits of language stand for the limits of my world…I am my world.” Except that this “I am” is not the body but language itself.

Reality, meaning, aboutness, the good, God and the self are pushed away into the realms of the unconscious, the unknowable, the unspeakable, and the unfathomable. In a very logical sense, they no longer concern us here as we race toward the end of the twentieth century. To say you are writing “realistic novel” is to commit as much of an intellectual solecism as, say, the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart does when he says God spoke with him before breakfast. The words “realistic novel” can only be spoken by a person who is speaking in the discourse of an earlier age or in parody.

Think of yourself in a room with bare plaster walls and no windows or doors. You have an infinite supply of variegated wallpapers. You paper the room with something in blue with a skylark pattern, then you do it over with angels, then an abstract, decorative pattern.

The first thing you notice is that you can’t see the wall anymore. This is the first effect of language, according to the philosophers and critics. As soon as you begin to use language, describe the world, you can no longer see it. You can only see your description. In fact, since we can’t even begin to describe something without language, then the existence of the wall itself becomes moot.

The second thing you notice is that each layer of wallpaper covers the previous layers. They’re lost, though you know they’re under there. In a sense the old wallpaper, the past, becomes part of the reality you are describing with each new layer of wallpaper. And sometimes you wake up in the morning and wish you still had the skylarks. You might even try to scrape some of the new wallpaper off. But that only makes a mess.

All you have is the design of each successive layer of wallpaper, and, just possibly, the shape of the room, its broad outlines, its cubic form. Life and art are a little like this. We only see the current wallpaper, remember bits and pieces of the old in the form of myths and memories of memories and fragments of discourse which no longer “mean” what they once meant. And, if we’re lucky, we intuit, or think we intuit, some vague outline of the something which may or may not be the room or the womb of reality.

To be a writer is to write with this knowledge, that the wallpaper is wallpaper and not the room, walls and plaster. It is to have that quality which Keats said went to form a man of achievement “especially in literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously,” what he called Negative Capability — “that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Negative Capability is the artist’s ability to suspend belief in any particular conceptual system (or wallpaper) or to see the conceptual system as pattern, as opposed to reality, as material in itself to be juggled and juxtaposed. Or, to put this another way, aboutness is illusory. What we see as aboutness the artist sees as just another pattern or part of a pattern. Or again, everything is pattern, infinitely plastic and malleable. A person who believes in a particular conceptual system believes that everything can be explained by reference to that conceptual system. Whereas the artist sees the pattern and feels the mystery that looms beyond the pattern.

The truth of the matter, everything that seems supremely important in life, begins when the talking, writing, painting, sculpting, filming and singing of discourse stop. All talk or art that says it’s telling you the truth about life is second rate. Of course, you can write something second rate that’s very popular, even quite good, for all these categories are relative. But great art is pattern over mystery, it is juggling words over whirlpools of silence.

7

In the extended sense, this view of language, life and art can seem exceedingly austere, if not forbidding and bleak. “The ultimate goal of the human sciences is not constitute, but to dissolve man,” says Levi-Strauss. (Just as Nabokov says that one of the functions of a novel is to prove that the novel in general does not exist.) Few of us can help feeling a nostalgia for the old ways, or what we think are the old ways, of talking. For ancient beliefs. For certainty and immortality. For familiar stories with plots and characters and recognizable locales. For adventure, romance and magic.

A lot of fictional, intellectual and political hay has been made out of this nostalgia, a nostalgia expressed, say, in the phrase “breakdown of values.” When an old way of talking disappears, many people are forced to apply narrative in order to explain it to themselves. They often feel they have a stake in the old way. They invent metaphors and analogies — machine breakdowns, erosion, war, disease — to make themselves feel easier. And to sell books.

You can see where nostalgia led Levi-Strauss in his wonderful autobiographical novel Tristes Tropiques. The annihilation of the self, of meaning and aboutness, by structural anthropology drove him into a quest for theological support, which he may or may not have found wandering amongst the Buddhist temples of the Far East. Or think of Sartre turning from the barrenness of existentialism to the warm, sloppy infantilism of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. Or of Michel Foucault leaving his university office every afternoon to pursue a gruesome and self-destructive quest through the bath houses of New York until his death from AIDS.

One can look at people like Sartre, Foucault and Levi-Strauss as contemporary monks whose intellectual vigor and honesty led them to the conclusion that God, man and reality cannot be reached through words. (On December 6, 1273, at the age of fifty, Thomas Aquinas suffered something like a nervous breakdown and never wrote again.) That, by analogy, telling a story is a logically impossible project. That our only recourse (save for silence) is to take a step willy-nilly into narrative, or faith — Keat’s Negative Capability is something like Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith. It can’t be done — all the critics and philosophers tell us — but some of us will jump in anyway and start the story “Once upon a time…”

In this regard, the American Catholic novelist Walker Percy once wrote:

…a novelist these days has to be an ex-suicide. A good novel — and, I imagine, a good poem — is possible only after one has given up and let go. Then, once one realizes that all is lost, the jig is up, that after all nothing is dumber than a grown man sitting down and making up a story to entertain somebody or working in a “tradition” or “school” to maintain his reputation as a practitioner of the nouveau roman or whatever — once one sees that this is a dumb way to live, there are two possibilities: either commit suicide or not commit suicide. If one opts for the former, that is that; it is a letzte Losung and there is nothing more to write or say about it. But if one opts of the latter, one is in a sense dispensed and living on borrowed time. One is not dead! One is alive! One is free! I won’t say that one is like God on the first day, with the chaos before him and a free hand. Rather one feels, What the hell, here I am washed up, it is true, but also cast up, cast up on the beach, alive and in one piece. I can move my toe up and then down and do anything else I choose. The possibilities open to one are infinite. So why not do something Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and Faulkner didn’t do, for after all they are nothing more than dead writers, members of this and that tradition, much admired busts on the shelf. A dead writer may be famous but he is also dead as a duck, finished. And I, cast up here on this beach? I am a survivor! Alive! A free man! They’re finished. Possibilities are closed. As for God? That’s his affair. True, he made the beach, which, now that I look at it, is not all that great. As for me, I might try a little something here in the wet sand, a word, a form…”

—Douglas Glover

Sep 132013
 

Savage Love Cover

Here’s the complete series of short essays I wrote for the National Post as the Guest Editor this week of the Afterward section (edited by Mark Medley). Read them in reverse order as they work in ascending order of complexity, each one building on the previous entries. Mark Medley invited me to write these essays as part of the fanfare for the launch of Savage Love (in bokstores next week).

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Click on the link: Douglas Glover

May 082013
 

One of those recent trips took me to Canada, where I was one of six artists participating in a couple of mixed-genre events. These were arranged by the wonderful Ontario poet and essayist John B. Lee, whose works are so copious, accomplished and varied that I can’t single out any one, two or three books by his hand to recommend. Google this terrific author and you won’t be disappointed, whichever book may catch your fancy.

Besides John, I sat in with Marty Gervais, another more than noteworthy Canadian poet (and journalist), one whose modesty, both personal and literary, belies a huge soul and deep insight; and with longtime friend Douglas Glover, whose readings of some of his short-shorts (though he practices a number of other fictional and essayistic modes) roused the packed houses, first, in Port Dover, a wonderful and funky Lake Erie fishing town, and then, two hours to the west, in Highgate, where we performed in a beautiful old Methodist church, reclaimed as an arts center.

I must likewise mention the two musician-songwriters who rounded out the bill. Young Michael Schotte is, simply, a guitar virtuoso; check him out too. And our master of ceremonies, Ian Bell, curator of the excellent Port Dover Maritime Museum, is also a fine instrumentalist. Ian is also author of song lyrics that are every bit as “poetic” as anything else I heard on those stages. Look him up– and prepare to be mightily impressed.

via Sydney Lea’s Blog: Don McKay and Canada’s cultural riches.

Apr 242013
 

A female Pileated Woodpecker flew into my front window this afternoon. She was down on the concrete path when I found her, one wing splayed out, one foot curled under at an ugly angle. But she was moving her head. I retrieved my handy turkey baster and got her to drink some water, and then some more. She seemed to get the idea of the baster. Then I folded her wing back straight. And waited. She lurched finally and got her foot underneath correctly, had some more water, and then started to vocalize. Wonderful to hear. You never get close to birds like this. Very satisfying to see her back in the trees. You can see that in the first photographs she looks pretty stunned, eyes half-closed, beak open. Someone should write up the medical use of turkey basters.

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Apr 192013
 

Back from epic, marathon reading and interview trip to Ontario. Arrived in an ice storm. Gorgeous reading events hosted by Ian Bell (his father was my Grade 11 history teacher) and John B. Lee (multiple publications on NC). NC Contributing Editor Sydney Lea was there and I managed to get a photo of him looking like God at the reading in Highgate. Also my very first book publisher, Marty Gervais. The mix of music (Ian Bell and the amazing Michael Schatte) and literary reading was surprisingly entertaining. People paid money to come. Doing two events back to back with a long car ride in between (with stops to visit memorials for famous forgotten Canadian poets and to cast an eye on John B. Lee’s ancestral farm) made me feel like I was on tour with a troupe of actors.

Sunday, I had brunch with the Jernigans, Kim who used to edit The New Quarterly, and Amanda, the poet, and her husband, the photographer John Haney (both Amanda and John have appeared on NC). This was all the more remarkable since they had not had electricity since Thursday (the ice storm). Then I drove to Waterloo to see Jonah and also Dwight and Kathy Storring (Dwight published a play on NC; their son Nathan has an essay here).

Do you get the impression that there are secret NC cells planted all over (you know, mostly so I can travel without paying for food)?

The photo below was taken by Zach Melnick during the War of 1812 documentary interview he did with me on Thursday in the farmhouse living room.

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DG being interviewed at the farm, photo by Zach Melnick

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Sydney Lea reading in Highgate, Saturday evening

Michael Schatte compilation, on tour with us he performed solo

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Possum I found in a den by the pond at the back of the farm

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You can hear the dog whimpering next to me. Notice the feet. I once raised a young opossum, called Snuffy, at first I kept him in a fleece-lined leather glove (approximating a mother’s pouch, I thought). My friend Bruce Hiscock did a drawing which hangs in the house. When he seemed big enough, we let Snuffy go in the woods. My great-grandfather was an amateur poet who called himself “Possum” and kept a stuffed opossum in his store. I published an essay about him in The New Quarterly a couple of years ago. More information than you need, right?

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First flowers, Coltsfoot

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My father once planted a small field with Scotch pine to sell as Christmas trees. As he once observed, they kind of got away from him.

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Daffodils in the woods. There are patches all through the woods, planted by DG’s mother.

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The farm buildings from the east.

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Dog

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Dog investigating possum den

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Coltsfoot

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Geese by the pond

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Laneway. To the right, a spruce windbreak. To the left, a field of oak and white pine planted over 15 years ago for eventual harvest.

Mar 132013
 

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Ground still frozen, huge trucks ferrying in loads of fertilizer. The tractor is just there for colour and to make nice circles in the snow. Old farming joke: Contrary to popular belief, plants don’t get nutrients from the soil. The soil is just to hold the plant down and then you pour fertilizer on it. These fields will be planted with canteloupes.

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The next day it thaws. A pile of irrigation pipes sinking into a field of melt water.

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The swamp at the back of the farm is the headwaters of a creek that eventually flows into Lake Erie, twenty miles away. This is precisely where the creek begins.

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Cedar trees in a copse dg’s father used to call Hernando’s Hideaway (his reasons remain obscure but mysteriously romantic).

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Wild turkey tracks, not to be confused with chickens (see below).

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Chickens. Reminded DG of Culebra.

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Sick chicken sleeping by the dishwasher in the farm kitchen. (The chicken’s name is Annette.) The chicken has moved into the house. It is like the pioneer days when people and farm animals lived together.

Chickens haunt dg’s dreams.

—dg

Mar 012013
 

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DG working on his new book at Brava Beach, Culebra. Beach attire includes $6 bathing suit purchased at Zeller’s in Simcoe, Ontario, circa 2003. Note snorkel gear, coconuts, palm frond lean-to. On this trip, dg was introduced to three major life-changing innovations: mojitos, snorkeling & mojitos.

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Brava Beach

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Brava Beach

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Resaca Beach

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Susie’s Restaurant with outside bar at far left. Next to the bar is the driveway to a gas station behind the restaurant. Then the canal. The driveway is usually crowded with cars till 6pm. At 6pm the gas station closes and the bar opens.

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Feral cat, one of many that hang out in front of Susie’s Restaurant. There were cats everywhere, cats and feral chickens. Deep in the woods there were chickens.

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 Five cats outside of Susie’s. See the eyes.

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Rooster under the table at Zaco’s Tacos where dg drank mojitos in the afternoon.

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Milka’s, one of the island grocery stores, also liquor store and valuable source of Häagen Dazs ice cream after mojitos at Dinghy Dock.

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A sign of the times.

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The old San Idelfonso graveyard, still in use. San Ildefonso was the original island village, but the American Navy moved all the people out to Dewey when the island became a Naval training station.

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Canal that runs from one side of the island to the other. This is looking east toward the ferry dock and the town square.

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The canal photo above was taken from the bridge. See the dinghies docked just left of centre at the bottom? That’s a restaurant called Dinghy Dock. Dinner starts at 6pm. You eat right next to the water and huge tarpon gather under floodlights in case someone throws them food. At 7pm Bulldog bats started swooping over the water, fishing with their feet. Amazing to watch. Good place to sit and drink mojitos before wandering home to bed.

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Dinghy Dock Restaurant

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El Eden Restaurant.

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Feral cats at the food kiosks at Flamenco Beach. There is a sign at the entrance to the beach that reads NO PETS. But there are chickens and cats all over the place.

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Great breakfast and lunch. The owner has a friendly dog, too. One morning when dg was missing his dog, the restaurant dog came and lay down on his foot.

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Vibra Verde dog, a friend to authors and a shrewd manuscript critic.

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A vicious wild cat, ready to pounce and viciously maul something, viciously.

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Another extremely vicious cat. This one rubbed up against dg’s legs and dg briefly thought about bringing it home in his luggage.

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Road side horses. Moderately vicious.

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Dewey from Resaca Mountain.

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Tamarindo Beach

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Land crab

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Heron

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Egret

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DG, thinking about mojitos, Resaca Beach. Wearing his ultra-cool Lake George Arts Project Bands ‘n Beans t-shirt. Shorts by Ralph Lauren (purchased economically at the Lake George outlet store). Watch, a Casio Illuminator.  Note the vast crowds on this extremely crowded beach.

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Our tracks. Resaca Beach. This place should be avoided because of the crowds.

—Photos by dg and mf

 

Jan 232013
 

FENCE27

Four of my micro stories — “The Poet Fishbein,” “Wolven,” “Splash” and “Dear Richard” — are just out in the new issue of Fence. I can’t give you a taste because that would be pretty much the whole story. They are so short they are not flash fiction but subatomic fiction. They are to the short story what caviar is to ostrich eggs.

dg

Dec 112012
 


Photo by Bill Hayward

I interviewed Gordon Lish years ago, 1994, I think, when I had a weekly radio show. We knew each other as author and editor. He had published a story of mine in The Quarterly and also had been my editor for The Life and Times of Captain N (Knopf, 1993). Shortly after my novel appeared, Lish was let go at Knopf (I do not think there was a cause-and-effect relationship, but you never know). This interview took place in the aftermath of both events.

The interview touches on Lish’s relationship with Knopf and, earlier, Esquire, where he was dubbed Captain Fiction; also his lightning rod personality, his friendship with Don DeLillo, his own writing, the virtues of throwing away and cutting, and the difference between mystery and information in art. It is always a treat to hear Gordon speaking extemporaneously; his deep-voiced, rhythmic orotundity and his talent for finding the precise if unexpected phrase are inspiring as oratory. Best of all, he speaks of life, fate and art in ways that inscribe those subjects with a desperate significance, even heroism.

I found the old tape of this interview, along with others, in a box in storage. There is some extraneous noise for which I apologize.

—Douglas Glover

 

Interview with Gordon Lish Part I

Interview with Gordon Lish Part II

Nov 252012
 

On Lawrencetown Beach north of Halifax, NS. Note that dg is wearing his trademark heirloom baseball cap purchased in Venice during the 2008 VCFA residency in Slovenia. Also camouflage cargo pants purchased at Walmart.

————

Apologies for being somewhat absent from the pages of NC. I’ve been on a reading trip to the East Coast, traveling by car with the dog. Stopped in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where I stayed with Mark Jarman in his grand house facing the Saint John River (on land once owned, yes, by that famous American patriot Benedict Arnold). NC Senior Editor R. W. Gray also lives in that house. And that night we three went out to the Lunar Rogue Pub and met up with Gerard Beirne, thus four, amazingly, four real NC contributors sat at the same table. Next day I moved on to Halifax to stay with my son Jacob, another NC contributor. Jacob took me for steaks at the Henry House the first night after which considerable Ballantine’s Scotch was consumed with Jacob and his roommate Sebastian Ennis (who introduced me to the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy). I got obsessed with the Dingle Tower, a monument across the Northwest Arm from Jacob’s apartment and thus a salient feature in the landscape out my window. (Needless to say I am sparing you 99% of the photos I happened to take. I spent the driving time listening to Chekhov stories and lectures on the history of Ancient Greece and taking pictures through the car windows and the rearview mirror, a practice worse than operating a cell phone or texting while driving, I think.) One morning I had coffee with Ian Colford at the Dalhousie University Club — you will no doubt recall his contributions to the magazine. Last Monday morning I back-tracked to Sackville, New Brunswick, stayed two days and gave brilliant readings at Mount Allison University and the Université de Moncton. The U de Moncton English Department faculty took me out to dinner (Prince Edward Island scallops) at the Tide & Boar (a so-called gastropub; the name is a pun on the nearby Bay of Fundy’s famous tidal bore) on Main Street. My host in Sackville was Professor Christl Verduyn, a Canadianist of considerable scholarly accomplishment who has written some very intelligent essays about my work; had dinner with Christl and her husband, Mount Allison University President Robert Campbell, at Joey’s on York Street where the waitress announced to us that she was pregnant (this was a first for me, and, in case you want to know, her best friend is pregnant simultaneously). Then I rushed back to Hampton, New Hampshire, for Thanksgiving and more beach walks. Lucy blotted her copybook  by assaulting every dog she met. Apparently, she takes exception to New Hampshire dogs. This goes right up there with her insane hatred of small blond children under the age of four.

I tell you this in part so that you know real people write the things you read on these pages; one can occasionally even talk to them in person.

dg

 

Christ Church Cathedral, Fredericton, NB. Just a few doors down from Mark Anthony Jarman’s house and not to be confused with the Lunar Rogue Pub.

Mark Anthony Jarman taking a picture of dg reflected in the passenger window of the car, or what writers do when they have time on their hands. You can sense the shade of Benedict Arnold. Fredericton, NB

Jacob & Lucy at Lawrencetown Beach, NS

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Cranberry Lake from the Bluffs Wilderness Trail west of Halifax, NS

Dingle Tower across the Northwest Arm from Jacob’s apartment, Halifax, NS

North of Halifax, heading for the TransCanada Highway, fog and hoarfrost. This photo was taken one-handed while driving at 65 m.p.h. I don’t know if that counts as some kind of record. I might have had a cup of coffee in the other hand, and I know I was listening to a lecture on Archaic Greece.

Sackville Wildfowl Sanctuary, Sackville, NB

North Hampton Beach, NH

Jenness Beach, NH

North Hampton Beach, NH. I could tell you this is me surfing, but you wouldn’t believe me.

Consulting with my editor, Odirone Point, NH

Aug 182012
 

The poet John B. Lee has collected a splendid new anthology of poems, original documents and fiction commemorating the Canadian part of the War of 1812 (200th anniversary this year, at least the start of conflict). The book, entitled An Unfinished War, War of 1812 Prose & Poetry (Black Moss Press), is imminent, pre-orders available, and contains two short stories by dg, “A Flame, a Burst of Light” which was first published in The New Quarterly last year and “Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm’s Mills (now Oakland, Ontario), November 6, 1814” which first appeared in Gordon Lish’s magazine The Quarterly in the late 1980s (dg still has the ms with Lish’s hand-written editorial notes). This story was subsequently selected by Margaret Atwood for inclusion in the New Oxford Book of Canadian Stories. It also appears in dg’s collection A Guide to Animal Behaviour.

Though written far apart in time, the stories reflect dg’s ongoing obsession with the history of the bloody ground where he grew up, Norfolk County, Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Erie. The Battle of Malcolm’s Mills took place six miles up the road from the family farm; the McCall mentioned in the story is a relative. The return of the prisoners of war took place on Long Point Bay where dg’s Loyalist ancestors settled a few years before. Both events took place in 1814.

In his long effort to parse the historical and geographical grammar of the place where he grew up, dg has collected an anthology of quotations Long Point, a Geography of the Soul: An Anthology of Quotations about Long Point and Norfolk County.

dg

———–

from “A Flame, a Burst of Light”

Of the reasons for our lengthy and fatal sojourn in the swamps of Sandusky, there are several theories. 1) The Americans wished to exact vengeance for atrocities committed by Capt. Crawford’s Indios on the Raisin River. 2) The Americans wished to prevent the men from rejoining their regiments before the close of the summer campaigns. 3) To supply the want of souls in the afterlife.

We were seven hundred dreamers starving and shivering to death in this gateway to the City of Dis.

Of the reasons for our deaths, there are no theories. Ague, fever (quartan, intermittent and acute) and the bloody flux carried us away. Old wounds, opened from damp and lack of common nutriment; pneumonia, dropsy, pthithis, galloping consumption, gangrene and suicide account for the rest. An alarming number of walking corpses attended the fallen like Swiss automatons in a magic show, then tottered off to expire face down in the bulrushes.

In the swamps of Sandusky, there were more corpses than souls. We had a surfeit of bodies. They were difficult to bury in the washing ooze.

Kingsland and Thompson, wraiths and daredevils, murderous on the day with Springfields we borrowed from the Americans at Detroit, mounted amateur theatricals though much bothered at delivering their lines on a stage of sucking mud. Sgt. Collins, of Limerick and the 41st, took the female roles, warbling a sweet falsetto. I mind he scalped Kentuckians with his razor at the Battle of the Raisin, along with Tsenkwatawa’s unspeakable Shawnee….

 

from “Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm’s Mills (now Oakland, Ontario, November 6, 1814”

In the morning, the men rubbed their eyes and saw Kentuckycavalry and Indians mounted on stolen farm horses cresting the hill on the opposite side of the valley. The Kentuckians looked weary and calm, their hollow eyes slitted with analysis. We were another problem to be solved; they had been solving problems all the way from Fort Detroit, mostly by killing, maiming and burning, which were the usual methods.

The Indians were Cherokee and Kickapoo, with some Muncies thrown in. They had eagle-feather rosettes and long hair down the sides of their heads and paint on their faces, which looked feminine in that light. Some wore scalps hanging at their belts.

They came over the hill in a column, silent as the steam rising from their mounts, and stopped to chew plug tobacco or smoke clay pipes while they analyzed us. More Kentuckians coming on extended the line on either side of the track into the woods, dismounted, and started cook fires or fell asleep under their horses’ bellies, with reins tied at their wrists.

General McArthur rode in with his staff, all dressed in blue, with brass buttons and dirty white facings. He spurred his mare to the front, where she shied and pranced and nearly fell on the steep downward incline. He gave a sign, and the Indians dismounted and walked down the road to push our pickets in. The Indians had an air of attending their eighty-seventh-or-so battle. They trudged down the road bolt upright, with their muskets cradled, as though bored with the whole thing, as though they possessed some precise delineation of the zone of danger that bespoke a vast familiarity with death and dying….

—Douglas Glover

—————

Order An Unfinished War: In the US here; in Canada here.

Jul 132012
 

Drove to the farm in Ontario with younger son and dog yesterday, in time for an evening walk around the place. Fields of melons, tomatoes and corn. A coyote den. I don’t know if you can tell from the pictures but everything is very dry, soil like white powder, the unirrigated crops looking decimated with patches of withered or non-existent plants. Even the weeds are drying up. We have irrigation so the issue is not so pressing.

dg

 

Apr 052012
 

The best novels are like dreams. They come out of the silence of the page like a dream. They structure themselves like dreams, that is, there are clear ways in which the structure of dreams parallels the structure of novels. Like dreams, novels use image patterning as a device for suggesting meaning: image repetition, association, juxtaposition, and splintering (Viktor Shklovsky’s term for the branching pattern created by a repeating image and its associated or split-off elements which also repeat). Like dreams, novels are available to interpretation; the best novels have a central luminous mystery at their core which tempts generations upon generations of critics and readers to find new structures and meanings beyond the surface of the words. And like dreams, novels are built around (and this is explicable in only the vaguest of terms) the recurrence or insistence of desire which, in order to generate plot, must be resisted; the locus or arena of desire and resistance appears again and again with obsessive regularity in novels, an obsessive regularity which, in real life, would seem eccentric if not pathological. In novels, character is perversion, and the novel returns again and again to the animating desire which it must resist to the bitter end or even beyond the end of the words on the page.

—from “Novels and Dreams,” an essay by Douglas Glover in Attack of the Copula Spiders

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.

—from The Enamoured Knight

Repetition, as I have said, is also a pattern. But it is a pattern of a different order, perhaps the pattern of patterns. To me, it is the heart of the mystery of art, of novel-writing. Without it, the novel becomes a strung-out plot summary. I have tried to think out why repetition is appealing, why it is aesthetically pleasing as a pure thing. I think there are two reasons, or sorts of reasons. The first is essentially conservative–repetition is allied to memory, to coherence and verisimilitude. The second is biological or procreative or sexual. Repetition creates rhythm which on a biological level is pleasurable in itself, the beating of our hearts, the combers rolling up on a beach, the motion of love. This is the sort of thing Lyotard is talking about when he writes about “intensities” or patterns of intensities in his book Économie Libidinal, or what the Spaniard Madariaga meant when he talked about the “waves of energy” in Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador de Seville.

—from “The Novel as a Poem” in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son

———-

Here is the performance version of “How to Write a Novel,” the first essay in my new book Attack of the Copula Spiders. I place it here for instructional purposes, also so that I can include it in our growing trove of craft and structure advice The Numéro Cinq Literary Craft Book, which you all should consult from time to time. I gave this talk as part of the Craftwork series at The Center for Fiction in New York, March 14, 2o12.

It’s important to note that “How to Write a Novel” is a fairly stripped down version of the years of thought I have given to writing novels (and stories and essays and, yes, even poems). If you want to get the whole picture to this point, you should read also “The Novel as a Poem” in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son. That book also contains essays on novels by Leonard Cohen, Christa Wolf, Hubert Aquin, and Margaret Atwood, plus an essay on point of view and my pride and joy “Gertrude, or the Postmodern Novel.”

Then you would need to read my book on Cervantes The Enamoured Knight. The first section of the book, “Recovering the Text: Technical and Analytical,” provides a re-reading of Don Quixote and preps you for the sections to follow.  The second section, “Don Quixote and Novel Form,” gives a history of the development of novel form, sorts out the rather confusing array of definitions offered by theorists, and then discusses a set of primary structures: plot, subplot, character grouping and gradation, and novel memory devices (which I have not really touched on elsewhere). The third section, “Night Thoughts of an Insomniac Reader, or Thematic Meditations,” demonstrates how the form itself predisposes the novel to a thematic “basket” of ubiquitous themes which appear in writers as diverse as Joseph Conrad, Cervantes, Jane Austen, and Alice Munro (to name four that come into the discussion).

Finally, in Attack of the Copula Spiders you’ll find not only “How to Write a Novel” (the complete text with sundry examples) but also analyses of novels by Juan Rulfo, Thomas Bernhard, Leon Rooke, and Cees Nooteboom as well as an essay on endings and a meditation on novels and history.

Unfortunately, foresight has been lacking. I haven’t managed to collect all of this material in one place (and that’s mostly because I have been sorting out these ideas for years, decades, often previewing them as lectures at Vermont College of Fine Arts where I teach in the low-residency MFA in Writing program). But here now you have a basic sense of where to find it all.

dg

Mar 272012
 

For you delectation and inspiration, here are the opening paragraphs of my essay “Pedro the Uncanny: A Note on Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo” excerpted from my new book Attack of the Copula Spiders on the Biblioasis International Translation Series. Pedro Parámo is an amazing novel, written about dead people from the point of view of a dead man. Rulfo based the structure on the idea of a cemetery in which the various grave occupants spend their time whispering to one another, an eerie and startling conception. Critics often all this book the first instance of Latin American Magic Realism. It’s a Mexican classic. Click on the link above to go to the Biblioasis site and read the rest of the essay.

dg

 

Feb 122012
 

Here is a taste of the latest of my epigrams at Global Brief just published.

dg

Cooperation is local, competition is pandemic. It has always been this way. We live in a churning cauldron of competitive vectors, of drags and accelerants. We compete for money, jobs, love, space and power. We compete, and we are competed for (for our votes, for our consumer dollars, for our admiration – desire desires desire). What goes for thinking these days is mostly competition; what goes for information is mostly shill and exhortation. The media world is a vast infomercial – competing for the mind of the reader, the e-reader or the (TV) e-watcher.

Conversation is a competition to have one’s voice heard; to have one’s ideas prevail. Languages compete and extend their reach or disappear. The world is a chessboard of international gamesmanship. In space, we are all competing for the higher ground. And, willy-nilly, the whirling, pulsing interactions of competition seem only to grow faster and denser as the world goes digital, and as connectivity multiplies arenas of contention. The individual human being wins and loses a thousand times a day – mostly without even knowing it, as the virtual and invisible electronic tickers mark the rise and fall of prices, currency and interest rates. Being alive, we compete.

via The Future is Red in Tooth and Claw : Global Brief.

Feb 012012
 

Here’s a teaser from a new essay of mine, just published at The Brooklyn Rail. This essay is from Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing published by Biblioasis. Out in March. Other essays include the latest version of my novel lecture, “How to Write a Novel,” also “How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise,” “The Drama of Grammar,” and “The Mind of Alice Munro,” and others.

dg

The Man and his Books

Thomas Bernhard is dead. He had a terrible life, at least the early part. He was born in Holland where his Austrian mother had fled to escape the shame of her unwanted pregnancy. He never knew his father who died far away and in obscurity (and obscure circumstances). His mother mistreated him because of the shame he represented. Back in Austria he wanted to be an opera singer and studied music but caught a cold working at a menial job to make ends meet; the cold turned into tuberculosis. He was hospitalized repeatedly, his treatment was bungled, he was given up for dead, and survived just to prove how stupid his doctors were. Since opera-singing was out, he became a writer. He became a famous writer of deadpan, mordant, hilarious, difficult (modernist) novels and plays that often portray depressed characters with lung diseases.

Another common theme is Bernhard’s disgust with his native Austria which he continually berated for its Nazi past, its stupidity, sentimentality, and philistinism. In his will he stipulated that none of his works could ever be published in Austria. Paradoxically he rarely left Austria and lived quietly in a country retreat outside of Vienna (many of his characters live in country retreats outside of Vienna).

Despite the fact that he seemed to put himself in every one of his novels, little is known about his intimate life. He wrote a five-volume memoir, Gathering Evidence, which is quite beautiful but, as all memoirs are, unrevealing. His first biographer somehow managed to discover that he liked to masturbate while watching himself in the mirror. This is both comic and significant; over and over Bernhard presents his narrators as characters watching themselves think about themselves. In fact, his narrators seem more interested in watching themselves think about themselves than in telling the story which often seems, upon analysis, more of an occasion for baroque invention than an end in itself. Reading Bernhard one is often reminded of the American experimentalist John Hawkes who once famously said:

My novels are not highly plotted, but certainly they’re elaborately structured. I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme…structure—verbal and psychological coherence—is still my largest concern as a writer. Related or corresponding event, recurring image and recurring action, these constitute the essential substance or meaningful density of my writing. (Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 1965)

Click here & Read the rest of the essay at The Brooklyn Rail.

Jan 192012
 

Here are the opening paragraphs of a new story just published at The Literarian, the magazine at the Center for Fiction in New York. The story invented itself late last fall when I happened to stop at a Barnes and Noble in Colonie and discovered huge walls of books categorized as PARANORMAL ROMANCE (see photo above taken by NC Contributor Cheryl Cowdy). This was a completely new literary genre to me—you can tell I don’t get out much. But it seemed very popular. I thought, I can write one of those. So I did.

Read the rest of the story at The Literarian, link below.

Also, if you’re in New York on March 14, come to my craft talk at the Center for Fiction (see the link at the bottom of the story).

dg

 

Everything Starts at a Bookstore

I was supposed to meet Zoe for lunch at a chic Parisian restaurant she had discovered on the Internet, a crucial rendezvous during which I intended to propose marriage, but I was running late. A fierce, cold rain lashed down suddenly as I bounded up the Metro steps, rain as I had never experienced before. It drove me back into the underground, where dozens of African Parisians discussed the weather in languages other than French. I glanced at my watch and leaped up the stairs again, blinded by the torrents of rain.

Wind whipped the leafless plane trees along the avenue. I spotted a flower shop and ducked in, thinking to buy a bouquet for my love. But I must have slipped through the wrong door, for I found myself in a neat, closet-like secondhand bookstore with dark oak shelves marching back toward an ancient desk fortified with parapets of leather-bound tomes. I hovered, dripping in the doorway, loathe to enter and perhaps spatter some valuable books with water but also reluctant to dive back into the deluge. I wiped rainwater off my watch face, frantic with vexation and indecision. I naturally blamed all my troubles on the Parisians, their precious City of Light, and Zoe’s love of travel, which I did not share.

via The Literarian at The Center for Fiction.

Jul 252011
 

Here’s Jean Glover, dg’s mother, reciting Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Breathes there the man with soul so dead…,” actually an excerpt from “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.” This is unrehearsed and you can hear the refrigerator whirring in the background as well as assorted whining dogs who, apparently, cannot abide the poem (everybody’s a critic). We were sitting in her kitchen, on the family farm in Ontario. She rides a stationary bike most days over the winter and memorizes poems while she’s riding. Scott is a favourite because her great-grandfather (or is it great-great…?) was raised by Scott who, seeing the boy playing in the street one day, discovered his widowed mother and offered to pay for the boy’s education. The family story is that Scott was writing his novel Rob Roy at the time. The boy and his brother were in and out of the Scott house as they grew and later Scott paid for them to go on the Grand Tour (somewhere there is a diary of this). The boy eventually succeeded to some family money and owned slaves and a plantation on the island of Cariacou. As soon as the British government offered to buy the slaves and free them, he sold up and moved to Canada. His daughter Anne married Daniel Abiel McCall. And their daughter Sarah married John Brock. And their daughter Kathleen was Jean’s mother. I give you the stripped down version of the story—we are a family that carries some history in its genes. And thus Scott comes easily to her mind. There is some Scott silver somewhere in the house, passed down through the family. In the video, Jean is just shy of her 90th birthday.

dg

.


.

Here’s the poem:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored , and unsung.

—Sir Walter Scott

Oct 262010
 

lieutenant-colonel-john-mccraeThe first poem I can recall, aside from nursery rhymes, was a rondeau written by a Canadian artillery officer (and medical doctor), John McCrae, in 1915. It’s also the first poem I ever memorized. I can still remember the words written on the blackboard. This was a different world. We still sang God Save the Queen before classes started and recited the Lord’s Prayer, and there was always a Union Jack and a picture of the Queen prominently displayed. And every November there would be men or women in blue blazers and berets at the bank door in Waterford with trays of poppies. I remember being very proud of myself for memorizing the poem. And on Remembrance Day, we were all (brothers & parents) going to town for the ceremony at the cenotaph. We stopped to pick up an elderly neighbour who lived alone in a little house at the edge of our farm. He was a retired teacher and classicist, living quietly with his books. I was sitting in the backseat with my father and brothers and cheerfully began to rattle off the poem in a boyish singsong. My father gave my arm a squeeze and shushed me and whispered: “Not now. His son died in the war.” I shut up, confused, suddenly aware, acutely aware, that literature isn’t just words on a page but somehow rooted in our personal lives, in our deepest feelings about love, loss and death. I think it hadn’t occurred to me before that people actually died in the war. I didn’t, of course, know the poem was a rondeau, but the form itself has sunk deep into my brain. McCrae was born in Guelph, Ontario, a university town about 50 miles from where I grew up. He had fought with the Canadian artillery in the Boer War but spent his civilian years as a pathologist in Montreal. When the First World War broke out, he went back into the artillery. He was still with the guns when he wrote the poem (the story goes that he wrote it sitting in an ambulance after watching a friend die). But soon after he was called to hospital duty where he subsequently died of pneumonia at the age of 45.

dg

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

 

Oct 132010
 

The idea of winning smacks of the absolute and archaic. The pulse of history, liberal guilt and the end-of-history, millenarian dream of global homogeneity are against it. We all go to the worms. Civilizations rise and fall. What remains of countless ‘wins’ are a few stone remnants and a museum display of corroded armour.

Language, as always, is dire with prognostication. One can win the battle but not the war. And even if one wins, it might be a Pyrrhic victory. In the modern parlance, quagmire is a metaphor turned into a technical term for a victory that won’t stick

Read the rest at On Winning and Responsibility : Global Brief.

Aug 162010
 

John Brock Here are the first few lines of a new essay “The Possum,” about dg’s great-grandfather, just published in The New Quarterly.

My great-grandfather John Brock killed himself with an overdose of laudanum in St. Williams on the North Shore of Lake Erie in March, 1914, the day before he was to appear in court to answer a charge of alienation of affection and criminal conversation. This was in an era when marital rights yet bore the flavour of property rights. Alienation of affection and criminal conversation referred to actions that deprived someone of his spousal relationship. In practice, the phrases meant anything from merely counseling a wife to leave her husband to seduction and adultery.

Today St. Williams is a sleepy hamlet on a sand and clay bluff overlooking the Inner Bay between Turkey Point to the east and Long Point to west, a beautiful and mysterious place, in summer especially when the lake surges languidly under the harsh sunlight and the trees on the point shimmer like a mirage along the horizon. In the early 1900s, lotus beds choked the shoreline and the bluffs were scrubby and bare except where the remains of the great timber flumes swooped down to the beach. For years, the McCalls (my mother’s family) had been engaged in lumbering, furniture making, boat building and general retail but mostly, as my mother’s father once observed, in shipping all the forest roundabout across the lake to Cleveland and Buffalo.

In 1914, the farms around St. Williams were turning to blow sand and dunes, and the McCalls turned necessity into virtue by lobbying the provincial government to buy their land and open a reforestry station to help put the trees back. The family businesses had been in gradual decline since the depression of 1873-78; we were the early victims of what is now called globalization, in this case the first wave of corporate bloat and centralization that coincided with the late Victorian era. When the railway finally extended a tentacle through St. Williams in the late 1880s, instead of inspiring a boom, it sucked all the money out of the village overnight. But in 1914 the family still thought a lot of itself, and those homes, with ivy crawling up their sweeping verandahs, stood with immaculate hauteur against the internal erosion of the economy and ecological ruin.

Buy the magazine and read the rest.

dg

Jul 302010
 

I just had to write a tiny piece on what I am currently reading to go with a new essay of mine coming out in The New Quarterly. No reason not to share it here.

I’m reading Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary Volume One (1953-1956). Before that I read his memoir A Kind of Testament. Gombrowicz lived in Argentina starting just as the Second World War broke out, then eventually, in the 1960s, moved to France and married a French-Canadian woman and died soon after of asthma. In the diary, which isn’t really a diary–it was more like a blog, written regularly for publication in a Polish magazine, he’s funny, confessional, awkward, arrogant and amazingly smart. He compulsively turns and returns to various motifs: Poland and expatriates, Polish writers, the realm of the interhuman, and the deformation of form. The Polish material resonates in my mind because, of course, for various reasons having not much to do with choice–mostly circumstance–I live outside my country. Gombrowicz thinks this is okay. Being outside your country puts you at a distance from which you can see more clearly. Also, in the end, you realize your country is in you–this is where your art comes from. He’s also very good on the communal construction of the self in the interhuman. For centuries and right up to the Existentialists, we have too blithely taken the existence of an integral self for granted. But Existentialism is a reductio. At the moment of decision, self-creation, the self disappears (this is very clearly described in Camus’ novel The Stranger). Better, as Gombrowicz says, to accept that much of what we call a self is created through the desires of others and through communal forms and expectations. Only if we accept this do we have a chance to forge a new and firmer sense of self not based on blindness and denial. And finally Gombrowicz is a kind of formalist who makes himself as an artist (and a person–he liked to chase boys in Buenos Aires parks) by rejecting form (often in parody).

dg

Jul 142010
 

TPR: You’ve published many works of fiction and nonfiction. What we want to know is how a terrific writer like yourself spends his spare time. Reading great books? Memorizing hard words? At art museums? Playing chess?

DG: Jonah and I played nine holes of golf yesterday. We learned several important skill sets. 1) 4 balls are not enough. 2) Though I play hockey and baseball left-handed, I play golf right-handed. Thus we did not need 2 bags of clubs. 3) Do not play golf with the pencil stuck behind your ear. You will lose it and then you can only etch the score into the score card with the tip of a tee.

TPR: Fascinating. I imagine your golf skills are pretty high. What is your handicap?

DG: I have an artificial knee. (Next time we’re going to rent two of those golf cart thingies and race each other on the fairways.)

TPR: Ugh.

DG: Let me finish. Also I was handicapped by the large number of water hazards. I had to wade into one festering swamp up to my knees to retrieve a ball. Jonah thought this was funny. He took some very good video of one my best drives which ends with a large waterspout in the distance. Also, as mentioned above, we were handicapped by a shortage of balls. The last hole we started with only one ball between us which is pretty difficult. Jonah hit his tee shot and then ran over and marked his spot and threw the ball back to me and then I hit my tee shot and marked that and  threw the ball back to him. This makes golf an arduous and time-consuming sport.

TPR: Is there any similarity, in your mind, between golf and writing?

DG: Yes.

TPR: Could you expand on that?

DG: Yes.

TPR:  Now?

DG: In writing as in golf, I seem to hit my drives into the water traps or they end up on the wrong fairway or they get lost altogether. Also both writing and golf depress me.

TPR: We imagine that you thought about writing a lot as you played and that there was considerable intellectual byplay–witty remarks, etc.

DG: Jonah was very witty.  At one point, he observed that what consoled him through the ordeal was the thought that no matter how awful things got he’d still be able to beat Stephen Hawking.

TPR: Er, thank you. That will be quite enough.

DG: So when will this be published?

TPR: Never.