NC Blog Archives | Page 6 of 31

Also in the news…

Dec 132015

The last time we mentioned Dr. Eilish Cleary, wife of NC Senior Editor Gerard Beirne, she was off in Nigeria and then Sierra Leone as a volunteer fighting the Ebola epidemic (you can see a piece from the Irish Times that we linked to here). At that time she was on leave from her post as Medical Officer of Health for the Province of New Brunswick. She returned to Canada and life went on as normal until roughly two weeks ago when she was summarily and without a published reason put on forced leave and then fired. This is a very murky and nasty political mess. The government line is that this is an HR issue and they can’t say a word. But Eilish has always been a smart and vociferous critic of fracking and just when she was fired she was doing research on the herbicide glyphosate which is extensively used in New Brunswick by the vast J. D. Irving Ltd. forestry company and by NB Power.

Eilish is a fine person and a friend, she and Gerry both, and I finally can’t let this one go by without mentioning it to the NC community.

You can track the news stories here. But the Twitter feed is more lively. Just search her name.

So send a little support, some good wishes. And if you tweet this, add the hashtag #eilishcleary.

That kind of night… | 2Cellos play Smells Like Teen Spirit

Dec 072015

Two Croatian guys who play the cello, Luka Šulić and Stjepan Hauser.

From the NC Office of Gross Oversimplification: White people dying off & why

Dec 052015

In August Ann Case and Angus Deaton published an amazing paper called “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century” that has been roiling the waters of American journalism and politics ever since. The surprise discovery is that, while death rates in developed nations around the world are still dropping, in the US among white, non-hispanic (as they say) people between 45 and 54 the death rate is rising. Much of this rise is attributable to self-inflicted harm such as substance abuse and suicide. It’s also the case that white people with less money and education are the ones dying off. Well-off, well-educated white people are still fine.

Debates about what this means have been all over the map. But I just read this piece by Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, which is very smart, reasonable, and suggestive.

Basically, Marshall writes, the die off indicates a radical loss of hope and future due to the fast-shifting demographics and power structure in the United States. The American population is changing; old race and class structures are beginning to crumble (not a moment too soon). The people with the least capacity for living with change are the ones at the bottom of the heretofore privileged class.

To this observation, I only want to add a jot from my own reading; I have always been fascinated by the position of the poor white in American social history (not to diminish the plight of black people and natives but because poor whites are an often overlooked part of the total structure). In the Old South, there were slaves, a tiny fortunate class of well-off planters, and a larger population of poor, non-planter white people who were volatile and difficult. The planter class essentially kept them under control by constructing the black person as a permanent under class and a potential threat. The poor whites were used to control the slaves, their identity and sense of superiority preserved by the thought that no matter how poor they were the black person was beneath them and they had power over him. W.J. Cash in The Mind of the South (1941) called black people the mudsill of Southern white identity, mudsill meaning specifically the foundation.^[1] Walter Johnson, in River of Dark Dreams (2013), offers an up to date version of Cash’s argument, explaining how Southern whites of all classes wrapped the performance of their identity around their slaves and the slave markets.^[2]

This thought structure, it seems to me, has been preserved through to the 21st century in one form or other. But the contradictions of reality are finally beginning to impinge. The rage of the Tea Party and the Trumpite GOP points straight at the symbols of threatened privilege from political correctness to Planned Parenthood to voter registration to American Muslims to the Confederate flag.

Now what’s really interesting to me is the fact that when the left thunders against white privilege it paints all whites as privileged. And they are. But the generalization misses the nuance: a majority of underclass whites have NO PRIVILEGE ASIDE FROM RACE. The black slaves called them poor white trash^[3] and looked down upon them (which only enraged them more). Structural racism has been the ONLY PRIVILEGE these people have enjoyed. And now it’s being taken away from them. Now they must face the fact that they have nothing of their own to fall back on. No resources, no education, no special rights, no reserved place in society, no identity.

Let me say this again. The trouble with accusations of white privilege (and what makes lots of underclass whites angry) is that a large number of white people are not privileged at all, can’t get jobs, have no influence or pull, except that they are white and can FEEL better than people of colour. This is not a real position of privilege; it’s more of a phenomenological sense of superiority. It’s ugly, a fantasy, and self-deceiving, but it makes them feel better about themselves. More or less consciously, this is a perceived superiority, an identity, they don’t want to give up. And it’s all they have.

To fill out the nuance I need to add that white privilege is a fact. Nothing I’ve said explains that away at all. But there are several more or less distinct classes of white people and privilege. There are certainly some well-educated, cosmopolitan white people who are comfortable with change and a multi-racial society. And then there is an oligarchic class of white privilege that really does want to maintain power, influence, and status. This is the equivalent of the planter class in the South prior to the Civil War, a class that used paranoia and racial separation to manipulate and control both black and white underclasses. Then, as now, the white underclass, the violent, impoverished good old boys were/are the truly dangerous crowd. And they are mad. They will not go down quietly.

But wouldn’t it be nice if they got mad at the people who are actually responsible for their manipulation and subjugation (hint: not black people, not Hispanics, not natives, not Muslims, not Jews, not women…). Instead of letting voices of oligarchic privilege orchestrate their anger (as the planter class did in the Old South; think: how did they get all those poor, non-slave-holding, good old boys to fight in the Army of Virginia?), imagine them turning their anger on the appropriate parties and voting them away.

This is not say that poor, ill-educated white people are just plain awful. But history, poverty, and class have dropped an evil cage over their heads that is increasingly difficult to escape. They have fewer avenues for individual betterment and fewer avenues for political expression, at least avenues in the old sense. Change is increasingly not an avenue they embrace; they rant against it and cheer on the demagogues. Under stress, hopeless, their mudsill of identity crumbling, they opt increasingly, on the one hand, for the well worn paths of hatred and resentment, and on the other hand, for the dubious escape of substance abuse and even suicide.

[A somewhat analogous drama has been working itself out in Canada, where the Conservative government, now defeated, ran on neo-liberal, tea partyish, divisive policies, playing up Muslim threats and crime issues (all code for protecting what the then prime minister called “old stock Canadians” which is code, yes, for white Anglo people). When Justin Trudeau was elected, he quickly put together a cabinet that is 50% women and included a man in a wheel chair, Sikhs, native Canadians, and French-Canadians. When asked about the diverse profile of his cabinet, he had two reactions. 1) He wanted the cabinet to look like Canada as whole. 2) It’s 2015. This is a man comfortable with change.]

Read Josh Marshall’s text “You Can’t Understand American Politics Without Reading This Study” here @Talking Points Memo.

A day later Marshall added new charts and figures based on a critique of the original study. The new graphs don’t change the thrust of his essay, but they add fascinating specificity to the original stats. For example, it turns out white women have a death rate rising faster than white men.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

“What Cash develops throughout his book is what he identifies as the enormously hedonistic quality of the Southern people. He sees them as self-satisfied, complacent. They will not be diverted from their smugness, their unwillingness to look critically at what they are, with the result that throughout their history anyone who has attempted to point out to them the extent to which they are being used and manipulated for the benefit of those in power has been unable to get anywhere. Conversely, those who have flattered their self-esteem and confirmed them in their prejudices have been able to manipulate them to vote and act contrary to their own economic and political interests.” W.J. Cash After Fifty Years By Louis D. Rubin in http://www.vqronline.org/essay/wj-cash-after-fifty-years↵
There, at the core of Southern capitalism, Johnson detailed how the masters performed a kind of ritual, conjuring their own whiteness and masculinity as they jockeyed for status at the slave pens. In turn, because so much of the master’s sense of his own self rested on the situation at the auction block, slaves had an opportunity to manipulate their buyers and sellers, and thereby their own fate. While the masters built their identities by performing for one another, the slaves preserved their lives by performing for their buyers—all morbid “advertisements for myself” in the charnel house of Southern consumerism.” Gabriel Winant in “Slave Capitalism” in N+1 Issue 17: The Evil Issue Fall 2013↵
“The term white trash first came into common use in the 1830s as a pejorative used by house slaves against poor whites. In 1833 Fanny Kemble, an English actress visiting Georgia, noted in her journal: “The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as ‘poor white trash'” ” This is from a fascinating discussion of the origins of the phrase at http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/41778/what-is-the-early-recorded-use-of-white-trash-and-has-its-meaning-changed-over↵

Another New Hire! Deirdre Baker Joins Numéro Cinq Masthead as Production Editor

Nov 272015

I dunno. NC’s a monthly magazine. MONTHLY! What were we thinking? What insanity! What a catastrophe! We need help (psychiatric care, drugs, a month in the Barbados, a ventilator, just to begin with).

To alleviate some of the pressure, Deirdre Baker has quietly been acting in support for a few weeks now (learning the ropes) and is ready to ascend to the masthead. She joins the indefatigable Kathy Para as a production editor. We are hoping Deirdre will be her twin, that the two together will propel us to the next level (whatever that is).

Deirdre has experience as a web editor and copy editor. We’ve never had anything remotely like a copy editor here before. Some of you may have noticed. Also Deirdre is from Waterford. She was two grades behind dg in high school, the same class as dg’s brother. This is probably not remotely interesting. DG could go on and on about the odd little geographical clusters within the masthead, but he won’t.

Please welcome Deirdre.

Deirdre Baker is a freelance web and copy editor living in Toronto. She worked for nearly three decades at the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, most recently as manager of the Legislature’s website and intranet. After years of bills, proceedings, debates, policies, and procedures, she is delighted to finally have something interesting to read for work.

Douglas Glover’s essay on Albert Camus now online @ CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries

Nov 192015

This photo of DG (as Existential hero) and the mysterious SE at the pool in Freiburg im Breisgau dates from about the time he first read Camus, 1968, and is included with the essay for context.

My essay on Camus is now up online in its entirety at the CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries.

Here’s what I wrote when the print edition came out a few weeks ago.

Last year, Kim Jernigan, the estimable, indefatigable, generous, and wise former editor of The New Quarterly, emailed me to say she was putting together a special edition of the journal CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries, and would I write an essay for it. The focus, the demand, was for an essay about rereading: pick a book I had read long ago and recently reread, and write an essay about the difference between the readings (and, perhaps, the difference between me then and me now). I leaped to the task, having just taken another look at Camus’s L’Étranger after years of remembering it a certain way, fixed in my mind since my first reading as a freshman at university. I discovered a new and truly remarkable book. I also discovered that, yes, I am only beginning to learn to read.

CNQ is a print magazine with a website attached. Issue number 93 is just out. Here are the opening paragraphs of my essay.

I was eighteen when I read L’Étranger for the first time. I read it in French in a freshman class at York University in Toronto, probably read it in English simultaneously. I think I even wrote an essay about it in French, and that essay might still exist somewhere in a box. Or possibly I dream this, trying to impress myself. I still do remember lines of poems I memorized that year: Mignonne, allons voir si la rose / Qui ce matin avoit desclose / Sa robe de pourpre au Soleil.…

I remember the instructor, a pale, heavy-lidded young man who rarely rose from the chair behind his desk, droning on with his face in a book. He wore a shiny grey suit and a white shirt open at the neck, which I took to be Continental attire. His eyes were invariably puffy and irritated – the word dissipated comes to mind now. I often sat next to a girl named Karen Yolton who was also sleepy, wore black nail polish but nervously tore her cuticles, and whispered scandalous tales of her escapades in a city that was new and alien to me.

I was a little lost and amorphously rebellious and wanted desperately to be an outlaw. I got an F on my first English paper. And perhaps this bled into my reading of Camus, especially Meursault’s carefree sensuality with his lover Marie and his inarticulate defiance of conventional normative language. I remember my teenage outrage at being told to feel what I didn’t feel. That was the thing you noticed in the novel as a young person — the appeal to false authority, the sense of people asking things of you that you didn’t feel and you didn’t feel like giving. Hell, I wanted to sleep with girls and defy authority; Meursault and I were one in my heart, aside from, you know, the small matter of shooting the Arab to death on the beach.

Somehow I always slid over the actual murder any time I summarized the novel to myself, seeing Meursault as a victim of social and linguistic tyranny not a confessed killer. Camus himself famously, and perhaps mischievously, confused his readers by saying, “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” This is neither an accurate description of the French criminal justice system nor the novel itself. Meursault shoots the Arab once, then pauses before pumping another four bullets into his body. Meursault’s interrogation before the examining magistrate turns on this fact, for which he has no explanation. But it shreds any chance of his pleading self-defense.

I was eighteen, as I say, and enamoured with the outlaw girl I met in French class, with her ragged cuticles, cigarette rasp, and freckles, and I had no clear idea what Existentialism was except insofar as I had seen a picture of Camus, looking dour and swarthy with a cigarette in his mouth, and somehow had decided this was the very image of the Existentialist hero, a phrase I now realize is an oxymoron, and I would imagine Karen, Camus/Meursault, and myself becoming really good friends, comrades against the (adult) world.

I adopted Existentialism as an attitude rather than an idea. Though deep down I quickly divined the speciousness of its crucial ethical argument, the basic and unworkable paradox of having to create value by making decisions without recourse to values. In time, I came to realize that Existentialism hadn’t amounted to much, had quickly been abandoned even by Sartre who invented it (he became a Communist, then a Maoist). It was only a moment in a long argument in the West between the language of the gods and the language of a world without a supernatural life support apparatus, a world without gods, a world of mere existence. This argument culminated first with Descartes’ Radical Doubt and later, in the early 20th century, in Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, after which philosophy veered sharply away from metaphysics into various branch lines: phenomenology, language philosophy, critical theory, structuralism, etc. Existentialism, an extreme 20th century application of systematic doubt, is a version of positivism with a concomitant impoverishment in the ethical and emotional sphere; the human aspect of language wilts.

But at first reading, the critical attitude, the defiant rejection of traditional values, melded seamlessly with my hormones and the biases of the hour: late 1960s counter-culture, Vietnam war protests, the Free Speech Movement, and nationalist revivals in both English Canada and in Quebec. Like many people, I read L’Étranger through the zeitgeist. I had lost my sense of humour, and in my yearning for simple positions, it never occurred to me that a novel might be beautiful, funny, tragic, and mysterious all at once.

—Douglas Glover

Read the whole essay at Douglas Glover: Making Friends with a Stranger: Albert Camus’s L’Étranger @ CNQ: Canadian Notes & Querie.

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New Hire: Joseph Schreiber joins the NC masthead as a contributor

Nov 152015

Trumpets up! Drum roll! NC would like to announce its latest discovery/new hire, Joseph Schreiber. Joseph is a writer and photographer living in Calgary. He runs a book blog called Rough Ghosts where he likes to write about experimental/innovative literature and books in translation (in other words, he is a natural fit). We’ve never met except on Twitter (where you meet some very nice people, BTW). You know how this goes: You start to notice someone, he or she likes something you posted, retweets, you say thank you, your thank you gets liked, you follow, mutually follow, warm feelings all around, more retweets, more polite thank yous, you look the person up on Google and my goodness he or she has done some nice writing about this and that, the next time you interact you DM and say, why not write something for me? And you get the new piece and you think, my, aren’t I a good judge of people! I have found another smart, good writer.

Joseph’s first review for NC — of Bohumil Hrabal’s Mr Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult — will appear in the December issue. Watch for it.

New Hire: Mark Sampson Joins Numéro Cinq as a Contributor

Nov 072015

Photo by Mark Raynes Roberts

Mark Sampson is a poet, novelist and critic. He has already written two reviews for the magazine. He’s no stranger here. See his review “Intoxication of Influence: Review of Samuel Archibald’s Arvida” in the magazine’s current issue. Also his “Small-City Chatter: Review of Jeff Bursey’s Mirrors on which dust has fallen” in the August issue. So it’s a great pleasure to announce that he is officially ascending the the masthead at NC with all the rights and perquisites accorded that august and rarefied body (aka gang of scamps and wastrels).

Please welcome him.

Mark Sampson has published two novels – Off Book (Norwood Publishing, 2007) and Sad Peninsula (Dundurn Press, 2014) – and a short story collection, called The Secrets Men Keep (Now or Never Publishing, 2015). He also has a book of poetry, Weathervane, forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in 2016. His stories, poems, essays and book reviews have appeared widely in journals in Canada and the United States. Mark holds a journalism degree from the University of King’s College in Halifax and a master’s degree in English from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he now lives and writes in Toronto.

Out & Back: More Images from the NC Bunker

Nov 022015

Some more pictures from the NC bunker. The light is grand, and, of course, uncapturable. The top couple of images are looking west at sunset. I’m not trying to show you what it really looks like. The effects are meant to exaggerate the light and dark, the patterns thereof. The middle two images are attempts to get the light streaming into the woods from behind. And now that the leaves are mostly gone I can see things I couldn’t before. Camel’s Hump looms in the distance, dark and ominous. The very bottom image is a snow squall coming over the Worcester Mountains in the west, a sign of the future.

Naturally, it’s terrifying and time-consuming to live in such a dramatic environment and I get no work done. What work? Lucy asks.

Making Friends with a Stranger: Albert Camus’ L’Étranger — Douglas Glover @ CNQ

Oct 312015

Last year, Kim Jernigan, the estimable, indefatigable, generous, and wise former editor of The New Quarterly, emailed me to say she was putting together a special edition of the journal CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries, and would I write an essay for it. The focus, the demand, was for an essay about rereading: pick a book I had read long ago and recently reread, and write an essay about the difference between the readings (and, perhaps, the difference between me then and me now). I leaped to the task, having just taken another look at Camus’s L’Étranger after years of remembering it a certain way, fixed in my mind since my first reading as a freshman at university. I discovered a new and truly remarkable book. I also discovered that, yes, I am only beginning to learn to read.

CNQ is a print magazine. Issue number 93 is just out, but you’ll have to order a copy to read it. But here are the opening paragraphs.

This photo of DG (as Existential hero) and the mysterious SE at the pool in Freiburg im Breisgau dates from about the time he first read Camus, 1968, and is included with the essay for context.

—Douglas Glover

Read the entire essay at CNQ 93, which has just been published but not yet linked at the web site.

The issue also includes work from Numéro Cinq contributors Caroline Adderson, Susan Olding, and Jeff Bursey, as well as Chris Arthur, Marc Bell, Kathy Friedman, Jason Guriel, the legendary bookseller David Mason, Peter Sanger, Robin Sarah (who just won a Governor-General’s Award), Carrie Snyder, JC Sutcliffe, Jess Taylor, and Anne Marie Todkill.

Natalie Helberg Wins Robin Blaser Award For Poetry

Oct 292015

Natalie Helberg, Winner of the 5th Annual Robin Blaser Award for Poetry

Natalie Helberg, one of Numéro Cinq‘s stellar band of contributors, has just won the 2015 Robin Blaser Poetry Award for a poem called “dearest Naoko, who said the horseshit is astronomical.” The poem will be published imminently in The Capilano Review 3.27 (Fall 2015). TCR, which administers the Robin Blaser Award, is a venerable West Coast Canadian literary magazine that specializes in experimental art and literature. Robin Blaser was a Colorado-born poet who wisely immigrated to Vancouver in 1966. Before that, he combined with Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan to spawn the so-called San Francisco Renaissance. Later he met Charles Olson and absorbed some of the Black Mountain spirit. In Vancouver, he influenced a broad spectrum of Canadian experimental poetry, a cultural stream that is still vibrant and alive today. In 1994, dg had the pleasure of interviewing Blaser (this is one of those Numéro Cinq coincidences) on his radio show. Some day he will dig out the tape and post the interview.

Natalie Helberg has been a real stalwart at NC over the past couple of years bringing a robust intellectual feminism and respect for experimental literature to the mix. Check out her many reviews, essays and interviews on her archive page here. Read her amazing essay “O Sujet d’Assujettissement (or, Story of O and Foucault)” in our September issue. And watch for her wise interview with Joanna Walsh (@badaude) in our November issue.

In Death and Fiction: Kevin Barry & Louise Manifold

Oct 262015

Uimhir a Cúig was launched back in December 2013 with a collaboration between the celebrated Irish writer Kevin Barry and the Galway artist and film maker Louise Manifold – On Being There and Not Being There; or Cotard’s Delusion, A Case Study featuring text/voiceover by Barry & video by Manifold.

As Barry wrote at the time: “This is a piece I wrote to go with a video and audio installation for an artist called Louise Manifold in Galway based on Cotard’s Delusion — a rare mental state in which you wake up one morning and believe yourself to be dead. It was apparently Cotard’s that inspired Beckett’s The Calmative. Louise filmed the interior of a derelict old cinema in New Jersey — as good a locale to define a state of living death as any!”

It was interesting therefore to happen upon, in the latest issue of The Honest Ulsterman (founded in 1968 by the late James Simmons – recently featured in Uimhir A Cúig), Maeve Mulrennan speaking to Kevin and Louise about their collaboration including details of their more recent work together.

Enjoy the article – while it contains a link to the video including voiceover, the printed text is only available here at Uimhir a Cúig .

—Gerard Beirne

Remember This?

Oct 202015

Always underestimated. Particularly enjoy the unbiased Tory commentary.

And here’s the new narrative:

Pugnacious Trudeau Steps Out of Father’s Shadow and Into Power @ Bloomberg

Schadenfreude

Oct 202015

Schadenfreude: noun (\ˈshä-d^ən-ˌfrȯi-də\) def. What dg feels after last night’s election.

A Quiet Word (2)….

Oct 172015

Having winnowed down the first batch of applicants and found some very nice people to work with, dg, aka the Dark Eminence at NC, still has a window open for a small number of select private writing students.

This time let’s be clear — there were a couple of misunderstandings last time: a) This costs money. Last time, someone thought I was doing it for free. b) It’s very flattering to be asked, but, really, poetry is not my area of expertise. Fiction and nonfiction prose only.

Authors interested in having a ms consult or studying with dg on an ongoing basis, please send particulars (writing background, project description) to editor@old.numerocinqmagazine.com. Don’t send your ms with your initial communication.

Hearing Your Words Through Another’s Voice

Oct 082015

Georgia Bellas is a literary cheerleader. A well-published poet and editor herself, she Tweets and talks about stories, poems, and essays under the guise of Mr. Bear, an anthropomorphic stuffed animal. One of her projects is a weekly radio program on Boston Free Radio, and her most recent edition, “Strange Situations,” featured two of my stories, “Chemistry“ (published right here at NC) and “Hood Ornament” (from Cheap Pop). It was a thrill to hear my words through another’s voice, and I appreciate Georgia’s generosity.

You can find a podcast of the broadcast here:

— Benjamin Woodard

Lost Video Footage of the Late Irish Poet James Simmons Turns Up Unexpectedly

Oct 072015

September’s Uimhir a Cúig, The Poets’ House, Portmuck, featured the poetry of the late James (Jimmy) Simmons – a senior Irish poet, literary critic and songwriter – and his wife Janice Fitzpatrick-Simmmons. To date no video has been available of this great Irish writer and singer/songwriter until early this week when 15 minutes of video, James Simmons – The Lost Footage, turned up unexpectedly on YouTube! It is an extraordinary find and a wonderful memory. The video ends fittingly and memorably with Jimmy and Janice singing together. Have a look below and enjoy. Beneath that you’ll find a recording of Jimmy singing The Ballad of Claudy, a beautiful and tragic lyric account of the bombing of the small town of Claudy in County Derry on the 31st of July 1972 resulting in the deaths of nine people including an 8 year old girl.

—Gerard Beirne

Kevin Barry Short-Listed for the Goldsmiths Prize

Oct 042015

A quick follow-up to my last post on recent comings-and-goings of Uimhir a Cúig featured writers – well the ink was barely dry on the news that Kevin Barry has a new novel, Beatlebone, forthcoming when the folks over at the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize included his yet to-be released novel on their six-title shortlist! My hearthiest congratulations to one of Ireland’s finest writers.

The prize was created to honour “fiction that breaks the mould or opens up new possibilities for the novel form”. Fellow Irish writer Eimear McBride, whose daring debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing won the inaugural prize in 2013, was one of this year’s judges & had this to say: “Beatlebone by Kevin Barry is a storm of a novel – unsettling and mesmerising. It’s formally interesting also, with the novelist choosing to step on and off the page.”

“It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought nine years prior. Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching forties, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to find calm in the comfortable silence of isolation. But when he puts himself in the hands of a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy, what ensues can only be termed a magical mystery tour.”

It almost sounds like a description of the writer himself, “a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy”. Well I, for one, eagerly look forward to the ride.

—Gerard Beirne

Optics: Canada

Oct 032015

Elizabeth May

There’s an election going on in Canada. Last night the leaders held their final debate. There have been something like 543 public debates, of which the public has mostly lost count. There are five major political parties in Canada: the Liberals, the New Democratic Party, the Conservatives, the Bloc Québécois (dedicated to dissolving the country), and the Green Party. The Green Party’s leader happens to be a woman, a very smart, eloquent, quick-witted woman named Elizabeth May.

Now here’s the annoying thing. Elizabeth May was only allowed to participate in one of these debates, the first one, which happened to be hosted by Maclean’s Magazine. May was a standout performer, stole the show.

After that, the leadership debates became nothing but a white guys’ club.

White guys in suits. This is a photo from last night’s debate. The guy in the middle, I think, is the moderator. A cringe-worthy photo if I ever saw one. Image via the Montreal Gazette.

And as debate after debate droned on, the fact that May was missing became more and more apparent, frustrating, and infuriating. WTF! May tried gamely to stay in the game by shadow-tweeting through the debates, but the media has paid less and less attention to her.

Whoever organized these events (several different organizations) let the Bloc Québécois (dedicated to dissolving the country — have I made that clear?) into the club but NOT THE WOMAN. Apparently, Elizabeth May is more of a threat than a party officially dedicated to dismantling the country.

Does this make any sense?

As a side note, I’d like to point out that Lynne Quarmby, who made multiple appearances on the pages of Numéro Cinq in years past as an artist, writer, and curator (you can look her up via the search bubble at the top right of the page), is running for the Green Party in the British Columbia riding of Burnaby North-Seymour.

I write this on impulse, I’ll probably regret it.

dg (annoyed and irritated)

Hospice for Western Civ, Or Decline-Porn

Sep 252015

via Dark Mountain Project

Feeling dyspeptic and spiritually ulcerated this morning at the downturn in Donald Trump’s polling. Very much in tune with the despairing tone of the Dark Mountain Project (post-ecological disaster thought) Manifesto. The DMP is an estimable community (except for when they dress up in fantasy old-timey clothes). The manifesto is sometimes quite lorn and beautiful, one loves being reminded of Robinson Jeffers’s poems, also Joseph Conrad’s general take on the decline of Western civ.

But then, you know, there is a lot of what I call decline-porn these days.

E.g. This teaser para taken from the manifesto sounds terrifying and truthful up to the point when it begins to sound like a Hollywood movie treatment.

But still…

It is, it seems, our civilization’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight — Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story.

Read the rest of the Dark Mountain Project Manifesto here.

Politics Never Better: Conservative candidate Jerry Bance caught in CBC sting urinating in homeowner’s coffee mug

Sep 062015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BdejLG6SU4

Canada is in the midst of a federal election campaign but apparently suffering from Trump envy. Not to be outdone, a Conservative Party (the current ruling party) candidate managed to get himself on film peeing into a client’s coffee cup and pouring it into the kitchen sink.

“I deeply regret my actions on that day,” says the candidate now.

Something NC could not resist.

And there is an absolutely hilarious Twitter thing going on at #peegate.

CBC Television has the video and a story here. But we also have the video above. Click to watch.

Conservative candidate Jerry Bance was caught on CBC-TV’s Marketplace in 2012 urinating in a homeowner’s coffee mug and dumping the contents into the sink.

Bance, the Conservative candidate for the battleground Toronto riding of Scarborough Rouge Park, has been a service technician for the last 25 years. He owns and operates XPress Appliance Service, an appliance repair company in the Greater Toronto Area.

Read and watch the rest @CBC: ‘I deeply regret my actions on that day’

A Quiet Word…

Aug 232015

Douglas Glover has a brief window open for a small number of selected private writing students. Authors interested in having a prose ms consult or studying with dg on an ongoing basis, please send particulars (writing background, project description) to editor@old.numerocinqmagazine.com. Don’t send your ms with your initial communication.

Gosh! Who would have thought…?

Aug 192015

via Science Daily

Gosh! Who would have thought, given how peacefully humans live together today, that our ancient ancestors practiced massacre, torture, and rape, that there are mass graves dating back thousands of years? We certainly have come a long way!

(This is from my morning reads. Couldn’t resist. Suits my mood.)

Besides various types of (bone) injuries caused by arrows, they also found many cases of massive damage to the head, face and teeth, some inflicted on the victims shortly before or after their death. In addition, the attackers systematically broke their victims’ legs, pointing to torture and deliberate mutilation. Only few female remains were found, which further indicates that women were not actively involved in the fighting and that they were possibly abducted by the attackers.

The authors of the study thus presume that such massacres were not isolated occurrences but represented frequent features of the early Central European Neolithic period.

Read the rest at Science Daily: Massacres, torture and mutilation: Extreme violence in neolithic conflicts

Out & Back: The End of Chickens

Aug 112015

There is a tide and time in the lives of chickens, as there is in the lives of men and women. Many of you have watched the rise and fall of the hen population on the farm with amusement and sympathy. But things have gone south. In late spring, a Cooper’s Hawk took the third to last hen. Then the second to last fell sick and died (they were all getting old for chickens). And finally Jean broke her hip a few weeks ago (um, she’s 94), putting an end to plans for repopulation. Chickens are social animals and aren’t happy on their own. While Jean was AWOL in the hospital, I got in touch with Amber Homeniuk, poet (see her poems in the current issue) and Jean’s favourite chicken expert, who offered to rescue ours.

Here we have images and video of the last moments. Amber came prepared with a chicken carrier, also sliced grapes and chicken feed. And you can tell from the video what a gentle and reassuring animal wrangler she is.

Below the video is a collection of images Amber put together of the first moments at the other end of the exchange.

More about chickens than you ever wanted to know, right? But I’ll miss them. Surprising, sociable creatures. Nice to have around the place.

Welcome, Jean’s hen! Images by Amber Homeniuk

Out & Back: NC’s HQ Relocates to Mountain Eyrie

Aug 082015

Due to ongoing death threats, drive-by shootings, kidnappings, lawsuits, federal investigations, vehicle repossessions, and debt collections, the usual fare of literary magazine publication, Numéro Cinq has relocated its headquarters to a hardened bunker somewhere in Vermont. For your edification, a selection of the usual boring Vermont vistas taken from the backdoor, looking west toward Camel’s Hump, the Worcester Mountains, and Mount Mansfield. Also some woodsy shots with dogs. Neighbours report a “small” 300-lb black bear living across the road. DG needs a new camera for this.

The best part is that nobody can find him.

Morning clouds

Very early, about 5am

Evening clouds

Another morning, need better camera

dg and Lucy, very first editorial conference at new HQ

New Hire at Numéro Cinq: Victoria Best Joins the Masthead

Aug 082015

It’s an epic pleasure, a bliss, an intemperate delight, to announce that English author, critic, and editor Victoria Best is ascending to glory, joining the masthead at Numéro Cinq as a Special Correspondent. Her first contribution — a profile of the Scottish novelist Janice Galloway — appears in the current issue. Much more is promised. Under her benign influence, we will be less carping and curmudgeonly. There will be more tea and less Talisker (or maybe the other way around).

Anyway, it’s exciting news.

Victoria Best taught at St John’s College, Cambridge for 13 years. Her books include: Critical Subjectivities; Identity and Narrative in the work of Colette and Marguerite Duras (2000), An Introduction to Twentieth Century French Literature (2002) and, with Martin Crowley, The New Pornographies; Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film (2007). A freelance writer since 2012, she has published essays in Cerise Press and Open Letters Monthly and is currently writing a book on crisis and creativity. She is also co-editor of the quarterly review magazine Shiny New Books (http://shinynewbooks.co.uk).

The Poetics of the Sentence: Examining Gordon Lish’s Literary Legacy @ IJAS

Aug 052015

Gordon Lish photo by bill hayward

Tim Groenland has written a compendious and measured account of Gordon Lish’s editing practice (fascinating images of pages edited — Nabokov, for example) and influence, minus the Raymond Carver hysteria. The essay builds on some of the work we’ve published at NC, including Jason Lucarelli’s ground-breaking texts “The Consecution of Gordon Lish: An Essay on Form and Influence” and “Using Everything: Pattern Making in Gertrude Stein’s ‘Melanctha,’ Robert Walser’s ‘Nothing at All,’ and Sam Lipsyte’s ‘The Wrong Arm’” plus my own audio interview “Causing Damage — Captain Fiction Redivivus: DG Interview With Gordon Lish.” All are quoted in Groenland’s piece, putting NC at the front of the wave of new interest in Lishian studies.

Here’s a teaser from the Groenland essay:

These studies make it clear that Lish was, in certain ways, “the minimalist in the machine” in Carver’s work (Churchwell n.p.) and it is clear that he applied similar techniques to the work of other young writers of the period: Lish was instrumental in the early careers of Barry Hannah and Mary Robison, for example, making him an essential figure in the development of what was variously known as “minimalism”, “Dirty Realism”, and “the new realism” (or, to use Mark McGurl’s recent formulation, “lower-middle-class modernism”) in the early 1980s (32). Michael Hemmingson has shown that Lish edited Barry Hannah’s fiction extensively throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s: he reports, for example, that the manuscript drafts for Hannah’s novel Ray (1980) are “a confusing, sloppy mess” and that Lish’s editing work here involved carefully rearranging sections into narrative coherence, much as Max Perkins did for Thomas Wolfe’s major novels (Hemmingson 490–491; Berg 119–130, 223–228). Lish performed line editing on photocopies of Hannah’s stories taken from the journals in which they had been printed, just as he did with Carver’s work: in several cases, the journal in question was Esquire, meaning that the editor often saw Hannah’s work through several iterations and could refine his vision of the stories in different stages. Hannah’s attitude to these changes was markedly different from Carver’s, and in a 2004 interview with the Paris Review he was unambiguous in his praise:

Gordon Lish was a genius editor. A deep friend and mentor. He taught me how to write short stories. He would cross out everything so there’d be like three lines left, and he would be right . . . This is your good stuff. This is the right rhythm. So I learned to write better short stories under him. (Hannah, “Art of Fiction 184”)

Read the entire essay @ Irish Journal of American Studies.

Elle, The Play, Adapted from Douglas Glover’s Novel @ Theatre Passe Muraille

Jul 152015

Click on the images for more information.

I checked the Theatre Passe Muraille website this morning and found the 2015-2016 season announcement. And at the top of the announcement page there is this lovely poster announcing Severn Thompson’s adaptation of my novel Elle, which, as you all know, won the Governor-General’s Award and was a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award.

This isn’t a surprise, of course. I saw a tiny workshop preview of an opening to the play at a festival in Toronto in August, 2013, and Severn Thompson has been in touch all along. But it is lovely to see the announcement up and the dates set.

Book the date!

Severn Thompson

Money, a Spanking New Story by Douglas Glover @ The Brooklyn Rail

Jul 132015

Here’s another dyspeptic comedy, a cracked romance (there is a dark, dark love angle), from the hand of Douglas Glover, just published in the July-August issue of The Brooklyn Rail. What to expect? Well, the protagonist’s name is Drebel, a combination of dreadful and rebel. Click on the link below the teaser or the cover image above to read the entire piece.

Drebel started when he was fourteen organizing a grocery shopping service for the elderly in his neighborhood. He charged a flat rate per bag, accepted gratuities, and handled the cash exchange between the grocery store and the old people. Once he gained a customer’s trust, he would skim a percentage off the change, especially when the old man or woman couldn’t see that well. He would smile winningly while counting out the money; the old folks loved having a young person to socialize with. Seeing themselves reflected in his eyes, they thought they were smart, plucky oldtimers. Later, he was able to arrange a small quid pro quo from the supermarket manager’s petty cash to steer his customers away from competitors. He never bought bulk or generic. When an elderly party insisted on cheaper brands, Drebel would shrug and say the store was out. He watched for customers whose memory was failing and preyed on them, lifting a hundred dollar bill from the open purse or pocketing an expensive watch from the sideboard. Once he swiped a handful of silver cutlery from a drawer, sweeping it into his courier bag and clanking out the door. But he had trouble fencing the forks and spoons, and he was really only interested in the cash. He couldn’t help becoming fond of the old woman who said she would put him in her will, though he knew she wouldn’t. He didn’t take any offer of warmth or affection personally. He knew the old people were wrapped tight in their narrow lives, narrower and narrower as they grew older. They could be just as devious and mean as the next person. Drebel noticed how the codgers took a perverse pride in trying to shortchange him, arguing over the receipts, shaving the tip. “Here’s another quarter, son. Oh, drat. I thought I had another quarter. Next time?” He didn’t care. All he wanted was his cut, the skim.

Read the rest at The Brooklyn Rail.

You’ve Read Robert Day’s Essay Series Chance Encounters of a Literary Kind on Numéro Cinq; Now You Can Buy the Book

Jul 122015

Numéro Cinq is always an adventure, a game of firsts. The first this, the first that. Now Robert Day‘s essay series Chance Encounters of a Literary Kind is being published (the end of the month) by Serving House Books and that is a first of a high order, the first ever book composed entirely of work that appeared in Numéro Cinq first (you can see I am obsessing on the word “first”). This is a proud moment for the whole community and an inspiration to the many who have contributed regularly and brilliantly to the magazine. I foresee more such NC-inspired books. (Actually, Robert Day’s novel, Let Us Imagine Lose Love, first serialized on NC, will be published in the fall as well, but I will do a separate announcement about that at the appropriate moment. The man is on a roll!)

I wrote an introduction — entitled “Exit, Pursued by a Bear” — for the Serving House Books edition, an honour and a pleasure (he opines) that you all get to share right now.

Exit, pursued by a bear

Robert Day and I met something like 35 years ago in a University of Iowa classroom. He was the teacher, I was a student. He strode into the room and proceeded to the blackboard where he wrote, in large capital letters, from one side of the room to the other: REMEMBER TO TELL THEM THE NOVEL IS A POEM. Outside of class we got to know each other a bit. He once said, pressing the elevator button instead of climbing one slight of stairs, that if God had meant us to use stairs he would not have invented elevators. I was on the cusp of a truly disastrous relationship just then. Day said to me, “Get out of there. For every day you spend with her now, it’ll take you another year to get out of it.” Ask me if I listened to him. One afternoon we spent kicking tires at a Jeep dealership. And one day he talked to me about the novel I was working on, a conference that must have lasted all of 20 minutes but somehow managed to open up the novel and show me its hot, beating heart, which hitherto had failed to reveal itself to me. That was a lesson I did listen to.

Now, many, many, many years later we have congregated again through the magical intervention of the Internet and the online magazine I materialized Numéro Cinq. We hadn’t been in touch in years; we still haven’t actually seen each other since 1981. But we continue to exert gravitational force upon each other’s lives in ways that are astonishing and delightful. The long and short of it is that I began to publish Robert Day. A short story first. Later the story became a novel. I published the entire novel. Then I published a memoir about his mother, a tender, sweet essay about her suspicion of the French, Day’s love of Montaigne, and the summer she died while he was traveling in France.

Then Day invented a new form, the Chance Encounters of a Literary Kind essays, brief, whimsical, sometimes touching, reminiscences about his brushes (often friendships) with literary greatness. The first one he wrote and tried out on me was about the poets John Ashbery and Tadeusz Rozewicz. He didn’t meet them; they met in his mind, and in a conversation with a friend over a kitchen table in Kansas. But the collision was sparkling in its reverent irreverence and the insights spawned in the erotics of juxtaposition. But it was also airy, gossamer-thin, a playful and informal thing, a little jeu d’esprit that took itself not very seriously, yet with flashes of seriousness and wit. Day asked me if I wanted more of these. He projected a series. He made a list. He wrote: “I’d like to keep the “Chance encounters” real–that is, what I stumble into or on to as I lead my literary life; there should be x of them the rest of the year because I poke around in these matters often these days, and, like any fiction writer, stories (and chance literary encounters) happen to me.

I have my favorite moments. Day and Raymond Carver quoting Jack London back and forth to each other. Day’s sweet evocation of the life-philosophy of poet William Stafford, who once advised his young daughter, “Talk to strangers.” This is in an essay that goes on to ponder our current Age of Fear, the prevalence of surveillance, and our willingness to submit to precautions that cheat us of human relations.

I also adore Day’s piece on screenwriter Walter Bernstein, especially Day’s expert interventions in an early script for the movie The Electric Horseman. Day being from Kansas, Bernstein considered him the expert on cowboys and horses. “Somehow Walter had learned the word hackamore (probably from an East Coast riding friend) and so I had to take the hackamore off all horses and put bridles and bits back in their mouths.” And, of course, the “Exit, pursued by a bear” stage direction from The Winter’s Tale that pops up unbidden and like fireworks in Day’s essay on Sarah Palin and going to see a production of Coriolanus.

The buzzword these days for someone who wanders about poking idly into things (and being brilliant and witty about them) is flâneur. But when I read Day’s essays I think, not of Walter Benjamin, but of the waggish early 18th century essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele and the journals they published, The Tatler and The Spectator, whose purpose it was “to enliven morality with wit; and to temper wit with morality.” Day’s essays are intelligent, literate conversation at its best—all too rare these days—written with aplomb in the author’s trademark amiable and self-ironic style.

—Douglas Glover

Slavoj Žižek on Greece: This is a chance for Europe to awaken @ The New Statesman

Jul 092015

From the cradle of democracy, we see a glimmer of defiance in the face of globalization, the IMF, and the so-called rationality of the market. Now if we could just elect Bernie Sanders…

Ah, but this is a story from a day or two ago. This afternoon, Greece looks like caving in.

The No in the Greek referendum was thus much more than a simple choice between two different approaches to economic crisis. The Greek people have heroically resisted the despicable campaign of fear that mobilised the lowest instincts of self-preservation. They have seen through the brutal manipulation of their opponents who falsely presented the referendum as a choice between euro and drachma, between Greece in Europe and “Grexit”.

Their No was a No to the eurocrats who prove daily that they are unable to drag Europe out of its inertia. It was a No to the continuation of business as usual; a desperate cry telling us all that things cannot go on the usual way. It was a decision for authentic political vision against the strange combination of cold technocracy and hot racist clichés about the lazy, free-spending Greeks. It was a rare victory of principles against egotist and ultimately self-destructive opportunism. The No that won was a Yes to full awareness of the crisis in Europe; a Yes to the need to enact a new beginning.

Read the entire essay at The New Statesman

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