Relative Wisdom and Human Contact: The Last Class — Tom Faure

Jun 072015
 

Tom Faure2Tom Faure portrait by 2015 student Emanuel Wickenburg

Below, the lecture I delivered to my high school sophomores in our last class of the year at the French-American School of NY. I tie the fundamental problems explored in our Western Civ curriculum – half history of Western philosophy, half classic literature – to the analogous problems facing this next generation. —Tom Faure

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YOU’VE COME A LONG way this year. You’ve encountered bronze-kneed Greeks (Iliad), old and midnight hags (Macbeth), and white bitches from Bronxville (“Virgins”). You’ve met impetuous gods, impetuous angels, impetuous humans. Tragic humans—many tragic humans. Remember Camus’ words: humans are tragic because they are conscious. We’ve journeyed the stormy waters of the history of Western Civilization, noting with irony that history is written by the victors. History is written by the victors—and all too often these victors have been white men. White men who embody primitive instincts like strength and courage. Cruel men. White men too, though, who possess a relative wisdom.

I use this term “relative wisdom” to assure you of a very important fact of human nature: our virtues and our vices are limited, relative. They are relative to our technology, our social conventions, the knowledge and morals of our time. Our paradigms. More on this later.

So yes, the victors have been white men—not white bitches from Bronxville. But, though we have used the dead white men as the spine of our yearlong conversation about human nature and human nurturing, I hope you have seen how frequently the discussion has turned our attention to the non-dead, the non-white, the non-men. What I’m getting at is that notion we have treated both seriously and laughingly this year: privilege. And those who are underprivileged. Privilege—as I have defined it in my own words: access to capital (economic, political, cultural)—privilege is at the center of today’s paradigm about global capitalism. But you might have a different definition for it. It is not a new notion. As we have analyzed this year, the same concepts keep returning wearing new robes—new names. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are like Frank and Claire Underwood. The Iliad explores the psychological experience of war as do “Redeployment” and “The Point.” The Flood of “Gilgamesh” and the Flood of Oryx and Crake. God of the Bible and Satan of Paradise Lost. Everywhere a search for knowledge, for understanding why we were made. Fallen heroes everywhere. The brashly democratic rogues at FIFA are like Agamemnon and, well, like Vladimir Putin. And like Obama and our American democracy. Oh well. The analogies are everywhere. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. That’s not my line—it’s attributed to Mark Twain, but apparently it wasn’t his line either. History in a nutshell, there. History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. The myths of the epic hero are echoed by the myths of the religious fanatic, are echoed by the myths of the American Dream, are echoed by the myths of the dorm room hacker-ingénue. The morality, logistics, and existential threat of Artificial Intelligence and high-frequency trading are analogues to the morality, logistics, and existential threat of any of the supernatural forces we’ve read about this year—gods, God, witchcraft, the uncanny, the unknowable tricks of nature and fate.

Privilege, it seems, is one of the various threads we could sew through Oryx and Crake, through Gilgamesh, into the Greek Philosophers, around the Saints and the Dantes, up and under Shakespeare, Milton, and the Renaissance, through the existentialists and the contemporary short story writers. Privilege—knowledge, strength, moral righteousness. Access. Our texts invite basic questions: what do we want our leaders to be like? Do we want our leaders to be like us, or better than us? Like gods? What about our gods? Our idols? Do we want our heroes to be made in our image or to transcend it—to whisper of possibilities, to suggest there is more out there? These are some of the questions you will continually return to as you search the world and search within yourselves for a sense of what exactly the hell is going on. Other questions we have asked this year and you will continue to ask—because history does not repeat, but it rhymes: what is the universe? Who are we? How can humans co-exist? Why do we have morality—is it in our nature, as some studies suggest (but have failed to prove), or does it stem from religion, mythology, and other collective responses to what was deemed necessity? A sad truth about most influential people today is that they accept the Hobbesian view that man is biologically bad and so created society to hold this bad nature in check. But a number of the philosophers and writers you studied this year, including the Cynics, Locke, and Rousseau, argue compellingly that man is naturally good—that society is not inherently a regulatory mechanism designed to keep man from his baser nature, but is rather a harmful set of restrictions designed by those in power in order to maintain control. The politicians and scientists who dominate mainstream intellectual discourse do not recognize this. They are a product of Western capitalism, which has a tendency to try to placate the dissenter with the odd reflection: “if it is so, it must be so for a good reason.” Please do not forget the Rousseauian perspective.

Today I want to turn your focus, as I have often done in our classes together, onto you. What will become of you? “The world is your oyster.” That’s an expression suggesting you have limitless potential. The world is within your reach! The world is your oyster. Unfortunately, the oyster has been sitting in the sun a little too long. (That’s a global warming joke.)

The reason I want to bore into you this concept of relative wisdom is because, as I allude to with the oyster gone bad, your generation faces a terrible time. And we have more ways than ever before to learn about how terrible that time is. This global awareness and interconnectedness can trick us into thinking that if we just think BIG enough, we can solve the big problems. It’s very tempting. But I think that, if you think too big, you might despair. You might fall into the black hole Kurt described in “The Point.” So think about RELATIVE success. Because you happen to have been born at a particular time when there is more information available than ever before about how underprivileged most people are. Our world is incoherent: the 1% own 40% of the wealth. Public schools are becoming ghettos for children of the poor. Indeed, the proliferation of private schools in the 20th century is due in no small part to the efforts by Civil Rights Movement reformers to desegregate public schools. White folks—in other words, the people in power—realized the government was going to try to create equal opportunities, so they expanded the small business of elite private schooling and turned it into the de facto segregating mechanism we have today. I’ll make it simple for you: the globe produces enough food for at least, by conservative measures, 9 billion people. There are 7 billion people on the planet. 2 billion people are going hungry. 2 billion people’s worth of extra food. 2 billion people starving. That’s some incoherent math for you.

And yet millions of poor people in the world actually describe themselves in happier terms than the rich do. Yes. It may be a question of ignorance—i.e.: they don’t know better. What do you think? Are they just ignorant? Perhaps they have relative wisdom. They have a moral life as rich as a wealthy Westerner’s, if not more so, yet they do not suffer the angst of the complacent consumer suffering an embarrassment of riches. The sense is that the unhappiest people are those who are physically suffering (which is a significant number of people) and those who, wading through a muck of decadence, have never learned how to actually fight for happiness.

You face a global capitalist economy and a system of geo-political boundaries whose only impartial (nominally impartial—in reality, I don’t know) oversight comes from a weak, castrated United Nations. Socialism is a dirty word for fascism in some parts, democracy is a dirty word for American imperialism in others. We as a country are wealthier than ever and lonelier than ever. Easy consumption and communication further isolate us. Our solution to isolation is to increase our isolation by interacting with digital versions of ourselves, digital and therefore boxed in by the logics of computation. We begin to define ourselves in response to our performances online—our social network avatars take precedence over the spontaneous, creative, freeing capacities that humans possess and computers don’t. You operate in a digitized social network that feeds valuable information to the technocrats of the future. Google, Facebook, and the NSA are compiling enough data to write the next Matrix. Are we still here, or have we finally plugged in too long? The Matrix might be disguised as the next Bible or the Q’ran. Are we the old man who dreamed he was a butterfly? Or are we the butterfly who dreamed of being an old man? I will tell you one thing: I’d rather be a butterfly than a computer algorithm.

Let’s think about our classic texts. On the one hand, technology could have really helped Oedipus out! Imagine if he could have Googled his genetic heritage! Or if he had Twitter! @Oedipus: “Feeling confused. Bad things keep happening around me.” @BlindProphet@Oedipus: “You accidentally killed your Pops. Try not to sleep with your moms now #self-fulfillingprophecy” @Oedipus@BlindProphet: “I see you. (See you. Get it?) Thanks for the heads up. My bad about King Laius.” We might have been robbed of some quality dramatic irony. But more seriously, imagine technology in the hands of Agamemnon. Think of the war shouts he could have delivered if he had data on behavioral trends, your search engine history, your deepest secrets texted to your friend when you thought no one was looking. He would of course exploit that and inspire you and you wouldn’t even know it. Every omen would be a good omen! (Remember his humorous diatribe against Nestor, the seer: “You never give me a good omen!”) Every omen would be good, and it would be evil. You would die for his ego, his empire.

I am frightened by the likelihood that this is close to what goes on now. It’s only paranoia if I’m wrong.

But I’m getting off track. The point is that, yes, it’s fun to think about these things, and joke about the past, and compare Agamemnon to the Most Interesting Man in the World from Dox Equis. By the way, the meme contains its own particularly interesting narrative power and therefore a subtextual dynamic of privilege. But, yes, while you have a series of collective challenges ahead of you (global warming, poverty, inequality, and systematic opacity blocking sound governance) you also have a series of personal challenges you each will face. You are no doubt already aware of some of them. The personal challenges may seem more difficult, though at the same time you may have better luck overcoming your own demons than making the world a better place.

This all comes back to the things we’ve been reading. What is man—this conscious being whose consciousness may be the only thing that makes it unique. Consciousness makes us tragic; it also makes us capable of something computers literally can’t do: think outside the box.

This lecture raises the notion I called “relative wisdom.” I do not want to suggest that everything is relative. Objectivity does exist. This year we have continually explored the difference between absolutes and particulars. 2+2=4. All bachelors are single. Not all bachelors, on the other hand, are happy. It is raining or not raining. Some of our knowledge is true a priori, while some is true conditionally or a posteriori. And SOME of our accepted knowledge is NEITHER true a priori nor a posteriori—it is UNTRUE, we just don’t know it yet ! Yes, some knowledge will be defeated by the progress of knowledge. C’est la vie. The earth is not flat, but it’s also not round—it’s actually an oblong type of flattened sphere, bulging in the middle, like Mr. Faure—kind of like a deflated soccer ball. Somebody call Tom Brady and the NFL. Speaking of corruption.

The point: there is universality. There is objectivity. But you have to accept your own limitations. Relative wisdom. Another concept: the Romantic poet Keats’ negative capability. Recall that this is the ability to accept the fact that some things can’t be immediately known—it is a relinquishing of enormous pressure. It links nicely to Sartre’s call not to give up in the face of radical freedom. A third concept: Nietzsche’s amor fati. Embracing your fate. These all triangulate around a central, primitive emotion: fear of the unknown. I will be the first to tell you I don’t know everything. I don’t even know everything that I DON’T know—that is my personal weakness, my own project. I hope one day to have climbed Plato’s ladder sufficiently to simply understand my own lack of understanding. Yes. You know me fairly well now—you might have noticed my own intellectual confidence. But I actually do possess some humility, I am not all that arrogant—I try to espouse the humility of Socratic self-doubt. I doubt myself. I don’t let others make me doubt myself, I do it myself. And I find that there is so much I don’t know. So step on in. I welcome you to the unknown. It is quite cozy in here.

So let us accept that some things are knowable, and our lives are worth pursuing even if we have stared into the dark abyss of meaninglessness and seen it has a compelling face. Even Nietzsche, to whom we have mistakenly ascribed the label of nihilism, believed life is worth living—in fact, he thought nothing was more essential. What can we do about the problems I’ve mentioned—problems just barely mentioned, and which are just the tip of the iceberg? There are many more problems, universal and personal, you will encounter. I’ve mentioned a few obvious ones. For all this, and in sincere fondness and full acknowledgement that I am just one small, well intentioned but flawed person of thousands whom you encounter in your life journey, I offer you a few parting thoughts, which I won’t go so far as to call lessons:

1) People are generally good.

It’s systems, bureaucracies, institutions, and especially these over the course of time that usually cause the problems. It’s the slow crawl of change. And the essential phenomenological division between individuals and groups—it makes it difficult and frustrating to reconcile individual desires and ideas with the plodding, democratic group’s work. This leads people to frustration and to giving up on the group project. They grab what they can and say “hey, survival of the fittest.” But that doesn’t mean people are bad. Don’t become cynical (small -c) about humans. You can be cynical about humanity, but don’t let that ruin your experience of humans. Humanity =/= Humans.

2) Commune

You need community. The thing about today is you could easily live in a gorgeous expensive luxury New York City apartment and never leave it. You could work from home, shop from home, have sex from home. And this would be your end. Do not hole yourself up inside a world devoid of actual human interaction. I’m not saying this to be anti-social networking. It’s not about that. It’s about the dulling of your senses, your empathy, and your creativity. Empathy, creativity. Because computers are closed circuits. Social networks are not conscious, not tragic, not free. You will be happier if you have people.

3) Relative wisdom.

Maintain an ambition to understand everything and everyone. Accept that you will fail. Accept the unknowableness of being. Accept this even as you study the history of your people and, building on this class, the history of other people. History is written by the victors. But just because history is a construct does not mean we cannot learn from it.

4) There is no perfect painting.

Extending from the previous point: don’t be afraid to fail, period. Not only don’t fear your ignorance. Don’t fear your inevitable failures. Remember what Sartre said. We face—and continually reface—a blank canvas. And we may be tempted to stare at the blank canvas and not add a single brushstroke until we see the endgame, the eventual painting. This is a mistake. You should attack that canvas. We could spend eternity staring at the canvas, unwilling to mark it, searching for the perfect painting. The radical freedom should not render you forlorn. Do not be afraid to mark the canvas. There is no perfect painting.

5) All you need is love.

Not only the Beatles knew this. Some of the most influential engineers and scientists have said the same thing. That the meaning of life is in the ones we love. We have, after all, very little other purpose. Let’s close read that sentence. “All you need is love” sounds like it is defining something via a negative: that ALL you need is love, in other words you need NOTHING except love. But you can read it another way too: “EVERYTHING that you need is love.” Think about that. Everything that you need involves love. Everything you love, you will need. All you love, you need. All you need is love. Woot close reading!

Love is a mystery—we’ve associated it this year with eros, pietas, beatific love, platonic love, familial love…yes, it is probably instinctively as powerful as our fear of the unknown. We biologically need love for the survival of our species. And love has been responsible for the horrors of war and the truth and beauty (another Keats line) of art. Remember Oryx and Crake, the game “Blood and Roses.” Love is a primary motivation for both sides of human history.

I can tell you up front that love is the single greatest thing you will experience, and that on the flip side love will probably cause you great pain. Why? Because human life is short, and the experience of our lives is also myopic, and we make mistakes. We screw up, we hurt people, and, even if we don’t do that, we eventually die. Death is the best case scenario. Grief is the price we pay for love. So yes, love may hurt you. And if it does, then you will be one of the lucky ones—for that pain, though sucky, would be a testament to the greatest feeling a human being can have.

This year I have tried to guide you on your own journey to more critical thinking and reading. I hope the journey has opened your eyes, transported your mind, etc. Maybe even occasionally touched your heart. It has mine. It’s been a pleasure being the Anchises to your Aeneas, the “wise” (hah!) elder who offers the hero knowledge or a weapon so as to obtain the elixir for the hero’s people. I do not take so much credit—you have sought out much more knowledge than I could give. Please, please, keep doing so. Go forth and plunder. Climb the Platonic ladder. Do not forget that the hero’s journey always involves, either directly or indirectly, the seeking of knowledge. Don’t ever let anyone cause you to question yourself. Question yourself. Be well and be good.

—Tom Faure

tom faure

NC Senior Editor RW Gray Launches Epic North American Book Tour / Cafe Crawl

May 202015
 

Entropic FC

R W Gray

After almost five years of empty promises in which Douglas Glover has listed almost every expensive Scotch brand name he could Google, our own NC at the Movies Senior Editor R. W. Gray has had to resort to raising funds for his own expense account and has now published his second collection of short stories,  Entropic (NeWest, May 2015).

Gray will be appearing across North America in support of this collection, so make sure to stop by and see him when he’s in your neck of the woods!

About the Book:

In his second collection of stories, author and filmmaker R.W. Gray once again finds the place where the beautiful, the strange, and the surreal all meet—sometimes meshing harmoniously, sometimes colliding with terrible violence, launching his characters into a redefined reality.

A lovestruck man discovers the secret editing room where his girlfriend erases all her flaws; a massage artist finds that she can alleviate her clients’ pain in more ways than one; a beautiful man invites those who want him to do whatever they wish with his unconscious body; and a gay couple meets what appear to be the younger versions of themselves, and learns that history can indeed repeat itself.

“R. W. Gray writes like nobody else; risky, edgy, erotic, subversive, even macabre short stories, very contemporary, coded with solitude, but reaching for myth, always beautiful and astonishing.” ~ Douglas Glover, author of Savage Love and Elle

“Writing about the body is difficult because bodies are difficult: they are beautiful and awkward, strong and vulnerable, and if they frame the soul, they also house a host of unspiritual urges. Entropic, R.W. Gray’s second collection of short stories after 2010’s Crisp, is all about the body, and Gray hones in on all of these contradictions with writing that is as visceral and demanding as its subject.” ~ Julienne Isaacs, The Winnipeg Review

“Gray’s stories of unfulfilled need dance the line between unnervingly erotic and darkly familiar. Reading Entropic is like peeking at the dark space in your heart, hoping to see a light.” ~ Chelsey Stuyt, Beatroute.ca

Zombie Attack, or the True Story of the Near Demise of NC

May 172015
 

zombie

We continue to experience interruptions at NC. We went down twice yesterday. But as far as I can tell, we’ve been online since some time yesterday afternoon. Right now we are limping along with most of the plugins, as they are called, disabled. Our precious and elegant hovering footnotes are not working, for example.

The language of disruption is fascinating. It has evolved into several (competing) narratives, involving Apaches, zombies, the undead, the defunct, the runaway, the unstoppable, the infinite, and the bad boy. Yes, apparently in server-land, NC was a bad boy yesterday. And you thought technology was devoid of poetry!

The tech person(s) at the hosting company said we had spawned an unsettling number of processes that had somehow not ended correctly and had spun loose from the main program (and thus became “ownerless”) and were continuing to process endlessly, perhaps also reproducing. These took up more and more space on the server memory until it was choked and stopped working. Since they haven’t ended correctly and are ownerless, no one can stop these things, and the only way to get rid of them is to turn off the system. (Jonah says the best way is to turn off and restart the server, but the hosting company won’t do that, as far as I can tell, because we share server space with other sites.) The system software is Apache. So twice yesterday because of NC, the host had to kill Apache, thus making NC a “bad boy.” Yes, this is the way they talk, in an affable non-confrontational way, of course.

These runaway processes (called runaway processes, too) are called “zombie processes” or defunct processes. They are the undead who refuse to be killed and rise in rebellion against the living forces of logic and reason. They create chaos and disruption.

You would not think such things could exist, but they are created in moments of change and conflict (the human metaphor keeps expanding). Somehow I triggered the zombie when I upgraded WordPress three days ago. I also upgraded the database but for some reason that failed (who knows what happened or what the status is now). In itself, that possibly triggered the rise of the zombies. But the tech people (still calling me a bad boy by implication) think one or more of the plugins we use is having a conflict with the new WordPress software. The plugins are subsidiary add-on programs written by freelancers, not WordPress. They provide a myriad of extra functions (like those lovely footnotes; but even the spam filtering software is a plugin). But they are not always kept up to date with the new WordPress upgrades and sometimes they have bugs (another metaphor) of their own that cause conflicts.

Maybe you all know these words, but it’s fun to write them out and own the metaphors that proliferate in the land of technology. We live, still, in a world of myth and fantasy.

Meantime, keep your eyes open and please report anything you see amiss on the site.

dg

The End of the World as We Know It, or Catastrophic Failure at NC

May 152015
 

I dunno. I clicked a button because WordPress wanted me to upgrade. Everything looked good. Then WordPress demanded that I upgrade the database. This mystified me, but I am trusting, gullible and naive in the extreme. You all know this about me. You all wonder why I am the one in charge.

First we got a beautiful error message saying there was an internal server error. And, though the site was up, with menus and buttons down the side, there was no content, just an error message.

With the help of tech support, I tried to revert to before the upgrade. Briefly, there was a window of hope. The site came up. One plugin did not seem to be working. I went to the gym to decompress.

When I came back, the page was blank, as it has remained since. Apparently, there is NO CONTENT. I mean I used the FTP access to look and the content folder was empty. I am now uploading what I hope is a complete backup folder, all the text, formatting and images.

If this doesn’t work, well, it could be the end of a beautiful thing. Who could know how fragile a thing it is?

In the morning, we’ll see where we are. Currently, some of the site is back online, but I don’t trust it, and none of the plugins are working.

dg

Out & Back: Not Writing, Otherwise Engaged

May 132015
 

Just back from a wild swing to the farm to oversee vast excavation and pipe-laying to repair the tenant house (twice burned down, but the original house was the first on the farm; ancient stone foundation dating to before 1850, we also found the remains of what must be the original well) plus swing to Toronto to see Jonah (hiked down the Humber River to the lake and back). Many pictures, no theme, my brain is a scattered mess.

Re. the pipe. We had a line locator come out to locate the old line, which he didn’t manage properly. So we had to follow the old pipe with the backhoe, a lovely serpentine hole with a couple of false tangents and trial digs here and there. Kind of interesting and delicate, especially at the very end when we were sure we were close to the main pipe. These digging photos are of purely documentary interest. No one made a map the last time the pipes were put in, and now I have pictures. Otherwise, I will spare you the details.

dg

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Toronto skyline from the Humber River mouth
Mike with the piece of foundation that fell on him
Creating a hole in the foundation
Brickwork from old well
note the orange subsoil and below it sand
The main one-inch pipe, the Holy Grail
The new pipe hooked into the main pipe.

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Senior Editor R. W. Gray’s Brand New Story Collection Just Published

May 062015
 

R W Gray

Numéro Cinq‘s Senior Editor R. W. Gray (filmmaker, screenwriter, short story writer extraordinaire, also editor of our amazing, unique NC at the Movies series) has just published his second short story collection, Entropic (NeWest, May 2015). Of which I wrote:

“R. W. Gray writes like nobody else; risky, edgy, erotic, subversive, even macabre short stories, very contemporary, coded with solitude, but reaching for myth, always beautiful and astonishing.” —Douglas Glover

You can read the title story — “Crisp” — of his first collection here to get a taste.

Entropic

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Numéro Cinq Special Correspondent Genese Grill has a book of Robert Musil translations just coming out

Apr 302015
 

Genese GrillPhoto by Rebecca Mack

Last September Genese Grill published two short Robert Musil essays she had translated here at NC — Robert Musil: Speed is Witchy! & Intensivism — Translated by Genese Grill. That led to a book offer from Contra Mundum Press. And, Lo! the book is out or nearly out. It’s called Thought Flights. Launch party and reading are in New York at the Zinc Bar May 10, 5pm. Save the date. Book your flights. It’s a big event in Musil-Land, and NC readers were there at the beginning. A great honour for us to have Genese on the masthead.

Cover

Here’s the invite and address:

Please join us for a book launch party and reading of my new translation of Robert Musil’s small prose, Thought Flights (Contra Mundum Press, April, 2015) at the glamorous Zinc Bar, at 82 West Third Street, New York, on Sunday, May 10th, at 5 p.m., accompanied by Stephen Callahan reading from Seities, his collection of prose pieces in progress.

—Genese Grill

And check out Genese Grill’s NC Archive Page for all her contributions to the magazine.

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Yudhishtira’s Dog and the Mountain of Death

Apr 262015
 
dog2

Illustration of Yudhishtira and is companions by Maharaja Mahatab Chand Bahadur (1820 – 1879) – http://www.oldindianarts.in/2011/10/illustrations-from-barddhaman-edition.html via Wikipedia

This morning, after reading the Towers of Silence piece from yesterday, in which mythic dogs came into the picture, A. Anumpama wrote and said, “Do you know the story about Yudhishtira’s dog and the mountain of death at the end of the Mahabharata?” Of course, I didn’t, but I do now. How could I resist an invitation with the words “dog” and “mountain of death?”

The story is in the Mahaprasthanika parva, the seventeenth of the eighteen books of the Mahabharata. Yudhishtira has come to the end of his string and he and his companions set off on their last journey toward death in the mountains accompanied by a dog. The companions fall away (die) one by one until only the righteous Yudhishtira reaches the high pass at the top amid the snow and wind. Arjuna meets him there and tells him to hop into the chariot for the last leg of his journey to Heaven. Yudhishtira calls up his dog, but Arjuna says he can’t take the dog to Heaven. Yudhishtira is mystified, but in the end he steps down from the chariot, saying he must be true to his good and faithful companion even if it means giving up on the joys of Heaven. As I read this (via the link Anu sent me) my aged dog was hunkered up against me, her head under my elbow. So we had a mythic moment together.

The story goes on. As soon as Yudhishtira makes his choice to stay with the dog, the dog turns into a god and rewards Yudhishtira by taking him straight to Heaven. But it’s a strange sort of Heaven, and the good people Yudhishtira remembers aren’t there. I’ll let you read the rest. It’s a great story.

dog

via Wikipedia

You can find many versions, translations or reconstituted, on the web. Here is a bit of the one Anu sent me.

And suddenly, there was Indra, in his chariot, offering Yudhishtira a hand up.

“Welcome, Yudhishtira, hero. You have won to my heaven. Come aboard and I will take you there.”

Yudhishtira whistled for his dog.

“Hold on.” Indra smiled fondly at Yudhishtira and wagged his finger. “No dogs in heaven.”

“He is a faithful and true companion,” said Yudhishtira.

“Sorry, old chap. Just gods and human heros in my heaven.”

“If he cannot come with me, then I will stay with him.” And Yudhishtira stepped down from Indra’s chariot.

“But, Yudhishtira, old warrior, great king. You are the great hero of a great story. Your place is in my heaven.”

“My place is where dharma is constant. This dog has been companion, protector, friend. I will stay near him.”

“Yudhishtira,” said the dog as he transformed into the embodied form of god Dharma. “My son, I have been with you through your long sad journey, and I am well pleased with your devotion. Draupadi and your brothers await you in Indra’s heaven; they have all left their bodies behind. You alone, great king, alone in all the ages, will enter Indra’s heaven in this body.”

But Indra’s heaven was not quite what Yudhishtira had expected. Duryodhana was there, for one thing, in a place of prominence and honor, surrounded by luxury. And there was Duhsasana, along with the 98 other sons of King Dhritarashtra, and the deceitful Sakuni, all in noble places, partaking of Indra’s glory. Karna was not there, nor Dhritarashtra, nor Drona; there was no one to be seen who had held Yudhishtira’s love and admiration on earth.

“Where are my brothers,” demanded Yudhishtira. “Where is the sinless Draupadi?”

There was an embarrassed silence. Then Indra spoke. “They are elsewhere, Yudhishtira. Now you must try to be friends with Duryodhana, and put the past behind you.”

“Take me to my brothers.”

Read the rest here.

And here is a picture of my dog, for the sake of context. Clearly, she is of the gods.

Lucy dubious

dg

When I am gone, lay me in a Tower of Silence, and let the birds carry me into the sky

Apr 252015
 

Capture

A Parsi friend of mine was talking about a recent death in the family and casually mentioned something about the custom of boxing up bodies and flying them back to Mumbai for exposure in the Tower of Silence. My ears pricked up instantaneously at the phrase Tower of Silence, which seemed at once poetic, terrible, awe-inspiring, mysterious and uncanny. It seemed like a phrase out of fairy tales, not something you hear in a phone conversation with a friend on an April afternoon in 2015. It seemed I had rocketed back into ancient things, when the world was magic and the great god Pan was not dead, or, as Isak Dinesen once wrote, when we lived on an the earth not yet “abandoned by angels.”

Tower of Silence2

So I did the usual reading tour of the Internet. The Parsi are Indian descendents of the once great Zoroastrian religion centred in what is now Iran. There are Towers of Silence in Iran as well as India. Funerary customs are as diverse as the human race. At some point, the Zoroastrians began the practice of exposing their dead to vultures and the elements in circular towers built on hills in lonely desert places. A particular design and rituals evolved around these structures, based on the poetic idea that death was a triumph of evil over good, a rushing in of the death demons that made the body ritually unclean. It had to be got rid of as quickly as possible and not touched except by ritual bearers. The practice of using Towers of Silence has died out in Iran but still exists in India, though modern chemical use in agriculture has almost cleaned out the vulture population. Vultures used to be able to pick a corpse to the bones in a couple of hours.

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Funerary customs are fascinating and excarnation is not uncommon. Tibetan Buddhists are famous for their Sky Burials. The North American Comanche used to expose their dead on platforms. Several Native American cultures I am aware of practiced some form of let-rot-and-clean-the-bones ritual, with reinterment after in a charnel house (Natchez) or ossuary (Huron). And our own practice of cleaning out the body, infusing it with preservatives, dressing it in nice clothes, and burying it in a box can seem, in some views, pretty icky. (Let us not mention the contemporary industrial solution: cremation in a furnace.) Face it: Many contemporary cultures have lost the ability to make dramatic symbolic gestures toward the cosmic mysteries that enclose us.

The Wikipedia article on Towers of Silence is full of poetry, words in languages I do not know but wish I did: dakhma, cheel ghar, astodan, doongerwadi. It leads to a great 1928 article “The Funeral Ceremonies of the Parsees: Their origin and explanation” by Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, wherein he writes things like  (this is in the footnotes — I am a footnote fetishist: the poetry is in the footnotes — also I am aware that dogs  are tangential to the subject at hand, excarnation customs among the Parsi, but the words are beautiful and there is mention of a spotted dog):

It appears from the customs of several ancient nations that the “dog” played a prominent part in the funeral ceremonies of many ancient nations.

(a) As said above, as in the Avesta so in the Vedas, we have a mention of two four-eyed dogs guarding the way to the abode of Yama, the ruler of the spirits of the dead. (b) Among the ancient Romans the Lares of the departed virtuous were represented in pictures with a dog tied to their legs. This was intended to show that as the dogs watched faithfully at the door of their masters, so the Lares watched the interests of the family to which they belonged. (c) The people of the West Indies have a notion among them of the dogs accompanying the departed dead. Compare the following lines of Pope:–

“Even the poor Indian whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds or hears him in the wind

* * * * * *

thinks, admitted to you equal sky
His faithful dog shall bear him company.”

As to the purpose, why the “sagdid” is performed, several reasons are assigned: (a) Some say that the spotted dog was a species of dog that possessed the characteristic of staring steadily at a body, if life was altogether extinct, and of not looking to him at all, if life was not altogether extinct. Thus the old Persians ascertained by the “sagdid”, if the life was really extinct. (b) Others, as Dr. Haug says, attributed the “sagdid” to some magnetic influence in the eyes of the dog. (c) Others again connected the “Sag-did” of a dog, which, of all animals, is the most faithful to his master, with the idea of loyalty and gratitude that must exist between the living and deceased departed ones. (d) Others considered a dog to be symbolical of the destruction of moral passions. Death put an end to all moral passions so the presence of a dog near the dead body emphasized that idea. Cf. Dante’s Divine Comedy (Hell. C.I. 94-102. Dr. Plumpter.)

“For that fell beast whose Spite thou wailest o’er,
Lets no man onward pass along her way.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Many the creatures are that with her wed,
And will be more until the Greyhound come,
Who with sharp agony shall smite her dead.”

Here the Greyhound is considered as the deliverer of Italy. He is the symbol of the destroyer of the passions of sensual enjoyment, pride and avarice which are represented by the leopard, the lion and the wolf.

tower of silence10

But the best  piece I found was in the amazing Italian-Parisian online architecture and culture magazine Socks, which ran an essay and photos on the Towers of Silence in 2012, upon which I cannot improve in the 20 minutes I have allotted myself for writing this.

Zoroastrianism traditionally conceives death as a temporary triumph of evil over good: rushing into the body, the corpse demon contaminates everything it comes in contact with.

The flesh of a dead body being so unclean it can pollute everything, a set of rules had to be created in order to dispose of the corpse as safely as possible: as the natural elements of earth, air and water are sacred, the corpses were not to be thrown upon the water or interred. Cremation was also forbidden, as fire is the direct -purest- emanation of the divinity.

Hence a complex ritual was developed, in which the corpses would be eventually exposed to birds of prey and thus devoured, in a final act of charity.

After death every division of class and wealth disappeared, for all deceased would be treated equally.

A proper architectural typology was invented solely for the purpose of burial’s ritual: transported in the desert by nasellars (traditional zoroastrian pallbearers), the bodies of the deceased were then carted onto sandstone, forbidding hills, to be eventually disposed on cylindrical constructions called Towers of Silence.

Read the rest at Socks here.

dg

Replica Art and the Paradox of Art Destroyed by Watching

Apr 242015
 

Chauvet lion

Something stunningly poignant, modern, and significant about the fact that some of the greatest and earliest human art work can only be viewed in the form of a replica. In France, a replica of the Chauvet cave and paintings has been built so people can see what the paintings looked like in situ without destroying the actual art, which has existed for tens of thousands of years in darkness but is threatened by people entering the cave.

In discovery is the beginning of destruction.

The real thing cannot be seen for, in viewing it, we destroy it.

Art that is destroyed by watching.

To know is to demolish.

To experience is to commence the decomposition of reality.

What is true can neither be approached nor referenced except at a sterile distance.

We are not threatened by experience, but what we experience is in deep peril from us.

Impermanence.

Consciousness is the production of replicas of the real.

We live in a reproduced universe.

Do you really want to go half-way around the world to look at fake art?

Do you really want to live in a fake world?

Think about it.

—Douglas Glover

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPoGk1dUWiI

And here is a clip from Werner Herzog’s film  Cave of Dreams.

 

More Evidence of Prescience: Anthony Doerr Wins the Pulitzer Prize — Read Numéro Cinq’s Interview

Apr 202015
 

Anthony Doerr

Just announced. Anthony Doerr has won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for All the Light We Cannot See. Once again the editors at NC were prescient. Here you can read Richard Farrell’s delightful 2012 interview with Doerr.

My earliest influence was maybe C.S. Lewis. I remember my mother reading The Chronicles of Narnia to me and my brothers; I was probably eight. And I remember asking her: “How did they make this book? How did they invent Narnia?” And she’d always say, “It was just one person who wrote these books. And he’s dead now.”

Dead! What? Dead people could tell stories that still held power over the living? I had always had a sense that books were like oranges on a tree, that they pre-existed in the world, and humans came along and plucked them. But now my mother was saying people made them. One person, one book at a time. That was a revelation: One weird old guy could use language, the cheapest of materials, and conjure whole worlds with it? Then he could die and those worlds could still hold sway?

via Manufacturing Dreams: An Interview with Anthony Doerr — Richard Farrell » Numéro Cinq.

Out & Back: The Farm — Absolutely Nothing Literary Here

Apr 192015
 

Images from the farm on Ontario, just these past few days. Lucy at the beginning, Jean at the end (93). In between, well, I got a bit obsessed with the clash of the industrial and the natural, which is modern agriculture. So I have three images of a Norway spruce windbreak, clouds spiraling up beyond them and a jet contrail. Then a series of images of tractor ruts in a rye field. I fell in love with the annual manure pile, never has a manure pile seemed so, well, epic. And finally we’re mounding the fields in preparation for planting. This is done with a machine, of course, that creates lovely symmetrical rectangular slices in the soil. The images are all variations. I like that, the repetition of the image with some slight variation.

The last time on the farm (Christmas) I had to dig out the risers to the septic tank to release the guard grid that had been improperly installed so that I could get at the plastic filter and clean it. This time a new experience: The tenant house has been without water since early March, frozen pipes we thought. I got the pipes to the garden hydrant turned on last week and then with the help and guidance of a neighbour ran a hose from the garden hydrant to the tenant house and attached it to the outside tap on the house wall, turned on the outside tap and ran water from the garden hydrant into the tenant house. I didn’t invent this, did not believe it would work, but it did. Low pressure but it works. Next we have to dig up the pipe to the house, which is clearly not frozen but blocked irretrievably.

I also spent a lot of time lying in the mud and ice on my stomach jamming a log up the irrigation pond overflow culvert, which has been partly blocked for a couple of years. This is a pilgrimage I make every trip to the farm. I have my own special log and I walk back to the pond, looking for arrowheads along a knoll where Early Woodland natives used to camp, and lie down with my face almost in the pond and run the log into the culvert. It is a zen thing to do and never works (also has a certain sub-erotic overtone, which I don’t really want to get into). Then Lucy goes for a swim, whimpering for me to throw a stick. This year there was still ice along the margins of the pond, but she still went in. We share this tendency to self-destructive obsession.

dg

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A Dancer at the World’s Rim | Review of Ray A. Youngbear’s Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives — Douglas Glover

Apr 182015
 

Ray A Youngbear and son

Taiaiake Alfred just wrote to say he’d discovered by chance that I had written a review of one of his favourite novels, Black Eagle Child by Ray A. Youngbear. Taiaiake sent me the link, which I had lost track of, which gave me a chance to waste half-an-hour adding the review to NC. This review is important in my own development as a writer. It appeared in April 1992 in the Los Angeles Times. I was working out the aesthetic and form for my novel The Life and Times of Captain N. So there was a crucial influence, a cross-pollination. Black Eagle Child itself was absolutely fascinating and mysterious.

dg

Cover

BLACK EAGLE CHILD: The Facepaint Narratives
Ray A. Young Bear
First published by University of Iowa Press

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Albert E. Stone, in his foreword to “Black Eagle Child,” calls this book an experimental autobiography. But the reader quickly discovers two things: This tale is not factual–it is full of composite characters and fictionalized events–and it is only tangentially about its author, the Mesquakie Indian poet Ray A. Young Bear, who eventually disappears behind a series of changed names, false leads, alter egos, digressions, epi-stories and myths.

Young Bear is a poet who makes his aesthetic home between two worlds, the native and the non-native. He is a dancer at the world’s rim–a fan dancer, for he conceals as much as he reveals of himself and his people. Concealment is a key aesthetic principle, for as Young Bear constantly reiterates, there is a price to be paid for telling tribal secrets to outsiders. In his afterword to “Black Eagle Child,” he recollects how his grandmother taught him that “there were things I could not write about.”

As an Indian who sets himself up as an author in the white sense, Young Bear is freighted with a terrible dual responsibility: to satisfy his readers that he is being truthful and informative, and to satisfy his personal and tribal need for secrecy. He must invent a new form, the nature of which is duality, a form that is never straightforward, yet full of implication. It will be poetic, but it will not fulfill every demand of traditional poetic genre. It will always be surprising; it may not end. A code, in other words, that only the right people can break.

In his first book of poems, “Winter of the Salamander” (1980), a much younger Ray Young Bear gave a hint of forms to come:

What do you do when
there is a man
who represents your dreams
who goes talking and appraising
his deeds
and for no reason he stops
and says something new
there is a chance
for those who want to learn
but not for those who feel it
hard and difficult

For “those who want to learn,” “Black Eagle Child” is a kind of non-autobiographical Zen treasure trove of non-information about Mesquakie Indians and Young Bear. It is ostensibly a poetic Bildungsroman centered around Edgar Bearchild, a Mesquakie boy from the Black Eagle Child Settlement in central Iowa (Young Bear is from the Mesquakie settlement near Tama, Iowa). It begins with Edgar in grade eight in 1965 and follows him through his career as the community’s youngest treatable alcoholic. There’s a brief stint at a prestigious liberal-arts college in California, then back to Iowa, where he becomes a successful poet haunted by UFOs. He lives off grants from the fictional Maecenas Foundation (Young Bear received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1970s).

This process of becoming a writer fascinates Edgar, who sees himself wrapped in a paper cocoon, changing, altering, saving himself from the usual fates of a reservation Indian. Learning to translate between worlds redeems him, though with redemption comes alienation and survivor’s guilt, since he must separate himself from the normal communal life of his people.

Twinned with Edgar (like the twin boys of Indian legend) is the more adventurous and traditional Ted Facepaint, who follows the tenets of the Well-Off Man Church, a fictional Mesquakie affiliate of the mushroom-eating, pan-Indian Native American Church. (This, by the way, is Young Bear being highly elusive. Rather than reveal traditional Mesquakie rites and legends, he describes a modern cultural intrusion in which he has no stake. Here he seems to reveal without revealing anything.)

Like Edgar, Facepaint also heads west to college. He drops out and hitchhikes across America, trying to reach some romanticized accommodation with this alien white country, only to be beaten and robbed along the way. Back in Iowa, he continues his frenetic drinking and eventually dies—metaphorically, at least—stabbed repeatedly with a screwdriver by rogue Mesquakies nicknamed the Hyenas. He is then mystically transported to Orion, the sacred constellation of the Well-Off Man Church. “Black Eagle Child” closes, however, with Facepaint’s resurrection at the hands of Rosie Grassleggings, an immensely obese native healer.

Young Bear knits together these two narrative lines with a complex pattern of imagery. Red-haired and red-hatted people relate to the red-capped hallucinogenic mushrooms, and also to the red-haired man of some native legends. White rabbits recall the Great Hare, Nanebojo, an Algonquin culture hero, who is often paired with Jesus Christ in modern native myth.

This is the bare skeleton of Young Bear’s code, the vastly complex and engaging system the reader has to learn to read. Only superficially chaotic, his narrative bears all the indications of a sophisticated and cunning literary intelligence. Young Bear has a novelist’s eye for precise social and atmospheric detail.

In his afterword, the author himself calls his book a collage, but whatever you call it, “Black Eagle Child” is an example of the new blood flowing back into the hardened arteries of Anglo-American literature from the margins–from the formerly colonized, enslaved and defeated peoples who must, inevitably, change us as we have changed them.

April 12, 1992|Douglas Glover | Glover’s most recent book, “A Guide to Animal Behavior,” was nominated for the 1991 Governor-General’s Award for Fiction, Canada’s highest literary prize.

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NC Housekeeping Notes

Apr 112015
 

NC Logo

1) I’m experimenting with running a Twitter feed down the right hand side of the page underneath the navigation buttons. I’m using a Jetpack plugin, which doesn’t give a lot of aesthetic options. I can, though, adjust the number of tweets displayed. And you have to refresh the page to refresh the Twitter feed. I have  resisted doing this in the past so as to keep the page clean and free of distractions, so this is just a trial. Let us know what you think.

Right now I am displaying only the Numéro Cinq Twitter feed. But I could add in a selection of NC writers and editors to make for a more wide-ranging feed.

2) I got a very nice note on Facebook earlier this week, complimenting us on our Index (accessed via the dropdown menu on the navigation bar at the top of the page). The writer is a professional indexer and really liked what we have done, wanted to know who had constructed it, etc. Of course, I shot off a lengthy response because this is a subject close to my heart. I’ve built that index up from the very beginning because it’s always been my opinion that most online sites have a serious drawback, a failure to provide readers with a logical and efficient way to access the archives. After the front page, writers and artists disappear into the gaping mouth of the archives rarely to re-emerge. At NC, we keep each piece on the front page for THREE months (current issue and two back issues). And each item is also cross-indexed by category (fiction, nonfiction, reviews, etc.) and by year and issue (under the Back Issues button on the nav bar). People who appear multiple times on NC usually get their very own NC Archive Page as well. And I use the slider at the top of the page to feature work from the archives each month. One of the great things about publishing in NC is that you NEVER DISAPPEAR.

3) You can see I have time on my hands.

dg

Another Numéro Cinq Author Tapped For Best Canadian Poetry | Lise Gaston

Apr 052015
 

Lise Gaston Lise Gaston

Lise Gaston just got word that her poem “Les Rues: Montreal” published in our December 2014 issue has been picked for inclusion in Best Canadian Poetry 2015. This is the fourth time a poem published on NC has made the anthology (Sharon McCartney got the nod twice and Amanda Jernigan once).

You can read Lise’s poems here:

Grave & Vital Nonsense: Poems — Lise Gaston

 

A Noir Romance: A New Douglas Glover Story in the Windsor Review

Mar 272015
 

Windsor Review2

A new little story of mine, a jeu d’esprit, a micro-story (a three-pager), called “A Noir Romance” has just come out in the fall issue 2014 (yes, a bit late) of the Windsor Review, a special Alice Munro issue. This is a print magazine, so you’ll have to go buy a copy to read the whole story. This issue of WR is blessed with work from several other Numéro Cinq bad girls and boys, including Marty Gervais, Karen Mulhallen, John B. Lee, and Amber Homeniuk.

Here’s a bit from the story, the opening lines.

“The short one, you say?”

“Yes. I believe that’s him. He had a mask. It was dark in my bedroom.”

“He had a mask.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But it was definitely the short one, you say?”

“He had a mask, but he was short just like the one in the middle.”

“The short one.”

“He had that look, you know. Short. I was wearing my nightie and putting cold cream on.”

“In the dark.”

“Yes. I’m really rather sure it’s the short one. He looks like a man who would steal up on women in their bedrooms.”

“Because?”

“Well, he has that look. Short. Shortness. Like the one in my bedroom.”

“Ma’am, the short one is an officer from the precinct. He picked you up and drove you here.”

“No. I would have recognized him.”

“He’s a police officer.”

“No, sir. It’s the man in my bedroom.”

“Because he’s short.”

—from “A Noir Romance” by Douglas Glover @ the Windsor Review

Michel Foucault’s Lecture on the Culture of the Self

Mar 222015
 

Foucault

Some time back we ran a couple of introductory lectures on the philosophy of Michel Foucault and here we are presenting one of his lectures, on the nature of the human self, with a lengthy question and answer period after. Something dark and revealing here about the nature of the self.  We are used to talking about power relations and seeing ourselves as either perpetrators or victims in the struggle for priority. Foucault problematizes the self (itself) by suggesting that we internalize the power relations and are subdued by them. What is a poor self to do when it has internalized the structure of its own enslavement? Makes you think. Who am I anyway?

dg

Here’s helpful bit of context from the European Graduate School biography of Foucault to situate you going into the lecture.

During the later years of his professorship at the Collège de France he started writing The History of Sexuality, a major project he would never finish because of his untimely death. The first volume of the work was published in 1976 in French and the English version would follow two years later, entitled The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. However, the French title was much more indicative of what Foucault was after: “Histoire de la sexualité, tome 1 : La Volonté de savoir”, which translates as The History of Sexuality Volume I: The Will to Knowledge (a newer edition is simply named The Will to Knowledge). It is an amazingly prominent work, maybe even his most influential. The main thesis of the work is to be found in part two of the book called “The Repressive Hypothesis” where Foucault articulately explains that in spite of the generally accepted belief that we have been sexually repressed, the notion of sexual repression cannot be separated from the concomitant imperative for us to talk about sex more than ever before. Indeed, according to Foucault it follows in the name of liberating so-called innate tendencies, certain behaviors are actually produced. With the contention that modern power operates to produce the very behaviors it targets, Foucault attacks here again the notion of power as repression of something that is already in place. Such new notion of power has been and continues to be incredibly influential in various fields.

His last two books, the second and third volumes of the history of sexuality research, entitled The Uses of Pleasure and The Care of the Self respectively, both relate the Western subject’s understanding of ourselves as sexual beings to our moral and ethical lives. He traces the history of the construction of subjectivity through the analyses of ancient texts. In The Uses of Pleasure he looks at pleasure in the Greek social system as a play of power in social relations; pleasure is derived from the social position realized through sexuality. Later, in Christianity, pleasure was to become linked with illicit conduct and transgression. In The Care of the Self, Foucault looks at the Greeks’ systems of rules that were applied to sexual and other forms of social conduct. He analyses how the rules of self-control allow access to pleasure and to truth. In this structure of a subject’s life dominated by the care for the self, excess becomes the danger, rather than the Christian deviance.

What Foucault made from delving into these ancient texts, is the notion of an ethics to do with one’s relation to one’s self. Indeed the constitution of the self is the overarching question for Foucault at the end of his life. Yet the point for him was not to present a new ethics. Rather, it was the possibility for new analyses that focused on subjectivity itself. Foucault became very interested in the way subjectivity is constructed and especially how subjects produce themselves vis-à-vis truth.

The Ribald, Refreshing, Mischievous Diary of Charles Henri Ford (Edited by Lynne Tillman) @ This Recording

Mar 202015
 

I was noodling around in my favourite links sites (check out our links page for some of the best sites on the Internet) and discovered these excerpts from Charles Henri Ford‘s diary, Water From A Bucket: A Diary 1948-1957, in This Recording. First I noticed that Lynne Tillman had edited the book and then I read the excerpt and then I ordered the book and have been happily reading through it, restraining myself from racing right through it, vaguely depressed that there isn’t more. I haven’t had this much fun since reading Witold Gombrowicz’s diaries. But Ford is sexually frank in ways that Gombrowicz was not (you had to read between the lines) and one is delighted and liberated in his audacity. His style is precise, aphoristic, chiselled. You can dwell on sentences. Ford knew everyone in the 40s and 50s and before. He was Djuna Barnes’ friend, knew Gertrude Stein who advised him on his love life. The Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew was his lifelong love (but that didn’t stop him from chasing shepherds, delivery boys, US Navy personnel, men in the restrooms of Paris, etc.). And he knew Lynne Tillman who did him the service of helping to bring this book into print.

dg

—

On arrival in Weston Friday before tea, Bert jumped into his Levis, looking more sexy than ever, and we three took a walk. Vorisoff, our neighbor, came to dinner. Shortly after dinner Bert and I went upstairs, he wanted to look at the pornographic playcards and since there was nothing else to do he suggested we go to bed so I went back downstairs and said goodnight to Vorisoff and Pavlik. Bert was going to spend the night in my bed. “Fuck me between the legs,” he said — and hollered when I hit the piles which seem to be practically out — because the next afternoon even my tongue hurt them (I had taken him in his bathrobe downstairs and washed his ass for him.) So after we had both come (I sucked him after shooting between his legs — I can see him now in bed lifting one leg to wipe the come off his crotch with the towel I tossed him), he said he was hungry so we had scrambled eggs, then he said he felt “jumpy,” that he wanted to take a walk and wanted me to get dressed and go with him. We had had Scotch after we got back. I shall make a list of “What’s beautiful about Bert.” Not now — it’s too long.

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Last evening before bedtime Pavlik had another of his crises, in which he unloaded his feelings about our relationship. The most terrible thing he said was that he had the feeling I was waiting for him to die and that when he did die I wouldn’t shed a tear: “Americans are the hardest people in the world…”

He said that when I was away from the apartment, then he “bloomed,” that there were other people who “calmed” him when he was nervous, but that I drained him — “I feel your pulling, pulling all the time, that’s why you look so young, you age me, if you were to stay away from me one year you wouldn’t look like you do now, like your portrait, just look in the mirror after one year, you’ll see!”

I told him, “If we are only staying together out of convenience and cowardice, then it’s pathetic, a break should be made…”

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The voice of Leonor over phone – soft, and low pitched, very seductive.

I like the idea of liking girls and going to bed with them but I’m afraid I’m much too conditioned by boy-loving. On the boat, in the group Tanny-Bobby-Betty (latter a dark skinned ballerina traveling with Tanny), it was always Bobby who set off the sparks and whom I liked to look at, touch, listen to — I’m made that way, that’s all.

via In Which We Are Going To Love Living In Paris – Home – This Recording.

Ford cover

Accounting for Robert Wrigley

Mar 152015
 

RW-with-trout (1)

In truth, there is no accounting for Robert Wrigley.  No explanation necessary. The mark of all true great poets. His poems account for themselves. I was thrilled to include him recently in Numéro Cinq — he was generous enough to share some new poems. Well, if you are like me, that was not enough; and so I am adding a few links to other recent poems and an interview. No, really, no need to thank me. Thank Mr. Wrigley instead and the wonderful publications that, against the odds, somehow survive (catch and release) and continue to promote great literature.

Split Magazine

Terrain

Bark  lovechild of Willow Springs

—Gerard Beirne

Out & Back: Just a bit OCD

Mar 132015
 

Okay, so I got a little obsessed with the trees and shadow patterns. These were taken yesterday, again along the Hudson. Cold after two warm days, the trail chopped up and icy. When you look carefully you see the trees, the shadows and the columns of light between the shadows. The snow simplifies the scene, makes it an abstraction. The trees are more or less straight and sharp-edged, but the shadows follow the contours of the snow, which, in turn is following the contours of the rocks, gullies, stumps, and down trees underneath. And then you start to notice the angle at which the light is hitting the trees, going across the frame or coming toward you (with a focal point at the sun). So you get a very complex and layered images. Then I started looking at the birch trees!

dg (Ask him what he is supposed to be doing instead of this.)

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Out & Back: Snowshoeing from NC Central (with the Dog of the North)

Mar 102015
 

First day it was warm enough to take the old dog on a longish hike, so we went to the Palmerston Range,  Adirondack outliers cut through by the southern branch of the Hudson River. Actually, we went out a couple of days before, too, but it was positively Antarctic on the exposed shoulder near the top and the trail was drifted over, and it was not so much fun. Saw a female pileated woodpecker and a barred owl (last week I saw a snowy owl while I was snowshoeing in the ravine behind NC HQ — you can see I am working hard on something or other, right?). We also scared up a flock of turkeys, exploding out of the treetops as we came down from the ridge. This about cured my SAD for this year.

dg

LucyDog of the North

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERALooking down to the Hudson River where we started

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAClimbing

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERACrossing the ridge

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAA little birch grove

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Barred owl (okay, I am not a photographer; it was far away)

The Architecture of Me: Ideology and the Personal Essay @ Ellena Savage

Mar 082015
 

Ellena SavagePhoto via ellenasavage.com

Here’s a teaser from an essay on, yes, the personal essay by a delightful Australian writer and editor Ellena Savage, an essay that takes a critical theory view of the position of the personal essay as it is structured within the culture, a step back, as it were, from the usual shallow debates about “truth” and self expression, etc. that cloud the current N. American workshoppy atmosphere. The essay originally appeared in the magazine The Lifted Brow and now resides on Savage’s own site where you will find many other delightful texts.

We acknowledge the personal essay as an ideologically conflicted genre; that as genre, it necessarily deals in the ideograms of dominant culture; and that the genre, born of Enlightenment conditions, is interested in the maintenance of democracy and the valorisation of the individual. The personal essay is an attempt to transpose personal histories over collective ones.

This conflict we speak of arises from the historically instructive nature of the personal essay; that while valorising the individual, is culturally embedded in what Frederic Jameson names the linguistic representation of the dialectical process. It is a catalogue of a collective identity. To understand the personal essay, we are forced to read it within its cultural history.

via The Architecture of Me: Ideology and the Personal Essay | Ellena Savage.

Oscar Winner Wes Anderson’s “Hotel Chevalier” — from the NC Archives

Feb 272015
 

Missed the Oscar awards (also missed the Super Bowl, am also boycotting AWP — go figure), so I was a little slow in putting two and two together. Wes Anderson’s movie The Grand Hotel Budapest was nominated for Best Picture but only managed to win the Costume Design, Make-Up, Production Design and Music categories. The “only managed to win” is meant ironically because, of course, most of us would imagine life complete with an Oscar in Costume Design (okay, well maybe that’s hyperbole).

In any case, what is cool is that our inimitable movie guy, Rob Gray, did a lovely little piece two years ago on Wes Anderson’s short film “Hotel Chevalier,” which, when you watch the opening, bears an uncanny resemblance to the front desk scenes in The Grand Hotel Budapest. As Rob observed at the time, all Anderson’s films come from the same palate. Fascinating to see and think about.

Wes Anderson’s short film “Hotel Chevalier” is a lean, bruised and naked tale in a Paris hotel room. Anderson shot the short with his own funds (and the actors, Natalie Portman and Jason Schwartzman, donated their time) two years prior to his feature The Darjeeling Limited but it was often screened at the same time and is referred to by many as a prologue to that feature film that followed it (as mentioned in this previous NC at the Movies entry). The two are aesthetically consistent, but that’s not surprising as most of Anderson’s films belong to the same visual palate and characters seem descended from the same family tree.

Click here to watch the movie and read the rest at NC at the Movies.

Formal Wear: Notes on Rhyme, Meter, Stanza & Pattern — George Szirtes @Poetry

Feb 252015
 

George Szirtes is a prolific poet and translator, a prize-winning poet, also a wit and a deft hand at Twitter. Born in Hungary, he moved to England in 1956, after the uprising in Budapest (probably not something many of you remember, though when I was growing up and going to university in Canada, I knew several Hungarians in diaspora dating from 1956).

We have some of his poems coming in the April issue, a truly special event. But I wanted to whet your appetites and also display this lovely essay he published in Poetry. It’s a defense of rhyme, an apologia for form, not a rant, not a call to arms, but a gentle and passionate reminder of the beauty of traditional rhythms and the human touch. Very smart, and applies to more than just poetry, if you extrapolate.

Rhyme can be unexpected salvation, the paper nurse that somehow, against all the odds, helps us stick the world together while all the time drawing attention to its own fabricated nature. Knowing that rhyme might become part of the field of poetic expectation, we strive to make its arrival as unexpected and therefore as angelic as possible, and, in so doing, we discover more than we knew. Rhyme can be an aid to invention rather than a bar to it. It is an aid because it forces us into corners where we have to act and take the best available course out. In the process of seeking it, we bump up against possibilities we would not have chosen were we in control of the process.

via Formal Wear: Notes on Rhyme, Meter, Stanza & Pattern by George Szirtes.

Bookend perspectives on Salgado’s preparations for STORYTELLING — JC Olsthoorn

Feb 212015
 

1-Salgado-Preparations-underway-for-Storytelling-Preparations under way for STORYTELLING

The video documentary on UK-based Canadian painter Andrew Salgado is now on Vimeo. During the same time frame it was being filmed (June-October 2014), I had the honour and pleasure to interview Andrew for Numéro Cinq magazine. My curated NC interview of Salgado compliments quite nicely what you see and hear of him in the film, all in his own words. Both pieces together help provide a deeper understanding of and insight into this fabulous artist, his creative thoughts and artistic processes.

Trailer of documentary on Salgado during STORYTELLING preparations.

You can view the 42 minute documentary film directed by Adam Fletcher and Cassidy Uggla here:
https://vimeo.com/120142633
The password is “ripplesinapond”

Enjoy!

—JC Olsthoorn

Mytho-Delirium: Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland — Douglas Glover

Feb 182015
 

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Another in a long list of zombie book reviews revived from my old days when you could actually make a little extra money writing reviews (and learn a lot about writing on the side). This one appeared in a magazine called Books in Canada in 1990. I quite like it because I managed, despite my tender years and experience, not to be awed by the aura of greatness. For example:

His long-awaited new novel, Vineland, his first since Gravity`s Rainbow (a book about V-2 rockets and coprophilia, I think) in 1973, reads like the mutant offspring of Henry James-turned-northern-California-mall-rat and Marshall McLuhan in the paranoid grip of a bad acid trip, with a little Joseph Campbellish mytho-delirium thrown in for colour.

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Vineland
Thomas Pynchon
Little, Brown (1990)

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THOMAS PYNCHON IS a mysterious and reclusive cult figure in the United States, a kind of highbrow J. D. Salinger, a grey eminence of the American Post Mod movement, and one of the four horsemen of the New Writing of the `60s and `70s, along with John Barth, Robert Coover, and William Gass. His long-awaited new novel, Vineland, his first since Gravity`s Rainbow (a book about V-2 rockets and coprophilia, I think) in 1973, reads like the mutant offspring of Henry James-turned-northern-California-mall-rat and Marshall McLuhan in the paranoid grip of a bad acid trip, with a little Joseph Campbellish mytho-delirium thrown in for colour. Part political allegory and part metaphysical fantasy, Vineland seeks to answer those perennial questions: What happened to the `60s? Who betrayed the Woodstock nation? It`s also about TV, the trivialization of violence, and America`s loss of innocence (yes, yes, that again —America, the eternal virgin) during the Nixon-Reagan presidencies.

Pynchon puts the blame for the steamrolling of Hippiedom squarely on the Tube, the Man (DOJ, DEA, FBI, CIA), and certain dark forces — “… the unrelenting forces that leaned ever after … into Time`s wind, impassive in pursuit, usually gaining, the faceless predators… [which] had simply persisted, stone-humourless, beyond cause and effect, rejecting all attempts to bargain and accommodate, following through pools of night where nothing else moved wrongs forgotten by all but the direly possessed, continuing as a body to refuse to be bought off for any but the full price, which they had never named.”

Bleak? Heck, yes. But Pynchon tempers his bleakness with a stoned sense of burnout that runs the gamut from sly literary in-jokes — e.g. a “Carpenter Gothic outhouse” — to full-scale satirical set pieces and running gags. A character named Zoyd Wheeler lives on government disability cheques he earns by jumping through plate-glass windows once a year in front of a battery of Live Action Cams and TV reporters. Zoyd`s daughter, Prairie, makes a hit as a cook at an Esalen-like martial-arts retreat serving up such yummy items as baked Spam with grape jam garnish, which she discovered on the recipe page of the local TV magazine section. Zoyd`s nemesis, Detective Hector Zuniga, is being treated for “tubal abuse” and tries to have his ex-wife charged with murder for shooting the family television set.

The plot of Vineland is a flimsy, cardboard thing (as you would expect in allegory), a frame for the jazz riffs of Pynchon`s manic-mythic reconstruction of American history. It has something to do with the obsessive, sleazoid relationship between Brock Vond, an evil Department of justice operative intent on subverting everything good in the U.S. of A. from the radical left to marginal marijuana farmers, and Frenesi Gates (blonde, blue eyes, anagram for “sin free”), Zoyd’s wife and the daughter of a couple of pinko Hollywood black listees from the McCarthy era.

At the counter-culture`s apogee, Brock “turns” Frenesi into a snitch and a stool pigeon. She betrays Weed Atman, the Christ-like leader of a rock and roll “republic” on the California coast, then sets him up to be murdered. Frenesi spends the next 14 years in the government`s Witness Protection Program, traveling from one trouble-spot to the next as a freelance traitor. Then in 1984, deficit-driven cutbacks force the WPP to drop Frenesi and her fellow stoolies from the program. She and her file disappear, and Brock goes hunting for her with an army of SWAT teams and black helicopters that pluck people from the ground in a black-comedy version of the “rapture.”

Everyone converges on Vineland, an imaginary county north of San Francisco where the hippies, rad lefties, the Thanatoids (a community of the living dead waiting for “karmic readjustment”), and Zoyd and Prairie have taken refuge from Yuppiedom. At the climactic moment, another round of cutbacks pulls the plug on Brock`s very own program. His choppers grounded, he simply dies away, or at least finds himself being led down an earthen trench to the mythic Yurok underworld where an ancient spirit couple sucks the bones from his body.

What all this seems to mean is that TV has sapped the moral fibre of what Pynchon calls “Midol America,” paving the way for the triumph of the cynical, rich, and sun-tanned retro-fascists of San Clemente and Santa Barbara. Yet, in the long run, these malign forces of modern commercial capitalism will strangle on their own deficits and the ancient Red Indian gods of the North American earth will reassert their hegemony.

This is goofy political day-dreaming and a middle-class, male, whitebread version of American history (what ever happened to women`s lib and the civil rights movement?). This is thinking big on the level of Doonesbury and Oprah Winfrey. Some of the ideas in this book are so downright trite they’re embarrassing (e.g. pistols and stick shifts are penis substitutes). And yet, and yet, beyond the run-on jokes, the jumbled mythologies, the errant orthography, and the relentless folksiness of the dialogue, there is something compelling about Vineland. It’s a book that sticks in your mind, seems increasingly hilarious in retrospect, and fairly seethes with a spooky sort of Quixotic, half-wit wisdom. There is something about the foolishness of it all that may be next door to greatness.

—Douglas Glover

(Books in Canada, April, 1990)

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New Hire: Jason Lucarelli Joins Numéro Cinq as a Special Correspondent

Feb 162015
 

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Jason Lucarelli is a brilliant literary commentator with a special bent toward literary Modernism and, specifically, Gordon Lish, Lishian studies, and Lishian influences. He’s already written two substantial essays and an interview (with Victoria Redel, a Lish protegé early in her career). And he has a lengthy interview with Diane Williams coming out in the March issue. It’s a pleasure to announce that he’s consented to make his relationship with the magazine official, public, and above-board by joining us as a Special Correspondent.

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Jason Lucarelli is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Numéro Cinq, The Literarian, 3:AM Magazine, Litro, Squawk Back, and NANO Fiction.

And here is the Jason Lucarelli NC  Archive Page with his previous contributions to the magazine.

 

Sex & Death: Jolly Engravings by Hans Sebald Beham

Feb 142015
 

BenhamHans Sebald Beham Engraving “Death and Three Nude Women” circa-1520-50 via Hans Sebald Beham.com

This is the end of the February death issue, but to keep you on your toes (and because I am in that sort of mood) I want to add one parting shot and introduce you to the engravings of Hans Sebald Beham (1500-1550) who covered a lot of subjects (look him up), including some lovely 16th century urban-scapes with crowds of people doing 16th century things. But he had an especially delectable inspiration toward luscious nudes and Death figures (so voluptuous women and skeletons) or sexual images and Death, an especially poignant and pointed juxtaposition of the energy (and pleasures) of life and the lugubrious prospect of our common end. Besides the Wikipedia article linked to his name in this paragraph, you can read a good essay about him here.

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Adam_and_Eve“Adam and Eve” by Hans Sebald Beham – Private collection. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Death_and_the_Standing_Nude“Death and the Standing Nude” by Hans Sebald Beham – Private collection. Scan by Yellow Lion, 2006.. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

HANS SEBALD BEHAM Death and the Indecent Pair 1529 Engraving 150Hans Sebald Beham “Death and the Indecent Pair” Engraving via Frozen Warnings

Death and the Sleeping WomanHans Sebald Beham “Death and the Sleeping Woman” Engraving (1548) via Live Journal

“Glover’s got serious cajones [sic]” | Belated Review of Savage Love @ Maple Tree Literary Supplement

Feb 132015
 

Savage Love PB cover2 small

Here’s a belated, adulatory little review of my book Savage Love, which came out in the fall of 2013. But in keeping with the buzz about my complete anonymity (“the most eminent unknown Canadian writer alive” — Maclean’s Magazine) the reviewer, a Canadian, only recently heard about me through “an American friend.” What I have come to realize is that a lot of reviewers seek to explain their own inattention (not reading Glover) by a) generalizing the inattention (no one reads Glover) and b) blaming me (Glover is unknown). Reviewers who take this tack mean well. They want to create a narrative that might make more people read me. But at the same time it’s a bit of a tired conceit, and I wish they’d just pay attention to the book.

The reviewer also creates confusion by, I think (though maybe he meant it), mixing up two Spanish words, cojones (balls) and cajones (drawers, as in desk drawers). No doubt, by the time a few of you have read this, the magazine editors will have rushed to fix the error (as I say, if it is an error). But for the moment the reviewer says I have “serious drawers.” It’s so priceless I screenshot it.

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I shouldn’t make fun. God knows, at NC we have cheerfully committed some atrocious blunders (if I had a dollar for every time we spelled an author’s name wrong….). It’s a nice review, and I am grateful for a good reader. And one day I will be remembered as “that writer with the two large desk drawers between his legs.”

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Savage Love is, in my view (and without hyperbole) a master-class in the short fiction form….Glover’s got serious cajones [sic]. I can’t think of another collection this audacious, this willing to alienate its readership by taking us to the edge of our comfort levels….If Freud’s right and life’s all about eros and thanatos, sex and a lust for death, then Glover’s collection can also be called a master-class in the human condition.

Read the rest at Writings / Reviews: Andrew MacDonald | Maple Tree Literary Supplement – Issue 18.

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