Flaubert and Cows: Essay — Mary Stein

Jun 202011
 

“They come out from behind the barn as though something is going to happen, and then nothing happens.”

— Lydia Davis, The Cows. 

(A claymation video of a line from Lydia Davis’s The Cows, by Electric Literature)

Flaubert and Cows

By Mary Stein

A few weeks ago, I ventured to my local Minneapolis bookstore on one of those rumored “quick stops” where people allegedly “swing by to pick up just one thing.” I was looking for The Cows, a new chapbook by Lydia Davis. Ultimately stymied by genre distinction, I begrudgingly asked a clerk where I could find this coveted gem, having not found it in any of the obvious places. After all, alphabetization couldn’t have become more complicated since the last time I was there, could it? The kind clerk pointed me toward the “Animal” section. The Cows was subcategorized under “Miscellaneous” where I found it wedged into near-oblivion between two door-stopper-sized books (one called Christian Lions and the other an anthology about birds).

The Cows is a fragmented story that meditates on three cows that live across the road from Davis. It was released as a chapbook in March, 2011 by Sarabande—a nonprofit literary press that releases approximately ten titles annually. Not six months earlier, Davis had embarked on an entirely different project. In September, 2010 Lydia Davis’s translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary was published courtesy of Viking Penguin. The scope of these two projects seem to exist in entirely different literary realms, and if “opposite” could ever be measured in gradations, Sarabande and Penguin are about as opposite as it comes. But what struck me about each publication was Davis’s search for relevance—not in the oft-overlooked crannies of daily life, but in subjects that stare us in the face: a book translated almost twenty times already; cows.

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About Face: On Class Reunions and Reading Salter — Richard Farrell

Jun 192011
 

About Face: On Class Reunions and Reading Salter

by Richard Farrell

IN THE FALL there were dress parades, football games and tailgaters. We marched into the stadium in crisp white columns and we admired them, the alumni, in their faded blue jerseys with gold numerals, ’42, 67, ’82. We lived by numbers, always counting down, minutes until formations, days until graduation. How would we ever make it to the other side of this crucible? We wondered where the intervening years would carry us. The future was our solace, the hope of escape, of glory, of numbers getting smaller. We envied the passing of time.

My twentieth reunion from Annapolis is in October and I’m undecided about attending.  A big part of me wants to entirely avoid it, a life already lived. Another part is drawn back.

“All afternoon the cars, many with out-of-state plates, were coming along the road,” James Salter begins “Lost Sons.”  The first image: cars moving on the road. He gives us only cars, a synecdochical device. The reader fills in: drivers, passengers, screaming kids, strangers coming to town. He provides so little, but it’s enough to convince us that we are in certain hands.

“Lost Sons” tells of a reunion at West Point, quite possibly a twentieth. In the barracks, half a dozen classmates are drinking, telling stories. Salter contextualizes almost none of it. Two characters brush against each other in the story, providing a loose structure. Hilmo was the full-back, the All-American, with the “definite look of success.”  Reemstma was the outsider. “There were faces that hardly changed at all and others like Reemstma’s whose name tag was read more than once.”

Their class was from the early sixties. “At the picnic it was announced that of the original 550 members, 529 were living and 176 present.” Only twenty-one dead, even with Vietnam. A charmed class.

My class at Annapolis has already surpassed this. Twenty-four dead, though only one lost in combat. The rest, pilots mostly, crashed, lost at sea. One was murdered by a serial killer who also shot Gianni Versace; another, our quarterback, was slain in San Diego along with my wife’s teammate from Navy’s track and field squad. Classmates cut down by crime, slain by jealousy or whatever madness causes one person to kill another. Of course, violence was part of our curriculum, but not of this variety. In theory, there are rules to war.

Twenty-four dead at twenty years out. I’m counting again. Our numbers will only keep dwindling.

“He began to describe the color and light—he painted landscapes—of the countryside near the Delaware, the shape of the earth, its furrows, hedges, how things changed slightly from year to year, little things, how hard it was to do the sky.” This is Reemstma, a painter now, an artist. I wonder about his reasons for going back to West Point. At a party he flirts with a classmate’s wife, Kit Walker. She seems interested in his work. He looks for her later, at another reception, and sees her talking to Hilmo. A tryst is implied with Hilmo; they are seen coming back together. “There was a grass stain on the back of her white skirt.”

This is right. Salter gives little things, barely enough, but they expand. Perhaps it’s in the way images are both small and massive, furrows and hedges versus the earth, slight changes and the endlessness of the sky, grass stains and betrayal,  infidelity. You get the feeling that Salter has been allotted a certain number of words, and that he’s damn stingy about parsing them out. They have to count. With Salter, we get what matters, and very little else.

In his memoir, Burning the Days, Salter described his plebe year at West Point this way: “It was the year of Stalingrad.”

It’s impossible to capture the seriousness of it all. The days were long, mercilessly scheduled. There wasn’t time, quite literally, to shit for the first seven days. Failure stalked every evolution, especially the first year. Even now, twenty years later, nothing felt longer, nothing more hunted, more stoked with the pressure of endurance, than plebe year. You were sent to Tango Company if you dropped out that first summer. I delivered mail there once. Young men and women milled about waiting to leave, with blank faces and shaved heads, like patients in a locked ward. My memory tells me it was a cold hallway in spite of the hellish Maryland humidity.

Looking back, it’s hard to recognize myself, thriving after that first week, enduring every hour filled with faith, with hunger for action, for war, perhaps. Maybe that’s just youth, the vitriol, the fire, the simple willingness to follow, to fill the shoes without a thought.

I should go back if for no other reason than the rich pool of story material. But how would I choose? Two decades worth now, seventy-three-hundred days, uncounted destinies. The impossibility of selection. Better to stay in bed or better yet, to grab a beer and slip back into that Navy ’91 sweatshirt. Sing an old sea chanty, “The old gray mare, she ain’t what she used to be.”  Salter chose.

They were playing ‘Army Blue.’ A wave of sadness went through him, memories of parades, the end of dances, Christmas leave. Four years of it, the classes ahead leaving in pride and excitement, unknown faces falling behind. It was finished, but no one turns his back on it completely. The life he might have led came back to him, almost whole.

Those rigid days feel distant now, even more distant than my childhood which came first. But Salter is correct. Maybe what frightens me most about going back are the overwhelming memories, that life returning, the camaraderie, the surrendering of my identity to the brigade, being part of something larger than myself, something grander, the spectacle of it all. Or maybe this is the very reason to go, to feel that again.


Salter offers the world—West Point, Barcelona, the Italian countryside, dogfights above the Yalu, the snow-faced Eiger, the luxurious clubs of Manhattan, Carbondale—but he won’t give you much to cling to. He won’t waste fourteen pages on Antoni Gaudi’s brilliance; instead he’ll say this:

At the very top of the four stone spires which Gaudi left unfinished the light has just begun to bring forth gold inscriptions too pale to read. There is no sun. There is only a white silence. Sunday morning, the early morning of Spain. A mist covers all of the hills which surround the city. The stores are closed.

This from “Am Strande von Tanger.”  If you haven’t been to Barcelona, haven’t glimpsed the awesome, dreamy beauty of the cathedral, then you don’t get the joke. It’s too pale to read. A white silence. Too fucking bad for you. If you don’t understand what West Point is, he’s not going to explain it. This is Salter.


READING SALTER is like hopping on a bullet train, or better yet, strapping yourself into the cockpit of a supersonic fighter and slamming the throttles. You feel speed, movement, the ass-clenching thrill of inertia overcome with afterburners. Then the speed disappears. You don’t notice travelling at Mach 1 as long as you stay above the clouds. The ride feels smooth, effortless, almost still. This is simple physics. This is Salter. You read him along the sound barrier of sheer emptiness.

Above one of the doors to Bancroft Hall, written in large brass letters, were these words: “Four Years Together by the Bay.”  It was a taunt, a joke, a way of reducing the harsh, ascetic reality of those four years to a wink. How I hated that sign. Only insiders got it, only graduates, alumni. You had to finish in order to smile. Those words reduced the misery of it to a mere puff.

Like something Salter might’ve written.

—Richard Farrell

Author is 6th from left. (Army-Navy, Philadelphia, 1987)

Notes:

 “Lost Sons” and “Am Strande Von Tanger”  are contained in the short story collection Dusk and Other Stories, by James Salter (New York: Modern Library, 2010)

Burning The Days: Recollection, by James Salter.  (New York: Random House, 1997)

The Book of Happenstance: Fiction — Ingrid Winterbach

Jun 172011
 

Winterbach
Of The Book of Happenstance, a novel from the award-winning South African author Ingrid Winterbach, our reviewer wrote: “The Book of Happenstance is about memory and death, yet paradoxically so, for the novel is ebulliently alive, ironic and smart. The characters seem hyper-linked to Google and Wikipedia; the book is full of spontaneous eruptions of intelligence, and that is fun to read.” Here’s a delightful excerpt from a new translation hot off the presses at Open Letter Books. Read the whole Numéro Cinq review here.

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Capture

 

The dead move along their own orbits, like planets. Like celestial bodies they encircle me in their elliptical courses. My mother, not urgently present in my thoughts for a long time, now appears in my dreams night after night. Her soft, elliptical path is at its point of closest proximity to me, and each of her appearances ushers in a great sadness. I see her lying in a small room, with only a bed and a tiny window. She is sleeping. She is abandoned, she is sick or dying. There is something indescribably desolate about her sleeping form under the blanket. There is something about the blanket which lends it an unbearable emphasis. I cannot hold on to the dream to reflect on it. Even worse is when I know that I have dreamt of her, but cannot remember the dream.

If Marthinus Maritz should describe an orbital course, it would be that of a distant, cold planet. Would he be one of the outer planets? Neptune with its howling winds? Uranus with its aeons of darkness, where time gets infinitely extended? Saturn, so light that it could float on an enormous lake? Or Pluto, the smallest, coldest, darkest, and most distant—the only solid outer planet, with its surface of ice and methane, a frozen rock?

Sof phones again late one night, shortly after we had sat in the car looking out over the sea in the manner of Mrs. C and Vercueil. At least this time I am not asleep. I am still immersed in my unravelling, in my laborious journey through evolutionary and geological history. I am still trying to make sense of the magma ocean, of iron pools, of the cooling earth crust, of the crystallising of the earth’s mantle. (How in God’s name should I conceive of all these processes?) My eyes are burning. Much more than a therapist (and here I have to differ from my lover), I need a geologist to guide me step by step through this inaccessible and treacherous terrain.

“Am I disturbing you?” Sof asks.

“No,” I say.

“I’m thinking of taking a lover,” she says and clears her throat slightly.

What can I say to this? Have you anyone particular in mind? Who is the lucky man, or woman? Nowadays anything is possible, and I am not yet familiar with the ambit of Sof’s sexual preferences.

“Who is it, Sof?” I ask.

“It is my children’s paediatrician,” she says, and gives an exculpatory little cough.

“I see. What does he look like? She? What kind of person is this—a kindred spirit, a concordant fellow being? Is there a future in it for the two of you?” I am tired, the nightly acquisition of complex knowledge is taking up much of my energy.

“He’s a cripple. I think he had polio as a child. He has reddish hair. He has heavy eyelids that flutter slightly when he speaks, as if he can open his eyes only with great effort,” she says with the unmistakeable tremor of erotic excitement in her voice.

“That has to be irresistible,” I say.

I know the type; I am familiar with the erotic persuasiveness of a russet complexion. (Perhaps I should never have terminated the relationship with Felix du Randt.) As regards the other afflictions, I do not need much convincing, since I have been beguiled by a variety of aberrations and deviancies—physical as well as psychological—myself. Consider the bony brow and the blunt death’s-nose. I should have re–mained true to Felix du Randt. He would have been a good man for me. He would have kept me on the straight path, the virtuous way. I would have been less exposed to temptation and spared many woes. My impressionable spirit would have been less contaminated. I am suddenly under the impression of the lifelong burden of emotional sullying (from the French souiller, to soil, Theo would have pointed out).

“It is!” Sof says. “It was the fluttering, half-mast eyelids that finally did the trick.”

“When was the deal clinched, so to speak?”

“This afternoon.”

“What is the next step? Where will you meet? Will you go dancing? No, sorry, I guess that’s not an option.”

“I’m meeting him in his consulting room on Friday afternoon after five. We will take it from there.”

“Sof,” I say, “this is unexpected. I don’t know what to say to you. I wish you luck. Happiness, ecstasy if needs be.”

(If I had the choice now between the bitter excitement of a drawn-out erotic intrigue and the grind and risk of writing—to which Becket refers as the “bitter folly”—which would I choose?)

“I’ve just read an interesting article,” Sof says with a little cough. She is embarrassed; she wants to change the topic. “All writers are actually pursuing a single ideal, namely the universal.”

“I’ve always thought the universal to be suspect.”

“It is,” she says, “but it does not make the striving of writers less valid. All writers intuitively know this—the one who gets a grip on the so-called universal attains the upper hand. The trump card. Whatever. I thought it would interest you.”

•

During this time Theo sometimes leaves the office in the afternoon for an hour or two to attend auctions. He returns with a feverish glint in his eye. In this state of heightened excitement he listens to Schubert’s piano sonatas to calm himself down. He breathes deeply, closes his eyes, and surrenders himself to the music. Only then can he resume his work.

Did you see lovely things? I ask cautiously. (What is the ironic undertone doing in my voice?) Beautiful, he says, but does not elaborate.

Enamoured of something? His heart set on objects of beauty? With that I am well acquainted.

His hands are not small, but well-formed, like his wrists. His nails are somewhat fan-shaped, the way I like them. He is no longer a young man. The well-defined, youthful male form has begun to soften. The eyelid is softer, it looks more vulnerable, as does the skin of the neck—I know how desirable I find that in my lover. The hair on his chest (what is visible of it) is beginning to turn grey. All these things appeal to me. I am here to assist him. The documentation of words no longer commonly used, that is our shared purpose.

I return to the cards. Eindera, regional term for eintlik—actually. Eindjie—archaic form of entjie—a little way (stap ’n eindjie met my saam, my lief—walk a little way with me, my love). Einste, originally eienste—decidedly the same. Eindtyd—the end of time, end of the earthly dispensation. Êit!—restraining exclamation: êit, kêrel, nie so onverskillig nie—easy, lad, not so reckless! Elkedaags and elkedags—outdated variants of everyday. Elkelike—regional term de-noting regularity. Elkaar and elkander (each other); elkend-een (everyone); elkendeur or elkensdeur (time and again); elkenkeer or elkenmaal (every time)—all of them outdated forms. Ellend (variant of ellende—misery).

“Die ellende staan blou in die blom,” I say. (Misery stands blue in the bud.) “A lovely expression. What would be the origin of ellende? Of the word, I mean.”

Theo explains that the Dutch ellende is derived from the Middle Dutch ellende,which means another country, or exile, also a disastrous condition, grinding poverty, and privation. This may be compared to the Old Dutch elelendi from the tenth century, the Old Saxon elilendi, and the Old High German elilenti, of which the el was abbreviated from elders, alja, and lende, landa—which literally means land elsewhere, that is to say, sojourn in a foreign country, exile, and its accompanying feelings of uprootedness.

“Thank you,” I say. “Now I understand that our earthly existence is essentially wretched.”

Theo smiles, but will not take the bait. I wonder how often I am mistaken about him.

We often listen to Schubert during this time. When Theo is relaxed, he sometimes whistles softly to the music.

A day or two later he shows me a ring that he has bought at an auction. It is an antique Indian ring, white gold, inlaid with countless small amethyst stones. He must have paid a fabulous sum for it.

“Is it a gift for someone?” I ask (cautiously).

“Yes,” he says.

“For your wife, perhaps?”

“Yes,” Theo says, “yes. It’s a present for my wife.”

“Then she is a lucky woman,” I say.

“Do you think so?” he says, and looks at me searchingly for a moment.

He holds the ring in his left hand with the tips of four fingers and a thumb. I notice that his fingers are trembling slightly. He is under the impression of the beauty, of the costliness of the ring, his face suffused with blood, his eyes gleaming with gratification. I can see that it gave him plea-sure to buy it. He turns the ring ever so slightly for the stones to catch the light. He slips it on the little finger of his left hand and spreads his fingers. He looks at it as a woman would look at it. I have seldom seen him so pleased, elated even.

At the end of July we have completed the letter D. From doodbabbel (babble to death), to deurween (to thoroughly bewail). From dadedrang (the urge to act, to do the deed), to dabbeljasgras (edible grass, on which the man from Am-ster-dam survives in the riddle). From diepborstig (deep-chested) to donkerbloedig (dark-blooded—with or from blood of a non-white, sic). From droeflik (a sorrow-filled state), to duiwel,sometimes duwel: the devil incarnate and carnal, the real, the one and only, undisguised and palpable, Beelzebub and Belial, the Foul Fiend, old Nick, old Scratch and Harry, the Evil One, lord of the evil kingdom and underminer of the salvation of our soul. All his folk names we have written up: Asmannetjie and Bokbaard (Ash Goblin and Goatbeard); Bokhoringkies and Bokspoot (Little Goat’s Horns and Goat’s Hoof); Broesa, Damoen, Drietoon (Three-toe); Gratebene (Fishbone Legs); Herrie, Horrelpoot (Club-foot), and Hans Jas (Hans with the Coat). Jasbok, Jonkers, Joos, Josie. Kantvoet (Lacefoot)and Klamhandjies (Little Damphands). Knakstert (Snaptail); Kopertoon (Coppertoe); Oortjies (Small-ears); Oupa langoor (Grandpa Longear); Ou Vale (Old Grey); Penkop (Peghead); Pikhakskene (Tarheels); Pylstert (Arrow-tail); Stofjas (Dustcoat); Swart Piet (Black Piet); Vaaljas (Old Drabcoat); Vaalkaros (Greykaross); Vaal-toon (Greytoe); Veins-aard (Trickster); Vuilbaard (Dirt-beard); and Woltone (Wool-toes). All the devil combinations we have written up.

“Duiwelsnaaigare?” I ask. Devil’s serving thread. Also called monniksbaard (monk’s beard), nooienshaar (maidenhair), perdeslaai (horse salad), or duiwelstou (devil’s rope), Theo Verwey explains. Duiwelsloënaar (devil’s denier), and duiwelsprenteboek (devil’s picture book). Duiwelstuig (devil’s instrument), and duiwelstoejaer (jack of all trades—my role as Theo’s sidekick and factotum).

The endless death combinations have been rounded off and written up. The cards have been alphabetised, brought up to date, catalogued. We move on, the devil and death and all the possible names and combinations we leave behind us. Too long we have tarried there.

—Ingrid Winterbach, translated from Afrikaans by Ingrid Winterback & Dirk Winterbach

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Summoning Eternity: Review of Ingrid Winterbach’s The Book of Happenstance — Jacob Glover

Jun 172011
 

WinterbachAuthor Photo by Val Adamson

book_happenstance_large

The Book of Happenstance
Ingrid Winterbach
Open Letter Books
Paperback, 254 pages, $11.95
978-1-934824-33-7

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Though Ingrid Winterbach sets her novel, The Book of Happenstance, in contemporary South Africa, a country dominated by a history of racial oppression, the book is not about race or the inheritance of Apartheid. The Book of Happenstance is about memory and death, yet paradoxically so, for the novel is ebulliently alive, ironic and smart. The characters seem hyper-linked to Google and Wikipedia; the book is full of spontaneous eruptions of intelligence, and that is fun to read.

Winterbach (who wrote earlier works under the pseudonym Lettie Viljoen) lives in South Africa with her husband and two daughters. She has a degree in Afrikaans—one of the main characters of the novel is an expert in Afrikaans. She is also a visual artist and has won all kinds of awards for her work in her native land including the W. A. Hofmeyr Prize, the M-Net Book Prize (for the book in hand), the University of Johannesburg Award, and the Hertzog Prize. The new English version of The Book of Happenstance, just out with Open Letter Books, was co-translated by Winterbach herself and Dirk Winterbach (I checked but was unable to pin down the relationship).

The novel is about a middle-aged woman, Helena Verbloem, hired on a research grant to help compile a dictionary with the scholar Theo Verwey. One night thieves break into Helena’s house, steal her sentimentally priceless sea shell collection, and shit on the floor. When the police appear uninterested in helping her recover the shells, Helena starts investigating the robbery herself. Some of the missing shells have turned up at the feet of a recent suicide, a man who killed himself by hanging.

The shell investigation trajectory involves two visits to a town a day’s drive away where the suicide (and his family) lived. Helen and her girlfriend Sof meet the locals in bars, disguise themselves as members of a Bible group delivering pamphlets, take pictures of the suicide house, question family and friends and come up with precisely nothing. In fact, what they learn is that the shells are gone, who knows where, and that her house had been broken into by accident by men looking for drugs. At one point Sof quotes the opening lines of Kafka’s The Castle: K has just arrived, the Castle is hidden in mist and fog, the village shrouded in snow, gazes up into “seeming emptiness.” Of course, the passage is even more enigmatic because it’s quoted in Afrikaans.

The shell plot is comic and Kafkaesque and ends in apparent inconsequence. The novel’s parallel plot belongs to Theo and Helena in the museum—less action than the quasi-investigation plot but many delightful scenes. The work scenes go like this: Theo and Helena sit in an office organizing words into alphabetical order, Helena fantasizes, talks about books, sometimes she asks Theo about a word and he—a human dictionary—answers with comic completeness in little essays like entries in an etymological database. Helena is obviously attracted to Theo, but the attraction is an intellectual crush not so much a romantic longing and certainly not lust.

Slotted between the interwoven main plots are a series of recurring but unplotted scenes in a tea room, more often than not Helen and another museum friend drinking, yes, tea and discussing the origin of life and evolution. These scenes are comic, exasperating—Helena’s naïve and ingenuous questions prompting lengthy, erudite answers which she seems to ignore half the time (inserting lengthy parenthetical scene commentary in the middle of the explanations). Helena’s interest in life no doubt evolves out of the context of death that surrounds her. Already, as novel begins, Helena’s parents and sister are dead, her brother estranged, she herself is divorced, her daughter is out of touch.

The novel is written in the first-person present tense. The present tense conveys immediacy and a kind of spontaneous propulsion that more conventional past tense Freitag-ular narratives don’t. In other words, Winterbach’s novel didn’t happen it keeps happening, throwing itself forward with a kind of whimsical blind hopefulness, a summoning of eternity.

In the first two sentences Winterbach announces the time frame of the novel: March to October—in March Helena starts working on the Afrikans dictionary with Theo Verwey, and by October Theo is dead. At the outset, we know the parameters, we know the course of the novel; Winterbach seems to splice the story out of the larger reel of time and in the same act warrant its significance, as Walter Benjamin suggests in his essay “The Storyteller.” “Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.”

Much of the novel consists of memories and reflections. When writing the memories Winterbach steps in and makes a stylistic choice. She writes a number of the memories in the past tense and some in the present and, a few times, seems to mix the two. The weaving of tenses together seems to add to the eternal bracket around the novel. Winterbach wants Happenstance to break out of linear time and rest securely in the present. Therefore, even the memories, past events, occasionally happen in the present. There is, I think, an ironized search for the eternal in the novel. The shells in their way seems to represent something beyond time to Helena, considering “their beauty restored [her] trust in all of creation” (59). At one point Helena’s friend Sof  says, “I’ve just read and interesting article… All writers are actually pursuing a single ideal, namely the universal.” To which Helena replies dryly, “I’ve always thought the universal to be suspect.” (130). But her denial rings with irony.

Happenstance is a terrific read. It is consciously intellectual without being pretentious or didactic. It is smart and knows it but the irony runs deep. Against the etymology, we have Helena obsessing over the shit on her carpet; she associates the lingering smell of aftershave in her apartment with crime, so that she qualifies every clean-shaven man with the thought: Could he have shat on my rug and stolen my shells? And then there is the whole Sof/husband subplot: Sof’s hatred for her husband and her desire to have an affair with a crippled pediatrician. Even Theo’s funeral has a comic aspect: a member of the museum staff, nicknamed Sailor, shows up drunk, wearing a natty white suit, and tries to jump into the grave with the coffin.

Finally: Why happenstance? The title of the English translation seems to refer the coincidental nature of the crime, the shell-robbery, perhaps the Kafkaesque and coincidental nature of all life. The novel forces the death of Theo Verwey and the loss of Helena’s shells together, but their juncture is conditional, fleeting and evanescent, means almost nothing except in the pleasurable connection of words, obsession, human affection, and our ultimate end (itself likely to be comic). It is all happenstance.

(Read an excerpt from the novel here.)

—Jacob Glover

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Jacob Glover1

Jacob Glover is studying Classics & Philosophy at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His work has been published previously on Numéro Cinq: essays (on Kierkegard, Montaigne, and Spinoza), translations, and poems.

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My First Job: Melissa Fisher — Winner of the 3 Quarks Daily $1,000 Arts & Literature Prize

Jun 162011
 

Editor’s Note: Melissa Fisher’s “My First Job” essay won the 2012 3 Quarks Daily Arts & Literature Prize competition judged by Gish Jen. Gish Jen wrote: “This memoir of growing up in Vermont begs to be turned into a book. At once deeply universal and deeply strange, it is wonderfully unpretentious, completely appalling, and appealingly clear-of-heart.”

 

Melissa Fisher, already “a person of interest,” as the police say, for her satirical photo essay “And the Sign Said” now offers us a “My First Job” in which she manages to insert blood, mayhem, drunkenness (not the author), underage driving, romance (the brown-haired boy) and a gorgeously hilarious picture of growing up a girl in rural Vermont. Nothing more to be said. Read it.

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Out There

Growing up with eight older brothers, I had a feeling that I could do anything.  I was keeper at soccer (not afraid to get kicked in the head if it meant making a save) and played first base, feeling pride in the shocking sting across my palm whenever anyone fired one in my direction.  It was the Fishers vs. anyone else in the neighborhood, and I was always the only girl on the field.

When we moved to Vermont, expanding our summer camp into a home, we traded neighborhood friends for trees. Thousands of trees. Our nearest neighbor was a mile south down a single-lane dirt road that was often impassable in the winter.  From our house-in-progress on Cram Hill going west, it was two and a half miles to asphalt, and the first house that way, a log home belonging to the Potters (their name spelled out in stones at the end of the driveway), appeared in the last half-mile.  We had a quiet view of Granville Notch to the west without a structure or speck of light in sight for miles across the panorama.  When weather shifted, a gray sheet of rain would spread across the valley toward us providing a 90-second warning to get the laundry off the line.  Some days the only hint of civilization was a distant loon-like call of the train whistle twice a day, southbound in the morning, northbound at night.

The electric and phone lines didn’t reach us, and cell phones didn’t yet exist.  We had a CB radio for emergencies.  In summers when humidity was high, a skip allowed my father (his handle was Preacher Ed) to talk on the squawk box to southern drawl truckers hundreds of miles away. These were our only conversations with the outside world. We were out there. .

First Babysitting Job, Starts with the Pig Blood in the Yard

So when I was 10, perhaps out of boredom or arrogance, I didn’t see any reason to say no when I was asked to babysit two kids of a couple I didn’t know well (they also lived in a house without electricity).  Later, I saw many reasons why this was a terrible idea, and I also questioned my parents’ judgment in letting me go. But the lure of two dollars an hour trumped any good sense I might have held.

My mother dropped me off in the driveway and backed around leaving me to walk to the house alone along a stone path that led by a stump steeped in blood with fresh blood lying in pools all around. Perhaps, I thought, I should have asked more questions, but how to prepare for this?  When the father, John, opened the door, I turned back to wave and watch my mother’s car head down the driveway back home, realizing suddenly that I was a bit homesick, scared, or both. John explained the blood—I had just missed the pig slaughter.  I wondered if I’d been expected earlier to help out.

The boys, blond-haired and shy, watched me suspiciously.  This was our first meeting so I reached out to them slowly, the way I had with the stray before he became Snowflake, my mother’s favorite cat. It didn’t work with the boys as well as with the cat. Their mistrust lasted long after the parents left for the wedding, and we spent the afternoon only half-playing, half-wondering when the parents would reappear.

I was ten. I didn’t know what a babysitter did. I fed them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and we went outside and threw rocks. Boys like throwing rocks. When they’re not eating them they’re throwing them. We stayed well away from the front yard, the stump, the blood.  I didn’t ask about the pig.

The afternoon dragged on. I only wanted to go home but had no idea when that might happen.  I hadn’t been forward enough to ask exactly when John and his wife would return. They were vague. I had the impression it was going to be just a few hours. In my mind, they were coming home at two or three in the afternoon.

The boys moped, grieving abandonment.  “Do you want to read a book?” I asked.  “I want Mommy to read it to me!” “Do you want to go outside with the trucks?” I asked.  “Mommy take me outside!”

By hour five, I had started to watch the driveway incessantly.  I couldn’t call home, of course—in my world calling home wasn’t an option to consider–and I wondered why my parents hadn’t come looking for me.  The boys weren’t the only ones feeling abandoned.

The boys refused to nap. I wondered if I should I walk them half a mile to the closest neighbor?  I didn’t want to get the parents in trouble.  Were they in trouble?

After 10 really, really long hours, and long after dark, headlights finally haphazardly probed up the driveway. When the boys’ parents came stumbling in, I was already at the door ready to go home. The mother drunkenly waved her arm (really her elbow) in the air and disappeared to bed. John’s head drooped. His eyes stared out without focus..

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Heading Home, the Body in the Backseat

When we finally got into the beat up Toyota wagon, he mumbled something about watching my feet.  At first, I didn’t know what he meant, it was dark, but soon I realized there was a hole as big as my foot in the floorboards.  We didn’t talk.  Something kept clunking in the back.  Turn left, clunk right.

When we hit the pavement, I suddenly could see light at my feet.  I watched a blur of the road between my heels.  Lines would appear, some double yellow, some white.  Back on the dirt road to my house, the clunking returned. Turn right, clunk left.

The driveway ended at the garage, but John drove across the lawn to the front steps. At last, with the dome light on, I could see a large mass in the back seat. I had been afraid to look. I had no idea it was a person. A toolbox maybe. When you live on the back roads things always clunk and roll around, but this was a big clunk.

“My brother-in-law,” John growled.  “He’s a waste of oxygen.”

John walked me to the door—I was only ten. And all I remember after that is going straight to bed, climbing the wooden ladder to the curtained loft room that was mine. But my parents must have seen John’s condition because they invited him in and made coffee. At some point, the brother-in-law wandered in, disoriented either from the repeated head trauma or the unfamiliar surroundings..

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Aftermath, More Babysitting, Animal Attacks, I Scar a Child for Life

Afterwards, my parents never said anything about that night, whether they wondered if I was okay.  They rarely said what they felt.  They seemed to accept John’s drunkenness without judgment. Oh, that’s just John… Somehow I can’t imagine parents being that open-minded today. And a few years later, when my 17-year-old brother arrived home late after school completely bombed on strawberry daiquiris, my father expressed his disappointment by grounding my brother for a month—a month alone out in nowhere without a phone; it was like solitary confinement.

It didn’t strike me odd that we’d have a drunk or two in the house. Rod, a neighbor well-known for his hundreds of junk parts cars in various stages of impermanence, would wander down the “thrown up” road (now more of a path) from his trailer a few times a year. He refused all food, lived simply on 16 oz. Budweisers or whatever other version of beer was handy.  He was friendly, smelled of urine, booze and cigarettes, and said Jesus Christ more often than my father ever did in the pulpit. Rod had a bony chest and his Dickies hung belted at the waist, cinched around fumes.  Rod’s granddaughter, Belinda, once bit me on the arm because I was using the bathroom. I wasn’t babysitting her.  She was just visiting.

What does (did) surprise me is that my parents ever let me baby-sit again.  But they did, many times.  Through trial and error I learned valuable tips such as Kool-Aid is more complex than Tang and requires infinite scoops of sugar.  And sugarless Kool-Aid on a picnic will destroy a child’s day and will ultimately be tattooed to his or her memory for the next 20 years. (I know because 20 years later I saw this person on the streets of Montpelier and his first words were, “Remember when you (tonal implication of ‘you moron’) forgot to put the sugar in the Kool-Aid?”)

B-Bet (short for Elizabeth) fast became one of my favorite watches and not just because I got to saddle up her mother’s tar-colored brute of a horse, Mischief, from time to time.  Mischief tried to buck me off more than once and would very reluctantly go for halting walks. On the way home he’d gallop if given the chance.  In my limited riding lessons I had only made it as far as a delicate posting trot on a pony. I was afraid even to canter, but I’d learned to hold on like hell.

B-Bet always had to come out to the car when I arrived to save me from Gus and Geezer, the geese watchdogs.  Gus was one-legged and cranky. Geezer was particularly vicious and would make a spear of his body, aggressively flap his wings and repeatedly stab my legs with his beak. I’d yell to no avail.  Two-year-old B-Bet would shake her finger at him, scolding, and he’d ashamedly retreat.

My best friend/rival Beth also babysat and we had our regulars.   One of her families had a cute rhythmic ditty that the father sang to lighten moods:  “Me-lis-sa-Fi-sher, ate-her-ki-tties.  Me-lis-sa-Fi-sher, ate-her-ki-tties.”  I have no idea where this came from.  I had never spoken with this gnomish furniture-maker, though I knew he crafted beautiful stuff. Understandably, his kids never spoke or made eye contact with me, either..

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Crossing the Line into Criminal Behavior with Accomplice and Small Children

The family I babysat for most often had two charming girls, one of whom once fondly asked me, “Why are you so fat?” At first, I’d put Meredith to sleep in the crib and then read to two-year-old Stephanie.  She would make me read every single book at least once and instantly scream if I stopped for the briefest moment, threatening to wake the baby.

After they were both in bed, I’d engage in battle with the wood cook-stove. I never understood the drafts.  My two options were to keep it wide open, meaning the temperature in the old schoolhouse would quickly escalate to 95 degrees, or damp it down and fill the house with smoke until the fire choked out. Either way, I’d end up opening all the windows and doors.

I loved their parents, Steve and Jude.  At nights on the drive back to my parents’ house, Steve would holler out, “ENGLAND!”then swerve and drive for half a mile on the left side of the empty road, a great belly laugh shaking out of him.

Stephanie and Meredith were terrible secret-keepers.  Once, when I was 14, their parents left me the car keys for the day—for emergencies.  Or perhaps so I could run to the Roxbury General Store for milk.  Along with milk, the store had two well-stocked coolers of cheap beer, gas, a dome-covered cheese wheel, flies, penny Swedish Fish, Charleston Chews—best after being stuck in a snow bank and frozen solid—more flies and Atomic Fireballs but not much else.

I didn’t drive to the store, not at first anyway. Instead I called a brown-haired boy.  Technically, he lived in the opposite direction from the store, but that’s fine. I just figured this would catch his attention.  I loaded the girls in the car, popped in the Genesis Land of Confusion tape I found in the glove compartment, and headed for his house—choruses of “Where are WE GOING?” rising from the backseat.

I was actually a pretty good driver with three years of experience.  My father had taught me to drive his Jeep when I was 12. Given where we lived, he’d been careful to explain about driving on washboards, how to do a hill start on loose gravel, and where to pick up the firewood he’d cut up down the road that needed to get stacked in the shed.

The truck I learned to drive in.

When he handed me the keys, Steve, the girls’ father, had pointed out that the car’s low gas light was on. But he was pretty sure there was enough to get to town and back if we had to.  So when we picked up the brown-haired boy—and not wanting to get stranded—we carefully poured in some gas from a red can in the barn. Then, a bit horrified (a sinking, Oh shit! moment when the gas warning light FAILED to come on), we realized it was too much and proceeded to spend the afternoon driving every dirt road in town until the yellow dot on the dash reappeared. (Okay, it WAS a nice realization that we would sneak around all afternoon, driving unlicensed and free. And 14!)

We weren’t worried about cops. I had never heard of the Roxbury town constable doing anything more than grudgingly volunteering for the position at town meeting.  Also I had heard and fully believed that regular laws didn’t apply to dirt roads (I think my father the minister was the one who told me this questionable fact).  The locals who usually hung out on the store’s porch were in and out of jail for various bits of misconduct—we were known as an outlaw town—but I was never sure how they got incarcerated (this reminds me that my friend Anna used to call jail “Three Hots and a Cot”). When my mother and the planning commission tried to clean up the village, Dave Santee, who lived next to the store, fired up the “Uglification Committee” and promptly hauled a toilet, two rotting dormers, and a one-wheeled tractor to his front yard.

I was aware, yes, that I was taking advantage of the situation, and, being a respectful minister’s daughter down deep (very deep), I was really afraid of being caught. Steve, the father, was a playful and irreverent ex-hippie. He loved it when I was a little bad—he’d say, “Oh, I bet that pissed off Ed and Ellie” and laugh. I adored him and looked up to him, and I hated the idea of losing his esteem. Not to mention the fact that my father might have had some feelings on this one, too (though, clearly, he TAUGHT me to drive at the age of twelve and, if the truth be known, wasn’t averse to a bit of rule-bending now and then either).

Late in the afternoon, when it finally occurred to me that Steve and Jude would be appearing in the driveway any second, we headed for home. I threw the brown-haired boy out of the car at his mailbox, barely stopping. Then I casually, airily (and very carefully) discussed with the girls the fact that what we had done all afternoon was perfectly fine, normal, unremarkable and not worth mentioning to ANYONE. There was no reason to say anything about it to their parents, and besides, their parents wouldn’t care.

We pulled into the empty driveway, unloaded, and were lingering on the lawn when Steve and Jude arrived moments later.  I was in a panic, the hood of the car was still hot, but ALL was well.

Then, suddenly, the girls were dashing toward their parents, screaming, ”Mommy, Daddy, Melissa drove THE CAR! We drove EVERYWHERE and finally the light came BACK ON! She told us not to tell you.”

I thought, Oh shit.

Steve said, “Is that right?” He looked right at me and laughed.

—Melissa Fisher

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Melissa Fisher is a writer and college administrator still living in Vermont.

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Knowing What Happens: Interview with Mavis Gallant — Jason DeYoung

Jun 152011
 

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Here’s a fascinating interview with the great Canadian ex-pat (she lives in Paris) short story writer Mavis Gallant. Gallant’s stories used to appear regularly in the New Yorker; she was one of those blessed few (like her fellow Canadian Alice Munro) to be “on retainer.”  This splendid addition to NC’s growing collection of interviews comes courtesy of Jason DeYoung—it was originally published in Writer’s Carousel, May/June, 2004. It’s a pleasure to be able to make it widely available. (Find Gallant’s books here.)

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Knowing What Happens: an Interview with Mavis Gallant

Interview by Jason DeYoung

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Jason DeYoung (JD):  How did Paris Stories and Varieties of Exile come about?  What was the thought behind getting those books together since both books contain mostly stories you’ve published in previous collections?

Mavis Gallant (MG): I didn’t have anything to do with it.  They were edited.  One was edited by Michael Ondaatje [Paris Stories] and the other by Russell Banks [Varieties of Exile].  They are published by the New York Review of Books.  They publish books, you know, as well as putting out the journal. And, they asked if I would be interested, that Michael Ondaatje would write the introduction and choose the stories. I said yes.  I had nothing to do with it or complain about.

The second book was to be called “Montreal Stories,” but that doesn’t work in the United States because people won’t read anything that has Canada in the title.  With any suggestion that it’s Canadian they’re allergic to it.  So in the US they chose the title [Varieties of Exile]; in the Canadian edition—because there’s a Canadian publisher, too—they used the title I wanted.  I wanted “Paris Stories” and “Montreal Stories” because they seemed to go well.

I was the one who suggested Russell Banks because with something about Canada in the United States you have to be very careful.  I knew that he had Canadian connections.  He has three Canadian grandparents.  I wanted an American whose work I admired, which is the case with Russell Banks, and who knew something about Canadian writers and Canadians.

JD:  As an American, I had no idea that there was such an “allergy” to Canadian writers.

MG:  Well, the Canadians have the reputation in America of being very dull.  If people know my name at all, they know I’m a writer—and that’s forgivable. (Laughs)  But when I used to say I’m Canadian, people would look trapped.  And there’s that feeling that they’re very dull and that Canada is a very dull place.   Actually it was true years ago, but it’s not true now, so they haven’t kept up.

JD: In your short story, “Varieties of Exile,” Linette says that “anything I could not decipher I turned into fiction, which was my way of untangling knots.”  How autobiographical is this line?

Continue reading »

Gunslinger & Angel of Death: Fiction — Casper Martin

Jun 142011
 
Casper Martin & friend.

Casper Martin & friend.

Here are two witty and hilarious short stories by Casper Martin, a student of mine at Vermont College of Fine Arts this semester. It’s a rare student who delights me this much, makes me chuckle and admire, but Casper has an outrageous sense of humour and a slightly pomo aesthetic that puts a premium on reversal and surprise and jokes that make you think. Both these stories were written from an exercise I sometimes give students. If you want to try to look it up, the exercise along with an essay on the short story (“Short Story Structure: Notes and an Exercise”) can be found in my book Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing (Biblioasis, 2012). It will also be reprinted in a book of my essays coming out next year. In any case, these two stories, brief and stripped down, are elegant in their simplicity and concept. Both stories turn a genre on its head. The kid gunslinger (practicing his chops on the town’s ONLY tree) and the encounter with the Angel of Death. The Angel of Death story is particularly intriguing because it manages to combine a tale about death with a story about sex, seduction, comedy and the spirit of life. I’ve never seen such a positive, lively and unsentimental death bed scene. This is something else.

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Gunslinger

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Ambitious, young Mathew Singleton lusted to be a gun fighter—Kid Matty—but he had never killed a man.  He saw that as an obstacle to his success, an obstacle he had to overcome as quickly as possible, while he was still young and his reflexes were still sharp as needles.

He rolled a forty-five-caliber cartridge between his thumb and forefinger, thinking he wanted to be the one to deal out those round-nosed lead bullets in a time without safety or protection.  The only defense was to shoot faster and hit your target.

Mat didn’t worry about getting killed.  He thought everything would take care of itself if that happened.  When he thought of the possibilities, he understood that he couldn’t kill a drunk or a storekeeper.  He had to kill a gunfighter.  He didn’t want to be known as an assassin of ordinary people.

♣

Young Mat walked into the Still Water Saloon and surveyed the crowd.  His eyes fell upon Davey McBride, a gunfighter so famous he could be found in his own dime novels.  Mat’s heart jumped inside him.  McBride sat at a poker game with his back to the wall.  Young Mat walked over and began staring at McBride.  Mat wondered if this would be the moment of his death.  McBride said, “Take a seat.  This game needs new blood.”

Mat resisted saying he didn’t have the money.  Money hadn’t seemed important until this instant.  He said, “I want to kill you.”  And he almost fell over in fear of what he had said.

McBride looked him over, measuring.  He said, “You get right to the point, don’t you, kid?”  When Mat didn’t answer he said, “Why don’t we play poker instead?  There’s less tears in poker than gun play.”

Mat thought he had gotten around playing poker, but there it was right in his face again.  He still didn’t want to admit he had no money.  Mat almost closed his eyes, but he knew he had to keep his eyes on McBride.  He thought this would be the moment of his death.  He said, “I mean it.  I want to kill you.”

McBride studied the kid.  He said, “Ever body wants to kill me.  Don’t worry about it, kid.  It’s OK as long as you don’t act on that desire.  Come on.  Take a seat.  Play some poker.  You might get to like me.”

Mat thought of drawing and shooting, but now he kind of liked McBride.  McBride was shuffling the cards.  He thought he could kill him right then.  With McBride’s hands above the table and away from his gun Mat knew McBride would be slow on the draw, but Mat wanted to win a fair fight.  Mat decided he couldn’t get out of being broke.  He said, “I don’t have enough money to play poker with you.”

McBride said, “Well then, you should get a job, earn some money and come back and play poker with me.”

Mat heard laughter behind him.  He held his hands out to his sides like he was going to draw his gun and fire.  He said, “Are you making fun of me?”

McBride said, “I don’t make fun of people.  I have enough people who want to kill me.  I’m just giving advice on how to get money so we can play cards.”

Mat was back to not knowing what to say.  He said, “I want to kill you.”  And he walked out between the swinging saloon doors.

♣

Two days later Mat was back at the Still Water.  He sat down at the poker table with McBride.  McBride said, “You took my advice.  I can see it in your eyes.  You got a job, you earned some money and now you want to give it to me.  Very good.  That’s much better than wanting to kill me.”

Mat said, “I took money from the offering plate in church.  If you have fast hands, you can put a little in with one hand and take a lot out with the other and nobody notices a thing.”

McBride said, “I better watch you, kid.  You must have really fast hands.  I don’t like that in people who want to kill me.”  McBride paused.  When Mat didn’t answer, he said, “How much did you get from the church?”

Mat didn’t want to say that he made up the story and still didn’t have money to play poker.  He said, “I don’t think I want to give you the money I stole from church.  I think I better hang onto it and put it back in the offering plate on Sunday.”

McBride smiled at him.  He said, “I think I like you.  You’re an upstanding citizen.  You probably don’t want to kill me.”

Mat didn’t hesitate.  He said, “I want to kill you.”

McBride said, “What you got for a gun?”

Mat said, “A Colt 45 1873 Peacemaker.”

McBride said, “You want to kill me with a Peacemaker?  That just doesn’t sound right.”

Mat said, “Forty grains of black powder moves a 255-grain round-nosed lead bullet right along.  I been practicing on the old elm tree just outside of town.  You should see the holes in it.”

McBride said, “So that’s you who’s killing our tree.  It’s not an elm.  There isn’t an elm in this whole state.  It’s a cottonwood.  Maybe if you kill it, you’ll get a taste for killing, but a tree’s not a man.”  McBride paused.  Mat said nothing.  McBride went on, “I have no passion left in me.  I don’t hardly want to draw a gun, but I will.  Don’t make me do it boy.”

Mat said, “I seen your book, The Merchant Of Death.  I know all your tricks, old man.”

McBride laughed.  He said, “Learn to read.  That book’s not about me.”

Mat said, “Yeah, well I know all the tricks in that book.  That’s all I need for you.”

McBride laughed again.  He said, “That book’s about Whiplash O’Keefe.”  McBride paused and then said, “I killed him.  Are we going to play cards or not?”

Mat walked out of the Still Water through the swinging doors.

♣

The next day, as Mat shot the cottonwood tree, he began to wonder whether killing McBride might be a bad plan.  Mat put a bullet into what looked like a squirrel hole and a dove flopped out dead.  He saw its blood where it fell on the ground.  The sight shocked him.  He wondered how it would feel to kill a man.  He could move his gun hand quickly and his aim was sure, but he wondered about aiming at a man instead of a tree.  He saw McBride’s face in his mind and he nipped a small branch from the cottonwood, catching it precisely where it met the trunk, just where he imagined hitting it.

Mat liked to shoot things, but he didn’t know if he loved it.  He never sighted down the barrel, always shooting from the hip.  He wondered whether that was what he was doing with McBride, shooting from the hip.  Maybe he should take his time and study the situation before going any further, but shooting from the hip seemed to work against the cottonwood.  He sighted down the barrel at a small branch and hit nothing.  He had no idea where the bullet went.

♣

The next day, Mat was back at the Still Water and McBride was sitting at the same poker table.  Mat said, “Do you ever move?  This is the only place I’ve ever seen you.”

McBride said, “I been known to move pretty quick.”

Mat couldn’t see McBride’s hands.  His heart sped up.  He said, “Put your hands where I can see them.”

McBride said, “Why should I?”  When Mat just stood there with his hands out to his sides like he might draw, McBride said, “Don’t be afraid.  I don’t want to kill you.”

Mat said, “Yeah, well, I want to kill you.”

McBride looked like he was getting angry.  He said, “What’d I ever do to you?”

Mat said, “It’s nothing personal.  I just want your job and killing you is the only way I know to get it.”

Clearly angry now, McBride said, “Are you stupid?  Killing a man is as personal as it gets.  You’re taking everything he ever had and everything he’s ever going to have away from him.”

Mat said, “It’s just business.”

McBride said, “What business you in?  It doesn’t pay very well.  You have to steal from the offering plate in church to get money to play poker.  My job’s sitting here playing poker.  How you going to do my job with no money?”

Mat was getting angry.  He thought of pulling his gun right then, but he couldn’t see McBride’s hands.  He suddenly realized that McBride wanted him to pull his gun.  McBride wanted to kill him right then.  Mat said, “So long.”  And he turned to walk out.

McBride called after him, “Don’t go away angry.  I’ll buy you a whisky.”

Mat turned around.  He said, “I never could understand why men drink whisky on a hot day to quench their thirst.”

McBride said, “Thirst’s got nothing to do with it.  Have one.  You’ll see.”

But Mat wasn’t listening.  The desire to live pulled him through the swinging doors.

♣

Mat was back at the cottonwood shooting it again.  Someone in town yelled at him.  “God dammit, stop killing this town’s only tree.”

Mat shouted back, “Fuck you sod buster.”  Then he said quietly, “Or storekeeper, fuck you too.”

Mat understood for the first time that it was the only tree in the whole town.  It wasn’t right in the town, but he couldn’t think of another tree in the area and he was killing it just so he’d be able to kill McBride.  He wondered if he would be able to kill McBride.  He put his Colt 1873 Peacemaker in its holster and then drew and fired as fast as he could.  It felt very fast and he hit the squirrel hole the dove had been in.  He could see splinters come out when the bullet hit.  He did it time after time.  Each time seemed faster than the last and he hit everything he aimed at.  It felt smooth and effortless.  He knew he could do it all day, but then when he went to reload the Peacemaker, he only had two bullets left and no money to buy more.

Mat had to wonder what he was doing.  Why did he want to kill MacBride?  Did he want to be the one sitting at the poker table talking to kids who wanted to kill him?  He only had a vague idea how to play poker.

And did he want to be in a town that only had one tree?  He was ready to pack it in.

♣

As Matt walked back into town, he saw McBride in the street.  He said, “Glad to see you’re not stuck to that poker table.”

McBride said, “You still want to kill me, kid?  Now’s the time.  I heard you say you want to kill me one time too many.”

Mat began to take in the situation.  He was in the middle of the street.  McBride was in the middle to the street.  They were about twenty yards apart, facing each other.  McBride had his hands out at his sides, ready to draw.  Mat had only two bullets in his gun.  He couldn’t help but worry he might need three shots to kill McBride.  He said, “Wait a minute.”

McBride said, “You turning yellow after saying you want to kill me so many times?”

Mat was getting angry.  After the way he had been shooting at the cottonwood, he thought he could probably beat McBride, but he knew many men, including Whiplash O’Keefe, had thought that.  He tried to remember The Merchant of Death.  Maybe it contained a secret that would save him, but his mind emptied.  He said, “Can’t we talk about this?”

McBride said, “I want to kill you, you yellow dog.  And it’s personal.  You understand that now?”

Mat could see the round-nosed lead bullets in McBride’s gun belt.  He wonder whether he feel it when one hit him.  Mat said, “I don’t want to kill you any more.”

McBride said, “Too late.  I want to kill you.  Draw or turn around and walk out of town with nothing but the shirt on your back.”

Mat didn’t know why, but he said, “OK.”  And before he knew it, he saw McBride’s hand going for his gun.  It looked slow, but Mat knew it was fast and without thinking he felt himself going for his gun.

Mat expected to see his bullet hit McBride the way he had seen his bullets hit the cottonwood, but he saw dust kick up in front of McBride and then he saw blue sky.  He watched a dove fly over.

Mat didn’t know what had happened.  Nothing hurt, but he was lying on his back and couldn’t sit up and he had to cough a little.  Then he saw McBride standing above him.  McBride said, “I got you through the lung.  I’m losing my touch.  I was aiming at your heart.”

Mat said, “Why’d you draw on me?  I wasn’t ready.”

McBride said, “The one who draws first wins.  Remember that, kid.”

Mat didn’t say anything.  He thought about shooting McBride.  Mat wanted to put a bullet through McBride’s Adam’s Apple.  He still had one bullet, but he didn’t know where his gun had gone.  McBride said, “What’s your name?  I should know who I kill.”

Mat said, “Call me Kid Matty.

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The Angel of Death

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Old Gustavo Kintenilla lay in his deathbed in Holy Family Hospital.  He thought, Jesus, I wish I could get laid one more time.  Maybe if I take Viagra and grab the nurse.  But wait a minute — I don’t have any Viagra and the nurse is stronger than I am.  She lifts me up to bathe me.  That’ll never work.

She bathes me, so she’s seen my naked body and it had no effect on her.  Christ Almighty, the body that used to drive women crazy had no effect.  She could have been doing the laundry.  That’s how exciting she found me.  I might as well be dead.  She sees me as dead, just waiting to be carried off.

Maybe if I could get a boner, if she saw my manhood in its glory, maybe that would change the context from bath to sexual encounter.  He began to fondle his penis, hoping to make something happen, but he got no response.  It felt like something soft and warm that had nothing to do with him.  He thought, Jesus, I wish I had just one Viagra pill.  But then he thought again and wished for two or three, but he began to worry that he would never see even one.

 ♣

At midnight that night, a beautiful apparition appeared in the room with him.  He said, “Are you bringing me my Viagra.  I knew my prayer would be answered.”

She said, “I heard no prayer.  I am the angel of death.  I am here to take you.”

He said, “The grim reaper?  Here for me?”

Hovering above the bed, she said, “You don’t rate the grim reaper.  You’re an ordinary man.  You get an ordinary angel.  Me.”

Gustavo felt some dissatisfaction on the angel’s part.  He said, “Do you love your work?”

She burst into laughter that sounded bitter and said, “I won’t have to do it forever.”

Gustavo worked the bed to get himself into a sitting position.  He felt a touch better.  He said, “How long have you been doing this?”

The angel looked puzzled.  She said, “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t doing it.  I walk the endless corridors of dead, but that doesn’t matter.  I have to take you now.”

Gustavo thought he heard tears in her voice.  He said, “What’s the rush?  Why not take a little time?  Make your job enjoyable.”

When she didn’t answer him, he said, “You could fuck me and then take me.  You might like it; increase your job satisfaction.”

She hesitated and then said, “Mr. Kintenilla!  We have standards.  I can’t do that.”

He was sitting up, almost leaning forward toward the angel.  He said, “You had to think about it.  I saw you considering it.  Call me Goose.  All my friends call me Goose.”

The angel of death was touching herself in a provocative way.  She said, “You’re not my friend, Mr. Kintenilla.”

He smiled at her.  He said, “No wonder you’re unhappy.  You have no friends.”  He paused.  “You could fuck me if you wanted to.  I know you want to.  I see you touching yourself.  Wouldn’t you like a man to touch you?”

Still touching herself, the angel said, “Who wants to fuck an old man on his death bed?”

He said, “You could restore me and fuck me as the man I used to be.  I was a handsome man.  I know how to pleasure a woman.”  He felt his groin coming to life.  He said, “Look here.” And he pointed to a bulge in the sheets.  He said, “Just talking to you is bringing me back.  I haven’t had a boner in years without Viagra.”

Breathing hard, she said, “I have to go now.  I’ll be back for you, Goose.”

 ♣

The next night at midnight the angel was back.  She looked lovelier than Gustavo remembered, heavenly.  He said, “You look so beautiful.  I could die happily in your arms.”

She said, “You mean in my pussy, don’t you?”

He said, “I think I’m in love.”

She said, “You don’t know what love is.”

He said, “What do you love?”  She looked down and didn’t answer, so he said, “I could rub your shoulders.  They do that for me.  I know how they do it to me.  I could do it to you.”

She hesitated again.  Then said, “No touching allowed.”

He said, “You’re the hesitant angel.  You know what you want.  Why not take it?  The touch of a man’s hands won’t hurt you.”  And he felt himself growing stronger, more in control as she turned her back to him.  He kneaded her shoulders with fingers that hadn’t felt so strong in years.

The angel said, “Oh.  Ooh.  Ooooh.” And pulled away from him.

He pulled her back to him.  He said, “Just a little more.  This is good for me too.  Don’t deny me this.”  He pushed more deeply into her shoulders.  He said, “Too deep?  Does it hurt?”

She said, “I feel no pain.”  And she leaned into him.

He cupped her breast.  He could feel no bra under her robe.  He slipped his hand beneath her robe and caressed the warm roundness of her breast.  His arms felt firm and strong.  He played with her nipple between his thumb and forefinger.

She pulled away and said, “Stop that!  Mr. Kintenilla, I told you, no touching.  Now I have to take you.  Your time is up.”

He said, “Call me Goose.”

She said, “Brace yourself.  This always comes as a shock.”

He moved to embrace her.  She backed up.  He said, “Don’t take me now.  I know you want me.  I felt the passion in you.  Let me make you feel good.”

She said, “Damn you, Goose.”  And she was gone.

 ♣

Goose thought, I am dead already.  This is heaven.  Or is it hell, with a cock-teasing, beautiful angel who let’s me fool around, but will never go all the way?  Lordy, I want her pussy so bad I could cry.  I would love just one more fuck before I die.  But instantly he knew that was a lie.  As he felt his blood moving inside his body for the first time in years, he knew he wanted more than one fuck.  He wanted to go on fucking forever.  But then he thought he might be a delusional old man playing out his last fantasies in his mind, that he might be dreaming all of this.  Then he thought, if it’s a dream, please let me fuck her in my dream.  At least, give me that.

♣

The next night at midnight, she was back.  He said, “Is midnight my time?  Half past is just as good, don’t you think?”

She said, “You’re overdue.  I’m behind schedule.”

He said, “Heaven can wait.”

She looked him in the eyes.  She said, “How do you know you’re going there?”

He felt stronger than ever.  He jumped up and out of the bed as though he were a youth.  He stood behind her with his arms around her, a hand on each breast.  He said, “Hell can wait forever.  Let’s run away together.  Love will provide.”

She scoffed.  “What do you know of love?  You just want to fuck me.”

He said, “You want it too.  You’re restoring me so you can enjoy it.”  He got one hand under the front of her robe and began massaging her pudendum.

She said, “Oh.  Ooh.  Ooooh.”  And she tried to pull away from him, but he pulled her back and pressed his penis up against her buttocks.  He got one finger into her.  He nuzzled her ear lobe and then bit it gently.

He said, “Are you ready for this?”

She jerked away from him, much stronger than he thought.  He knew he could never control her.  She, “I can’t do this.  I am the angel of death.  Damn you, Goose.”  And she was gone.

 ♣

Goose cursed himself for asking.  Why didn’t he just do it?  He could feel her desire, her willing it to happen, but he had to say something and bring her rational mind into it.  How stupid could he be?

He dreamt of her that night.  He said to her, “Your pussy is exquisite.”

She said, “What did you expect?  I’m an angel.”

Then she turned ugly and became death.  He wanted to look away, but he didn’t.  He knew his death was coming.  There was no hiding from it.

Then she became beautiful again and he was a young man pursuing her, wondering if he would ever get her.  He thought he would.  Getting a finger in was a good sign, but then he thought it might just scare her away.  She hadn’t left him on the best of terms, but she did call him Goose.  He felt warm and full of hope.  Then he slept without dreams.

 ♣

The next night at eleven twenty five she was back.  She said, “Your time is midnight.  You’re going tonight.  We have half an hour.”

He said, “I love the word we.  I think that’s thirty-five minutes we have.  Maybe we can do it twice.”

She said, “Gather ye rosebuds, Goose.”

And he did.

♣

The next morning the day nurse who had come to know Gustavo Kintenilla saw his empty bed.  She looked at the framed picture of him as a young man his children had brought in and she said to the night nurse who was leaving, “Goose was a handsome man.”

The night nurse looked at it and said, “He was.  He must have broken some hearts.”

The day nurse said, “Did he go peacefully?”

The night nurse made a face.  She said, “No.  I checked on him just before midnight and he was writhing around the bed.  I couldn’t restrain him.  Who knew he was so strong.  And then at midnight he was gone.  Just like that.”

The day nurse said, “I hope he wasn’t in pain.”

—Casper Martin

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Retired from software development at Bell Labs, Casper Martin lives in Andover, Massachusetts, with his wife, two dogs and four cats. A binge writer who hesitates to talk about the muse, he tries to understand what it is that moves him or leaves him stagnant as he fails to write on a regular schedule. After he heard the poets read at VCFA, he thought he might be able to fake what they were doing so he embarked on a three-semester jaunt through poetry where he discovered his voice tended to be invective. He now suspects faking it is no easier than producing the genuine article, and hopes to demonstrate the truth of that assertion by producing a real poem some day. Probably the kindest thing that can be said of his writing career (which began in 1973 in a creative writing course at Indiana University) is that he has great stamina. He hopes to graduate from VCFA in January after 7 (yes 7!) semesters.

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Nature Writing in America: The Enigmatic Edward Hoagland — Adam Regn Arvidson

Jun 132011
 

 

If one more reviewer or foreword writer refers to an author as some latter-day Thoreau, I’m going to throw that book in the nearest pond.

This knee-jerk reference is everywhere—each of the previous two authors in this series, Loren Eiseley and Edward Abbey, have been referred to as Thoreaus (a remarkable fact considering how unalike Eiseley and Abbey were). And there it was again, in the foreword of Edward Hoagland’s most recent essay collection, Sex and the River Styx (2011): “Edward Hoagland,” crows the title, “The Thoreau of Our Times.”

My beef with the comparison is that it sets up false expectations. I initially began reading Hoagland because quite a few people I was meeting told me that I should. During my first two trips to Vermont for my MFA studies, whenever I would say that my writing focused on science and nature, there was a good chance I would be asked if I had read either Annie Dillard or Hoagland. No? the incredulous inquisitor would gasp, You must read The Courage of Turtles. To me that sounded like a good bit of nature writing: the courage of turtles—a dose of ironic personification coupled with a straightforward description of subject matter. When I finally got to Hoagland, it was Sex and the River Styx first (start with the current stuff, right?). As I opened the book, the combination of writer friends’ swoons, a golden embossed tree on the cover, and that Thoreauvian header had me primed for something truly naturalistic.

But I was disappointed.

Let’s be clear: this is a complex and wide-ranging collection, which certainly touches on nature (its beauties, its dangers, and how we’re pretty much ruining it), but it remains more immersed in Hoagland’s mind than in the world around him—natural or not. So I went back to the source: the man’s seminal work, the now (unfortunately) out-of-print 1971 essay collection everyone had been recommending. I was surprised to find a dearth of nature even here. Tugboats, circuses, county fairs, and sex? Sure. Paeans to trees and reptiles and charismatic megafauna? Not really. Yes, the titular essay is about turtles, but those turtles are found in a bowl in an aquarium shop, painted up as curios at a boardwalk arcade, and in Hoagland’s own aquarium, kept as pets. Even the essays that do focus on the wild world, namely “The Moose on the Wall” and “The War in the Woods,” are about, respectively, taxidermy and bear hunting.

Strangely, though, I couldn’t stop reading. I sampled Notes from the Century Before (1968), about a summer in British Columbia; have begun Walking the Dead Diamond River (1973), a collection examining the nature/city dichotomy, and am part-way through the 2003 collection Hoagland on Nature. I can’t put him down.

In “A Last Look Around,” one of the swan-songily named essays in Sex and the River Styx, Hoagland says:

I’ve been publishing books for forty years, and I don’t have a fastball any more, just a knuckleball, spitball, and other Satchel Paigey stuff.

That stuff’s hard to hit, but a lot of fun to take a swing at (or watch from the stands). Hoagland’s writing is about nature, but it comes at you sideways, through the tugboats plying the East River, through commercial coyote trappers, through the tame big cats and sad elephants traveling the country with the Barnums, through references to pharmaceuticals and lawn maintenance. Which means Hoagland gets our human situation (and always got it—I think his earlier work is Satchel Paigey, too, which is a compliment). We don’t live in nature. We live somewhere in between.

I loved metropolises and saw no conflict between exulting in their magnetism and in wild places.

That’s from another Sex and the River Styx essay, “Small Silences,” and it suggests we can live in both worlds. But there are hazards:

Yet a more authentic affinity with what we call nature is being lost even faster than nature itself. Into the void slips obsessional pornography, fundamentalist religion, stobe-light showbiz…and squirmy corporate flacks…. If gyms don’t substitute for walking, it’s hard to find a place to walk, as houses line every beachfront and scissor every patch of woods with cul-de-sacs for real estate.

And:

If you wait until your mature years to get to know a patch of countryside thoroughly or intimately, your responses may be generic, not specific—just curiosity and good intentions—and you will wind up going in for golf and tennis and power mowers, bypassing nature, instead.

These little rants in the latest collection are a departure from Hoagland’s earlier work, the hallmark of which is a blameless observation, crafted in a way that leads the reader to a conclusion without seeming to do the leading (more on that later, see the upcoming “bonus post” at the end). Sex and the River Styx, the essays in which were originally published between 2003 and 2010 in a variety of magazines ranging from Harper’s to American Scholar to Outside, feels, well, final. Start with the titles: “A Last Look Around,” “Last Call,” “Endgame,” “A Country for Old Men.” Hoagland is approaching 80. He has written hundreds of essays since “The Big Cats” appeared in Esquire in 1961. Sex and the River Styx has a tone of exasperation to it, as if he were saying, World, I’ve been trying to save you from yourselves for 40 years and this is the last time I’m going to tell you.

Perhaps that explains my initial disappointment. I read Hoagland the wrong way ‘round. I’m not there yet. I’m just short of 37 and have the strange notion I can still make a difference. There is a long arc to Hoagland’s work, which, taken as an oeuvre, is emphatically about how to take care of the world—without shaming anyone specifically (like Abbey does).

Also without sequestering oneself into a certain pigeon-hole. As a case in point, to find Hoagland’s work, I bounded up and down the steps of the Minneapolis Central Library, visiting the travel, literature, and science and business sections. He is anthologized in the 1989 nature writing collection This Incomparable Lande, but is omitted from Bill McKibben’s landmark American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau (2008), which features about 100 works by authors including the well-recognized (hmm) nature-writers Woody Guthrie, Lyndon Johnson, and P.T. Barnum. Apparently, neither academia nor library science know exactly where to put Hoagland. (Considering McKibben’s pro-nature sensibilities, the omission of Hoagland’s “Endgame,” an extraordinary and wide ranging essay on threats to the environment, is an unfortunate oversight.)

If Hoagland had a pet subject matter, it was big mammals, especially wild predators. Yes, he is best known for a ditty about turtles, but it’s bears and mountain lions and wolves and coyotes that obviously capture his fancy. Hoagland began his adulthood traveling with the circus and working with lions and tigers, and that passion never seems to have left him. He broke into The New Yorker in 1971 with “Hailing the Elusory Mountain Lion,” has essay collections called Red Wolves and Black Bears and Tigers and Ice, and has traveled to Africa to document both the human and animal tragedies happening there.

Several of the animals he illuminates are on the federal endangered species list. The wolf, in fact, was one of the poster-fauna for the Endangered Species Act, which became law in 1973. A number of Hoagland’s essays predate that law, including those collected in The Courage of Turtles. Earlier, he contributed his wilderness memoir Notes from the Century Before (about the wild, grizzly-populated Pacific coast) to one of the greatest years for nature writing in the last century, 1969, in which Wendell Berry, Loren Eiseley, and John Hay all published important works.

I expect Hoagland would be horrified to learn that Congress recently stripped protection of western wolves by de-listing them in a rider to the budget bill signed recently by President Obama. No plant or animal has ever been removed from the Endangered Species Act by an act of Congress–politics trumps science.

For my part, I am still trying to figure out exactly why I have become so enamored with this writer, especially after my initial disappointment. Neither Eiseley nor Abbey affected me quite this way.

I am beginning to think it has to do with the reality of the writing. Hoagland is neither agitator, activist, nor rebel, but rather observer: of mountain lions, of bears, of kids spending more time in front of video games than outdoors, of red wolf trappers on Texas bayou plantations, of endangered animals in circus cages, of Viagra and pornography and overpopulation, of turtles. Of nature and human nature.

I don’t want to compare Hoagland to Thoreau just because both talked from time to time about plants and animals and human impacts on the environment (incidentally, Hoagland’s 1991 essay “About H.D. Thoreau” focuses on the 19th Century writer’s humanism and activism, which makes the Hoagland-Thoreau comparison a bit more apt).  Hoagland seems more rooted in civilization, even as he dreams of an afterlife “thocketing among the boulders” of some creek as he washes out to sea to be gently rocked for eternity.  Hoagland hits me a lot harder than Thoreau does.

For instance, at the moment of this writing, I am sitting in a campground at Wild River State Park in Minnesota. In front of me on the left is a two-person tent, where my three-year-old son is sleeping off the morning’s hike. In front of me on the right is a 32-foot motorhome, in which my father and his long-time girlfriend are doing the same. My laptop is on the picnic table on a plastic checked tablecloth purchased on the way up here at a Wal-Mart. This weekend get-away in the motorhome is Ethan’s 3rd birthday present from my dad. This is not the way I normally camp.

But this morning we were enveloped in a flock of yellow swallowtail butterflies on the banks of the St. Croix River (designated in 1968 as one of the nation’s first Wild and Scenic Rivers). We spied blooming wild geranium and trillium and false Solomon’s seal in the woods. We watched two giant russet and crimson cecropia moths mate on a tree near the visitor center. A tiny spider I cannot identify just jumped from the tablecloth to my arm, thought better of that decision, and jumped back to the tablecloth. There’s a light breeze in the oaks and the sky is blue.

I could get wrapped up in so many philosophical battles with myself (what’s the gas mileage of that motorhome? where was this tablecloth made? why have we let our rivers get so polluted that the federal government is likely to name three more Minnesota mussels to the endangered species list next year?). But I am too judgmental; I should observe more. And the most important observation? My dad took my son camping.

Which makes me think of this, from the title essay in Hoagland’s most recent collection:

And that’s not an inconsiderable recipe for life—to do no harm and to bear witness. The second is often harder than the first.

(My son, incidentally, seized my Hoagland on Nature, handing me Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks and Things that Go in return. A budding nature writer? Maybe Hoagland needs to grow on him a little, too….)

Proceed to the next essay, a closer examination of “The Courage of Turtles” with an eye to how Hoagland shares his (sometimes scathing) observations without placing much actual blame (a  craft essay), or return to Nature Writing in America Table of Contents.

— Adam Regn Arvidson

James Agee’s Unconventional Use of Colons: Essay — Anna Maria Johnson

Jun 112011
 


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Numéro Cinq is fighting a guerrilla war against a culture that is determined to forget the beauty, grace and precision of well-written words. In this essay, Anna Maria Johnson goes to the barricades with a lovely meditation on a tiny point—James Agee’s unconventional use of colons in his great book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. A small, small point, but the inspiration is prodigious for beauty of prose (and poetry) begins with attention to small details of correct (or eccentrically creative) technique.

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James Agee’s Unconventional Colons in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

By Anna Maria Johnson

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Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to Horace Liveright dated May 22, 1925, advised,  “My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible . . . You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.”   James Agee, unlike Ernest Hemingway, apparently had no compunction against experimenting with punctuation.  Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men makes both conventional and experimental use of the colon, which appears a grand total of 1,530 times in 424 pages, for an average of ~3.608 colons per page.

Agee’s text is most heavily colon-saturated throughout the more experimental portions of the book (those passages most descriptive, lyrical, and expressive), while his more reportage-styled passages (those with direct quotations, facts and figures, literal information, and directly conveyed scenes) use few colons.

Agee’s Use of Colons

In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the colon draws attention to itself most when it appears at the end of paragraphs, and when it is used rhetorical purposes rather than according to syntactical sense. Agee was surely aware of his significant reliance on the colon, even titling one section of the book, “Colon,” as if the whole section were a thoughtful pause or breath, like the Bible’s use of “Selah” in the Psalms.   Agee consistently controls the colon use, using it to different effect in different passages of his book, according to the tone and sense he wishes to convey.

Why did Agee choose to employ the colon so prodigiously in this book, and toward what ends? Let’s explore some of the ways, both conventional and experimental, in which he used the colon, and examine why he may have chosen to do so.

Agee often uses the colon in conventionally acceptable ways.  For example, shortly after the Preface, Agee uses the colon conventionally when he lists the “Persons and Places” of the book as if they are a cast of characters for a play (“FRED GARVRIN RICKETTS: a two-mule tenant farmer, aged fifty-four”).  In the Table of Contents, colons separate section titles from their subtitles, as in “Part One: A Country Letter” (Agee 2).  He also, in the expected way, places a colon before a list, as when he writes in his Preface of the project’s components, “The immediate instruments are two: the motionless camera, and the printed word” (Agee x). Of course, it is allowable to place a colon before a direct quotation, as Agee does on page 13, “By my memory, he [Beethoven] said: ‘He who understands my music can never know unhappiness again.’ I believe it.”  These are inarguably appropriate and conventional instances of colon usage.

Continue reading »

Star Suite: Poems — Gary Moore

Jun 072011
 

Gary Moore is an amiable friend, a poet and playwright, a man with a yen for the stars and stardom, at least the artistic kind of stardom. These are poems about the stars, about that yearning for distant points of light, the type, yes, of all yearning, the hopeful, melancholy ember of lust and desire that fires us through a lifetime of attempts and regret. Gary is the author of the full-length dramas The Tongue of Their Gladness, Long Lankin’s Curse, and Beaver Falls.  As a young man teaching in Shanghai, he wrote and produced a bi-lingual rap opera, The Great Emancipator Meets the Monkey King, that  introduced rap music to the People’s Republic of China.  Burning in China, his one-man show about writing and performing the rap opera and then being swept with his Chinese friends into the Tiananmen democracy movement, sold out at last year’s New York International Fringe Festival. He is Academic Dean at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a member of the Dramatists Guild.

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Star Suite

Poems by Gary Moore

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I wanted the prize but the prize looked the other way

I wanted the prize but the prize looked the other way
It was the other prize
I wanted the beach but I got the mountains
Not everyone gets the mountains
I wanted the beautiful woman and I got her
But I didn’t live happily ever after
After that I tried to be careful about wanting
No, not in the moments when my dick rose up
And I couldn’t think until I quelled it
But the big wants:
I kept art alive
I lived out my mother and father’s hope that I’d be clean and successful in some way
……………they’d understand and pay my bills
I wanted to be equal to humanity
I fed my baby daughter at 3 a.m. while Van Morrison sang ‘Into the Mystic’
I held my dying mother’s hand
I was cruel and apologized
I lost love and said so and wept
I screamed and pounded the steering wheel
Like you
And there was more
I wanted to be one with the stars
Maybe you know this too
Yes, we all know the song about the guy who built the railroad—was it to the sun?—and
…………..now he’s begging for a dime?
I wanted the stars
They drove me crazy when they put on their silver dresses those flirtatious nights
Then disappeared when they took them off
That’s the nature of want I heard them sing
And because I so longed for light in darkness
The stars could tell me just about anything
With those rays slipping off their shimmery shoulders
No matter how much I wanted a different song

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Continue reading »

es muss sein? es muss nicht sein, i tell you: Poem — Brianna Berbenuik

Jun 052011
 

Here is a melancholy little love poem, in the Frank O’Hara mode, from the Victoria, British Columbia, poet, Slavic Studies student, Chernobyl expert, blogger, and shootist, Brianna Berbenuik, known affectionately in Numéro Cinq circles as AK Berbenuik for her exciting adventures with Glocks and AK47s. The author photograph is appropriately and unseasonably wintry; the poem reminds dg of many saying-goodbye-with-boxes moments in his wintry past.

dg

es muss sein? es muss nicht sein, i tell you

By Brianna Berbenuik

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this is our great romance.

dreams
of sucking salt from your fingertips
feeling the pressure of the padded ends
on my tongue.

i collect moments with you
like you collect little sisters

like dolls, your girls are
worthless without their packaging—
easy to throw away,
and begin the search again

everything is half-way.
that night, i thought you might kiss me.
it was foolish, but i am sorry i didn’t.
maybe next time—

“i am stuck in traffic in a taxi cab
which is typical, and not just of modern life”

i am laying on your floor surrounded by
banker’s boxes, like architecture
everything in stacks; ready for relocation.

sometimes we keep ourselves this way.

—Brianna Berbenuik

My First Job: Essay — Natalia Sarkissian

Jun 042011
 

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Once again Natalia Sarkissian goes cutting edge, writing the first in a new Numéro Cinq memoir series called “My First Job”—to go with the terrific “What it’s like living here” and “Childhood” series already under way. In the essay, Natalia recounts her early career as a Good Humor man, the ins and outs of customer base development, the advantages of having an ice cream truck for driving your friends around on weekends, and the day she made so much money she was throwing dollar bills into the freezer because there was no room left in the cash box. This is a piece of Americana—still in the evenings in my neighbourhood, we hear the musical notes of the Mr. Ding-a-Ling truck (our version of Good Humour). My sons don’t rush out anymore, clutching their dollar bills, but still we look up at each other smile. As with her earlier essays, Natalia brackets off a piece of her life and serves it up to the reader. If you read through all her NC texts (glance at Nonfiction contents page), you’ll see a life emerging: mysterious, scarey, adventurous, sad and triumphant.

dg

My First Job 

(In which I break into the food industry, drive a truck and  learn about business)

by Natalia Sarkissian

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The Search

In the swing, on the shady side porch, with the sun breaking through chinks in the trellis, I’m thumbing through the Stony Brook newspaper, scouring the help wanted ads. I’m nineteen years old and it’s a silky June day in the late 1970s, one of those days when the light shines strong and white in a glowing sky while the breeze is still cool and fresh. Wafting up from the Long Island Sound, a rush of that cool, fresh air rustles the leaves overhead and the hair on my neck but still, I’m perspiring. Time’s running out. After three weeks hunting, I’m still jobless. On September 10, I’m to fly to Italy to spend a semester studying art. Such plans require significant cash. Although I have a student loan to cover tuition and airfare, I need spending money. It’s Italy after all. I need lots of spending money.

Turning the page of the paper, jostling the swing, I find an advertisement that catches my eye.

Sell pots and pans! Make $200 or more per week!

So. They’re back but their name and location have changed. Last year, when I visited their office in Great Neck and signed up to be a rep and plunked down $65.00 for a starter kit that never materialized, they were Deluxe Kitchen Gear. This year, they’re Culinary Designs in Smithville. Well, I’m a year older. A year smarter. No con’s going to swindle me out of another chunk of change. I continue to search but nothing I’m remotely qualified to do materializes.

  Continue reading »

Whirlpool (All Tremors Cease): Underwater Video Meditation — Steven David Johnson & Anna Maria Johnson

Jun 022011
 

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Way back in February, I posted a series of whirlpool photographs made by husband, Steven David Johnson.  His obsession with whirlpools hasn’t ceased; only deepened.  Recently he purchased a wet suit (zipped into it, he closely resembles a superhero) and underwater camera in order to film whirlpools from beneath the surface.   He’s created a visual meditation on nature’s instability, layering his video imagery of a small whirlpool in the Shenandoah River’s North Fork over a soundtrack of “All Tremors Cease” by an artist named Erin Dingle (who kindly licensed her work through Creative Commons).  The resulting video meditation is dedicated to the victims of 2011’s natural disasters.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUoDwJrDr1E?rel=0&w=560&h=349

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There’s something profound about two artists, a videographer and musician, who are unknown to one another, yet are able to collaborate in this very new media format, responding aesthetically to the recent disasters that have have affected our world.  We human beings (artists, musicians, whirlpool-watchers) are in this together.

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—post text by Anna Maria Johnson, video by Steven David Johnson, music by Erin Dingle

St. John’s, Newfoundland: Photographs — Nicole Dixon

Jun 022011
 

Something self-indulgent about dg publishing these lovely Nicole Dixon photos because they reference a brooding, romantic, Heathcliff streak in him, the part of him that likes the idea of climbing Signal Hill in St. John’s, staring into the fog, and knowing there is nothing between the rock he’s standing on and Europe to the east except the vast, surging, very cold Atlantic. (Just behind you is Deadman’s Pond and just in front of you is Cuckold’s Cove—they have a way with names in Newfoundland.) There is also something satisfyingly uterine about St. John’s Harbour—ships go in and out through a narrow passage called, um, The Narrows (which you can see at the bottom of Signal Hill) while the harbour itself is, well, it all looks like an anatomy diagram dg remembers from when he was 12. DG has many writer friends in St. John’s who sometimes call him up late at night from the bars. It is also the home of the Burning Rock writing collective, an amazingly vibrant literary community with the best name ever. (Sometimes it seems St. John’s must have more writers per capita than any other place in the world.) On a personal note (as if talking about anatomy diagrams wasn’t personal enough), dg’s mother was stationed in St. John’s as a radio operator with the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. He has photographs of her marching through the streets as part of the VE-Day celebrations (also pictures of the massive victory party after). She used to like to go out to Cape Spear, just south of St. John’s and the eastern-most tip of North American, and look out into the Atlantic, too.

Nicole Dixon is an estimable fiction writer, with a first story collection coming out next year (see bio below). She  took these photos on a recent trip to St. John’s to attend the Atlantic Provinces Library Association conference, where she co-presented a paper on Sea Stacks (seastacks.ca), a web-resource she built to promote and disseminate information about Atlantic Canadian authors and books for children and teens. Much appreciated.

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Crisp: Short Story — R. W. Gray

Jun 012011
 

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Lightning, God, rocks, an eternally smouldering corpse, and a giant mother are the furniture of this spectacularly macabre and hilarious short story from R. W. Gray’s first collection Crisp, which I discovered just a couple of months ago while reading books for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award (Crisp was a finalist). First, the coincidence: I actually met Rob Gray two years ago in Mark Jarman’s house in Fredericton, New Brunswick, but it did not register with me at the time that he was a writer of such gifts and charm. (Goes to show, I guess, but what?) Second, the literary refs: I love the giant woman, the smouldering car. Obviously, we are not in the world of the real, possibly the world of the Real (in the Lacanian sense). The giant mother is, of course, a descendant of Rabelais’ giants, also a relative of the mysteriously enlarging giantess in Robert Coover’s novel John’s Wife (gorgeous novel: the giant woman saves the sheriff from a forest fire by peeing on him) and even the giant pig that takes over the house in Flann O’Brien’s amazing little book The Poor Mouth. This story has, as Mark Jarman writes, “verve and swing.”  It’s a pleasure to present it on Numéro Cinq. (And you can buy the book here.)

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R. W. Gray was born and raised on the northwest coast of British Columbia, and received a PhD in Poetry and Psychoanalysis from the University of Alberta in 2003. He is the author of two serialized novels in Xtra West magazine and has published poetry in various journals and anthologies, including Arc, Grain, Event, and dANDelion. He also has had ten short screenplays produced, including Alice & Huck and Blink. He currently teaches Film at the University of New Brunswick in Frederiction. Crisp is his first book.

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Crisp

By R. W. Gray

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It’s Tuesday and our father has packed the trunk of his rusty blue car. I am seven, my brother Randy is five, and we’re both standing on the porch and what neither of us says out loud is that we’re relieved. We watch him load the last of his stuff in the car. The lamp with the tassels from the living room, and his dining room chair, the one with the arms. Now there will be only three chairs left. I think to myself that the lamp and chair are signs he isn’t coming back. He’s taking everything he could need. Then I see a storm in the South bunching up where the highway and the horizon meet and I worry this is a sign he’s going to stay. I tetherball back and forth this way.

Randy stands and stares. He grips a rock in his right hand and I wonder if he’s going to throw it. I say nothing to him. I’m not a very good older brother. Mom pushes the screen door open and stands between us. Her left hand is over her mouth, her right hand props her elbow to keep her mouth in place. I can hear the thunder now. I want to call to Father as he opens the door, say maybe he should wait out the storm. But he nods before I can and gets in. The car shudders, a plume of blue smoke erupting towards us on the steps. He doesn’t wait for it to warm up, just backs up then the car moves forward and away. His left arm reaches out the window and waves a slow wave. Thunder again, and I look up to the rain suddenly falling on my bare face, the storm here already, like it just remembered it should rain and is making up for lost time. She starts to cry then, our mom. Maybe she thinks the rain will hide her tears, the telltale red of her run-ragged eyes. Or maybe she doesn’t care.

We watch him drive the half-mile down to the end of the driveway, driving into the storm, the clouds mud grey and the lightning cracking in the big sky. His car stops at the highway. He doesn’t signal. The car idles, long enough for me to think maybe he’ll turn around and come back. Maybe he’s thinking about Randy and me. How we need a father. One one thousand. Two one thousand. What’s he waiting for?

A bolt of lightning rips through the air above the highway, smites Father’s rust-pocked blue car and it explodes as the gas tank turns electric. Mother’s hand flies off her mouth and she lets out a strange animal shriek; she starts to laugh, everything tumbling out of her mouth at once. She had been nagging him for weeks to get the gas tank fixed. It was leaking gas everywhere. The back seats, the carpet, were wet with it. So it could have been the car cigarette lighter that pops clear of the dash when ember hot. But I prefer to think it was the lightning, that God has something to do with it. Because only God can smite things.

Mom’s face clinches red and raw in the rain, the laughter spilling out of her a little angry then a little sad then a little angry, and on and on. I see Randy look down. Yellow liquid running down her legs from her short denim shorts. She’s peeing herself, a yellow puddle forming around her bare feet on the deck. The rain’s falling harder now, splashing the urine. Randy looks like he’s going to say something but I give him a full force look. I give him the look that he and I both understand means just look at the horizon, look at the smoldering metal of our father. We are rocks, Randy, just look at the horizon.

What if he’s still alive? I take a step forward, a lurch.

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Titboning Vargina (and Other Social Readings): Review of Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask — Darryl Whetter

May 302011
 

Sam Lipsyte, © Robert Reynolds

The Ask
Sam Lipsyte
296 pp.
$25
ISBN  978-0-374-29891-3 

As a Canadian, I’m ashamed that American fiction, which is largely underwritten by a market, has a keener social eye than Canadian fiction, which is underwritten significantly by state-funded, supposedly arms-length grants. Contemporary American novels from maturing writers like Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, Michael Cunningham and Sam Lipsyte (author of this superb novel The Ask) as well as emerging novelists Joshua Ferris and Jonathan Dee examine, castigate and celebrate today, while my fellow Canadian writers remain obsessed with yester-year. Egan’s recent A Visit from the Goon Squad mocks celebrity culture and trophy marriages. Dee’s The Privileges boldly reasserts that novels about money are not the exclusive domain of the Victorian novel. Ferris’s chilling The Unnamed and Cunningham’s By Nightfall fearlessly plumb the life-time relationship. Here in Canada we get muskeg tales of outport woe (see February by Lisa Moore and/or Annabel by Kathleen Winter). With The Book of Negroes, a mega bestseller in Canada, Lawrence Hill digs deep to conclude that slavery was bad. Canadian writing grants that should make our fiction brave and bold too often leave it feeling like it was written (reluctantly) by a harried committee at a government ministry.

Sam Lipsyte’s searing, hilarious and moving new novel The Ask is able to judge the society it records without sounding as sanctimonious as a government recycling campaign. Most fiction writers at some point feel the pull of Chekhov’s claim (or Thornton Wilder’s paraphrase) that literature is not bound to answer questions but rather to pose them fairly. However, Chekhov’s advice can create a crippling rudderlessness that leaves superficial fiction misidrected and unengaged. Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad has an utterly condemning scene with a self-inflicted scar. Franzen’s The Corrections has that minor but unforgettable couple who lost their adult daughter to murder. The father responds by eventually deciding to never speak of the matter again. The mother draws the killer’s gun every day then rips up her (near perfect) drawing. Social portraiture is alive and well in American fiction. In The Ask, the multi-talented Sam Lipsyte laughs and cries along with the characters he condemns and condones.

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Three Poems — Maya Sarishvili

May 292011
 

Poems from Microscope

by Maya Sarishvili

Translated by Timothy Kercher and Nene Giorgadze

These rare English translations of the Georgian poet, Maya Sarishvili, come to us through the work of Tim Kercher and his translation partner, Nene Giorgadze. Of Tim’s many translation projects (see another Kercher translation here on NC), I am particularly drawn to Sarishvili’s poems as her work creates a meticulously urgent consciousness—her writing reminds me of the startling humanity of Anna Swir’s poetry mixed with elements of the mysteriously resonate, vulnerable work of Mary Ruefle.

Tim Kercher and I became friends at Vermont College, having survived the famed Lasko pivo, DG-infused Slovenia residency of 2008. Originally from Colorado, Tim currently teaches high school English in Kyiv, Ukraine, his fifth overseas teaching appointment. Tim lived in the Republic of Georgia for the past four years, where he started editing and translating an anthology of contemporary Georgian poetry. His manuscript, “Nobody’s Odyssey,” was recently selected as a finalist for the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and his poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, Quiddity, The Dirty Goat, Poetry International Journal, upstreet, The Minnesota Review, and others.

Co-translator Nene Giorgadze holds an MA in Georgian Literature from Ilia University (Tbilisi, Georgia), has lived in US since 1999, and speaks three languages: Georgian, English, and Russian. She has written poetry and prose since childhood. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in Ann Arbor Review, Raleigh Review, Rhino, and others

Maya Sarishvili won the SABA Prize for Poetry, Georgia’s top literature award, for her collection, Microscope, which includes these three poems. She is the author of one other poetry collection, Covering Reality (2001), as well as three radio plays. She lives in Tbilisi, Georgia where she works as a third-grade teacher and is mother to four children, ages 5 to 12. Her work has is forthcoming or has appeared in Crazyhorse, Versal, Nashville Review, Los Angeles Review, Guernica, and others.

What a pleasure it is to grapple with and savor these poems.

-Martin Balgach

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[Now, the storm has arrange the insane,]

Now, the storm has arranged the insane,
set down a different order.
Those at the end are children, like rhymes.
A lunatic poem started as a protest.
My smile is thrown down
like a wounded wing
—clumsy me—
I can’t lift it, can’t grip it.
A crowd tramples my lips—
it gets worse in the throng’s midst.
I look up—drops like mini-megaphones.
I chase them down and to each one,
read my poems.
It’s odd. Not a single drop lingers with me.
And I remember the sticky stage
in a packed-out house
where, once upon a time
as a child, I foolishly rose
when my mother was dying
and clumsily climbed up on the table
to make God better hear my prayers…

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from Two Rivers: Fiction — T. Greenwood

May 272011
 

Herewith, a short excerpt from Tammy Greenwood’s novel, Two Rivers, from Kensington Press (2009).  Harper Montgomery’s wife has been dead for a dozen years. He’s raising a daughter on his own and still grieving the death of his wife.  He’s also hiding his involvement in a violent crime. Everything changes when a train derails in the fictional town of Two Rivers, Vermont.  Amidst the wreckage, Harper finds Maggie, a fifteen-year-old pregnant girl with dark skin and nowhere to live. Harper takes Maggie into his home and begins his journey toward redemption.  Howard Frank Mosher described Two Rivers as ‘the story that people want to read: the one they have never read before.”

This excerpt is from the novel’s prologue.  Read an interview with Tammy Greenwood here.

-RJF

from Two Rivers

by T. Greenwood

1968: Fall

Blackberries. The man’s skin reminds him of late summer blackberries. The color of not-quite midnight. The color of bruise. This is what Harper thinks as he looks at the man they have taken to the river, the one who is half-drowned now, pleading for his life: the miracle that human skin can have the same blue-black stillness as ripe fruit, as evening, as sorrow itself. 

Of course he also thinks about what you might see (if you were here at the confluence of rivers). Three white boys. One black man, begging to be saved. The harvest moon casting an orange haze over everything: just a sepia picture on a lynching postcard like the ones his mother had shown him once. He’d had to look away then, both because the hanged man had no eyes, and because it was the only time he’d seen his mother cry. And he knows that if she were still alive she’d be weeping now too, but not only because of the black man about to die.

It was anger that brought him here. After he understood that Betsy was dead (not wounded, not hurt, but gone), everything else — the grief, the sadness, the horror — became distilled, watery sap boiled down into thick syrup. All that was left then was anger, in its purest form. It was rage that brought him here. But somehow, now, in the cool forest at the place where the two rivers meet, as the man looks straight into Harper’s eyes and pleads, the anger is gone. Swallowed up by the night, by old sadness and new regret.

“Please,” the man says, and Harper thinks only of blackberries.

He will see this color when he closes his eyes tonight and every night afterward and wonder what, if anything, it has to do with the most despicable thing he’s ever done.

The Confluence of Rivers: An Interview With Tammy Greenwood — Richard Farrell

May 272011
 

I first met Tammy Greenwood seven years ago. She was teaching a creative writing class at UCSD Extensions in San Diego and  I was living in the Mojave Desert.  This meant I drove 3 hours each way to attend her class.  I can think of few better testimonials to her as a teacher.

Tammy is the author of six novels and has a seventh novel in the works with Kensington.  (I’ve had the distinct pleasure of reading drafts of the new book, and it’s going to be a good one!) She has won numerous awards and grants for her writing and has taught in various universities and workshops.  I could go into specifics, but suffice to say, she’s living the dream!

Tammy combines a keen eye for details with a capacious heart, and yet somehow manages to push her stories into the gloomiest of places.   Her novels examine the tragedies of contemporary American life, with memorable characters who suffer from the curse of loving too much and being wounded by the flaws of desire and destiny.  Kids die in her novels; trains crash, families grieve over lost love and commit adultery; there are hoarders and cancer survivors and shoplifters.  Tammy’s characters hold a mirror up to the darkest corners of their being, and they never flinch from going deeper.

I’ve been fortunate to work closely with Tammy and another fine San Diego writer, Jim Ruland, in an intimate writing group we affectionately call “The Dub Club” (Dub standing for the letter ‘W’ and not the former president.)  It’s my pleasure to interview Tammy here on Numéro Cinq.

The Confluence of Rivers: An Interview with Tammy Greenwood

 by Richard Farrell

 

RJF: Place seems to matter a lot to you.  You’ve invented towns in Vermont in your novels.  Places you’ve lived seem to appear frequently in your work.  Could you talk about how you think about place, about landscapes, as you outline your writing?

Tammy Greenwood: I have described my work in the past as “auto-geographical.” What I mean by that, is that setting (for me) comes from a true place. I feel like that in order to create authentic characters, they must first inhabit an authentic world. Setting is one of the first decisions I make, sometimes even before character.

I grew up in rural Vermont, and (especially as a teenager), I was always trying to escape it. I think it’s funny, because now it is with tremendous longing that I return to Vermont again and again in my fiction.

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God’s Flea: A Play — Diane Lefer

May 262011
 

It’s a pleasure to introduce the first play ever published on Numéro Cinq, God’s Flea by Diane Lefer (wise friend, former colleague at Vermont College of Fine Arts—in the mid-1990s, when I had a radio show, I interviewed her, still have that tape). God’s Flea is an uproarious piece of political folk theater. Set on the Arizona-Mexico border, it borrows from the tradition of carpa, a Mexican popular theatrical form something like vaudeville, full of stock characters, slapstick, broad comedy and topical comment. But it also draws plot inspiration from a 19th century Colombian short story which, in turn, draws its inspiration from folktale and legend. This is the kind of theater you don’t see on Broadway, but it makes you think about what theater is and should be. It speaks to the people, the impoverished (lots of those around these days) and oppressed; it speaks of miracles and saintliness; it tells a joke, reveals horrors, pronounces a moral lesson. Jesus and Death and Sheriff Arpaio are characters; the good man at the center of the story is a gambling addict. The staging is quick and breathless, using lighting to switch scenes; actors change costumes onstage, on-the-fly. It’s a treat. (And don’t miss Diane’s earlier contributions to the magazine: her story “The Tangerine Quandary” and her “What it’s like living here [Los Angeles]” essay.)

—dg

Tomás Carrasquilla Naranjo was a 19th-century Colombian author and his story “En la diestra de Dios Padre” (In the right hand of God the Father) became a classic. It’s about a humble and saintly man whose generosity to Jesus and St. Peter (in disguise, of course) earns him five wishes. I love it that the story is written in rural vernacular. I don’t relate to its piety. So when Fernando Castro asked me to create a contemporary adaptation in English, I was relieved when he agreed with my plan to transfer the action to the US-Mexico border, make the greedy sister the main character, and create a version atheists could accept while retaining the underlying values of Catholic social justice teachings. Instead of Sunday School lesson, my genre model was carpa, or Mexican vaudeville, a style known for using comedy, stock characters, and physical humor to address sociopolitical issues. In this case, immigrant rights—a movement I’ve been involved in for years.

—Diane Lefer

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God’s Flea

a play by Diane Lefer

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inspired by the classic Colombian short story,
“En la diestra de Dios Padre” by Tomás Carrasquilla Naranjo

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DOÑA GOLOSITA, greedy middleaged woman, played by a cross-dressed male, and not an attractive sight in spite of her oversize chichis

PERALTA, her brother, humble and pious, played by a cross-dressed woman

Two INTERROGATORS in ski masks

Note: INTERROGATOR, played by female, also plays SHERIFF ARPAIO, JESUS, DEATH; the other, male, also plays ST. PETER, MARUCHENGA (the maid), DIEGO (the gardener), CABBIE, CONGRESSWOMAN

Time and Place: Today. The Arizona-Mexico border.

Set: A swivel chair (the torture chair). A trunk. A kitchen counter or shelf upstage.

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Three Poems — Ray Hsu

May 232011
 

Here are three poems from Ray Hsu in Vancouver that demonstrate wit plus a strange and beautiful talent for expressing mystery, vast spaces, ideas and ancient wisdom in a few terse lines. Ray is originally from Toronto but is currently a post-doc fellow at the University of British Columbia. His first collection, Anthropy, contained a poem on the death of Walter Benjamin (suicide on the Spanish border after his attempt to escape Nazi Europe, as he thought, failed) thus signalling at least in part Hsu’s aesthetic allegiance to the European mode of cerebral, critical, urban poetry of edgy juxtaposition as opposed to the North American penchant for lyric and nature imagery. Barbara Carey, writing in the Toronto Star, called him brainy and eclectic. She wrote: “It’s anthropology remade in the freewheeling, crisply detached style of postmodernism … Hsu’s work resembles that of Anne Carson, the celebrated Montreal writer and classics scholar who combines cultural references to the ancient world with a cool (in both senses of the word) contemporary voice.” His second book, Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon, was published last year and continues his investigation into what he calls the “grammar of personhood.”

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Three Poems

By Ray Hsu

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Notes to the Border Guard

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The man who would come to be called Confucius: I could see in his eyes that he
wanted something else out of the world.

As I began to move west from the vast plains to the borders of civilization itself into the
state of Qin, I would imagine him moving West too, away from sun behind him.

I told him about the other half of their souls and its depths. Sure, there was on one side:
the one of which Confucius knew, its intricate practicalities.

But on the other was a sprawling forest that sounded like an ancient poem.

When I look up I don’t see gods, but a different kind of order. He has one way of
comprehending this order, but it is among the bustle of this order that I sense another
still.

It eludes the treasure hunters searching for wealth and luck.

When I spoke to the king, even with his warriors far below, I saw that he was afraid.

Or was it the warriors themselves that the king feared? They needed something to
believe in—a spirit or an idea—or else they were nothing to themselves.

I tell the king.

Then I see in the king’s eyes that he knows. Yes, he thinks. I thought that politics was
about me.

No one knows what will happen. But what I have told him is enough for now.

I know that he is a sensitive man, that he may already feel in the wind a hint of the blood
that is in his future.

At the gate, I resist the urge to turn and look back at the kingdom.

This government wants to be so much more. It dreams of all tongues speaking its
language.

But it isn’t up for me to solve. Beneath my skin, I feel a readiness. It feels like an engine.

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Stars in the blue sky before the night’s darkness

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Before I start, you describe to me the brightness of the night sky. I am only an
amateur. Others supply facts, some bother with their points of view.
Some publish theirs as science, some make highly accurate predictions.

Somewhere light is not simply pollution. Different places, different skies: the
Texas Star Party, the Nebraska Star Party. Kitt Peak. The McDonald Observatory.
A sky with no clouds, as dark as it gets around here.

But you reach far out into the night to find me a dark sky. You remind me of Lao
Tzu: When darkness is at its darkest, that is the beginning of all light. What
colours do you find?

I turn on my red light. I put on my glasses, the mirrored kind you wear on
glaciers. No luck: the magnitude for tonight is less than before. It can only get so
dark. One more event horizon: the light we cannot escape. The sky brightens.
These lights are all too human.

You measure me a clear night so I can finally test my vision. Tell me where to
look.

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How to Be Awesome

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“The internet’s completely over. … The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip
and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are
no good.” — Prince, The Mirror

Week 1: Syllabus; Course Expectations

Week 2: How to Fake Your Way to the Top

Week 3: How to Spend the Day Playing Video Games

Week 4: Going to Events is More Fun Than Reading

Week 5: How Your Friends Can Get You Published

Week 6: How to Get Into Grad School

Week 7: Theft

Week 8: How to Avoid Professionals

Week 9: How to Predict the Future

Week 10: How to Teach at a Major University

Week 11: How to Become a Wizard

Week 12: How to Refuse a Prize

Week 13: Last Class

—Ray Hsu

Waiting For Romesh: Short Story — Clark Blaise

May 202011
 

Meet Cyrus Chutt Chutneywala of Baroda, Gujarat, waiting for a friend in the the Factory Tavern on Andy Warhol Square in Pittsburgh. His friend, Romesh, calls the bar to let Chutt know he’ll be late and the waitress inadvertently hits the speaker phone and public address switch and lets the entire clientele know she has a hard time getting past that name, Chutneywala. Thus begins Clark Blaise’s comic story “Waiting For Romesh” from his brand new collection  The Meagre Tarmac, just out from Biblioasis. (See Philip Marchand’s review in the National Post.)

Clark is an old friend (dating back to the early 1980s and dg’s Iowa Writers Workshop experience) who once made the mistake of inviting dg to stay the night. Clark and his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, were sharing an appointment at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs and living in palatial splendour in a huge house on Circular Street with an octagonal carriage house and mistress apartment in back. DG somehow managed to stretch that night into three months (this was in the days of dg’s impoverished apprenticeship, um, actually, he is still an impoverished apprentice), the walking definition of a Horrific Guest. Clark moved away, dg stayed in the house til it was sold. He wrote his story “Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon” in the little glassed in conservatory.

Clark Blaise is brilliant story writer and memoirist, intelligent, cosmopolitan, a master of point of view. He has lived multiple lives and written about all of them, from his impoverished childhood in Florida, Pittsburgh and Winnipeg to his extended sojourns in India and his long and eminent teaching career. He is the author of 20 books of fiction and nonfiction. He has taught writing and literature at Emory, Skidmore, Columbia, NYU, Sir George Williams, UC-Berkeley, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the David Thompson University Centre. He has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2003), and in 2010 was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Nowadays, he divides his time between New York and San Francisco, where he lives with his wife, Bharati Mukherjee.

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WAITING FOR ROMESH

By Clark Blaise

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These are the random thought’s, over a late afternoon and early evening, of a balding man waiting for his friend. What is the evolutionary advantage of thinning hair? Could it be that balding apes sensed heat and rain before their hirsute brethren, knowing to seek shelter, thus having more playtime to pass on their genes?

According to theory, one monkey out of an infinite number working on an infinite bank of typewriters will create a flawless draft of King Lear. It puts a human face on the notion of “infinity.” Two or three might come close, misspelling a word or deleting a comma, which seems somehow even more miraculous, more human, and tragic. It signals a failed intent. Perfection seems just a more refined form of accident.

Higher altitudes are cooler because fewer molecules are available for collision, thus releasing energy. Given infinite time, every molecule in a confined space – even if the molecules represent the world’s population and the confined space is earth itself – makes contact with every other.

All roads lead to Rome. It is said that if one sits long enough at a café on the Via Veneto, everyone he has ever known will eventually pass by. This has not proven to be the case, however, for Cyrus Chutneywala of Baroda, Gujarat, seated this afternoon at The Factory Tavern in Andy Warhol Square, Pittsburgh. Cyrus, called Chutt by his Indian friends and Chuck by his colleagues at the Mellon Bank, has been waiting through a long afternoon, dinnertime and now early evening for his Wharton batch-mate, Romesh Kumar.

“I hope you weren’t offended,” the waitress said half an hour earlier, when she set his third narrow flute of beer – this one on the house – in front of him. She is tall and thin, wearing black jeans and a slack, black cutaway T-shirt. He searches for the proper word: singlet? Camisole? Her dark, krinkly hair is gathered in a ponytail. It was she, standing at the end of the bar, who had received Romesh Kumar’s “please-tell-Mr.-Chutneywala-I’m-late” phone call. She accidentally hit the speakerphone and public address system at the same time, alerting indoor and outdoor customers to a Chutneywala in their presence, and that she thought “Chutneywala” sufficiently amusing to ask for a repeat. Everyone had heard her giggle. They overheard her half of the conversation. “His name is what? Chutneywala? Come on, man. Who shall I say is calling? Everyone also heard “Romesh Kumar.” He had no secrets.

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Reasons to Rejoice in Green Algae: Essay — Lynne Quarmby

May 192011
 

Volvox, first described by van Leeuwenhoek in 1700, is a close relative of Chlamydomonas.

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Reasons to Rejoice in Green Algae
By Lynne Quarmby

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Every once in awhile you get shown the light
In the strangest of places if you look at it right
– The Grateful Dead

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We’ve had three hundred years of microscopy and some of us are still fascinated with the beautiful creatures that swim in pond water. To the naked eye, to the unpracticed observer, they look like cloudy, icky scum and we don’t want to swim with them. But they are also delightfully alive, they congregate, they swim (and wouldn’t care if we swam with them), they even “see” or at least sense light. And under the microscope, in the lab, in experiment after experiment, these tiny green algae are yielding discoveries that are important to you and me, in terms of health and the environment and, yes, in the revelations they bring of the wondrous reality of the molecular world.

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What it’s like living here: Stanley Fogel’s Cuba

May 182011
 

Stanley Fogel’s ¿Que Coño Pasa? Snapshots of my Wonderful Cuban Life is the first book-length text ever published on Numéro Cinq, another first, another huge milestone in our adventure in digital publishing. I am calling it a “What it’s like living here” because, in fact, it tells us what it’s like living in Cuba today. But, of course, it doesn’t fit the pattern: it’s a book. The first chapter, the introduction, takes the lesson of Edward Said’s Orientalism and applies it to the West’s construction of the so-called Cuban historical fact. The next three chapters are very much a memoir of the years Stanley Fogel has spent living and teaching in Cuba, the personal facts behind the wall of words. Snapshots is thus a blend of the critical and the personal (with a dash of Fidel Castro’s own rhetoric added for flavour). Stanley Fogel is in a good position to see what he sees. A Canadian scholar with a yen to be “displaced,” he has spent about four months a year since the early 1990s in Cuba. He is a quirky, perceptive, thoughtful (critical in the best sense) guide to that other world. He tells a story different from the received wisdom, he fills his story with people and anecdote—our Virgil.

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Me: I spent 36 years at the University of Waterloo/St. Jerome’s University where I was overcome by deconstruction and taught critical theory. A travel book, Gringo Star, ECW Press, only partly captures my desire to be displaced in the world. In 1999 I was awarded an honorary degree from Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. Re. the opus at hand: I have spent c. 4 months per year since 1991 living in Havana, discovering the richness and distinctiveness of Cuban life–culture and politics transformed by the Cuban Revolution. I am retiring there shortly. (Do come visit if you’d like an ‘insider’s’ sense of Havana.) —Stanley Fogel

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¿QUE COÑO PASA?

SNAPSHOTS OF MY WONDERFUL CUBAN LIFE

By Stanley Fogel

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A mi hermano, Mario Masvidal, y la revolución cubana

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Thanks to Elizabeth Effinger and Trieneke Gastmeier
for typing and grooming the manuscript.
Thanks, also, to St. Jerome’s University for grants
towards the preparation of the manuscript.
The photos, man with libreta and man with eggs,
were taken by Giorgio Viera.

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Chapter 1: ¿COÑO, QUE PASA? An Introduction

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A loose translation of “¿Coño, Que Pasa?” is “Jeez, whazzup?” “¿Que Coño Pasa?” is a grammatically skewed version of the first phrase. Its speaker is betraying more bewilderment and/or astonishment at what s/he has witnessed or heard than in that initial formulation. Both, though, transmit the effusive, gestural nature of Cubans’ speech and flamboyant responses to what is happening locally or beyond. Indeed, to absorb the import of the remark most fully, it is best to hear it uttered by someone, steeped in Cubans’ idiomatic lexicon and delivery, who shortens the noun to “’ño,” confident its meaning will survive. If you’re planning on spending time in Cuba and want to sound authentic, work on your “’ño”; remember, the shorter the syllable the better: taking the first, small bite out of the word “gnocchi” will suffice. Despite the possibly sexist dimensions (coño=cunt) of the formulations, no offense, feminist or otherwise, should necessarily be taken by the addressee of either remark, given that both men and women have been heard to repeat them, most often in gender-free contexts.

Too often, however, the voices of individual Cubans have been muffled or overwhelmed, most noxiously, of course, by pervasive U.S. media disseminating their political leaders’ rabid and hawkish views regarding the island. “A Caribbean gulag” is the mantra incessantly uttered, one which erases any sense of the lively, polyphonic voices existing there. Much more persuasive and compelling than dogmatic right-wing comments, to my ear at any rate, are Fidel Castro’s speeches which offer the vision of utopian and egalitarian possibilities for Cuba’s inhabitants and, indeed, for the world. That impressive voice, however, has come to represent, metonymically and univocally, the diverse people who live in Cuba. In addition, it often offers idealized visions that can by no means always or easily be translated into quotidian life. Nonetheless, not least because Fidel’s speeches have been so influential in shaping Cuban government policy and because they have not had the widespread reach of American anti-Cuban material, excerpts from some of those speeches are presented here, interspersed with my own commentary. They are meant to act more as a parallel discourse than as a countervailing commentary. While it is true, that they can draw attention to a discrepancy between the ideal and the real, they also point to genuine achievements as well as noble aspirations.

These pages, it is hoped, give some hint of the richness of Cuban life, a fecundity jammed, again, to a significant extent by American efforts to isolate the country and to caricature its unique political, cultural and social dimensions. While the U.S. bombards Cuba with messages, threatening, hectoring and proselytizing, Cuban versions of itself and its interpretations of world events and tendencies don’t get a hearing of any kind in North America, unless one subscribes to Granma International or accesses granma.cu on the web. With globalization of an American-capitalist kind that has produced homogenization in much of the rest of the world, the idiosyncratic qualities of Cuba since the Revolution are even more worthy of examination, respect and transmission. In Orientalism, his groundbreaking work that in many ways launched postcolonial studies and strove to articulate a postcolonial sensibility, Edward Said pronounced on the dangers and distortions inherent in a Western imposition of meaning on the East. Surely, U.S. constructions of Cuba are no less pernicious; they may, in fact, be more deleterious given Cuba’s size, its proximity to the belligerent presence immediately to the north and its pre-revolutionary interconnectedness with the U.S.A. To that list, one could add the current constellation of political forces in Florida which dictates, in large measure, the direction of Washington’s policies towards Cuba.

I have lived in Havana for approximately three months a year since 1992, the epicentre of the “periodo especial” [special period], when, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, then Cuba’s sponsor and ally, food, gasoline and electricity all but disappeared for a time from the lives of ordinary Cubans. I witnessed the seismic shift firsthand when, early in my time spent in Havana, I happened to be passing by the University of Havana Library. Just outside the doors was a large, unsightly pile of Russian language books dumped there unceremoniously by the staff. The special period’s duress may have begun; at least, though, there was the satisfaction of jettisoning a Soviet presence that many felt was joyless, arrogant, oppressive and, possibly even, racist. Traces of that occupation do remain, principally in the numerous Ivans, Liubas and Vladimirs registered in Cuba’s census. Freed from naming their children from such imperialist sources, many parents opt for such freewheeling monikers as Misleidys (my lady) or Roelvis (you’re Elvis) that augment the sense, readily apparent, of Cuban expressiveness and buoyancy. Not that politically-based nomenclatures are passé; there is always the chance of encountering a Usnavi (U.S. Navy) or, more in line with official Cuban sympathies, a Hanoi. Famously, a kid with that latter name in the early 1970s was a “one hit wonder,” singing a song demanding the release of American dissident, Angela Davis, then in a U.S. jail. When she was freed, one of her first stops was Havana where she appeared at a huge rally in her honour.

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Move It or Lose It: Essay — Martin Balgach

May 172011
 
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Photo by Pedro

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Here’s a topical, relevant, heartening essay on the e-revolution and web-publishing from Martin Balgach who, incidentally, has just joined the NC masthead as a Contributor with a special portfolio in poetry. Martin and I became friends at the Vermont College of Fine Arts summer Slovenia residency in 2008 where Martin was in my workshop (a mixed workshop—poets, fiction writers, memoirists and some walk-ins from the planet Cepphebox). For a better introduction read Martin’s poem “Fighting” published earlier on NC. His poetry and criticism have also appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Cream City Review, The Dirty Napkin, Fogged Clarity, The Puritan, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, works in publishing, and lives near Boulder, Colorado. More of his work can be found at www.martinbalgach.com.

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Move It or Lose It

By Martin Balgach

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These days, many of us feel like cosmonauts orbiting an era of hyperbolic digitalization, seemingly infinite bandwidth, and awe-inspiring technologies that boast space-age ingenuity vis-à-vis a pre-determined essence of almost-antiquation. We’re living in a world that redefines itself overnight; so it’s easy to nurture a curmudgeonly preoccupation with mourning “what once was.”

But for those inflicted by the age-old, pen-to-paper desire to transcribe our hearts and guts into stories and poems and essays, we must adapt or face extinction. Friends, the literary journals have moved to the back of the store near the restrooms. Yes, ostensibly, it’s a bleak testament to the viability of our craft, but the future is rewriting itself before our eyes and I’ve decided to become part of the story.

As a longtime writer and relative newcomer to publishing, I’ve been sending out work for a few years, hundreds and hundreds of submissions to journals of all creeds and colors, from the esoterically academic, to the newly crowned cool kids and the autonomously avant-garde. After mounds of rejection, I have finally enjoyed a modicum of “success,” having seen my poems published in print and online. And do you want to know the truth? I’m rather enjoying the electronic venues: they get read, a lot, by lit snobs and family, by Facebook friends and co-workers who equate poetry with rhyme, by strangers and who-knows-how-many-more virtual viewers.

Sure, whose eyes don’t get fatigued by a computer screen’s mechanized glare? I’ll admit it—my online reading attention span is shorter than its print counterpart. But regardless of medium, as a reader, I like instantly accessing great poems, essays, and stories. And as a writer, I appreciate having an editor respond to me in a few weeks or months, agreeing to publish a piece, to give it an audience, to make it part of a collective vision and creative endeavor. I want to participate in an artistic community, to have my work become an integral component of a curated statement. Yes, I like seeing my poems sharing pages with low-fi indie rock tunes, color-soaked digitized paintings or photographs, all these consciousnesses breathing the same pixilated air.

I was fortunate to recently have a poem published in Fogged Clarity, an evocative online journal (with an annual print anthology component) that embodies editor Ben Evans’s vision that art, in its varied forms, represent a collective human experience, an emotional testament to our time. Fogged Clarity is easily one of the most vibrant, engaging, inclusive yet defined collections of contemporary creativity, music, literature, interviews, criticism, and thought on the scene. And content is added monthly! But don’t take my word for it, see for yourself—any of us can go there instantly, with a click: www.foggedclarity.com.

I’ve never believed any writer who claims that writing is primarily a personal endeavor. Sure, the solitary satisfaction is part of the act’s cathartic charm, but it can’t be the ultimate aim. Intrinsically, writers want to be read. And in a world where art budgets have been slashed and paper, printing, and shipping costs are only sky rocketing, maybe it isn’t a tragedy to see struggling print journals transmuting into online entities, going away completely, or never gaining enough traction to even get off the ground. After all, isn’t survival of the fittest evolution’s integral denominator?

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Where are today’s Steinbecks?| Essay — Mark Lupinetti

May 172011
 

The other day I posted a BBC story that pondered the lack of socially committed writers in America today. Where are today’s Steinbecks? the author asked (and I asked by extension). Mark Lupinetti wrote such a passionate and inspiring comment to that post that I decided to lift the comment out of the box and put it up as an essay. Flavian Mark Lupinetti, a writer and cardiothoracic surgeon, obtained his MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.  His work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Bellevue Literary Review, Cutthroat, and ZYZZYVA.  He lives in central Oregon with his dogs, the Four Weimaraners of the Apocalypse.

Here’s what he wrote:

The salient features of 2011 America include hyperconcentration of wealth for the few, increasing vulnerability for the majority, and impoverishment for many. Wasteful wars motivated by expansionist goals consume vast resources, jeopardizing minimal standards of social welfare. While corporate power rages unchecked, fundamental rights of workers are subject to relentless attack. Were Steinbeck alive today he would recognize a society little changed from the first half of the last century, a time when he wrote his era’s most moving and cogent novels of the class war. DG raises the pertinent question, “Where are today’s Steinbeck?”

 All right, Doug. I’ll take a crack at it.

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Where are today’s Steinbecks?

By Mark Lupinetti

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Before we search for today’s Steinbeck, let us consider our treatment of the Steinbeck that we have. I use the present tense because Steinbeck will be with us always, whether we’ve read the text or listened to Henry Fonda narrate Tom Joad’s soliloquy. We can take comfort that, “Whenever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Whenever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.” And so on.

When The Grapes of Wrath appeared in 1939 it received a generally favorable response from both critics and the public. Some, however, called it sentimental. Others condemned Steinbeck’s portrayals of “the greedy bastards responsible” for the Depression, as if the tender feelings of politicians and landowners might ache from this characterization. Still others accused him of being a socialist or a communist.

Steinbeck’s personal politics defied simple characterization, as exemplified by his support for American aggression in Vietnam. Yet today his reputation and his standing in the literary canon is jeopardized less by attacks on his politics than by those directed at his craft. Even some who sympathize with the politics of his novels consider him a propagandist.

A peculiar feature of the modern literary establishment is its demand for drilling into the core of the human being in terms of psychology, sexuality, relationships, spiritual beliefs–but as soon as the political aspect of the individual is brought into play, an additional test presents. Now it becomes necessary to prove one has no “agenda.”

And there can be no doubt that Steinbeck did write with an agenda. No one can conceive of Steinbeck contemplating, “A middle-aged guy . . . I’ll call him Tom . . . suffering from ennui. He lives in New York City and he writes books. No, he’s an accountant. Oh, wait, I’ll put him in Oklahoma, and make him bored by life in the Midwest. I’ll call it Ledgers of Wrath.”

Nobody would argue that even the most compelling and articulate political position can stand the test of literary excellence by itself, that craft does not matter, that storytelling and character may be dispensed with if the politics are sufficient. To accuse Steinbeck of melodrama or sentimentality, however, suggests that he inflated the harsh conditions of cannery work or sharecropping or itinerant labor for dramatic purposes. In fact Steinbeck softened these portrayals, believing a truer reflection would prove too troubling to the reader.

Contemporary educators show limited respect for Steinbeck. If he appears on the curriculum at all, it is mostly at the high school level, where the historical and sociological value of his work receives the greatest emphasis. Creative writing classes at any level tend to disparage his literary merit. Thus, if today’s writers don’t aspire to be Steinbeck’s heirs, perhaps one cause is the lack of honor paid to the original.

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Kilroy: A Writer’s Childhood — Keith Maillard

May 132011
 

Keith Maillard2

Because he had a difficult time pronouncing “Keith” when he was a child, Keith Maillard called himself “Keats.” Because he was sick a lot, he made up stories; he drew stories on the bathroom tiles and his grandmother cleaned them off every day so he could do more the next. Because he was a kid during the Second World War, he thought Kilroy was a magical, ubiquitous person. Herewith is a second excerpt from Keith Maillard’s memoir Fatherless (NC published “Richland” in March). It goes straight to the heart of childhood, that gorgeous, magical moment in time when adults are mythic creatures, the night holds unspeakable terrors, words are mysterious and difficult to control, illness visits and strange medicines applied, and the self applies itself fiercely and joyously to the task of understanding. Keith Maillard was born and raised in West Virginia. Currently the Chair of the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia, he is the author of thirteen extraordinary novels and one poetry collection.

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I’ve always had the impulse to tell stories. It must have started with wanting to hear stories. When I was little, my mother put me to bed by telling me the adventures of Bucky the Bug, a tale that she made up on the spot, that evolved day to day. I was so little that I had to go to bed before it was dark. “You never minded,” my mother told me. “You always wanted to hear the next part of the story.” Those summer nights, as they settled down on me, felt as huge as continents. The light would be fading out at the windows; I’d be tucked into bed but not sleepy yet, and my mother would be telling me what was happening to Bucky the Bug right now. I don’t remember the stories, but I do remember the sense of living inside them. When my mother stopped telling me stories, I begin to tell them to myself. As soon as I could, I notated them—first with stick figures, then, much later, with words.

The lower half of our bathroom walls was tiled. Each tile—cream-colored and blank—looked to me like the panel of a comic strip. I’d sit on the bathroom floor and draw on the tiles with a soft lead pencil, filling in each one with the drawing that went with the story I was telling myself, working my way around the bathroom walls until I had filled all of the tiles as high as I could reach. Every evening my grandmother would scrub them clean with Ajax Cleanser so I could start over the next day and do it again. I felt no sense of loss when my comic strips were wiped away. I loved waking up in the morning knowing that I had all those shining blank tiles to fill—more than I could count—unending rows of cartoon squares where I could tell myself stories.

When I got older, I moved from bathroom tiles to paper. I was sick so much as a child that they bought me a bed table and a special wedge-shaped pillow so I could sit up and draw. Whenever I got sick, I had to take unbelievably nasty blue pills called “pyrobenzamine.” My grandmother would smear my chest with Vicks Vaporub, cover it with a layer of cotton, then a layer of cloth—thin t-shirt material. She’d set the vaporizer going in the corner of my bedroom; it hissed quietly, making everything steamy and scented of camphor. She turned on the radio for me—a box made of Bakelite with a green dial. Voices from the radio told me stories as I drew my own stories. The first two fingers of my right hand became callused from holding pencils and crayons. Sometimes I had fever dreams as thick with images as wallpaper. In my earliest years I had visitations that were worse than nightmares.

Night terrors occur in the early part of the sleep cycle when there’s no rapid eye movement. They afflict toddlers and young children, can be deeply frightening to adults if they don’t know what’s happening—as my mother and grandmother didn’t. Adults often describe the children as looking possessed. They cry out. They’re obviously deeply distressed, and sometimes stare fixedly at something just beyond their field of vision. Most children, when they have night terrors, don’t remember them, but I remembered mine. My mother and grandmother kept saying, “Look at his eyes, look at his eyes, look at his eyes.” I don’t know what my version of “Oh, my God!” would have been, but that’s what I was feeling. My mother and grandmother’s voices sounded rumbly, echoey, as though they were in another room, a huge one with stone walls. I couldn’t move a muscle—Wrong with my eyes, wrong with my eyes, what could be wrong with my eyes?—heard them saying over and over again, “Look at his eyes.” My eyes, my eyes?

Another time it was a shower of pins that were many different colors. They weren’t nice colors, like rainbow colors; they were sharp nasty colors—blue and black and red—and they were falling in a thick cloud of little pins all lined up together, not dispersed, coming down all together. From the way I was seeing them, they were above me and to the left—a countless number, millions of tiny pins raining down on me, trying to do something pitiless to me. I don’t know how long I had night terrors, but they made the night dangerous. I tried to keep them out by pushing on the front door to hold it shut. I might have sleepwalked there; I was not fully awake—I know that—and the radiating glow of that awful yellow light, threatening, disgusting, smeared through the curtain on the door, on our door that led outside to where there were things. I drew that shower of pins. “Like that, like that. It looked like that.”

When I’d first been learning to talk, Keith had been hard to say, so I had become Keats. That’s how I thought of myself, and for years that’s how I signed the cards I gave my mother and grandmother at Christmas and on their birthdays. While I was still inside that eternity of “not-in-school-yet,” I consumed comic books like peanuts, and the classic, iconic pop-culture images from the late Forties flowed into my own stories. Like Batman, I drove a sleek, murderously fast car jammed with amazing modern gadgets; mine was called “the Keatsmobile.” My headquarters was a complex series of interlinking caves deep underground beneath our apartment; the walls were lined with jewels—diamonds and rubies and emeralds and sapphires—and I could see them in my mind, fabulously glittering, as I strode down the corridors. This wondrous place, my home inside myself, was called “the Keats Cave of Splendor.” I lived there with a dozen or so of my friends, and I was the ruler of that world, the fearless hero in charge of the whole works. Like Superman, I wore a uniform with a cape; the letter K was emblazoned on my chest. My best friend and constant companion, my advisor, my right hand man in the Keats Cave of Splendor, was Kilroy.

In the war that was just ending—the terrible exciting war I saw in movies and newsreels and magazine photographs—Kilroy had been everywhere. Wherever our soldiers had gone—even into the most dangerous, bombed-out, desolate, death-ridden cities of Europe—Kilroy had always been there ahead of them. He left drawings of himself, two little dots for eyes, his big nose hanging over a fence, and his eternal message: “Kilroy was here.” The GIs kept trying to find some place, any place at all, where Kilroy had not been there ahead of them, but they’d never been able to find it. That’s the story of Kilroy as my mother had told it to me, and I was lucky to have Kilroy as my best friend. Because he’d always been there first, he understood everything. If I was ever confused or upset, Kilroy would come and explain to me what was going on and why things were happening the way they were. He was a magician, a shaman—my tutelary deity, my guide, my mentor—and these are all adult words. In my childhood he was simply my pal. He was a wise man who knew everything, who could tell me everything I needed to know. He was—and it’s taken me sixty years to see this—someone like a father.

My first work of fiction, written in my head and notated in stick figures that were wiped away every evening, was entitled “Kilroy and Keats.” What we did in the Keats Cave of Splendor was fight against evil. I knew what evil was because I had stared at it when no one else could see it, because it had rained down on me like pins. I knew that evil sometimes sniffed around outside our front door. Evil is what the Japs and the Nazis had done to people—the worst things that anybody could imagine—and they’d done it happily and laughing like the villains in Superman and Batman stories. There were things called “concentration camps” where the Nazis had done really evil things, but Kilroy had been there, and he could explain it to me—how people could have done things like that.

I can remember—just barely—when the War was still going on, imagining it on the other side of the river, but I can’t remember it ending. I told my mother that I wanted to build a fort in our back yard. She said she’d help me do it, but that we’d better put little American flags on it so that when our planes came over, they wouldn’t bomb it. I was terrified. If there was even the faintest possibility that our planes would bomb my fort, then I simply would not build a fort, and I never did. Later—how much later, I don’t know—it came to me in a flash: Nobody would bomb a little fort in our back yard. My mother had lied to me. Kilroy would never lie to me.

We were Americans, and we’d won the war. We’d beat the evil Japs and Nazis. We’d beat them with the bombs that I saw in newsreels, atom bombs brighter than a thousand suns. Kilroy knew all about them. He’d been in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and watched them fall.

—Keith Maillard

 

 

Childhood — Court Merrigan

May 122011
 

Here’s a lovely addition to the growing list of Numéro Cinq “Childhood” essays from Court Merrigan who grew up in Nebraska and lives just across the state line in Wyoming. Court was raised on a farm. He has that authentic Western voice, a voice bred in the  dirt and heat and the smell of oil from the farm machines and the chink of irrigation pipes and sound of distant thunder (farmers watch the sky far more than city folk). I have a fondness for the piece based on personal history—the first story I published was about a hail storm on the farm where I grew up. Court’s father towers over this story, his laugh, his exhortations and his reading. What’s really particular and authentic here is that father, Catholic, Jesuit-trained, literate, and wise. He’s appeared before on NC, just in passing,  in Court’s “What it’s like living here.”

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Childhood

By Court Merrigan

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The Nebraska Panhandle, 1988

First water, we called it—the first water of the summer irrigation season—first water was coming. On the Fourth of July, 1988, the summer before I entered seventh grade, my father had my whole family at the end of a field of Great Northerns laying ten-inch irrigation pipe over new corrugations.  It was 111 degrees in the shade and all I wanted was to be at the lake with the guys, riding in a motorboat, waterskiing, maybe sneaking a can of beer from a cooler to pass around.  But beans don’t irrigate themselves.

My father was talking about Cincinnatus, the hero that saved Rome and then refused to be dictator, returning instead to his fields.

“This country could use a Cincinnatus or two,” he said.

My grandparents, resolute Catholics, had deemed it their duty to apportion a son to the Church.  My father had been shipped off to seminary at age thirteen, joining the last wave of men to receive a pre-Vatican II education.  Just shy of ordination, he decided celibacy was too heavy a cross to bear.  He bolted for co-ed college and Vietnam and this farm, toting along his classical education like sharp jeweled shards.  It has always seemed to me that these shards jab his brain even when he is about the grittiest of farm labor.  Perhaps more so then.

Cincinnatus was a favorite theme.  We heard the story many times.  I think about him still in moments of reverie, dreaming of accomplishing heroic deeds myself in the camera’s unblinking eye, refusing all offers of position and prestige, returning to my farm with a final wave to the hushed TV masses.

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What It’s Like Living Here — Danielle Frandina in San Francisco

May 112011
 

photograph by Jessica Pezalla

When he was young (in the last century), dg had a thing for that 1936 (definitely before dg was born) Clark Gable movie San Francisco (with Spencer Tracy and Jeanette MacDonald). DG actually used to want to be Clark Gable when he grew up. Unfortunately, things turned out otherwise. But he did go around for a number of years humming that song to himself even though he lived in Ontario and did not see San Francisco until, um, 1969. But enough about dg. Here’s a lovely “What it’s like living here” piece from Danielle Frandina who actually lives in San Francisco and perhaps never even saw that ancient movie (forever twined in dg’s mind with SF)—a pleasant and striking contrast to the economic doom-sayers and the plate geologists who all see the state sliding into the Pacific figuratively or actually pretty soon. After reading Danielle’s words, I think we should all join Jeanette MacDonald for a rousing chorus or two of “San Francisco!”

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What it’s like living here

From Danielle Frandina in San Francisco

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I grew up in Colorado, and if you’re from the West, but not the West Coast, you’re born with an innate suspicion and resentment of Californians.  Back in high school, my boyfriend wanted us to move there after graduation, but I refused, choosing the deserts of New Mexico instead.  During the mudslides and fires that plagued the Golden State in the mid-Nineties, I remember thinking some very insensitive thoughts about Californians, something along the lines of, “They’re getting what they deserve.”  In my mind, California was Los Angeles, and Los Angeles represented all that was despicable and embarrassingly indulgent about Americans.  But eight years ago, I loaded up a borrowed car with little more than my clothes, books and music and headed to the Bay Area for the sweet shelter of my two best friends, the debris of my former life smoldering in the rear view mirror.

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The Apartment

photograph by Joe Frandina

I live in a lemon-yellow building on Dearborn Street in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District.  It was built in 1910.  This date matters.  It means it was constructed after the 1906 earthquake, so I can’t gauge how the structure will hold up when another one of that magnitude hits. The Bay windows of my studio apartment face street-side onto three palm trees that guard a locally famous community garden, the oldest in the city.  During a storm, the palms sway and shake so violently that it’s easy to imagine I’m witnessing a tropical storm.  This sight always sends me back to the beach town of Mui Ne in Vietnam, where, as a lone backpacker, I was once bedridden for three days.  In my fevered state, all I had the energy to do was watch the palm trees dance through the glassless windows of my bungalow as monsoon season really took root.  Strangely, this is a soothing memory.  I recall feeling no fear, no resistance, just letting the illness course through my body, being completely at ease with my surroundings and circumstances.  I rarely feel that way.  At ease.

My apartment is around the corner from what is now called the Gourmet Ghetto.  Slow Foods Movement and Farm to Table restaurants line 18th Street.  To explain to San Franciscans where I live, I just tell them my street is catty corner to Tartine, arguably the best artisan bakery in the city.  On any given day, at any given time, there is a line around the block to get in and order a Morning Bun or Croque Monsieur.  And it’s worth the wait.

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Let Us Change Bodies: Poems — Kim Fu

May 102011
 

Kim Fu is an exuberant young Canadian writer whose work is popping up all over the place, including two poems in the recent issue of The New Quarterly that also features a short story by our beloved dg. Kim is currently finishing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia where she studied poetry with Keith Maillard. I have the good fortune of knowing Kim personally by way of her being a dear friend of my son, Jacob. Kim is kind and gentle with a fierce intellect. Read her poems and you’ll see.

— Lynne Quarmby

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Let us change bodies

Let us change bodies
as we might change seats.
Everyone move one to the left,

now you are someone else.
Your teeth are misaligned in a different way,
your vision is wrecked or perfected,
you box people and art with new prejudice.

Your mouth is still mindlessly full: a street pakora,
or clear noodles made of bean curd,
or goat meat shredded and tamped down, or raw liver,
or an electric toothbrush, a lover’s finger, a deep-fried scorpion
all and any of these things suddenly routine.

Now you’re someone else,
the sun is crushing your eyelids shut,
sending you fleeing from noon, thirsty
down to the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.
Now you’re someone else,
and the air is tepid bathwater, the grey inoffensive,
leaving you docile and confused about the time of day.

Now you are watching a window
as a wasp trembles in
and ricochets off the kitchen chair like a drunk.
Now you are in a bed that bows as deeply
as a suspension bridge,
cradling a man’s head to your chest as he weeps
and you feel your resolve drain away.

Now you are climbing the outer cliffs of a mountain
on a spiritual pilgrimage,
the marker at the top an upstretched hand.
Now you are climbing a mountain
because the landscape forms the profile of a witch
and you were drunk and wanted to prove a local legend wrong.

Now someone is taking your picture,
and you’ve forgotten how your mouth works;
you mash your lips together with one canine exposed
thinking it’s a closed-mouth smile.
Now your grown child is begging you to eat,
but grief has severed the ties between your hand and the spoon.

Now you are paralyzed by your own importance.
Now you are counting fireflies, or stars,
or lit-up homes in a valley.
Pinpoints lives that blink on and then off
or blaze like meteors in the Pleiades,
eclipse the night.

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Tree Exposed by Lightning

The tree lies on the crushed house
looking startled, a man who wakes up
in a heap of alley trashbags, kidneys gone.
His rounded back is the still image
of a Tesla ball, a violet tattoo of branches.
The fastest path to the ground passes shoulders
and coils to the spine.

Look at the pulp heroine with her clothes ripped open,
backgammon points of breast,
insides of a tree: under black cinder,
raw sienna, a jagged reveal.
Was there a sound? A whipcrack,
less certain than thunder,
mild vertigo of expecting an extra step.
Then the creak, a warning to the house:
sorry, old friend.

Why do you know where you were
when so-and-so was shot,
when so-and-so pushed the button
and the bombs fell,
when the faces went stern on the television?
Why do those get to be the moments?

When the tree came down,
we ran out into the eye.
We ran from our homes,
from the store and the gas station,
the diner and the bank.
We knew each other’s names.

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No-Fault Divorce, Winter

Gave a stranger fifty-five cents to ride the last bus
rumbling slowly along the unplowed streets.
He saluted me through the window. I pressed on,

past cars abandoned sideways at the bottom of a hill.
Decorative hedges shorn, branched as coral made of ice.
Street signs pressed in crystal. The city looked wild,

snow stacked haphazardly in the middle of the road,
lost hats and gloves, futile tire tracks. Somewhere,
blankets contoured to bodies, a glimpse of flesh:

glancing light off smothered patio furniture,
indistinct shapes to be dug out or forgotten.
Twenty blocks from home, sky relit by reflection,

I passed under dammed gutters, stalactites glistening.
Home: newly empty bed and sulphurous gas heat,
creak of water pipes almost audible. Cyclical,

inevitable, still no one was prepared. In the wind,
a poignant sting. Such pleasure in our defeat.

—Kim Fu

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