The most beautiful death
Brave New World novelist Aldous Huxley was diagnosed with cancer in 1960, at which point his health slowly began to deteriorate. On his deathbed in November of 1963, just as he was passing away, Aldous – a man who for many years had been fascinated with the effects of psychedelic drugs since being introduced to mescaline in 1953 – asked his wife Laura to administer him with LSD. She agreed.
Read the letter with links: via Letters of Note: The most beautiful death.
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I lock the doors–turn out the lights–set the dog on the FedEx man–the mail spills out of the box unopened–still and relentlessly the packets arrive–I dream of escape (motorcycles, the road)–I kick the dog–I kick Jonah–I watch endless episodes of House–I think I’m ill–I go to Best Buy and look at large screen TVs–I eat ice cream–I start drinking at 10 a.m.–
A monk once said to Abba Philemon:
I am very conscious of how my mind
constantly wanders all over the place,
drifting after things that are no good for it.
What can I do, father, to be delivered?
Abba Philemon hesitated and then replied:
This is a remnant of the obsessions your external life inflicts on you.
It still troubles you because you have not yet
reached the heights of perfect longing for God.
The longing for the experience of God
has not yet fallen on you like fire.—Abba Philemon. The Discourse. from Philokalia (adapted from the John Anthony McGuckin translation)
DG is being talked about again! This time for his apparent predilection for writing about weird sex (a Canadian thing, according to the author, Jeet Heer, who is, by the way, an otherwise estimable journalist), especially with large, hairy omnivores. DG has gone from being famous for being unknown to transforming bestiality into art. He thinks: Has anyone actually read the book? No one has sex with an animal in his novel! The heroine turns into a bear and grows extra sets of nipples, but she only has sex with humans. (Of course, this will no doubt disappoint many NC readers, a rowdy crowd, usually up for that sort of thing.)
As Katherine Monk points out in her book Weird Sex & Snowshoes, Canadian filmmakers are notable for their interest in outré forms of passion. Think of the acrobatic sexual positions displayed in the movies of Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, and Denys Arcand.
I’m wondering whether a similar fixation on erotic outrageousness isn’t also a running theme in Canadian literature: after all, the Governor General’s Award has twice been given to novels that feature a woman having sex with a bear (Marian Engel’s Bear and Douglas Glover’s Elle). [My emphasis.]
In many ways, bears make a natural sex symbol. With their hairiness, burliness, and wary aggression, bears embody a certain ideal of rugged Northern masculinity (notably among a subset of husky gay men). The image of ursine/human mating is redolent of both folklore (Beauty and the Beast) and mythology (the many occasions when Zeus took an animal guise in order to seduce a nubile maiden).
via “Sex, Prose, and the Veggie Aisle” by Jeet Heer | The Walrus Blog.
Okay, the last paragraph is interesting. Suddenly, bears come into focus for dg as attractive, sexual beings. He can see a canoe trip novel, something in Algonquin Park, a hunky male human of uncertain sexual orientation falls for a gay bear. All sorts of hanky panky ensues, while canoe-loads of campers look on in amazement.
Joking aside, you really ought to look at Marian Engel’s novel Bear, possibly the best book ever written about a woman having an affair with a bear.
dg
Hasbrouck was there and so were Bill
And Smollet Smith the poet, and Ames was there.
After his thirteenth drink, the burning Smith,
Raising his fourteenth trembling in the air,
Said, ‘Drink with me, Bill, drink up to the Rose.’
But Hasbrouck laughed like old men in a myth,
Inquiring, ‘Smollet, are you drunk? What rose?’
And Smollet said, ‘I drunk? It may be so;
Which comes from brooding on the flower, the flower
I mean toward which mad hour by hour
I travel brokenly; and I shall know,
With Hermes and the alchemists—but, hell,
What use is it talking that way to you?
Hard-boiled, unbroken egg, what can you care
For the enfolded passion of the Rose?’
Then Hasbrouck’s voice rang like an icy bell:
‘Arcane romantic flower, meaning what?
Do you know what it meant? Do I?
We do not know.
Unfolding pungent Rose, the glowing bath
Of ecstasy and clear forgetfulness;
Closing and secret bud one might achieve
By long debauchery—
Except that I have eaten it, and so
There is no call for further lunacy.
In Springfield, Massachusetts, I devoured
The mystic, the improbable, the Rose.
For two nights and a day, rose and rosette
And petal after petal and the heart,
I had my banquet by the beams
Of four electric stars which shone
Weakly into my room, for there,
Drowning their light and gleaming at my side,
Was the incarnate star
Whose body bore the stigma of the Rose.
And that is all I know about the flower;
I have eaten it—it has disappeared.
There is no Rose.’
Young Smollet Smith let fall his glass; he said,
‘O Jesus, Hasbrouck, am I drunk or dead?’
By Phelps Putnam, from The Oxford Book of American Verse, Oxford University Press, New York (third printing, 1952).
DG found this poem, one of his favourites, at a lovely blog site called Recently Banned Literature by William Michaelian.
Man’s form, whether as individual or as species, is the tragic defiance of which he is author and victim. Lucifer, Prometheus, Faust, the main heroes.
This is a quote from Elfie Raymond’s essay on Georg Lukacs.
See also this:
And why form at all? Why order over anarchy? Because without his soul man is not man; and the soul is but the power which must realize itself in one’s lifetime to create forms from and for life. What else does it mean when Aristotle says that the soul is man’s formal cause but that we must give form to ourselves, individually and collectively? And form is achieved when the flux is arrested, and experience is distilled into its lasting significance.
dg
This is an excerpt from Keats’ letter (Dec 21, 1817) to his brothers:
I spent Friday evening with Wells, and went next morning to see Death on the Pale Horse. It is a wonderful picture, when West’s age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no woman one feels mad to kiss, no face swelling into reality-The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth. Examine ‘King Lear’, and you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness-The picture is larger than ‘Christ rejected’.
I dined with Haydon the Sunday after you left, and bad a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith, and met his two Brothers, with Hill and King ston, and one Du Bois. They only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment-These men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their eating and drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter-They talked of Kean and his low company -Would I were with that Company instead of yours, said I to mvself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me and yet I am going to Reynolds on Wednesday. Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
dg
Some years ago I noticed, in a New York Times review of Jonathan D. Spence’s book The Search for Modern China, a reference to the Not-Not Manifesto published in Chengdu, Sichuan, on May 4, 1986.
Here is a quotation Spence uses in his book.
Not-Not: a blanket term covering the object, form, contents, methodology, process, way and result of the principles of Pre-Cultural Thought. It is also the description of the primordial mien of the universe. Not-Not is not “no.” After deconstructing the relationship between man and objects to their precultural state, there is nothing in this universe that is not Not-Not. Not-Not is not the negation of anything. It is only an expression of itself. Not-Not is aware that liberation exists in the indefinite.
And here is a portion of the original manifesto translated by Michael M. Day in his book China’s Second World of Poetry.
On the ruins of ancient Rome, those big, lofty stone pillars: they have always been alive, they have always been thinking – this is told us by our entirely wide open intuition – only if we are incapable of entirely benumbing ourselves, we then have no way of not deeply believing: they really are alive, without doubt they have continuously been thinking, always thinking. Up to this day, the sole difficulty has been that we have been unable to find any form of cultural artifice to “prove” whether they ultimately live in the fashion of an “animal,” or in that of a “plant.” Our present culture has been incapable of embracing them, this wondrous phenomenon of life. We also have no ready way of saying what manner of thought they ultimately follow, and what they ultimately are thinking.
So — Today we declare:
First, they live in a not-not fashion;
Second, they are not-not life;
Third, they make us feel not-not;
Fourth, they make us become not-not;
Fifth, we are not-not.
dg
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I am looking for a suitable Walter Benjamin or Viktor Shklovsky quote to go with this post.
dg
I can’t resist another article on brain development complete with multi-colour 3D MRI illustrations and a diagram with pointers to things like “The Mouse Brain” and “The Reptile Brain.”
From Primitive Parts, A Highly Evolved Human Brain : NPR.
(DG is drawn to research like this because it helps him understand himself. For so long, so much of what he thought of as thought was really just an argument between his reptile brain and his mouse brain. This also helps explain his growing tendency to speak of himself in both the third and first person.)
This connects with my earlier post on brain evolution and rats and human nature.
dg
DG enjoys the way other people like to make up sound-bite narratives about his life and then publish them in large newspapers. This particular angle is poignant. The lonely hero, finding his path solo, forgotten, unnoticed, friendless, a man without a country, stranger, outsider, off the grid (completely–he doesn’t even know what the grid is), a craggy, moss-eaten hermit dwelling in the barren lands, the old bull moose with spider webs in his antlers, the Fisher King, etc. But, you know, you read this stuff (and when Elle came out what a terrific writer I am, etc. etc.) and it bears so little on your real life that you have the distinct impression that there is another DG, a double, call him DG2, out there, a composite of readers’ and reviewers’ imagined DGs, just as Don Quixote was haunted by a second fictional Don Quixote who was wandering around Spain telling everyone he was the real Don Quixote. Luckily, I kind of like DG2. We met once in Montreal at the Old Bagel Factory and walked down the Main to The Shed and had a drink and talked about old times (his old times were much more scandalous than mine, of course–once in a while we happened upon a memory we had in common, not too often, and, yes, he is better looking than I am, and maybe 10 years younger). Then we parted company and I drove back to Oblivion where the blue dog and Hobbes had completely forgotten me, so I felt at home.
Flying Under the Radar: 10 Underrated Canadian Authors | Afterword | National Post.
dg
p.s. Why “monkey droppings?” I don’t know! Something Freudian–Freud has that idea of the mystic writing pad where, I guess, the mind writes and erases, leaving traces, which, sort of, are like droppings. Writing=droppings. The writer, Corey Redekop, is a shrewd judge of literature though, and also an estimable prize-winning novelist. Shelf Monkey is the title of his first novel.
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Okay, this topic evolves out of the comments attached to the “What I think” post below. Court and Gary and others are frustrated with the current literary scene, finding it difficult to get a toehold in terms of publication. The idea here is to try to establish a forum for NC readers and lurkers and the editors we have in the community. Vivian Dorsel is the publisher of upstreet. Robin Oliveira is the fiction editor (hopefully she can join in). I edited fiction at The Iowa Review during my stint at the Writers’ Workshop. I edited Best Canadian Stories for over a decade. I’ve judged innumerable contests. We can start here.
This is me talking from my experience as an editor, not as a writer or a teacher. Years ago, when I was at The Iowa Review, I easily received 50-70 stories a week, from writers like Joyce Carol Oates down to complete neophytes. The magazine then published four times a year, with 4-6 slots for short stories, at most 24 stories could find a place in a year (so, yes, obviously LENGTH makes a difference, a fact of life and economics). I suspect the odds are a lot worse now with the proliferation of writing programs. Typical for editors at this level, I was not paid well (the English Department gave me a research assistantship) and it was a part-time job. Most literary magazine editors and readers make nothing. With those kinds of odds you can afford to have a hair trigger rejection finger. You read so many awful or mediocre manuscripts (let’s be honest here) that it gets easy to say no to perhaps 80% of those 50 or more stories a week. Most of those stories you don’t even read past the second page. A cliché, a lame sentence, or a grammatical error automatically knocks them out. (Also sending clips and a c.v. along with that 3-page cover letter guarantees rejection—sure signs of an amateur.) It’s a simple as that. Ask yourselves a) How perfect is my first page? b) Is there enough panache and intelligence evidenced in my first two pages to make me stand out from the herd? After the first 80% of the stories (or essays or poems—it’s the same) get turned down, the work begins. The next 19% are the stories you come to loathe because they are often earnest and competent and second-rate to the core. These stories have plots that start up pretty decently and characters that move through their paces the way they should and they express the regular story-like emotions. But they are ordinary. They have no panache, no real surprises, no blazing excitement. Often you have to read right to the end of these stories because, you know, you’re rooting for the author, hoping against hope that he or she will pull off the terrific ending or suddenly bring a character to life. Sad truth is they never do. And the other sad truth is that there will be enough stories with panache, surprise, intelligence, and delightful linguistic turns, etc. that you can safely reject this 19% as well. The final, final sad truth is that even with that 1% of stories left to read, you know you’ll have a hard time filling the magazine slots with stories you really think are first class, superlative, all the way through—they are so rare.
There really is a perspective trick here. From the writer’s point of view, here is a story he has rewritten 20 times over three months, polished and perfected, and he looks out at the current scene and sees all the schlock that gets published here and there, and he thinks, My God, I am going to save the publishing world with this story! Editors are going to greet me as the saviour! And then that envelope or digital submission shows up at the editor’s desk along with 200 other equally earnest and brilliant (from their author’s perspective) submissions (and there will be MORE tomorrow!). Think of it. Two hundred Messiahs a day! But from the editor’s point of view it’s a triage situation, wave after wave of awful to pretty good stories, all looking about the same after a few months on the job, most of them DOA.
This shouldn’t discourage anyone, except those who want an excuse. I don’t think it’s ever been different. To stand out for an editor you have to be very, very good. And not just very good in spots—all the way through the text. That’s the key. Competent and nice aren’t enough. Tryers go to the end of the line. Stories need to ring with truth, linguistic pizzazz, mystery, life, passion and excitement from the first word. This isn’t to say that there aren’t bad editors, sycophants, people led by fads, provincials, people driven only by marketing models and bottom lines. And lots of schlock gets published—although that’s mainly because certain kinds of schlock actually sell well to an undereducated market that likes schlock (yes, honestly). And, yes, editors often lean toward established names, partly because those established names have figured out how to separate themselves from the herd (not just because names sell). And some magazines and editors have preferences in terms of style (e.g. avant garde or conventional realism)—we all have different tastes. But most editors are trying to fill their magazines with good exciting writing. It’s not a conspiracy.
But it is awfully hard to get published, to get started, and even to keep getting published over a lifetime. The art is difficult and long to learn, and the competition is brutal. And there certainly have been cases when editors have missed a work of genius (scary thought). And, yes, if your work is eccentric, or out of the mainstream in some way, editors will have an even harder time deciding if you are really good or not. And there certainly are cultural troughs and bents that militate against certain kinds of art (classicism yields to decadence and vice versa over time). All this comes and goes, lean times and fat (pretty lean right now). The main thing is to learn to write well and drive yourself with a realistic sense of how good your work has to be to attract an editor’s attention. The rest is in the hands of the gods.
dg
DG and the blue dog heading into the woods together
Strange the things that educate our emotional responses to life. I just finished a draft of the story called “Uncle Boris up in a Tree.” One of the characters, Bjorn, the straight arrow, buys a bright yellow Land Rover. The yellow Land Rover is, for me, a dream image, a symbol. But the “Land Rover” part doesn’t seem right. I think and think. I realize I meant it to be a yellow Rolls Royce. Rolls Royce seems right. And later I remember that when I was a kid I loved that movie The Yellow Rolls Royce, that for years I played the soundtrack over and over. The Yellow Rolls Royce is an unusual movie. It’s a triptych, three different love stories connected only by the object, the image, the yellow Rolls Royce. I think the dramatist Terence Rattigan wrote the script. Very romantic, sentimental, sad. So then I realize that this movie, and the emotional education I derived from it, stands unconsciously behind the story. The yellow Land Rover is the clue. And I think there is a certain attitude to life and love that I try to get at in the story that comes from the feelings I got from that movie and the music, when I was a kid (and maybe I haven’t grown up so much).
Here are two of the songs from the soundtrack. “Forget Domani” and “Now and Then” (this one still shakes me). I think Riz Ortolani wrote the music. Katyna Ranieri sings.
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dg
Jonah, The Scarlet Letter, notebook, and coffee inside the tent one morning
What we read on the EPE (Epic Canoe Event): Jacob reread Dante’s Inferno, Jonah read The Scarlet Letter, dg brought along Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary, Volume One. Jonah finished The Scarlet Letter early which was a problem (dg had, perhaps too hastily, ordered him to leave behind the Richard Dawkins hardcover he had wanted to bring). But then one lovely night dg got to listen to Jacob reading three cantos of The Inferno out loud by flashlight to his brother (with glosses and explanations). Throughout the trip there was much animated campfire discussion of The Scarlet Letter as Jonah waded through: the frequency of the word “bosom,” Hester’s personality, the demonic epithets applied to little Pearl, the peculiar role of Chillingworth (the “black” man, healer, and a man who consorted with Indians), and the nature of Dimmesdale’s wound.
dg
In regard to various and sundry culture critiques animadverted within the NC garden walls (this little Eden, refuge from the bad world), it might be helpful to enunciate a positive credo.
A person writes because, through writing, he comes to know himself and the world better. A person may write for money or fame or to achieve social position by posing as a writer, but these are secondary and, to some extent, inauthentic motives that often result in inauthentic and second-rate writing. Inauthentic motives result in second-rate writing because they interpose someone else’s point of view between the writer and the work. The writer writes to an audience conceived loosely as a market. He writes to formula instead of form—and don’t be fooled: there are some very slick and intelligent-seeming formulas out there. Many people who want to be writers do not know themselves well enough to be able to sort out their motives. Again, don’t kid yourselves: most of what gets published is second-rate recyclable literature at best. (Why this would come as a surprise, or even be noteworthy to anyone in his right mind I have no idea.) If you write to know yourself and the world better, as a means of becoming a better version of yourself in your writing, then certain questions need to be answered in the writing. Who are you? What does it mean to be a person? How can a person relate to other persons? What is real and how do you know the thing you think is real is real? What do you want? How do you differentiate, evade, quell, and dismiss all the false demands of fad, formula, packaging, expectation, received opinion, ideology, and commerce to achieve your own unique answers? How do you translate the answers into words on the page? And, perhaps most importantly, how can you make this fun? If you use your writing as a mode of inquiry, if your plots are dramatic collisions between self and other or between self and the real (always with the preceding questions in mind), and if you are brutally honest with yourself and your characters, then you have a shot at writing well.
dg
Here are the first few lines of a new essay “The Possum,” about dg’s great-grandfather, just published in The New Quarterly.
My great-grandfather John Brock killed himself with an overdose of laudanum in St. Williams on the North Shore of Lake Erie in March, 1914, the day before he was to appear in court to answer a charge of alienation of affection and criminal conversation. This was in an era when marital rights yet bore the flavour of property rights. Alienation of affection and criminal conversation referred to actions that deprived someone of his spousal relationship. In practice, the phrases meant anything from merely counseling a wife to leave her husband to seduction and adultery.
Today St. Williams is a sleepy hamlet on a sand and clay bluff overlooking the Inner Bay between Turkey Point to the east and Long Point to west, a beautiful and mysterious place, in summer especially when the lake surges languidly under the harsh sunlight and the trees on the point shimmer like a mirage along the horizon. In the early 1900s, lotus beds choked the shoreline and the bluffs were scrubby and bare except where the remains of the great timber flumes swooped down to the beach. For years, the McCalls (my mother’s family) had been engaged in lumbering, furniture making, boat building and general retail but mostly, as my mother’s father once observed, in shipping all the forest roundabout across the lake to Cleveland and Buffalo.
In 1914, the farms around St. Williams were turning to blow sand and dunes, and the McCalls turned necessity into virtue by lobbying the provincial government to buy their land and open a reforestry station to help put the trees back. The family businesses had been in gradual decline since the depression of 1873-78; we were the early victims of what is now called globalization, in this case the first wave of corporate bloat and centralization that coincided with the late Victorian era. When the railway finally extended a tentacle through St. Williams in the late 1880s, instead of inspiring a boom, it sucked all the money out of the village overnight. But in 1914 the family still thought a lot of itself, and those homes, with ivy crawling up their sweeping verandahs, stood with immaculate hauteur against the internal erosion of the economy and ecological ruin.
Buy the magazine and read the rest.
dg
I just had to write a tiny piece on what I am currently reading to go with a new essay of mine coming out in The New Quarterly. No reason not to share it here.
I’m reading Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary Volume One (1953-1956). Before that I read his memoir A Kind of Testament. Gombrowicz lived in Argentina starting just as the Second World War broke out, then eventually, in the 1960s, moved to France and married a French-Canadian woman and died soon after of asthma. In the diary, which isn’t really a diary–it was more like a blog, written regularly for publication in a Polish magazine, he’s funny, confessional, awkward, arrogant and amazingly smart. He compulsively turns and returns to various motifs: Poland and expatriates, Polish writers, the realm of the interhuman, and the deformation of form. The Polish material resonates in my mind because, of course, for various reasons having not much to do with choice–mostly circumstance–I live outside my country. Gombrowicz thinks this is okay. Being outside your country puts you at a distance from which you can see more clearly. Also, in the end, you realize your country is in you–this is where your art comes from. He’s also very good on the communal construction of the self in the interhuman. For centuries and right up to the Existentialists, we have too blithely taken the existence of an integral self for granted. But Existentialism is a reductio. At the moment of decision, self-creation, the self disappears (this is very clearly described in Camus’ novel The Stranger). Better, as Gombrowicz says, to accept that much of what we call a self is created through the desires of others and through communal forms and expectations. Only if we accept this do we have a chance to forge a new and firmer sense of self not based on blindness and denial. And finally Gombrowicz is a kind of formalist who makes himself as an artist (and a person–he liked to chase boys in Buenos Aires parks) by rejecting form (often in parody).
dg
Driving back and forth to Canada, knocking about the farm and Port Dover, listing to Fred Eaglesmith CDs—all this made me think of Stan Rogers who once wrote a song about the fish plant in Port Dover (now for sale again) called “Tiny Fish for Japan” and that reminded me of “Northwest Passage,” our favourite driving song for years. Even now the boys and I are apt to lapse into a chorus or two as the miles click by…
See also BBC piece on Sir John Franklin and the Northwest Passage here.
dg
TPR: You’ve published many works of fiction and nonfiction. What we want to know is how a terrific writer like yourself spends his spare time. Reading great books? Memorizing hard words? At art museums? Playing chess?
DG: Jonah and I played nine holes of golf yesterday. We learned several important skill sets. 1) 4 balls are not enough. 2) Though I play hockey and baseball left-handed, I play golf right-handed. Thus we did not need 2 bags of clubs. 3) Do not play golf with the pencil stuck behind your ear. You will lose it and then you can only etch the score into the score card with the tip of a tee.
TPR: Fascinating. I imagine your golf skills are pretty high. What is your handicap?
DG: I have an artificial knee. (Next time we’re going to rent two of those golf cart thingies and race each other on the fairways.)
TPR: Ugh.
DG: Let me finish. Also I was handicapped by the large number of water hazards. I had to wade into one festering swamp up to my knees to retrieve a ball. Jonah thought this was funny. He took some very good video of one my best drives which ends with a large waterspout in the distance. Also, as mentioned above, we were handicapped by a shortage of balls. The last hole we started with only one ball between us which is pretty difficult. Jonah hit his tee shot and then ran over and marked his spot and threw the ball back to me and then I hit my tee shot and marked that and threw the ball back to him. This makes golf an arduous and time-consuming sport.
TPR: Is there any similarity, in your mind, between golf and writing?
DG: Yes.
TPR: Could you expand on that?
DG: Yes.
TPR: Now?
DG: In writing as in golf, I seem to hit my drives into the water traps or they end up on the wrong fairway or they get lost altogether. Also both writing and golf depress me.
TPR: We imagine that you thought about writing a lot as you played and that there was considerable intellectual byplay–witty remarks, etc.
DG: Jonah was very witty. At one point, he observed that what consoled him through the ordeal was the thought that no matter how awful things got he’d still be able to beat Stephen Hawking.
TPR: Er, thank you. That will be quite enough.
DG: So when will this be published?
TPR: Never.
VCFA graduate Shelagh Shapiro does a weekly radio literary interview show Write The Book in Burlington, VT. She interviewed dg during the residency and the podcast is available here. Check out her other podcasts as well.
I would write more about this, and will, but my current internet capabilities are very low.
dg
The Robot Cafe, Port Dover, Ontario
DG writing from The Robot Cafe in Port Dover, Ontario, next door to the Hobo Java CD and guitar shop on Main Street. A live middleaged band playing mid-afternoon to an audience of three teenage girls (one dressed like a boy with a surfer haircut and a boy’s bathing suit, one pretty hefty in a zebra stripe dress) who between sets get up and sing “I’m A Little Teapot” into the microphone. Scifi movie posters on the walls. They Came from Outer Space. Tobor the Great. Girls in bikinis and tshirts walking in off the beach. This is Fred Eaglesmith‘s hometown. They are selling his CDs at the counter. Jonah is trying to repair a music website, but the wifi is inadequate. We could have been watching the (yawn) World Cup. I imagine you can tell from this that dg won’t be posting much for a few days. Have fun on your own–don’t get into trouble without me. dg
Memorial reading for Jack Myers last night. I spent 10 days with Jack, twice a year, for over a dozen years, but I didn’t know Jack as long as some faculty members (30-20 years), and Mark Cox was with him over the last days. It was lovely, sad, and poignant to be with his friends and hear his words and sit there leafing through my mind for my own memories. Among others: the Tang Night all-male faculty ritual Chinese buffet pig outs with Jack, Mark, Syd Lea, Walter Wetherell, Francois Camoin, and others; long evenings in Noble Hall dorm rooms with Jack and Mark sneaking cigars by the window and the vivid witty talk flowing; the night Jack talked about the Buddhist idea (I think I remember this right) of the little self that is the needy, compulsive, selfish side always tripping up the larger aspirations of the better self (I’ve thought about this a lot in life); the day he got me to start reading James Hillman, lending me his copy of one of the books; the crisp white shirts he often wore to readings; his scalpel like poems and pool-playing; and more. It was something, last night, hearing Jack’s poems and then Mark’s simple eloquent rehearsal of the last days of an old friend.
dg
Norfolk County Fair, 2008 (photo by dg)
Here’s the opening of a new essay on novels, history, historical novels, orality and literacy, truth, Dan Brown, and ghosts. It’s just been published Vivian Dorsel’s magazine upstreet #6.
dg
1. Novels and History, an Exercise in Dialectics
The difference between written history and novels is contained in the difference between two theories of truth: truth in history is denotative or evidentiary while truth in novels is defined by coherence. It’s as simple as that. Yet they both rise from the same internal source in the mind, the story-making source, the imagination. This makes history and novels, at some level, teasingly similar. And then, of course, we do use that word “truth” in discussing novels in a loose and sloppy way that leads to all sorts of confusions. When we ask if a novel seems true, we often mean whether it sounds authentic, whether it’s plausible, whether the characters could have existed or events transpired. Sometimes “truth” in this context refers to emotional truth, an even more subjective truth than verisimilitude. As a novelist I have often found that what seems perfectly plausible to me in an emotional vein can be incredible to other people (readers).
But the fact remains, when you want to test the truth of an historical assertion, you have recourse ultimately to documentary or archaeological evidence, whereas, when you want to test the truth of a novelistic assertion you can only look at the text. It makes no sense to ask what Sancho Panza said or looked like outside Don Quixote, whereas you can test the claim that George Washington had false teeth or Sir John A Macdonald occasionally drank too much by examining documents from the period. This is the reason for a secondary difference between history and novels: historical explanations change when new evidence surfaces, whereas no fact in the world at large can force an author to rewrite a novel.
This is not to deny, of course, that there are sometimes criticisms of novels in terms of plausibility or truth, especially when it comes to historical novels. When you write an historical novel, you accept a certain contractual relationship with the reader in terms of verisimilitude, that quality of seeming to be real, which is one of the signal attributes of realistic fiction. But in fiction this contract can be fairly loose. When I wrote my novel Elle, it made sense to get the dates right and the proper sequences of events not to mention the correct king in France at the time. Readers accustomed to verisimilitude in novels are easily distracted by obvious mistakes of so-called historical fact. But a reader’s knowledge of any particular era is usually shallow, which leaves plenty of room for creative displacement without damaging superficial plausibility. For example, the relevant historical documents (themselves in doubt) say the woman I used as the basis for my protagonist in Elle remained on the island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence for two years and some months. But I ran out of dramatic possibilities for her after a year, so I sent her back to France early. Aesthetic considerations easily trumped historical accuracy, and no one noticed.
This is also not to say that occasionally these debates about the truth or historical accuracy of novels don’t sometimes erupt into frenzied public acrimony. These debates are irrelevant or relevant in a very interesting way. A case in point is the hysteria over Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. When the movie version of the novel was released, the Toronto Star ran a meta-commentary on the “flurry of analysis about the truth of the novel.” Among other debate armatures, the Star mentioned the Archbishop of Canterbury’s denunciation of the “lies” in the novel which might, he thought, lead Christians to doubt their faith.
One of the narrative premises on which the plot of The Da Vinci Code is based is the claim that Jesus was married and had a child and that child had descendants and so on and so on. This apparently contradicts the story in the Gospels which do not mention a wife or a child. We’re in Salman Rushdie territory here; The Da Vinci Code is a novelistic attack on the roots of Christianity. But no one in Europe or North America is going to issue a fatwa against Brown because, of course, we all know a novel is a novel and not a claim on truth. At bottom, we (except for fundamentalists and people who watch too much TV) all know that a novel is already a “lie” completely imagined for our entertainment.
Buy the magazine, and read the rest.
2010 © Douglas Glover
The best thing that happened so far: 10 a.m. Faculty Meeting. Mary Ruefle sweeps up to me to say hello, sweeps me into a hug with one long arm and, with the other, presses a small book into my hand. She says, “I saw this at a tag sale and thought you should have it. It’s a little water stained. But I thought of you.” It’s a beautiful little soft cover booked printed in Mexico entitled The Wisdom of Don Quixote with lovely colour paintings scattered throughout and pages and pages of quotations from Cervantes. You can’t find it on the internet–at least I couldn’t. Selections by Ricardo Elizondo. Illustrations by Jack Unruh. Translation by Susan Moreira. Published by Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. A splendid gift, terrific start to the residency.
dg
Hermann Broch
We didn’t go hiking today. Weather too threatening. Try again tomorrow. I got my hair cut yesterday. Darcy, the woman who does it, just got engaged. She’s 31, Italian, big-hipped, kind of pretty face, likes to snowmobile, still lives with her parents. She got engaged to a 42-year-old builder in Ballston Spa. They’ve been going out for three years. They’re getting married May 11 next year. She said he asked her while they were on a bike ride and she cried all the way home and didn’t have tissues and got mascara all over her shirtsleeve. He said, “At least your nose doesn’t run when you cry.” I find all this strange and mysterious and fascinating. She seems so sensible and yet romantic and doomed. Last fall they went to San Francisco together for a vacation. At a restaurant, she got hit on by a woman. She got very flustered.
And I was thinking of the romantic intensity of that love Bronte was describing, where you sort of dissolve yourself in the desires of the other and she/he in you. Whatever that means. This is mixed up in my head with the Hermann Broch novel I’m reading [The Sleepwalkers]–the love in there is much more modern, strange–two unknowing and unknowable creatures thrashing together, drawn together, repelled, irritated, misunderstanding each other, thinking about killing one another and making love without words. Gorgeous and sad. And not at all like the perfect service of Rochester and Jane, though it’s interesting how Esch (one of the main characters) longs for that kind of love. When he offers it, his lover doesn’t understand what he’s saying and he gets angry and hits her, then they decide to get married. Jesus!
I went to Borders with the boys this afternoon after school because it was raining. And I got Jane Eyre and I guess from a 
quick glance that Rochester’s name is Edward. I was sitting there reading at the end of the book, the last couple of pages, where Edward goes blind and she has to read for him and tell him what everything looks like. “Never did I weary of reading to him; never did I weary of conducting him where he wished to go; of doing for him what he wished to be done. And there was pleasure in these services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad–because he claimed these services without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly that he knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance; he felt I loved him so fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes.” I had forgotten this, how strong it is.
Oddly, the very last paragraph of the book quotes the same lines from the Book of Revelations that I use in my story “Bad News of the Heart.”
—dg
A Journey Round My Skull: Unhealthy book fetishism from a reader, collector, and amateur historian of forgotten literature. Recent obsessions: illustration and graphic design from around the world.
[A beautiful site. Just look at the images and go a little mad. N.B. I used Witkacy’s name in my novel The Life and Times of Captain N.]
Witkacy. Chopping of Forest. Fight.
[In this site I found a short story by Adelheid Duvanel…]
“Inner Tumult” (1978) by Adelheid Duvanel
[which led to this…]
Man who authored everything on the internet: (continuously updated cut-up flux of his “best of” excerpts (intended as a stream of consciousness fairy-tale-in-progress for his only daughter now living with her mother in new york)
[and this, by the same man,…]
zoran rosko vacuum player: infraground literature, music, films and philosophy
[and this…]
[and finally this…]
Slow down and dig in. Krúdy’s style is built of imagery that halts you at sentence’s end to ponder what it reveals about the subject: “Her face was unapproachably severe, like a façade with shuttered windows, where no crimson-clad girls ever lean out over the windowsill.” Wait, one more: an old woman, dressed up in feathered hat and finery, “on parade like some superannuated circus steed that, come tomorrow, might be harnessed to a hearse.” The sheer richness is overwhelming. Krúdy’s trademark is the linked comparison – one extended simile or metaphor stacked upon another, with magical impossibilities sprinkled throughout [dg’s emphasis]: “The mirror’s reflection grows faint, or perhaps the face itself does, taking on an acrid, fastidious look like that of a cobwebbed old daguerreotype set by sentimental hands on a headstone. In the pupil of the eye tiny, swimming dots appear: they are rowboats steered by melancholy boatmen conveying luggage and traveler – departing life – from the shore to the vast old bark awaiting.” Such writing, grumps will say, “draws attention to itself.” But, grumps, that’s the point: the storyteller captivating you. Listen to him. His voice is as important as what happens to his characters. The imaginary people are introducing you to a real one.
—Arthur Phillip
dg
This is the opening of an essay on Alice Munro just published in CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries 79, in a special Short Story Issue to coincide with the biennial convention of the Society for the Study of the Short Story in English, currently taking place in Toronto.
by Douglas Glover
Alice Munro’s constant concern is to correct the reader, to undercut and complicate her text until all easy answers are exhausted and an unnerving richness of life stands revealed in the particular, secret experiences of her characters. She does this in two ways. First, she has a sly capacity for filling her stories with sex, thwarted loves, betrayal and violence while self-presenting (somehow, in the prose) as a middle-aged Everywoman with only the faintest hint of a salacious gleam in her eye. And second, she deploys an amazing number of intricately interconnected literary devices that ironize and relativize meanings while conversely revealing (unveiling as in “apocalypse”) an underground current of life that seems all the more true because it is hidden, earthy, frank, and shocking. In her story “Meneseteung,” for example, the truth has something to do with menstruation, bloating, diarrhea and opium. That this truth is called into question at the story’s close is pure Alice Munro whose message may only be that life is never what you think it is.
“Meneseteung” advertises itself as faux amateur biography of a forgotten and forgettable local poet, a spinster named Almeda Joynt Roth, who lived at the end of the 19th century in a small Ontario village just inside the advancing frontier. In 1879, Meda is drifting toward middle age when a salt well entrepreneur named Jarvis Poulter moves into town and half-heartedly begins to court her. One night Meda hears a drunken commotion in the street outside her house. Ignoring the ruckus, she manages to fall back asleep, but in the morning she discovers a woman’s body in her backyard 
and runs to Jarvis’s house, two doors down the street, for help. Jarvis nudges the body with his toe, pronounces the woman drunk and wipes his hand off on a leaf after shaking her roughly by the hair. Then, apparently aroused by Meda’s nightgown (suddenly seeing her in a sexual light), he invites her to walk with him to church later in the morning (a decisive signal of interest in the world of the story). Meda is in a tizzy. She has taken a sleeping drug the evening before, her period is starting, she has diarrhea, she’s making grape jelly; now she doses herself with nerve medicine (probably laudanum). Just before Jarvis shows up she pins a note to her front door; Jarvis retreats in silence. Meda spends the rest of the day in a drug haze, imagining the townspeople as gravestones toddling down the street. Then life returns to normal; only Jarvis is no longer interested in paying court to Meda. In 1903, village louts chase the eccentric old biddy into a nearby swamp. She catches cold and dies, leaving behind a slim volume of poems entitled Offerings.
That’s the story action, the bare bones. But with Alice Munro the difference between the bare bones of the story and the way she organizes the bones and flesh of her text is…
2010 © Douglas Glover
The Guardian live play-by-play blog has some of the best humour I’ve seen/heard. Here are bits from the Spain-Switzerland match going on as I post this. If only more sports announcers would talk like this, I’d get cable again.
58 min “Hi Rob,” says Michael Minihan. “Just to point out, I made love to Mick McCarthy at a motel just outside Doncaster and I can confirm your suspicions about him being a tender lover. After the two of us had emptied the mini bar, he made off in the morning without paying though, typifying Premier League managers irresponsible attitude towards debt.”
48 min “That persistent drone is really annoying,” says Adam Forbes, lining up the inevitable gag. “Any news on the BBC offering games with Mick McCarthy filtered out?” HONK! I like McCarthy. He’s an underrated manager and, I imagine, a deceptively tender lover.
41 min Ramos passes the ball straight into touch. Spain are struggling to penetrate, against Switzerland. I can’t believe this is happening. I’ve lost faith in everything.
34 min Here’s the latest from Nightmare Corner, with Ross Kitson: “If I was playing against that Spanish attack I would be having nightmares for days – but appreciative nightmares, like the one where you are really thankful as you are being beaten about by a charming semi-clad Amazonian woman.”