Jul 122015
 

chance_frontcover

Robert Day

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

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

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Exit, pursued by a bear

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

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

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

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

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

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

     —Douglas Glover

May 172015
 

zombie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dg

May 132015
 

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

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

dg

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Apr 262015
 
dog2

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

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

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

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

dog

via Wikipedia

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

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

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

Yudhishtira whistled for his dog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Take me to my brothers.”

Read the rest here.

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

Lucy dubious

dg

Apr 252015
 

Capture

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

Tower of Silence2

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

tower of silence 13

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

tower of silence10

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest at Socks here.

dg

Apr 242015
 

Chauvet lion

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

In discovery is the beginning of destruction.

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

Art that is destroyed by watching.

To know is to demolish.

To experience is to commence the decomposition of reality.

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

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

Impermanence.

Consciousness is the production of replicas of the real.

We live in a reproduced universe.

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

Do you really want to live in a fake world?

Think about it.

—Douglas Glover

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

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

 

Apr 192015
 

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

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

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

dg

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Apr 182015
 

Ray A Youngbear and son

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

dg

Cover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mar 272015
 

Windsor Review2

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

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

“The short one, you say?”

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

“He had a mask.”

“Yes, sir.”

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

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

“The short one.”

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

“In the dark.”

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

“Because?”

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

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

“No. I would have recognized him.”

“He’s a police officer.”

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

“Because he’s short.”

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

Mar 132015
 

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

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

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Mar 102015
 

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

dg

LucyDog of the North

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERALooking down to the Hudson River where we started

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAClimbing

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERACrossing the ridge

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAA little birch grove

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

Feb 182015
 

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

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

dg

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Vineland
Thomas Pynchon
Little, Brown (1990)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douglas Glover

(Books in Canada, April, 1990)

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Feb 142015
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feb 132015
 

Savage Love PB cover2 small

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

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

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

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

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

Feb 102015
 

Okay, here’s a coincidence that bears telling you all about. Long years ago when I still reviewed books (lots of books), I worked freelance for Larry Kart, then books editor at the Chicago Tribune. In 1995, Larry asked me to be one of the judges for the annual Nelson Algren Short Story Award, which was a very prestigious prize in those days. The other judges were Nicholas Delbanco and Sandra Scofield. The writer we picked for first prize was a 22-year-old Vietnamese immigrant named Dao Strom, who was a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

As I say, I had forgotten when I was a judge for the prize and I had forgotten who won (lost in memory — look, a lot happens in life, right?). I do remember the awards ceremony at a very large hotel banquet room in Chicago (I was thinking: What the fuck am I doing here?). I do remember meeting Nicholas because we became friendly acquaintances after that. And at the reception I met Wayne Booth, the eminent author of that great book The Rhetoric of Fiction.

In any case, our new contributing editor Fernando Sdrigotti (in London) put me in touch with Dao Strom (in Portland) a couple of months ago and I invited some work from her. The result is the lovely hybrid memoir we just published today. But it wasn’t till I was noodling around, looking for more biographical details that I noticed she had won the Nelson Algren Award. And then I did remember that the person we gave the prize to was Vietnamese. And then the tumblers began to click, and finally I found an old piece in the Tribune about that particular award, which confirmed what my brain couldn’t.

So after almost 20 years Dao Strom and I meet again through the angelic intervention of Fernando.

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Dao Strom managed not only to make the finals the first year she entered the competition, but also to finish in first place. Of three stories she submitted, “Up Over Boulder Hill” was singled out by the judges, Sandra Scofield, Nicholas Delbanco and Douglas Glover, themselves novelists and short-story writers.

via Cradle Of Writers – Chicago Tribune.

Jan 132015
 

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I used to teach this movie over and over to creative writing classes. First of all, it enchanted me, then I began to notice the structure, the repetitions, the mirrored scenes, the composition of the scenes, the rhetorical flourishes, and finally I began to think about so-called realism and the romantic comedy. The romantic comedy, a genre I adore, is a deeply conservative confection, a bon-bon based on the idea that out of all the people in the world, there is one true love for you, a person with whom you’ll form a mystical attachment and have many babies and people the earth (these kinds of dramas have their roots in ancient fertility rites, which existed long before we realized that lots of people only meant pillaging the countryside and causing global warming). Nevertheless, they appeal to us because deep down we’re programed to believe that somehow our sexual instincts, love and society will/should converge and create many years of happiness (and babies). This movie is just full of weddings, not just the four in the narrative, but the funeral itself is coded with wedding thematics, and then there are a bunch of after-plot wedding photos at the end.

In any case, what you have here is my teaching outline for taking people through the movie. I am an incredibly tedious person when I have the AV remote in my hand. I describe things, let you watch a few seconds, replay it again and again, whole scenes are repeated, then I explain again and digress and so on and so on. But invariably you begin to see that though this seems (aside from the fantasy aspects of the genre) a fairly  realistic treatment of a bunch of young friends looking for love, the movie is actually a carefully constructed artifice, every word, action, and scene carved to contribute to  the larger work. And the writing is superbly witty (and full of classical Greek rhetorical devices). The screenwriter was Richard Curtis, who also did Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually (which repeats the ensemble cast/multiple plot structure of Four Weddings and a Funeral).

If you watch the movie with the notes in hand and use them to trigger a deeper technical analysis of what is going on, then watch it again and again, till you can really FEEL the repetitions, catch the nuances and tie-backs, see the thematic passages inserted, watch the multiple plots each advance step-by-step, if you pay attention, you’ll learn a good deal about the structure of narrative. Or you can read through the notes and watch the example scenes first.

For as long as it’s available, you can stream the entire movie here for free.

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Genre: Romantic comedy (true love); ensemble structure with multiple subplots. A fanciful, socially conservative genre, much like the ancient tales told around campfires in caves that educated the audience in the ultimate mores of the tribe. Get married, have children. An ancient, conventional genre, the art is in manipulating the conventions in a witty and original manner.

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Basic composition principles:

1) Repetition is the heart of art. Watch for repetition of all kinds: large structural repetitions, subplots, thematic passages, bookends, motifs, anaphora, epanalepsis, anadiplosis, tie-backs, simple word repetitions. Distinguish also between repetitions that work to organize the whole work and those that are used to organize smaller segments only. Note also how repetitions are varied to keep them fresh. Note the repetitions of “meringue” and “lovely” and “sheep,” e.g.

2) Strict time control. In this case by using invitations, text time markers, and the clock (lateness) comic motif throughout.

3) Plots are organized into clear, simple steps.

4) Each step, event, or event sequence has a simple informing desire and some dramatic interference. The informing desire varies and can be quite simple. E.g. In the the movie’s third segment, Charlie must simply not be late meeting David. Many small dialogue scenes begin with a simple question. The interference can take many forms as well: not-answering dialogue, scene crunches or interfering scenes, speech impediments (in this movie), suspensions, nested scenes (a version of parenthesis, or what I call in a different jargon nested globs), intercut scenes. Often the desire/interference structure can be expressed grammatically as a but-construction.

5) Clear announcement of thematic material. In a movie, this has to take place in dialogue.

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1.      Overture: Music closing with the words “when every happy plot ends with a marriage knot.”

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2.    Wedding #1 (Broken up into segments: waking up and getting to wedding, wedding, reception, post-reception. Each segment then broken up into separate steps and scenes.)

a.    alarm clock motif (note how it repeats and varies throughout; call it a species of anaphora)

(1)    Note how the lateness+alarm clock anaphora is used in a series of parallel structures to introduce the various characters economically

b.    wedding invitation+time switch device (time control)

c.    lateness motif

Lovely dialogue: The only words used are “fuck” and “bugger” (only once at the end).

d.    wedding ceremony (ring issue; meringue word repetition starts up)

(1)    The chief technical problem here is that weddings are all the same. The writer had to invent technical ways of creating dramatic interest in each wedding ceremony. Obviously, the ceremonies are all cut down one way or another. But also note the different other devices that make the weddings interesting. In this case, the device of the scene crunch: while the ceremony is going on, Charlie also has to find replacement rings.

e.    wedding photo motif

f.    walking to reception (Gareth/Mathew thematic scene structure established)

(1)    Secondary subplot (Bernard and Lydia) starts up and goes through preliminary steps, leads to second wedding

(2)    David’s romantic subplot starts up

g.    PLOT STEP: CHARLIE MEETS CAREY

h.    bookend devices: Hen’s brother and the demented old man

i.    speech motif (Charlie; sheep word and image repetition begins; note suspension in speech)

Speech rhetoric:

Charlie begins with a joke narrative, leads to a suspension (“there are now skeletons…or so I thought”), followed by a moment of truth-telling about himself and his awe of people who get married, then the suspension ends: “But now back to Angus and those sheep.”

j.    PLOT STEP: CHARLIE AND CAREY IN BED BUT SHE LEAVES NEXT DAY (Note word play in sex scene, esp. the repetition of “skulk”.)

Sex scenes: difficult to write; three different strategies offered in this movie.

1) word play over sex scene, e.g. skulking;

2) scene crunch (Charlie trying to be alone while Lydia and Bernard have sex);

3) elided.

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3.    Wedding #2 (Broken up into: waking up and getting to wedding, wedding, reception, post-reception)

a.    alarm clock

b.    wedding invitation+ time switch

(1)    Bernard and Lydia subplot advances

c.    lateness

d.    wedding ceremony (mispronunciation gaffes)

e.    wedding photos

f.    PLOT STEP: CHARLIE SEES CAREY BUT SHE’S ENGAGED

g.    speech (Tom’s travesty of Charlie’s speech)

(1)    Fiona’s subplot (dialogue scene)

(2)    Scarlet’s subplot (dialogue scene)

(3)    David’s subplot advances (meets love interest)

h.    PLOT STEP: CHARLIE AND CAREY IN BED AGAIN

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4.    Non-Wedding Interlude Segment (Broken up into: waking up, wedding dresses, list of lovers, conversation with David, Charlie’s near declaration of love.)

(1)    Note here how the wedding motifs are dragged into a non-wedding segment: invitation, wedding gifts, trying on wedding dresses, etc. (This is an example of thematic forcing.)

b.    alarm clock

c.    wedding invitation

d.    lateness

e.     backfill: gorgeous scene with a LIST and a SUSPENSION.

f.    PLOT STEP: CHARLIE ALMOST SAYS HE LOVES CAREY (lovely word repetition begins)

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5.    Wedding #3 (Broken up into: wedding, reception)

a.    invitation

b.    lateness (this time not comic)

c.    wedding (truncated by Charlie’s lateness; note the point at which he enters the wedding ceremony and how this segment of the ceremony is repeated in the next wedding)

d.    Gareth/Mathew thematic scene

(1)    Scarlet’s subplot (meets Chester)

(2)    Fiona’s subplot (admits love to Charlie)

(3)    Hen’s subplot (new boyfriend)

e.    speech again (Carey and Hamish)

f.    PLOT STEP: GARETH DIES

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6.    Funeral (Funeral and post-funeral dialogue)

(1)    Note how the language in this segment turns the funeral into a wedding: the church setting, the various tie-backs to ongoing plots, the opening words of Mathew’s speech, the dialogue between Tom and Charlie in which Mathew and Gareth are identified as being married

(2)    Note also the way the comic motifs are omitted: no alarm clock, lateness, no time switch (because the funeral follows so quickly upon Carey’s wedding)

b.    speech again (Mathew)

Note how the camera marks the various plot and subplot characters through the poem.

c.    Tom/Charlie thematic dialogue on true love (thunderbolt repetition begins)

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7.    Wedding #4 (Broken up into: waking up and getting to wedding, non-wedding, aftermath and real not-wedding)

a.    alarm clock

b.    invitation (note suspension)+time switch

c.    lateness

d.    bookend devices: Hen’s brother and the demented old man

e.    PLOT STEP: CHARLIE MARRYING HEN, BUT CAREY SEPARATED

(1)    Fiona subplot advances

(2)    Scarlet advances

(3)    Tom subplot advances (meets Deirdre)

(4)    First marriage couple advances (now have twins)

(5)    Second marriage couple advances (Bernard is “exhausted”)

f.    Mathew/Charlie thematic dialogue in vestry

g.    wedding (interrupted by David; note use of suspension)

h.    PLOT STEP: CHARLIE PROPOSES TO NOT-MARRY CAREY; SHE SAYS, I DO

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8.    Epilogue

a.    multiple subplots end in marriage (except for Fiona)

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Some definitions:

Anadiplosis: “Repetition of the last word of one sentence, or line of poetry, as a means of (sometimes emphatic) liaison.” Dupriez

Epanalepsis: “Repetition at the end of a clause or sentence of the word or phrase with which it began.” Lanham

Parenthesis: “The insertion of a segment, complete in meaning, and relevant or irrelevant to the subject under discussion, into another segment whose flow it interrupts.” Dupriez

Suspension: A narrative moment when some crucial information is promised but held back till later in the action.

Tie-Back: Textual reference back to earlier material in order to remind the reader, create rhythm and add textual density.

Anaphora: Multiple repetitions of the same grammatical construction at the beginning of successive textual elements.

But-construction: Grammatical construction using the word “but” or some cognate to create dramatic interruption, interference, or contrast at the level of a sentence.

—Douglas Glover

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Dec 142014
 

wordfest b&w more

For your Sunday morning delectation, along with coffee, croissants and the crossword, you can follow the link below (or click the image) to a page containing two lectures I gave at Vermont College of Fine Arts on reading. Like a broken record, I am always saying that 80% of what I teach when I teach writing is how to read (and to write about what you read). I have twice lectured at VCFA on reading and managed to record both for a possible future essay. Go to the page, and you’ll find the recordings plus all sorts of amusing goodies (um, lecture handouts) including some hilarious examples of VERY BAD readings, a marked up reading copy of Elizabeth Tallent’s little story “No One’s a Mystery,” a reading rubric I give to students, and a 90-page pdf of excerpts from my letters two students on reading (evidence of a deeply compulsive personality).

For my money, the first lecture is more fun (it has the bad examples). The second lecture is rather more pointed at students in the program who are struggling with their critical papers.

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The lectures are here! 

 

 

 

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Nov 232014
 

6261458W010 advert_11connors.jpg

Stumbled on this in my researches. Nevermind what researches. A little gem of an early addiction movie that uses the Law of Unexpected Consequences to poke fun at the legendary roots of the soda pop industry in the legions of 19th century quack remedies that usually included hard drugs like cocaine, heroin and opium. The overture is quite upbeat for the subject matter. Aside from the music, it’s a silent movie, short, made by D. W. Griffith in 1912. The acting is strange to us, telegraphic (or cartoonish), faces almost masked to project the large emotions, even thoughts. I love the gestural decline of the son and secretary into degradation and death, the madcap crowds swilling Dopokoke (yes, that’s what it’s called) at the drug store (they really were drug stores in those days). Also, that secretary has just bags of hair. Amazing. (She went on acting right into the 1950s.) As an added  delight, I include a soda pop ad (above) from, I think, the 1950s. It’s clearly a Coca-Cola bottle, right? Also a brief (possibly truncated) docu-history of drugs in America).

(It’s Sunday, I have student packets, there are STILL leaves to be raked — I had to think of something to do to keep from actually working.)

dg

 

Nov 182014
 

BenedictPinckney Benedict via artoftherural.org

Here’s a lively book you all ought to read. I reviewed it in 1992 for The Chicago Tribune, which at the time had a wonderful weekly book section and sponsored the annual Nelson Algren Short Story Award. Again, this is one of those Lazarus texts, not quite dead and gone but hibernating on a hard drive. Some aren’t worth keeping, but others, like this one, serve at the least to remind me of good books that I once carefully read. You’ll have to pardon the anachronisms. Pinckney Benedict can no longer be described as a young writer. And Cormac McCarthy is much better known that he was then.

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The Wrecking Yard
by Pinckney Benedict
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday

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Pinckney Benedict is a young writer who hails from the hills of West Virginia and is blessed with a natural gift of southern Bible-belt oratory, part-lyric and part-hammer-and-tongs sermon. He doesn’t write like one of those precious minimalist or K-Mart realist northerners — his stories rise in the heart of a non-existent, mythic America, a no-time and no-place of elemental characters and pure narrative.

At his best, he reads like a cross between Barry Hannah (at his best) and the great, though lesser known, Cormac McCarthy of, say, Blood Meridian or Outer Dark. All three are inheritors of the southern (Faulknerian) tradition of violence and bombast. All three work a vein of exaggeration and hyperbole that is a kind of pure macho poetry.

The Wrecking Yard, Benedict’s second story collection (his first included “The Sutton Pie Safe” which won him the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award), runs the gamut from a Hemingway homage set in Nicaragua to a tale in the form of a radio play about a sideshow freak who was once struck by lightning and kills her lovers by electrocution.

The aesthetic keystone of The Wrecking Yard is “Washman,” a long story about a crippled hunchback killer, a limping evil, who shoots down a man in a gunfight over a mule, steals his girl (previously stolen from someone else) and leads a posse of upright citizens to a strange and terrible fate.

Of the twelve men who chase Washman into the mountain fastness where he lives, five die before they find him — two in avalanches, two to drowning and one to a diamondback rattlesnake. Five more die in a forest fire after they hang Washman, and the last two go mad.

The girl reaches the valley town with her hair burned off and lungs scorched, and pregnant, though she is not sure who the father is. “It will be a monster,” she says. “I’ll be mother to a monster that has eyes but no other part of a face. The flames sang it to me when their curtain passed over. They took my hair but they left me alive.”

This story takes place in a country of the imagination, not any place recognizably real. It is a peculiarly American country, a country invented by Ambrose Bierce and Bret Harte — white, poor, rural, southern and western, just at the edge of civilization (represented by women, sheriffs and doctors), just at the edge of the twentieth century (cars mix with mules and horses).

It is an eerie country of aimless, spectacular destruction, of gruesome and obsessive (or mechanical) evil. It is a place where fine speech goes for nought, where sly understatement and violence are the preferred modes of human intercourse, where retribution outweighs self-preservation, where insult and death are one, and where women are either absent or occasions for volcanic testosterone explosions.

In “Odom,” a pair of hillmen, father and son, clearing a piece of land for a new house, slowly become obsessed with blasting their parcel of forest to smithereens. The house, the original point of the exercise, is forgotten in an orgy of destruction, of pine and hemlock rocketing skywards, impelled by explosions of contraband dynamite.

“Farther away, the trees are down, but they have not been cut. They have been blasted wholesale from the ground, and the seared trunks lie at startling removes from the tangles of their roots. The trees are tumbled pell-mell over one another, two and even three deep, in a welter of sap and pith and broken wood. Odom has cleared enough space for a mansion, for the home of a giant.”

Odom even blows himself up in a premature blast — though this doesn’t stop him. At the end, bandaged head and hands, he is starting on the bedrock of his lot, hand-drilling a blast hole, father and son joined together, driving “a narrow shaft toward the hidden bitter heart of the rock.”

In Pinckney Benedict’s imaginary universe, life is a constant Coyote and Road Runner cartoon of despair. And Odom is a typical Benedict hero — obstinate to the point of stupidity, half-cartoon, half-god, huge, terrible and funny.

In “Bounty,” a gruesome shaggy dog story, a piece of poor white mountain trash named Candles drives into town with a rusty truckload of dead animals claiming a five-dollar-apiece wolf bounty from the sheriff. Candles drags the sheriff out to his truck and starts dropping the bodies of dogs on the street. It slowly dawns on the sheriff (and the reader), as the bodies accumulate, that these are family pets, mostly snagged in steel leghold traps — hounds, Alsatians, beagles.

“When Candles opened his mouth to speak, the sheriff held up a forestalling hand. ‘I don’t need to hear it,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure exactly what went on here.’ he said, indicating the back of the truck, ‘and I don’t believe I care to know.'”

Benedict’s style is laconic and deadpan. He gets comic mileage from the tension between the dry, matter-of-fact way he writes and the terrible and outlandish things he describes — from three men crawling up Washman’s hanging body to snap his neck to Odom’s blast-blackened fingers to the come-hitherish whispers of the deadly Electric Girl (whose boyfriends are all suicides).

It is not clear that Benedict has a message to get across. Rather, I think he has tapped into a deep lobe of the American psyche, a fragment of that lawless and ambiguous frontier that the nation has internalized and repressed but not forgotten.

He is weakest when he moves away from this vein of material, when he strays into the present or the real — that Hemingway homage or the title story in which a junkyard employee muses over the people who die in the cars he cannibalizes.

He is at his best when he ignores the contemporary Siren calls of sentimental realism and interpersonal sensitivity and simply lets the violence overflow, propelling his reader into a world of strange and macabre beauty.

—Douglas Glover (Published first in The Chicago Tribune Books, January, 1992)

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Nov 182014
 

This is a photo of Black Kettle and other Cheyenne chiefs during peace talks with Major Edward W. Wynkoop at Fort Weld, Colorado (September 1864). Three months later in November, Black Kettle and his people were massacred at Sand Creek.

Difficult to read, but sometimes we have a duty to read difficult things. Alan Gilbert gives a detailed account of the run-up to the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, and then tracks the collective amnesia that has allowed some of its perpetrators to maintain historical reputations unblemished. Among other things he quotes this letter, an eyewitness account by Captain S. S. Soule, who commanded a company.

dg

The massacre lasted six or eight hours, and a good many Indians escaped. I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees, have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized. One Squaw was wounded, and a fellow took a hatchet to finish her, she held her arms up to defend her, and he cut one arm off, and held the other with one hand, and dashed the hatchet through her brain. One Squaw with her two children, were on their knees, begging for their lives, of a dozen soldiers, within ten feet of them all firing—when one succeeded in hitting the Squaw in the thigh, when she took a knife and cut the throats of both children, and then killed herself. One old Squaw hung herself in the lodges—there was not enough room for her to hang and she held up her knees and choked herself to death. Some tried to escape on the Prairie, but most of them were run down by horsemen. I saw two Indians [take] hold of one anothers hands, chased until they were exhausted, when they kneeled down, and clasped each other around the neck and were both shot together, they were all scalped, and as high as half a dozen taken from one head. They were all horribly mutilated. One woman was cut open, and a child taken out of her, and scalped.

Read the rest as Amnesia: Spain, Sand Creek, Oklahoma, Germany » 3:AM Magazine.

dg

Nov 162014
 

Agamben

I don’t know how many of you have been following the story of Kaci Hickox, the amazing nurse who went to Africa to treat Ebola patients then was jumped on by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and her home state Maine Governor Paul LePage. She was locked up, then quarantined and threatened with jail, despite having no symptoms. She was quite outspoken in her disdain for the efforts to control her behaviour.

I put this story next to another, the recent Canadian decision to simply revoke the citizenship of Canadians deemed to be behaving inappropriately. One used to thing that citizenship was irrevocable. Clearly not.

These stories reminded me of Giorgio Agamben’s concept of State of Exception, an idea I am only loosely beginning to understand (something like the gambit by which so-called modern democracies unilaterally exclude citizens from the bare rights to citizenship, make them non-people, and thus tend ineluctably toward totalitarianism — okay, tell me how wrong I am).

So I put together a couple of items. First, a little animated explanation of Agamben’s concepts of Homo Sacer and State of Exception. Then a lecture by Slavoj Žižek, at the beginning of which he takes a wild detour into an explanation of how western liberals mistakenly interpret the concept to State of Exception to refer to people traditionally thought of as dispossessed and voiceless. No, Agamben says. We are all in a State of Exception.

The case of Kaci Hickox just proved it.

dg

 

Nov 112014
 

lynne_tillman_by_david_shankboneLynne Tillman by David Shankbone.

Here’s a review I wrote of Lynne Tillman’s 1992 novel Cast in Doubt. Those were the days when I was a young, hungry whipper-snapper trying to review in all the notable places. It was also my introduction to a lot of amazing writers, including Lynne Tillman. This review originally appeared in the Washington Post Book World, then, as is the nature of these things, it more or less disappeared. Kirkus Reviews called the book “Beach reading for the John Hawkes set.” Which is pretty funny actually, stupid and smarmy and quite smart all at once. Would that all readers were of “the John Hawkes set.” The novel was originally published by Simon & Schuster’s Poseidon Press and finally reprinted by Red Lemonade. We have published a story by Tillman on Numéro Cinq. You can read it here.

dg

Cast

Cast in Doubt
By Lynne Tillman

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Cast in Doubt is a clever, witty, passionately written act of postmodern literary prestidigitation — a mystery novel without a body, a murder, or crime of any kind.

Not only that, but the novel’s hero-narrator, significantly a writer of detective mysteries, temporizes, delays, makes false starts and detours, searching for clues in old books, then completely muffs his investigative quest, and finally abandons it without solution.

Yet Lynne Tillman, the author of four previous books, writes with such elan, such spirited delight and comic intelligence, that it is difficult to take anything but pleasure in the jokes, aphorisms, potted etymologies and digressions which are the real substance of this book.

Tillman’s point is that the traditional mystery novel is an old-fashioned rationalist project, offspring of an outmoded epistemology. The crime is always soluble, the resolution a neatly logical tying up of motives and loose ends. A postmodern mystery novel, on the other hand, is about what Ludwig Wittgenstein called the “dark background” of our thoughts and words. As Horace, Tillman’s sixtyish, gay narrator says, “I am drawn to the mystery and inconclusiveness of life…”

Cast in Doubt begins on Crete, in a fishing village where a gossipy community of artsy expatriates dwells in restive seclusion. Horace, a New Englander by birth, lives with a Greek boy named Yannis and bickers fitfully with his fellow denizens — an insane South African poet, a former child movie star turned into a hermit who worships electricity, and a retired opera diva.

Helen, an American girl with a pierced nose, arrives one day to disrupt Horace’s complacency. Helen is beautiful and aloof. She carries a diary with “analyst” printed on its cover. In her wake trails a would-be lover named John who promptly attempts suicide by cutting his own throat. Like language itself, she seems pregnant with meaning.

Horace befriends Helen, toys with the idea of falling in love with her (as bizarre as this seems, even to him), then offends her with his nosy intrusiveness when he goes to visit John in the local hospital. As suddenly as she appeared, Helen departs, possibly in search of a mysterious Gypsy woman she has mentioned meeting.

Horace suspects Helen needs saving from something — her past (John mentions a twin sister who may have killed herself), or Gypsy con artists. He decides to search for her but falls under a spell of doubt and lethargy upon the arrival of his friend, Gwen, from New York. Gwen is a hip, cynical black woman, a famous scene-maker in the Village. She deflates Horace’s odd passion for the slender Helen, then makes a pass at the recovering John.

Eventually Horace does drive off, secretly, and in the wrong direction. He meets a Gypsy caravan, gets drunk, stays the night and has his fortune told — “You can’t see,” the fortuneteller intones. “You do not learn. You only look for the right things.” The next day, on a beach, he meets Stephen, the child-star-hermit, who happens to be carrying Helen’s diary, which Horace steals. Having found her private narrative, the story of the story, he loses interest in Helen herself and races home again. But the diary is enigmatic and fragmentary. It ends with a list:

Do laundry
buy glue
meet S
phone W
toilet paper
tampax.

Horace’s attempt to solve a real mystery, not just one in a book, comes to nought. Helen never reappears, nor is there any hint that anything untoward has befallen her. Years intervene — during which Horace writes a new crime novel appropriately entitled The Big Nothing. At the book’s close, he is bemused, philosophical, and contemplating a trip to the market.

Cast in Doubt is about meaning and the writing of books — and the impossibility of both. (Horace is always planning a magnum opus called Household Gods which never gets finished.) It takes language, not as a device for communication, but as a limiting concept characterized by what the post-mods call slippage (puns, double entendres, Freudian slips, etc.).

It says that things are not what they seem, that life is wayward and uncertain, and that there is high comedy in the collision between our over-weaning confidence in words and life’s mocking inconclusiveness. And when, as happens, Horace gets drunk and begins to vamp and dance, he becomes for us a precious image of all humans, not as wounded and alienated, but as fumbling, playful beings, essentially at home in and absorbed by the shifting messages and meanings that make up the world.

—Douglas Glover
(Originally published in Washington Post Book World, 1992)

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Nov 052014
 

CaptureYves Klein via Wikipedia

This guy mystifies me, makes me think. Dead at 34 (multiple heart attacks), three years after this picture was taken in 1959, considered one of the early performance artists and a pioneer of the so-called New Realism in France, by which was meant a kind of super-realism that saw art as gesture, not representation, a daub of paint on a white board (no, that’s not right, more like instead of painting a woman you use a woman’s body to put a daub of paint on a white board). A little old hat now. You watch the video (whoa — in the second half watch the naked women and the FLAME THROWER). Naked women used as sponges and brushes by the formally attired artist, men in suits in chairs around the painting area. I am amused by his stiff earnestness as he nudges and guides the naked women into place. I am amused by the stiff old guys along the wall. I remember André Breton’s autobiographical novel Nadja, about the narrator, his wife and the neurotic, wild woman he falls in love with (neurotically — really, it’s the right word — and wildly). What is exposed in art SO OFTEN is the male assumption that women are the instruments and objects of art not artists, that men find wisdom or redemption through women (the flip side of this, of course, is the classic male fear that women ALREADY KNOW). Look at Klein’s photograph again. He is so young, so earnest, and so naive (and well-dressed despite the paint spatters). Pathos here. Not just for him, but for the women, also for the men sitting along the wall watching. Everyone so locked in his or her own (permitted) adventure, not the real adventure. Now watch the video again, look at the photograph, everyone near death, full of life, youth, enjoying the moment, even the women (dutiful, practical, earnest — interesting how aseptic, non-erotic the film is). I write this not to condemn Yves Klein. Not at all. We are so quick to condemn people for their false ideas with the same naive earnestness, the same belief in our own righteousness. The trouble with human beings is that they are all so well-intentioned (except, you know, for the psychopaths and narcissists). What is the real adventure?

dg

Oct 242014
 

© 2014 Open Space Arts Society. All rights reserved Sam Shelstad and dg at the Open Space Gallery, Victoria. Photos by Miles Giesbrecht.

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Cannibal characters, love, Hermann Broch, Numéro Cinq, Jane Eyre, and sundry other topics, more or less interesting, come up in this lively onstage interview I did at the Open Space Gallery in Victoria, October 8. The nominal topic was my book of stories Savage Love, from which I had just give a reading. My charming interlocutor was estimable Sam Shelstad, a well-published MFA student in the University of Victoria writing program. As my son Jonah once observed, I never answer the question asked, just compose whimsical responses loosely inspired by the question and whatever free associations come to mind as I wander on. I don’t know if this is a fault or a virtue.

dg

© 2014 Open Space Arts Society. All rights reserved

Oct 232014
 

© 2014 Open Space Arts Society. All rights reservedDouglas Glover reading at Open Space Gallery, Victoria. Photo by Miles Giesbrecht.

 

I hate to inundate you with all this stuff from my Victoria trip, but you all know I don’t get out much and hence my tendency to hyperventilate if I get over the county line. Here’s a the recording of my reading from Savage Love at the Open Space Gallery in Victoria. The art work behind me is by Tommy Ting and Dong-Kyoon Nam. The story is called “Pointless, Incessant Barking in the Night.” The reading is preceded by an introduction by my gracious hostess, who gives all the particulars of the event.

dg

Oct 222014
 

My beloved and loyal fiction publisher, Goose Lane Editions, had its 60th birthday last month. Part of the celebration was the publication of a little boxed set of similarly designed small books, six@sixty, one short story each by esteemed Goose Lane authors over the years: Giller Prize winner Lynn Coady, Mark Anthony Jarman, Alden Nowlan (whose house I used to visit when he was alive, back when I was a reporter at the Evening Times-Globe in Saint John, New Brunswick), Shauna Singh Baldwin, and Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, as well as me. All the books look like mine but in different colours. It’s a lovely gesture, a limited edition, simple and elegant. Also mine is very cute, like a book you can keep as a pet.

My story, “Woman Gored by Bison Lives,” is from my book A Guide to Animal Behaviour, which Goose Lane published in 1991. It was shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction that year.

It’s a melancholy love story about a lesbian couple in Saskatoon. They watch an English tourist gored by a bison, and subsequently one of the lovers dies of cancer. I was learning to write aphorisms in those days. The story ends with a little run. This is the surviving lover talking to a three-year-old child: “There are certain things you have to know. Suicide is not an option. Life is always better under the influence of mild intoxicants. Masturbation is healthy, the sooner started the better. It’s a sin not to take love where you find it. That is the only sin.”

The story as a whole begins like this:

Days, while my husband is at work, Susan and I make love on the couch in her parents’ basement. It is a desperate thing to do, and we are both a little stunned by it. But something has pushed us to the edge of caring.

Gabriela, the baby, is upstairs sleeping, while Susan’s mother does housework or watches soap operas. We keep our clothes on, manacled at the ankles by a tangle of underwear, jeans and belts.  And when Susan comes, I press my palm across her lips to keep her from shouting out her joy.

I don’t know if we are in love. But we are both in need of solace, and our sex is a composition of melancholy and violence, as though we are seeking to escape and punish ourselves in the same act.

dg

Back Cover

Capture

Oct 202014
 

DSCF9318At the end of the Victoria trip, dg spent an afternoon with the Coast Salish master carver Charles W. Elliott in his studio at the Tsarlip First Nation Reserve on the Saanich Peninsula north of the city. Above is a thunderbird atop of a Charles Elliott totem pole  in front of the ȽÁU, WELṈEW̱ Tribal High School just down the road from the studio.

DSCF9299Charles W. Elliott holding a print he designed as a symbol for the University of Victoria Indigenous Governance program.

Still processing this visit. Charles Elliott is an amazingly generous and intelligent artist, very articulate and personable. He took a lot of time to describe what he does. Coast Salish art is a formalist invention (which, naturally, makes is tremendously interesting to me) — he called it the Salish “system” — that involves the use of a finite set of motifs (e.g. thunderbird, raven, orca, etc.) and design elements (eyes, bracket shapes, lanceolate shapes, etc.). Often the smaller formal elements are fitted into a larger form that derives from a utilitarian space (house fronts, paddles, spoons, bowls, etc.). The print above, for example, is circular, a shape derived from the spindle whorl used by the native women to process wool. The artist fits larger motifs into the overall form and then fills the blank spaces with either smaller versions of a motif (or in inversion) or with repetitions of the abstract design elements. For example, the thunderbird wings contain eyes, brackets and lanceolate shapes. Beneath the thunderbird is an orca, and you can see the bracket shapes used down the whale’s back. The idea, Elliott says, is to bring the spaces “to life.” The large motifs refer to legends, myths, and powers (also, in some cases, clan and social organization elements), so they carry story and meaning to the viewer. But at the same time there is a purely design aspect to the art, a pleasing abundance and vivacity of structure. What’s truly interesting is how the abstract design elements can be used to imply naturalistic details (see the shins on the thunderbird’s legs).

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Here’s the school front. Note the repetition of the structure: thunderbird on top of the pole, thunderbird on the from wall of the building, and the structure of the building as a whole is a thunderbird with wings. What you can’t see from the angle is that before the front door is an entryway in the shape of a bird again. To get into the school, students pass beneath the thunderbird’s wings. Also not the bracket shapes along the roof  line. And then think what a lively public art form this is.

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DSCF9281This is Elliott’s studio with a huge ocean-going dugout canoe made of old growth cedar, a work in progress. On the left is the base of a new totem pole.

DSCF9282Studio again. Note the Che Guevara image, one of several, in the studio, also mentioned by Elliott. You can’t forget that the natives are a colonized and dispossessed people who wake up every morning and look around and see commuters racing up the highway to a city that covers the land that was once theirs spiritually and economically, land they never gave away in any sense proper to their own culture and way of thinking. Put yourself in their shoes. As Elliott said, it’s as if there is a constant cloud or blanket of colonization over the natives. How they could they forget and be pleased?

DSCF9297Little things all over the studio. Here’s a spinning fish lure in the shape of an octopus, the legs scalloped with those bracket patterns. Everything comes to life in this art world, inanimate objects, utilitarian objects.

DSCF9284So here’s a bronze spindle whorl (traditionally they were made of wood) made by Elliott’s 19-year-old son, Chas Elliott, who is learning the art from his father and brought this over to show us. If I remember correctly this is a seal (but I heard so much I might be misremembering). Mouth in the spindle opening. Flippers or paws to the side. Flippers accented with eye and bracket and lanceolate shapes. Here’s a link to show where both father and son appeared a couple of years ago.

DG with a “talking stick” (you would hand this to someone who would then hold the floor whole others listened). By now you should be able to distinguish some of the motifs and design elements.

DSCF9229Outside the studio looking at a totem pole in for repair after about 20 years in the field. Totem poles don’t last forever, obviously. This one needs to be shaved down to fresh wood and repainted. And there is some rot at the top that needs digging out and a plug put in. A sad thing is that native carvers like Elliott can only work with old growth timber. For some reason, the old growth trees grew slower, their tree rings are much closer together, and the wood is harder and more durable. Newer trees seem to grow faster (perhaps because they get more light), the rings are farther apart and the wood between is “punky.” There is hardly any old growth timber left. I won’t go on. This is just a taste of the visit with Elliott, an immense privilege, not to mention fascinating; I could go on and on.

—DG, photos mostly by MF

Oct 122014
 

DSCF8995Surprisingly, there are great swathes of clear cut forest all along the coastal road in the west. Sometimes the lumber companies leave a thin screen of trees along the road and sometimes not. Depressing to see. Most of the logs go straight to China these days.

DSCF9036Sombrio Beach (photo by MF). Behind us, makeshift tents and campsites occupied by surfers trying to dry out in the dense mist.

DSCF9135The Juan de Fuca Trail near Sombrio Beach.

IMG_2248DG at the University of Victoria First Peoples House as a guest of Taiaiake Alfred and the Indigenous Governance department, talking to grad students and faculty in the program. Not a great photo and dg looks particularly self-important, perhaps conducting a symphony, but it’s the only one and it preserves the moment.

First Peoples HouseHere’s the hall (without people). Amazing place modeled on the traditional Coast Salish long house.

tshirtTaiaiake Alfred presented dg with a coveted Indigenous Nationhood Movement tshirt, which meant a lot.

DSCF9172Harbor seal off the marina wharf in Mill Bay. They were playing all along the coast, some far out and diving with dramatic tail slaps. At Mill Bay we heard the tail slaps, saw loons and a kingfisher and then a bald eagle zoomed close overhead, all in about five minutes. DG stopped mentioning the seals to the locals because it marked him as a greenhorn.

DSCF9186Cow Bay, a touristified, single-street, old village on the coast, organic foods, organic baked goods, and one store that sold liquor and tools.

DSCF9214This is the so-called butter church on Comiaken Hill in the Cowichan Reserve, Cowichan Bay in the background to the right. Abandoned, it was the first church in the area, an ancient-looking chapel, on a hill that feels lonely, mysterious and sacred, empty grass field to the left where people were once buried, though most of the markers are down, one lone oak tree, low mountains all around except in the direction of the bay. Also a place of ill-memory because of treaties signed nearby in the 1850s. The church was built in 1870 with the help of natives who were paid with money earned from the sale of butter. Apparently.

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DSCF9192St. Anne’s Church, just down the road from the butter church. Back in Victoria we had run into an ancient beekeeper who said his great- or great-great-grandfather was Chief George Tzouhalem of the Cowichan band. An Irishman who fought with Pickett at Gettysburg apparently came up the coast and married the chief’s 15-year-old daughter — this was the beekeeper’s line. He said to drive up to this place because old chief Tzouhalem is buried here and his grand-daughter bought a pink granite plinth and had it raised over the grave.  We walked all through this sombre place and finally, yes, did discover the plinth, raised by the grand-daughter Ettie George, just as the beekeeper had said. He had known Ettie and had stories.

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DSCF9191Christianity is dissipating perhaps. The crosses all over the graveyard were mostly temporary markers. Occasionally, there was something more indicative of a different way of being. Later, I got to talk to a man who makes the grave markers, a social role passed down through his family, and he said the crosses are just places to put names now, not signs of belief. Alarming number of fresh graves in every native graveyard, signs of hard lives, poverty and the depression that goes with being a dispossessed and colonized people.

Oct 102014
 

© 2014 Open Space Arts Society. All rights reservedReading at Open Space Gallery, Victoria.

© 2014 Open Space Arts Society. All rights reservedPhoto credit: Miles Giesbrecht. Artists’ works: Tommy Ting (London), Dong-Kyoon Nam (Winnipeg).

DSCF8947Mist on the water. Strait of Juan de Fuca near Sooke.

DSCF9024DG on Sombrio Beach.

DSCF9150Port Renfrew otters (just before we saw the bear).

DSCF8791First Nations exhibit, Royal BC Museum.

DSCF8764Douglas Street.

DSCF8742The bookstore founded by Alice Munro and her first husband.

DSCF8907Breakwater (dark by the time dg got to the end).