Douglas Glover

The Long Dry | Novel Excerpt — Cynan Jones

Mar 122017
 

This section of The Long Dry provides a wonderful snapshot of the novel as a whole. Here we can spot the tense-yet-loving dynamic in Gareth and Kate’s marriage; we sense the interminable hardship and danger of farm life itself; and we get a glimpse of the book’s central plot point: the cow that has gone missing at the height of a drought. Perhaps most importantly, we also get a snippet of Jones’ lean, spare prose — the signature quality of this fine book. — Mark Sampson

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The Finger

Inside she sets the table. The knives and forks and plates in piles on the vinyl cloth. She starts to read her catalog of supplements, things she hopes will stop her aging, help her hold less water, help her be less tired, and make her want sex more. For her age, she is a very beautiful woman, but she does not see it. It is beginning to go from her. She knows it.

He comes in, scraping his feet on the metal grill outside the back door, not because he needs to, but from habit. Or perhaps it is his announcement—a signal they have always had but never spoken of. They had many of these when they were younger.

She rinses the cafetière and warms the cup with water from the kettle, which she’s boiled several times while she has waited for him. She does not make the coffee. Some things she mustn’t do. She’s threatened by the coffee, about how strong to make it, how it tastes when it is made. He makes coffee every day, just for himself as no one else drinks it. He makes a strong potful of coffee at this time of the morning and it does him for the day, warming up the cupfuls in a pan as they are needed, which makes them stronger as the day goes on. No one else touches the pan. She says it’s why he does not sleep. His first coffee each morning is the remnants of the night before because he does not want to wake the house grinding the beans, and the children sleep above the thin ceiling of the kitchen.

He sits at the table with a loose fist and runs his thumb over the first joint of his forefinger in the way he has, so it makes a quiet purring sound, like rubbing leather.

“What about the dosing?”

“It’ll have to wait,” he says.

He rubs his finger. He does this always at the table, talking or reading a paper, even with the handle of a cup held there, so that this part of his finger is smooth and shines. Whenever he’s at rest.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve checked the obvious places and she’s not there. She’s got her head down and gone.”

He does not tell her about the stillborn calf.

“It’s typical. It has to be today,” she says. “I should have gotten up to check.”

“She would have gone anyway,” he says quietly.

He looks down at the missing part of his little finger on his right hand and makes the sound against his thumb again. She still blames herself for this damage to him. He was trying to free the bailer from the new tractor and she had done something and the catch had just bit down. He takes a mouthful of coffee. It was a clean cut and it healed well and he could have lost his hand instead. That’s how he looks at it. In some ways he loves it.

She burned the toast, so he goes quietly over and makes some more while she tries to rescue the wrecked slices.

“The vet phoned about Curly,” she says.

“Oh.”

“He wants to come today.”

He knows the vet will put the old dog down. Not today, he thinks. It’s a hard thing to have happen today, if he has
to find the cow too.

“You should have some breakfast,” he says to her. It’s odd how seriously we take the silly names of animals.

The door latch snaps and Emmy comes in still dressed in her pajamas and with her blanket tucked in her hand, thumb in her mouth. She shuffles over to the old settle and curls up with her green-and-purple zebra. She would come down when she heard her parents talking in the kitchen below in the morning.

“Hello, sweetie,” says her mother.

She shines her eyes up at her mother, looks to her father quickly, shyly. Something secret passes between them and she smiles and settles. They stop talking of the cow.

He sits there rubbing his finger and looking at the stump of his little finger fondly.

“It’s going to be hot again today,” he says.

—Cynan Jones

“The Finger” is excerpted by permission from The Long Dry (Granta Books and Parthian Books, 2014; Coffee House Press, 2017). Copyright © 2014 by Cynan Jones.

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Cynan Jones is the author of six novels, including The Dig, Everything I Found on the Beach, and Bird, Blood, Snow. He lives in Wales

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Love in the Time of Drought | Review of The Long Dry by Cynan Jones — Mark Sampson

Mar 122017
 

In The Long Dry, Jones writes very well about ducks, their sex lives, and their feces. In fact, if there were an International Literary Prize for Writing about Ducks, Their Sex Lives, and Their Feces, Jones would easily win it. These passages are moments of levity in an otherwise dark, brooding, brutal and devastating novel. –Mark Sampson

The Long Dry
Cynan Jones
Coffee House Press, 2017
136 pages; $15.95

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If there’s one thing novelist Cynan Jones knows very well, it is the menace of ducks. Ducks are a menace. Anyone who grew up on or near farmland knows this. Ducks have a way of wreaking havoc on a farm, especially with their feces. Cynan Jones knows this. In his novella, The Long Dry, Jones writes very well about ducks, their sex lives, and their feces. In fact, if there were an International Literary Prize for Writing about Ducks, Their Sex Lives, and Their Feces, Jones would easily win it. Behold:

Given the way they have to have sex, it’s remarkable that there are any ducks. More remarkable that they have sex often. The male more or less drowns the female, who has to focus hard on staying afloat, and they both have to deal with wings and beaks and water and feathers, and it looks nasty, and they still have sex. So there were a great many ducks. And they all shat everywhere.

It became a problem for the tourists, and the locals didn’t like it. People talked about the ducks in pubs, and if you stood in lines at the local shops you heard people talk about ducks … If you put your washing out, somehow the ducks knew, and by some defiance of physics managed to crap on it. And duck crap isn’t nice. It’s green like baby shit. If you fed a baby on broccoli for a week …

The reason why they shat so much … was because “the people” fed them chips, whoever “the people” were. A duck should eat things from the water; that’s what they’re designed to do. But they were lazy and so hoovered up whatever people threw them, fighting off the seagulls and the errant starlings and the pigeons and, if they had to, fighting off each other, too. This poor diet is making the poor ducks poo. That was one take. Answer: we should give them proper food. Genius. So they tried. It was not the answer. They ate the food put down and the fish and chips and had sex even more. Ducks’ arses were no tighter than they’d ever been. There were simply too many ducks.

This passage is a moment of levity in an otherwise dark, brooding, brutal and devastating novel. The Long Dry is Jones’ debut book, first published in the U.K. in 2006 and made available in North America this year by Coffee House Press. Jones has published several other books in the years since, including The Dig, Bird, Blood, Snow, and Everything I Found on the Beach. His prose has been compared to that of Cormac McCarthy and Ernest Hemingway – that is, lines of spare, almost taciturn beauty that belie the tension and fraught emotions that coil below the surface by using short, compact sentences with a deceptively simple syntax that carries a surprising amount of descriptive weight. It is a style that could (and, perhaps, should) be labelled derivative of those two masters, but it is also one that serves the setting and themes of The Long Dry well.

This short novel (my reviewer’s copy is paginated at just 119 pages) is set on a hardscrabble farm in Wales. Jones structures the book using many briefly, almost elliptical chapters that act as a kind of narrative pointillism, slowly painting us a bigger picture. Our protagonist is Gareth, who inherited the farm from his father and lives there with his wife, Kate, and their two children, Dylan and Emmy. A couple of issues become apparent at the beginning of the book: a harsh and unforgiving drought has swept across the countryside, and a pregnant cow on Gareth’s farm has gone missing. These two misfortunes will prove the catalyst for a series of vignettes that will reveal the various physical, financial, sexual and psychological deprivations surrounding this family. As the reader soon learns, Gareth’s is a world plagued with miscarriages, sexual frigidity, infidelity, money woes and a looming family tragedy.

The novel’s central tension exists between Gareth and his wife, Kate. They do love each other but they are, we come to learn, very often on opposite sides when it comes to matters of the farm and their own success on it. Much of what divides them is the hard road they had to travel to give birth to Dylan and Emmy, as the couple suffered multiple miscarriages between their births:

They continued to try, first easily then with more need, to give their son a brother or sister. She miscarried twice. On the third time they told her she couldn’t have children then. She was thirty-four and damp like autumn, not wet in the way young women are, like spring, but damp and rich and earthy, and it didn’t seem right that she could not have a child. She was fertile and hungry, like fallen leaves.

In the midst of all this, Kate allows her herself to engage in a brief and regretful dalliance with a farmhand one day while Gareth is away. The encounter is short and loveless – the farmhand basically fucks her against a filthy tractor tire in the shed – and yet it casts Kate into a deep depression and acts of self-harm. Gareth, as far as we can tell, does not learn the truth: “It was two years before she was well again but she still feels sick now when she thinks of what she did, and the nagging doubt haunts her sometimes. It has never been the same since then. He blamed it on the miscarriages.” Through her depression, we can see how much more the farm means to Gareth than it does to her, and this divide will lead to an explosive exchange between them near the end of the novel.

Gareth’s father purchased the farm in 1951 to quit a job at a bank that he hated. Jones gives us little detail about how the father’s views on farming varied from his son’s, but one is left with the impression that Gareth’s holds an idealized view of what this land meant to his father and he is desperately trying to live up to an unspoken sense of expectation. A key link between the previous generation’s farming and Gareth’s is the story of Bill, who comes from the farm next door. Bill’s father killed himself after the hogs he had invested money in contracted a rare disease and had to be destroyed. Bill himself is described as “simple”, and never fully grasps that his family actually sold the farm prior to his father’s suicide or that the family must move into the village afterward. In an act of charity, Gareth’s father gives a portion of his land to Bill in the wake of his father’s death, a kind of pretend farm that Bill is free to work on, and it’s a kindness that Gareth himself continues to extend:

So Gareth’s father gave some land to Bill. He fenced off a few acres by the road and said to Bill it was his land now, and he could farm it. So he takes the orphaned lambs and grows things there and helps out on the farm when help is needed, like a shearing time, and he cuts grass for old ladies in the village and takes people spuds and cabbage, but underneath, as Gareth knows, he doesn’t understand still.

Perhaps fittingly, Bill’s situation on the farm features prominently in the climatic argument between Gareth and Kate near the novel’s end. Kate, fearful of their future, is pushing her husband to sell some of their land to home developers, but Gareth refuses to pull the carpet out from under Bill’s feet. “My father gave him that land,” he tells his snarling wife, “and I won’t take it from him.”

The biggest, and also darkest, irony in The Long Dry is that neither the lingering season of drought nor Gareth’s lost cow about to calve are the worst tragedies about to befall this farm, this family. We are told, in a kind narrative aside, that nine days from the conclusion of the novel’s main action, a fate will befall daughter Emmy that will lead to her sudden death. Emmy, we learn, will lose her life after eating a poisonous mushroom while out for a walk in the woods. The mushroom she eats is one of the most poisonous found in Europe: the amanita virosa, or “destroying angel.” It is especially lethal due to a delay between initial ingestion and the onset of symptoms.

Indeed, Jones goes into great chemical detail as to what happens to Emmy’s body as the toxins move through her after she eats the fungus; and it is startling how much emotional power he’s able to rend out of such a clinical description. Emmy’s death hits us hard, not because we have gotten to know her particularly well over the preceding 80-odd pages, but because Jones frames her death as just another hardship that comes from farm life, from an existence so very dependent on grappling with the natural world in all its capriciousness. Somehow, this makes Emmy’s fate even more devastating.

Thankfully, there are glimmers of hope that come near the end of The Long Dry – in the somewhat predictable form of the arrival of rain. It is what we, and Gareth’s family, are left with: the sky opening up and giving us a reprieve from all that has taken its toll on us, but also a reprieve from the even darker tragedies that await us in the wings.

—Mark Sampson

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Mark Sampson has published two novels, Off Book (Norwood Publishing, 2007) and Sad Peninsula (Dundurn Press, 2014), a short story collection, The Secrets Men Keep (Now or Never Publishing, 2015), and a collection of poetry, Weathervane (Palimpsest Press, 2016). His new novel, The Slip, is forthcoming from Dundurn Press in 2017. Mark’s stories, poems, reviews and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals throughout Canada and the United States. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he now lives and writes in Toronto.

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Abandonment Begets Abandonment: Review of Abandon Me by Melissa Febos — Carolyn Ogburn

Mar 112017
 

I’m told if you score a bullet across its tip with a pocketknife, first lengthwise then across, your shot will penetrate its target cleanly, but ravage the organs inside. I thought of this when reading the blunt, clean prose of Melissa Febos in her new memoir, Abandon Me. —Carolyn Ogburn

Abandon Me
Melissa Febos
Bloomsbury, 2017
320 pages; $26.00

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I am told if you score a bullet across its tip with a pocketknife, first lengthwise then across, your shot will penetrate its target cleanly, but ravage the organs inside. I thought of this when reading the blunt, clean prose of Melissa Febos in her new memoir, Abandon Me. Her sentences are short, precise things containing emotional whirlwinds of joy and pain.

Melissa Febos is a writer and teacher who grew up in Massachusetts, earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and currently lives in Brooklyn. She’s on the faculty of Monmouth University and the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA); she serves on the board of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, and the PEN America Membership Committee. Her debut work, Whip Smart (2010) is a memoir of her work as a dominatrix. It’s also a story of getting sober, getting honest, and learning to live in her own skin. (It’s also funny: When her therapist asks her what a dominatrix is, Febos responds, “It’s really just one of the most well-paid acting gigs in this city.”) Her essays are found in journals, magazines, and online venues from The Rumpus to the Chronicle of Higher Education Review.

It can be hard to write about staggeringly painful personal life stories without sounding superficial, even trite. Students are encouraged to “write from the scars, not the wounds.” With the passing of time, the story may become more focused; resonances, patterns reveal themselves, and hard emotional truths can be drawn slowly to the surface. In other words, to write a simple truth about your own life, as memoir writers do, requires a great deal of craft. For all its risqué subject matter, Whip Smart was a more or less conventional memoir written by a smart, gutsy writer not afraid to explore her own history with honesty and poise. Febos would have been barely thirty when her first book was published. Now, seven years later, she takes more chances. Abandon Me is a deeper, riskier book.

Abandon Me opens with an epitaph from the psychologist D. W. Winnicott, “It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.” The book’s title, also the title of the novella-length essay found within, is both demand and plea: Abandon me. When written as a sentence—and it does feel like a sentence, both complete thought (the “you” understood, just off-stage) and punishment—the capital-A insists on being heard, a harsh, cruel word; while me is small and subjective.

The word abandon, Febos tells us, comes from the French, abandoner:

to give up, surrender (oneself or something), to give over utterly, to yield utterly.” Derived from a French phrase, Mettre sa forest a bandon, which meant to give up one’s land for a time, hence the latter connotation of giving up one’s rights for a time. Etymologically, the word carries a sense of “put someone under someone else’s control.

While no abandonment is complete in itself—and they’re all, here, ricocheting from the same impulse—the themes of absence, longing, and desire run throughout Febos’ relationships here. One of the abandonments she writes about is the departure of her father, when she wasn’t yet two. It wasn’t a disappearance: he was “a small suitcase that my parents unpacked for me as a child.” His name was Jon; he was “a career drug addict and alcoholic; he was Wampanoag; he played guitar.” She’d grown up knowing another man, here called the Captain, as her father, an Portuguese sailor whom she physically resembled more than she did her mother. The Captain left when she was eight.

In other words, Febos young life was marked by abandonment, the state of being the one left. But she’s also the one who leaves, the abandoner. Switch the words around: I abandon. I leave. “No lover had ever left me,” she writes. “I had spent enough years in therapist to know this was not something to brag about.”

The abandonment of the father mirrors that of the lover (and, in turn, mirrors that of the father), but it’s Febos’ abandonment of herself that is written most deeply throughout these pages. “Fear of abandonment begets abandonment,” Febos writes. “I gave myself away to solve the pain of his leaving and in doing so performed my own abandonment.” But along with biological bloodlines, Febos was parented by books, by story.

If a self can be said to resemble a house, Febos’ home is a library. The memoir begins with the Captain reading Ferdinand the Bull to Febos as a child, dissolving a paragraph later to the adult Febos and her lover reading Hemingway to each other in bed. Febos turns to books, stories, and television throughout the text range from Ferdinand to the Oxford English Dictionary, Salinger to Cervantes, Carl Jung to Scott Peck, William Blake to Salvador Dali, Jim Henson’s Labyrinth to the 1984 fantasy film, The NeverEnding Story. Febos’ story is stitched together with other stories, stories she’s claimed as her own. “To hold the memory of my history was to be searingly awake. I was not awake.” (178) So how much of this is true?

That’s the question everyone wants to ask the memoirist: What really happened? If you’re going to tell the truth, we demand evidence, facts, veracity. But to remember is an performance of the imagination, a deeply creative act.

She’s told us how to read her. In this 2016 essay called “Kettle Holes,” Febos writes:

We are all unreliable narrators of our own motives. And ‘feeling’ something neither proves nor disproves its existence. Conscious feelings are no accurate map to the psychic imprint of our experiences; they are the messy catalog of emotions once and twice and thrice removed, the symptoms of what we won’t let ourselves feel. They are not Jane Eyre’s locked-away Bertha Mason, but her cries that leak through the floorboards, the fire she sets while we sleep and the wet nightgown of its quenching.

We’re all, Febos seems to imply, creating ourselves out of ideas of ourselves, even while we’re living up to our nostrils in emotions that we didn’t choose, feelings (that, she reminds us, aren’t facts) that will not let us go. “Our selves are sometimes the only things over which we wield power,” she writes. “And our means of expressing it are sometimes chosen for us.”

At its most prosaic level, Abandon Me is the story of an affair: Febos fell in love with a married woman; they had a brief, tumultuous relationship, which ended messily. If you want to read the story for the plot points, you’ll find here a familiar story. Between its outlines, Febos weaves the threads of her renewed relationship with her birth father, and the women relatives with whom he lives. She pulls mythology, pop culture, history and philosophy into her narrative, as if surrounding herself with a posse of lively, intellectual friends.

But at its core, Abandon Me is almost wordless. “I had exiled large swaths of my history, and had been denied others. I had spent long stretches of time divorced from my body.” Paragraphs break off mid-thought, conversations are offered in fragments. It’s told in short chapters, often only a few pages long, even these broken into smaller units. Her friends don’t understand what she’s doing, why she doesn’t see them. She can’t explain it any better to her friends than she can to her lover. The best parts of this book make no sense at all.

That’s what I mean by ambitious. A lesser writer would have made her story make sense. She would have filled in conversations with dialogue, remembered what she wore; she would have distracted us from the gut-punch of pain that leaves us reeling with memories of our own. It’s not an easy book to read, not least because it demands that we read it with an honesty of our own.

There are places where Febos’ sentences are tonally repetitive, thudding, insistent. I longed for the distraction of a more lyrical line, and the wry humor that I remembered from Whip Smart. But maybe, more than anything else, I felt uncomfortable with my own memories of my own breathless affairs, the reminder that the most personal experiences are never ours alone, but are, despite all our feelings to the contrary, universal in their particularity. I can’t wait to see what Febos writes next.

—Carolyn Ogburn

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Carolyn Ogburn
Carolyn Ogburn lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina where she takes on a variety of worldly topics from the quiet comfort of her porch. Her writing can be found in the Asheville Poetry Review, the Potomac Review, the Indiana Review, and more. A graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and NC School of the Arts, she writes on literature, autism, music, and disability rights. She is completing an MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is at work on her first novel.

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Bargain | Short Story — Sean Preston

Mar 102017
 

James Joyce & Sean Preston

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“I’d love to be able to sing, or play piano. Can you imagine how obnoxious I’d be if I had a tangible talent?” he said to her, as though a more discreet gift bubbled beneath his surface.

The pair crossed the road. He did that thing where he blocked her way with his arm, intending to lift this arm barrier when an opportunity to cross the road arose. She did that thing where she stepped through his arm barrier a second earlier than he would lift it, indicating that she did not need his help crossing the road. He didn’t mean to condescend, not that he cared if he did, but it was not his intention. He found crossing the road challenging. There were several near misses in his youth; he worried that they would die crossing the road.

She had her habits. One of them was buying cheap furniture from places that were so fucking far away, by the time you paid for travel to the ungodly zones of south-west London, you hadn’t really saved much money at all.

This habit is why the pair stood outside a house in an area of London that they had never been to before. She looked around, the air smelt unseasonably fresh, wet with Autumn. A tree that stood in the front garden had been chopped to a stump. Somewhere in her that made her feel glum. Still, it was a beautiful house, and beautiful houses encouraged something close to hope, she had found.

“Wouldn’t you like to live around here?” she asked.

“Why? So we can travel all the way to north-east London to get cheap furniture?”

“Stop moaning. Always moaning. I’m paying for it,”

“It’s not the paying for it. I’d happily pay for it and stay at home and let you carry a chair all the way home.” He said, before a satisfyingly timely sneeze shook his world. “Ugggghhh. Fucking cold; fucking eBay.”

“How long have you been ill for?”

“Dunno. Just sort of came over me today… like a…”

“Don’t do the like thing.”

“Came…. Over… Me… like…”

This habit is the habit of trying to be funny. It is a noble pursuit. Whatever simile he came up with would be irrelevant. He believed the real humour to be derived from trying to be funny was not any resulting wit, but the actual pursuit of humour itself.

*

Armchair collected, the pair emerged from the house, the chair arched on his back.  She would pirouette down the garden path, thanking the woman who had sold the chair, smiling wide, complimenting the beautiful garden, saying goodbye, wishing well, assuring the seller that they were OK to carry the acquisition.

Once outside, alone, they stopped to work it all out. They hadn’t thought this far ahead. She took the front legs of the chair – a thick oak frame with the promise of reclineability, and he cupped the back legs with his hands, bearing most of the weight. It wasn’t working. It was awkward. He just wanted to do it his way, to carry it on his own. But more than that he wanted to complain.

“This is much bigger than you said it would be.”

“Well, she was standing next to it in the picture so it looked little. I didn’t expect her to be that sort of bigness.”

He laughed at that. Her lazy TV parlance threw up some excellent descriptions from time to time.

“Yeah. She was a sort of a weird bigness though. Mainly big below the waist. Like a Weeble.”

She nodded in agreement, smirking politely.

“Like Mrs Doubtfire when she messes up the costume change in that restaurant bit.”

“Or one of those children’s’ drawing where you fold the paper and draw the next compartment…”

“Yes, yes… like some kid drew it and she came to life, “ he added. “Y’know, I once broke up with a girl in infants by writing: ‘You’re dumped’ on the t-shirt of the middle torso bit.”

“You’ve told me.” A habit of his was to recall occasions in which he had outsmarted or bettered romantic interests in his life.

“I bet you used to draw a Papa Roach t-shirt or something shit like that.” He said, hurt, before dropping the chair on one side, sending the leg into his thigh.

“FUCK. Fuck, fuck, fuck. For fuck’s sake.” He put the chair down and continued the display of anguish. “It’s not working. Let me carry it on my own. You’re too low bodied.”

“You’re holding it too high.”

“If I hold it lower I’m bending my back like a fucking tramp.’

It was her time to perform now. She displayed doubt; reservation at the analogy.

He picked up the chair, hoisted it on his back. “Tramps bend.”

“Are you just thinking of Fagin? Because he’s not really a tramp.”

“Of course he is, he wears fingerless gloves.” He stepped down from the pavement to avoid an oncoming family that, to his utter dismay, had not single-filed. “Ahhh, this fucking thing. I’m not well enough for this.”

“I’ll give you a blow-job when you get home.”

“No you fucking won’t! Don’t fucking say that if it’s not true.”

She shook her head. Now it was her turn to be hurt. “I paid for it; I pay for fucking everything for the house. You never buy shit for the house.”

“You care about the house. I don’t. I don’t buy shit for the house because I don’t care. I don’t fucking go on at you for not buying porn because you don’t fucking like porn. What would be the point?”

“What porn do you buy?”

He picked the chair back up. “Blow-job porn. Men getting blow-jobs from girlfriends and not carrying chairs.”

“Not-carrying-chairs porn?”

“Welcome to 2016.”

*

The tube was fairly empty. A real reprieve, he thought. The presumption that the carriage was going to be busy had made him anxious. Seeing the lit carriage pull up with whole sections empty delivered a lightness to the evening. The worst was over. The unknown: gone. The meeting of strangers: gone. The carrying: the worst of it behind him.

She noticed his mood variations and had a basic understanding of root cause. Food was a great modifier, of course, and there were also antagonisers and pacifiers at her disposal. She used them sparingly, used them well. Right now, she pacified him by mothering him. Her hand rested gently upon his skull, her fingers stroked his crown. He couldn’t kiss in public, so it had always struck her as odd that he was so readily mothered in front of people. The carriage was emptyish but even if it had not have been, he would’ve let her cosset him.

“So illlllll.”

She smiled. Not a performing smile. “I know.”

“I’m always so sick all the time.”

“My little permanently ill poorly child.”

“Are you poisoning me?”

“To death. “

“At least I’ll get some sleep and won’t have to carry chairs home.”

Then he did that thing he does in sitting up very suddenly, remembering something important, a matter of urgency somehow recovered:

“I really wanted to watch Space Jam the other day.”

“It’s on iPlayer.”

“It’s not on iPlayer. I checked.”

“I’ve got it on VHS,” she said, regretting instantly.

“What fucking good is VHS? We don’t have a video player. I have one video and it’s porn and it’s useless because we don’t… have…. a video player. When I want to watch Space Jam, I watch it online, when I want to come, I come to stuff online.”

“So loud. Shut up.”

“Wasn’t that loud.”

Quiet, briefly.

“Always talking about coming.”

“Well. I dare say I wonder why.”

“Ooooo. So dry. Such great ‘dry comedy’.”

“That also is very good dry comedy. Much drier than mine because you really prolonged the bit where you said ‘dry comedy’. Dryer… than… a Ryvita.”

“Not great.”

“A Ry… vi… ta… with a hangover.”

“Yeah. Still not your best work.”

And then that silence where the pair go who knows where.

“Actually, I was going to say,” he said, finally, “Why did you tell Brian that I would be unlikely to want to go on any holiday with them this year.

”Well I dunno. You said you didn’t want to go away.”

“No. I didn’t want to organise going away.“

“Well I dunno-uh,” she protested again. “He mentioned it to me and I said I wasn’t sure because I knew I would be in trouble if I said the wrong thing.”

“No one is in trouble in this relationship. Least of all you.”

Silence again. The tube stopped. The doors chimed. The doors opened. A girl with an ironically garish Gucci sweatshirt got on. It was the sort of sweatshirt his girlfriend used to wear when they first started seeing each other. It was tight, promised nothing. There was charm to the train girl’s makeupless face, and the dampness to her neck, flushed red, was encouraging somehow.

He stared at the girl. He is a fool in this way. He mostly thought of how much he wanted the sweatshirt, but also, inevitably, he thought of the girl naked. He learnt to hate this in himself, or maybe she had taught him. He considered this before an awareness that his partner was staring at him staring at the train girl came over him suddenly, dreadfully.

“God. Doesn’t she… doesn’t she look like… actually you don’t know… Thingy, anyway.”

He crossed his arms, checked his shoes, contracted his lips, raised his eyebrows, aware that his subterfuge had fooled no one. But he is unyielding. He will maintain his innocence, should it be questioned. He shouldn’t have panicked, he should have said nothing, but he did. He would’ve grasped at anything.

“Oh, I sorted that problem with the toilet seat.”

“What problem?” she asked, poker faced.

“It kept moving side to side. Had to get underneath it and screw it back up,” he said, performing the actions as he explained.

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Yeah, it moved side to side.”

“Maybe you can fix Catherine’s as well.”

There it is.

“What?”

“Maybe you can fix Catherine’s toilet as well.”

“Why this again?”

“You’re such a fucking liar.”

“What are you on about?”

She shook her head. Rueful. She was rueful. And she was a volatile human being. She approached eruption. He had seen this many times. This was their habit, and it had to play out. He hoped that she would take pity on him. It sometimes went that way. He wished that he could take back all the moaning about the chair, he wished that he could go back to being mothered, or smothered. He wished he could go back to carrying the chair. He didn’t want the Gucci sweatshirt, no matter how beautifully garish it was, or how beautifully it framed the train girl’s tits. He wished all thoughts of nakedness could be expelled forever. He just wanted her to take pity on him, see his suffering. And this time she did. Sort of. She wasn’t going to let it rest yet, but there was calm to her.

“Look at your face, you look so panicked.”

He sensed that he could speak freely. He might’ve ventured exasperation, even.

“I’m not panicking. I just hate being accused. I’m sick, I’m picking up a chair, and you just wanna turn it on me somehow so you’re the upper-hand person. You want to be in control; you hate it when I get to be fed up about something. So now you’re bringing up nonsense about some girl I fucking hate anyway. And she’s ugly. I wouldn’t have sex with her if I was single.”

“So your life is basically just not having sex with people you want to because you have a girlfriend?”

“That’s every man’s life!”

Sssh.

“What makes you think that’s not every woman’s life too?”

“Because they don’t just try to have sex all the time when they’re single.”

“Are you having sex with her?”

“For fuck’s sake, no!” And then a sneeze. A big one. Followed by a second. “I’m too ill for this shit.” He wiped his eyes, sniffed a few more times. “And too grumpy in life now to make anyone else want to have sex with me. Way too miserable a conversationalist. And deaf too. I can’t hear anything in clubs anymore. Could you imagine a chat with me at some bar? ‘Hey, y’alrght, what’s your name?’ … ‘Yamya.’ … ‘What? Never mind. What you drinking?’ ‘Yamya.’ … ‘Oh fuck off.’”

What a reward it was to hear her laugh. Better yet when she had to look away to try and hide it.

*

“Nearly home now,” she said, pointing out what was undeniable. He offered nothing, the chair on his back, the air colder, his mood subdued, beaten. “So did Brian try it on with anyone the other night?”

It was her habit to talk, to find out what had happened.

“Yes, this one girl. She was horrid.”

“What… bitchy?”

“I dunno if she was bitchy. I mean she was horrid to look at. Discouraging face.”

“Perfect for him. So what went wrong then?”

“He commented on her facial hair.”

“What the fuck? Why would anyone do that?”

He looked at her now. “I know, I know. She did have a fair bit going on though. Not that he should have said anything.”

“What did he say?”

“I dunno. Some joke about signing up to her Movember.”

“Oh my God. What an actual dickhead.”

“It wasn’t even part of his routine, he was trying to get somewhere with her. He came up to me later asking where she was gone. Said he loved her.”

“He probably did.”

He laughed. He loved it when they got on like this.

“’She takes photos, maannn.’”

He loved it when they put other people down.

“Ugh, lame.”

He loved it when they saw the same thing.

“Totally”

When they understood.

“Dweebs. The lot of ‘em.”

When he remembered why.

“Why do all girls take photos?” she complained.

“Fucking excellent question. I honestly don’t know, but I have never been out with a girl before you that didn’t consider herself a photographer. It’s like men who are DJs. ‘Yeah I DJ’d at my mate’s thing the other night.’ … ‘Cool, did your girlfriend take photos of the night oh she did oh well that’s fucking great cheers mate.’”

“I think men find it attractive because it reminds them of porn.”

“Because some porn is photos?” he said, labouring a confused expression.

“Yeah.”

He nodded, accepting the suggestion as at the very least valid.

She offered: “Photography… pornography.”

*

The armchair didn’t fit. That was obvious from the minute they were in the living room. The cove it was supposed to slot into was way too narrow. The pair stood, trying to figure out whether there was anything that could be done. But there was nothing. It simply would not fit.

He looked at her, his hands on hips. And she looked back at him. She did that thing, that exaggerated grimace.

“I love you,” she said.

“I told you,” he whimpered, immediately.

“Don’t look so satisfied. You look like your grandad that time he read that article about tofu giving you cancer.”

“Don’t. Even.”

“Do you want a blow-job?”

He sighed. Sneezed. “I love you too.”

—Sean Preston

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East Londoner Sean Preston is the editor of short fiction platform Open Pen, considered by Francis Plug: “More like a shot of absinthe than a pint of boring lager.” Sean is an ex-pro wrestler, full-time thing-maker at a South London record label, and short fiction writer.

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The Expression of Loss | Poems — Agustín Fernández Mallo, Translated by Zachary Rockwell Ludington

Mar 092017
 

agustin-fernandez-mallo-by-aina-lorente-solivellas-500pxAgustín Fernández Mallo (Photo by Aina Lorente Solivellas)

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From Joan Fontaine Odisea

4.

A created thing is more perfect
the less it carries the mark of man,

thank you, Bar Code, for still guaranteeing silence,
the ingredient in objects alchemy was searching for.

Underneath this skin is another skin,
and under that another, and another, and another,
and thus, as many layers as you like, until n∊N→∞
antecenter of the center which is finite.
That center is the mask.

[the week has 8 Mondays. The 8th is the week]

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4.1

This beach is one I don’t recognize. A bottle moves
closer in to shore with the message afmallo@hotmail.com, which
I myself wrote when I was a capsized drifter
and I didn’t throw messages into the ocean but into rivers
which [I didn’t know] goe out to the see whiche is deeth.
You spread out pure,
unoxidized,
unwinged.
On beaches you’ve never walked you now step upon yourself.

.

5.

The ball traces a parabolic arc and
the golfer matches its arpeggio with her back.

The sky tenses and her breasts,
more mercury than ever, complete the silhouette
against the ocean of grass.
……………………………….It’s raining
against the grain.

The water’s geometry can’t overcome
the dry thwack of silence when the atmosphere gasps and the ball touches
….down.
Sphere against sphere. Your nipples
[endless and expectant] turn down, the windows
of a beach hotel in winter.
……………………[a car honks, your husband’s waiting].
No caddie could ever
pick your clubs like me.

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5.1

Light at dawn undoes the knots
on bowties, cuts through the make-up,
dissolves smoke and happy new year!s
in that hollowness that lasts a few hours
when the calendar shifts a digit.
………..I surprise myself thinking one day I’ll be an ancestor.
You come in pulling on a bra strap, oblivious
to the black and white confetti stuck to brittle hair,
I want you to know that tonight is my birth, you say,
and I won’t be able to forget you.
In that house we were all
terminal mannequins from Golpes Bajos,
material from childhood [where nothing ever happens
and you have to make it up].
Creation and Apocalypse sometimes coincide.

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5.1.1

The point of remembering is forgetting
oneself, making the heart into
a weathered magnet that leaves
things equidistant from each other,
…………………….spinning
…………………….in their places,
the point is not to try to find out
where the sliver of light under
doors is coming from,
or the sliver of light between your lips.

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14.

At the end I saw my body empty out
………..[1.83 m in 64 kilos]
a pencil with no lead you joked
Saturday afternoons
and Antonio Vega was playing:
I get a chill when I see
your young body and your soul
isn’t in its place anymore.

A suitcase with no destination
is a suspicious object.
A body with no shape
………..[1.83 m for 64 kilos]
is the axis around which
a traveler spins, awkward and pointless,
never my guest again.

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14.1

I look at your smile and I think
all lyric poetry expresses loss.
A child doesn’t write verse,
a diet of memory still hasn’t
passed through him, they still
haven’t shuttered
his local Toys Я Us.

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70.

The first light of day doesn’t stop the night,
it keeps on weary in another
more visible and secret sector.
…………[grass between asphalt cracks,
…………ice on the edge of a kiss,
…………the implosion of planets,
…………the silence of objects].

What you’re seeing isn’t morning,
but the logical opponent of night
produced by binary reasoning,

to wake up is to be reduced to photons,
center and stop-point
of that other nocturnal particle which is sleep
sectioned into petals.
And they fall.

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From Ya nadie se llamará como yo


I see a forest and something more alive inside (prayer)

…………An indeterminate being wanders through the valleys, howls on the peaks, sleeps beneath the snow, its tracks take on different directions all the time. Nonetheless, it senses the Earth’s magnetic field. I know because its footsteps follow the veins of certain minerals. (Cardiology)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………The cells of the retina are the same as those of the skin because when we are embryos the retina is part of the skin. This gives us a clue as to why the literature of every civilization develops a multiplicity of analogies between the eyes, the epidermis, and that which unites them, light. (Great Migrations, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………The wolf rejects us because he knows that in his chest there is an area, no larger than the pit of a cherry, which is incredibly sweet to a palate we believe we have forgotten. (Zoophilia, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………In a big-box store I saw kids playing with balls from the display stand, pedaling around and ditching the bike wherever they felt like it, jumping rope, hitting punching bags with no rhythm; the ones who weren’t yelling were laughing. “These kids here have grown up inside, they don’t know anything else,” he said to me. (Foundational Moments, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………The hardcourt used for the game of tennis is obtained by crushing thousands of bricks taken from abandoned housing developments. (Great Migrations, 2)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………Animals pose in front of the camera lens but not because they feel they are being watched. The pose is older than their looks, even older than their bodies. The pose is blind, but it sniffs, it finds its way. (Speleology, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………In rural areas Nature is strictly separated from the human habitat: specialized physical and climactic barriers are erected between the home and open country to ensure survival. In cities, the urban landscape forms a continuum with the buildings’ interiors, the city enters its apartments in the form of colors, smells, materials, and even flora and fauna. This continuity is what ensures the survival of the inhabitants of an urban space. (Extreme Climatology, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………In me there is no body: I am a ship travelling in the same direction as Earth. (Pet, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside.

…………Regarding the ancients and their languages, now dead, we must remember that we only retain their texts, the writings they’ve left us, not the sonic record, and so we have no idea how they pronounced their words. If today we could hear a Greek from the 4th century B.C. pronounce poiesis, or a Roman say rosae, it’s possible we would hear what would, for us, be grunts or birdsong. Just thinking of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra spouting out sounds like a dog barking, or a whale or a robot, produces a kind of shiver that could knock down a good portion of our idea of History, or even of civilization. What’s left to us is the mute materiality of that writing, and we make up a sonic landscape for ourselves, built as a fantasy. Thus, the only thing that truly brings back the past in real time is sound. That’s why voices are so important for the paranormal, for spiritualists, in live concerts, political rallies, etc. The oldest recorded human voice is a 35-second recitation of the poem, “America,” read in 1890 by its author, Walt Whitman, and recorded on a primitive wax cylinder. 35 seconds which not only seem to bring the poet to us from beyond the grave, but which also establish year zero of human speech such as we know it today. (Spring, 1)

I see a forest and something more alive inside..

—Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated by Zachary Rockwell Ludington

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Agustín Fernández Mallo was born in La Coruña in 1967. He is a qualified physicist and since 2000 has been collaborating with various cultural publications in order to highlight the connection between art and science. His Nocilla Trilogy, published between 2006 and 2009, brought about an important shift in contemporary Spanish writing and paved the way for the birth of a new generation of authors, known as the ‘Nocilla Generation.’ He has also published a book of stories, El hacedor (de Borges), remake, and the essay Postpoesía, hacia un nuevo paradigma. His poetry is collected in the volume Yanadie se llamará como yo + Poesía reunida (1998–2012), and his latest novel, Limbo, was published in Spain in 2014.

Zachary Rockwell Ludington teaches Spanish at Emory University in Atlanta. He received an award in 2014 from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund for Pixel Flesh, his version of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s Carne de píxel. His creative work has appeared in Drunken Boat, PEN America, and elsewhere.

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Obsession | Interview with Carlos Fonseca — Jessica Sequeira

Mar 082017
 

Carlos Fonseca cropped 500px

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Carlos Fonseca’s Colonel Lágrimas is a novel that deals with the attempt of mathematician Alexander Grothendieck to isolate himself in the Pyrenees and devise a formula that encapsulates the whole of the 20th century. To do so he invents different personalities, all with different lives and interests — Chana Abramov, a woman obsessed with painting the same Mexican volcano a thousand times, Vladimir Vostokov, an anarchist in battle with technological modernity, and Maximiliano Cienfuegos, a simple man who will nonetheless become the symbol for the Colonel’s as well as Europe’s restless political conscience. Grothendieck’s own life story traverses the 20th century, from the Russia of the October Revolution to the Mexico of the anarchic 1920s, from the Spanish Civil War to Vietnam, back to France and from there to the Caribbean islands.

While reading it I thought of the theories of social scientist Gregory Bateson, who saw society as a set of systems with adaptive changes, dependent on feedback loops and the way multiple variables change and interact. This is a deceptively simple novel — turning its pages, one enters a kind of Zen state, as anecdote follows anecdote, and every word is located precisely in the place that seems right for it. But these are not just jewels moved by pincers on a metal plate. Through its form, Colonel Lágrimas dares to ask about the meaning of activity and the meaning of thinking, and embodies those questions in the structure of the text itself.

Each fragment is exquisitely written, and although not linear, the carefully phrased thoughts seem to be in an order that makes sense. If one were to be swapped out, however, it would not fundamentally dislodge the architecture of the work. Every individual “idea” contributes to the anecdotal edifice, but the book does not really depend on any one of them, in the way a formula depends on the variables that comprise it. Just as in Bateson’s theories, the pieces interlock in interactive ways that suggest a meaning beyond the individual parts. Any “formula” devised by Grothendieck would have to be dextrous enough to take these billions of feedback loops, sequences and interactive mechanisms into account, no minor undertaking, perhaps even impossible.

Colonel Lágrimas embarks on these abstract challenges in a way that is both beautiful and analytical — it doesn’t surprise me that Fonseca used to want to be a mathematician. Born in Costa Rica in 1987, he grew up in Puerto Rico. Now he lives in London and teaches at the University of Cambridge. The book was originally published by Anagrama, and was translated for Restless Books by Megan McDowell, who has also worked on Juan Emar, Alejandra Zambra, Carlos Busqued and a number of other authors.

Book Cover Lagrimas

Jessica Sequeira (JS) : How did you decide to write this book? In what ways does it link to your life experiences and to your studies? (It doesn’t have to, of course, but I wonder if there’s a connection.)

Carlos Fonseca (CF): I think most books are the product of a constellation of obsessions. I started writing Colonel Lágrimas as soon as I saw that many of my obsessions coincided within the same structure: my obsession with Chuck Close’s hyper-realist portrait paintings, my obsession with Alexander Grothendieck’s life as some sort of allegory of the twentieth century, my obsession with archives and archival-novels. When I started writing it, I was finishing my doctoral studies and I somehow imagined the novel as a form of escape from academic studies. Then again, you can never escape your obsessions. So the novel ended up addressing some of the ideas that intrigued me at the time: the idea of a history as a giant museum, the inability to pass from thought to action, the Borgesian notion of history being reduced to a giant encyclopedia or archive. And then, there is also the story of how – as an adolescent – I wanted to be a mathematician. Perhaps, now that I think about it, the novel was a way of rethinking my past.

JS: The colonel seems to face a similar set of questions a historian would. While reading, I noted some of his possible confusions, which I’ll copy here:

Is history a science? Is the attempt to create a blueprint misguided if we’re talking about human endeavor? Or can one look for a pattern there as well? If so, how should one go about trying to find it? Is it best to remove oneself from the world to ensure peace of mind and the tranquility necessary for tracing larger arcs? Or should one try to be as actively engaged in daily life as possible? Do the aims of history writing undergo development, in the same way that ideas of modernism marked a literary shift, partly in response to scientific discoveries? And is there some shining pattern or arch-truth behind these changes? Or is history just an infinite parade of possible anecdotes to arrange, catalogue, exhibit, assemble and frame in a Duchampian exercise, like a box of old film reels? Can the historian in his observational role play some part in affairs, creating change through his attempt to understand? Or is this withdrawal into the imagination folly? My question for you is how you see history, and how is it different or similar to the colonel’s?

CF: I am fascinated by history and I like the image of the historian as someone lost in a giant archive, shuffling around documents as if they were pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. And you are absolutely right: I am interested, not so much by the figure of the historian as he who finds the “truth” about history, but rather as he who recontextualizes and reframes the fragments of history. As you note, this is a Duchampian gesture: what matters is the frame, the context. A playful take on history. In this sense, more than a scientist or even a historian, the colonel is a collage artist: like Walter Benjamin before him, his idea is to construct a book in which every single forgotten fact is quoted, framed and analyzed. An encyclopedia of forgotten histories that would permit us to see the other side of History. On the other hand, the book is also critical of the image of that peaceful museum so often imagined as the peaceful resolution at the end of history. The question remains: how to think of political action within this giant museum? How to break open the museum’s doors and start running against the wind of history?

JS: You’ve mentioned Duchamp’s techniques. What is your relationship to art and how do you see contemporary literature as engaging with some of the techniques of the art world? (Do you see it doing this?)

CF: I have become, lately, very interested in art – and in particular conceptual art – as a territory lying at the limit of literature. I like Duchamp’s gesture of moving art away from the immediacy of the sensory towards the realm of the conceptual. Or at least, forcing us to reimagine what the relationship between the sensory and the conceptual, between feeling and thought, might be, beyond a mere contradiction. Ideas, too, have a body, I would claim. I see contemporary art as a playful realm of liberty for the imagination and as such I see it as the limit towards which literature should aim. I think that to write alongside Duchamp – as writers like Enrique Vila-Matas, Mario Bellatín or Margo Glantz do – is to imagine literature as a realm where thought meets emotion. As Don DeLillo likes to say: “Writing is a concentrated form of thinking.” I like to think that Duchamp’s gesture is precisely this: to turn thinking into art and art into thinking.

JS: Do you think of yourself as influenced by Puerto Rican or Costa Rican writing in any way? Or do you think nationalistic categories aren’t important?

CF: Influences are a tricky subject. I think you end up being influenced by much more than you imagine or intend. In this sense I can only hope to be influenced by both the Puerto Rican and the Costa Rican literary traditions, traditions which I have read passionately and which abound in wonderful writers. I like to think that just like each writer has two parents, each writer inherits, indirectly, two different traditions. In my case, being born in Costa Rica and raised in Puerto Rico, I like to think that perhaps a novel like Colonel Lágrimas is the strange offspring of the Puerto Rican baroque writing, on the one hand, and Costa Rican minimalism and experimentation, on the other. While writing the novel I kept thinking that the playful narrator had much to do with the voyeurist narrator in Luis Rafael Sánchez’s 1976 novel La guaracha del Macho Camacho, a novel that fascinates me due to its rhythm and narrative techniques. Meanwhile, I also kept thinking about Carmen Naranjo’s 1982 novel Diario de una multitud, an experimental novel that always reminds me of a set of Russian dolls. I don’t think national categories should be abolished but rather rethought or disrupted in innovative ways. But, I guess at the end of the day, I agree with Italo Calvino’s quote: “The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.” The writer always has to be a bit out of place, he has to become a bit of foreigner even to himself. Writing is, in a way, another form of exile.

JS: In such a globalized world and with your experiences and influences in particular, do you still think “Latin American literature” makes sense as a phrase?

CF: I think “Latin American literature” only makes sense as an anthropological phantasy: as the label others give us, that is to say, as a particular lens through which the world sees us. I only figured this out when I arrived to study in the United States. Until then, it had always been a pain for me to explain my double-nationality to others: the way I was both Costa Rican and Puerto Rican. This was solved as soon as I arrived to the United States. Suddenly, I figured others had decided for me: I was Latin American. Like any other identity, this was, after all, nothing else but a mask. But masks and phantasies are also real. I think, beyond asking whether it exists or not, it is important for Latin American writers to play with this phantasy: to play with the anthropological phantasy that is Latin America in the eyes of the world. We always need to rethink the phantasy in order to critique it, I would claim. I also think that these broader categories end up helping writers from peripheral countries. If you stay at the national level, you keep reproducing the hierarchies dictated by the market: unknowingly, you keep speaking about Argentine, Mexican and Colombian writers, just because their market visibility is greater. Latin America as a category gives space to writers from countries that wouldn’t have visibility otherwise: countries like Ecuador, Paraguay, or Bolivia, just to mention a few.

JS: The Restless Books page refers to a “new Latin American boom”. Do you think that this term is legitimate? Or do you think phrases like this should also be abolished?

CF: Besides it being legitimate or not, I understand what they seem to be referring to: let’s say that in the post-Bolaño literary landscape, Latin American writers have gained a heightened visibility. Latin America – whatever that might be – is seen as a territory of literary innovation, as an exciting place where new voices can be found. The Bolaño phenomenon – for good or evil – transformed the way international publishers see our work and allowed for the region to be reimagined, no longer as the land of magical realism, but rather as the land of avant-garde innovation. I think this is a great step forward, independently of whether it comes with an actual boom or not. Of course, it does hint at the fact that the boom is still present in our imaginations as the golden age of Latin American literature: a spectre that never gets tired of haunting us.

JS: What writers or artists are important for you? Who do you like to read, from the past and present? How have you been influenced by the work of your teacher, Ricardo Piglia, and how does your work break from his?

CF: The other day I was rearranging my library, so I had time to think about this: which author to place alongside which author, who to give the best spots and so on. I guess, at least right now, the names in the main shelves are the following: Faulkner, Machado de Assis, Borges, Sebald, DeLillo, Lispector, Perec, Sarraute and Piglia. Then, next to them: Bernhard and Calvino. From each I have a particular memory, and perhaps my favorite is Faulkner, but with regards to this novel, I think the most important author was Machado de Assis whose Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (published in the UK as Epitaph of a Small Winner) is a fascinating inheritor to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: a playful experiment in narration. I love the idea of thinking of Machado as a black nineteenth century Brazilian predecessor of Borges, another author that is always central, not only to me, but to most writers in general. Regarding Ricardo Piglia, there is no doubt I am highly indebted to him, not only for his generosity and his amazing lectures, but for his capacity to redefine the way we read nowadays. Very few people, if any, have reimagined the figure of the reader in such a radical manner.

JS: In what direction is your current work headed?

CF: As of late I have become obsessed with obsession. I have become fascinated with protagonists whose engagement with their fixed ideas leads them to that shaky territory between art and science, between madness and reason, between art and nonsense. I am more and more interested by so-called outsider artists: artists working in the realm of that which Jean Dubuffet called “Art Brut”. Artists who don’t see themselves as artists. I see in them a metaphor of art itself, as well as a new way of linking thought and art.

JS: It’s fashionable to glamorize action in the world, and criticize thinking. While your book criticizes somebody who thinks too much, it also gets at many of the subtleties and pleasures of thought. How do you conceive of the relationship between thought and action? Do you think there is still a role for the observer in a world so oriented toward the glamorization of the “event”?

CF: This was one of my greatest obsessions while writing the novel. I wanted to explore the relationship between thought and action. Most people, when they read the novel, say that in it nothing happens. I accept these comments gladly precisely because I was interested in producing such a space of tedium, boredom and thought. A space which, like a museum, has secluded itself from the world in order “to think” the world, but where nothing necessarily happens, at least in the sense of the action to which we are accustomed. The protagonist of the novel, the colonel, belongs in fact to that strange sect of explorers of the negative which Enrique Vila-Matas has so well described in his book Bartebly and Co. Like Bartebly and like Alexander Grothendieck, upon whose life story the novel is based, the colonel decides one day to renounce the life of action in order to dedicate himself solely to the life of thought. I am fascinated by such characters: characters which one day decide to devote themselves to a conceptual project that might at first sight seem absurd, characters like the protagonist of Thomas Bernhard’s Correction. I am interested in sketching out how thought is also a type of action, perhaps the most beautiful and contemporary of them all. The only action that truly changes the world.

—Carlos Fonseca & Jessica Sequeira

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Carlos Fonseca Suárez was born in Costa Rica in 1987 and grew up in Puerto Rico. His debut novel, Coronel Lágrimas, was published in Spanish by Anagrama and in its English translation, as Colonel Lágrimas, by Restless Books. His work has appeared in publications including The Guardian, BOMB, Minor Literatures, and The White Review. He was recently selected as one of the twenty new young voices in Latin Literature by the FIL Guadalajara. He currently teaches at the University of Cambridge and lives in London.

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Jessica straightened

Jessica Sequeira is a writer and translator born in California, at home in Buenos Aires. @jess_sequeira
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Dancing the Numbers: Review of The Schooldays of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee — Jason DeYoung

Mar 062017
 

By the way, no one in this novel is clearly named or called Jesus. Only the title teases that one of the characters is—perhaps—the historical Jesus. Perhaps post crucifixion, perhaps not? Perhaps this isn’t the historical Jesus at all—perhaps Coetzee is  playing a game on us. Perhaps not. But the reader can’t help looking for parallels. —Jason DeYoung

The Schooldays of Jesus
J. M. Coetzee
Viking, 2017
272 pages; $27.00

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I.

“T his is how it is. There is no before. There is no history. The boat docks at the harbor and we climb down the gangplank and we are plunged into the here and now. Time begins. The clock starts running.” Ironically, this here and now is the afterlife.

Characters eking out lonely lives in an unrecognizable historical situation or in an altogether invented milieu are classic narrative approaches in J. M. Coetzee’s novels. But where The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus differ is that its characters have no past. They have come to this novel “world” washed clean of their former lives, without their memories, and given new names—given new ages! One might arrive a child, another a 41-year old male. They are set on their new paths with their new names to find new work or new caregivers. They are forced to learn to read and speak a new language, and given only the most modest of starts in a place called Novilla—a “no town,” where “things do not have their due weight.”

Perplexing and certainly stranger than Coetzee’s other works, these novels continue the departure from his more well known realistic fiction found in such novels as Disgrace or Age of Iron. Indeed, his new works are less concerned with standard storytelling altogether. As David Attwell describes in his critical biography J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing (2015), after Coetzee won the Nobel Prize in 2003, the “simple urge to represent” no longer seem to interest him, instead he is currently engaging in “secondary-order” questions such as, “What am I doing when I represent? What is the difference between living in the real world and living in a world of representations?”

These “secondary-order” questions have appeared as meta-fictional adventures in recent novels, such as Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man. But for the current set of novels, he has dropped the meta-fictions for something different, something more abstract and foreign. These characters are new: new to these pages, new to the world itself depicted within these pages, coming up against all this new world’s original customs and beliefs. Its literary touchstone is more Don Quixote and less Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John.

For all their newness, however, these novels are as narratively straightforward as they come, broken into regular chapters and standard scenes, written in Coetzee’s economical, direct prose.

II.

In The Childhood of Jesus one of the first things that becomes apparent is that the majority of its characters are without desires or passions—they are on whole contended individuals. Hard manual labor is done without complaint or imagination, food is primarily bread and water, and sex isn’t a notable consideration because, as you see, it doesn’t “advance us,” as one character explains. Of this dry world it is said: “[I]t is so bloodless. Everyone I meet is so decent, so kindly, so well-intentioned. No one swears or gets angry. No one gets drunk. No one even raises his voice.”

This is Simón, the point-of-view character for both The Childhood of Jesus and its sequel The Schooldays of Jesus. Simón is literally fresh off the boat, arriving on the same ship as Davíd, a young boy whom he takes care of, yet Simón is not his father. While on board the ship, the boy had lost a letter that explained who he was and who his mother is. And one of the main plots of The Childhood of Jesus is a quest to find Davíd’s mother, which turns out to be a woman Simón just “thinks” or “believes” to be said mother. And Simón’s “feeling” feels as random as it sounds. The woman, Inés, eventually accepts that she is indeed the child’s mother despite having no recollection of the child. Remember each person arrives in this world “washed” clean of their previous life, without memories, without connections.

The setting for The Childhood of Jesus is a fictionalized town where everyone is expected to speak Spanish and where housing is provided for. There isn’t much pleasure outside of football, and Simón can’t even find spices at the grocery to make the food better. The novel itself is episodic but can be broken down into three broad movements: arrival, search for Davíd’s mother and her acceptance of that role, and finally setting up Davíd’s education. The Childhood of Jesus ends with the three characters on the run from the law, because Novilla’s officials want Davíd in a special school for children with mental deficits, either mental or emotional. Davíd is without a doubt a special child, yet he doesn’t have deficits. He is playful, willful, and hates authority.

By the way, no one in this novel is clearly named or called Jesus. Only the title teases that one of the characters is—perhaps—the historical Jesus. Perhaps post crucifixion, perhaps not? Perhaps this isn’t the historical Jesus at all—perhaps Coetzee is playing a game on us. Perhaps not. But the reader can’t help looking for parallels.

III.

The Schooldays of Jesus takes on the same episodic structure as its prequel, and can seem scattered and unfocused at its outset. But at its core The Schooldays of Jesus is the examination and dramatization of concepts related to education. Its opening chapters establish that Simón is the primary agent of education for young Davíd. He is the one who explains and defines the child’s understanding of the world, but as the novel progresses, we see both characters attending school, and we hear Simón philosophizing on the educational values of confronting immoral men and, indeed, the final “showdown” is a debate between measurable science and artistic passion.

The novel opens as the three main characters arrive in Estrella (another city “which has no sensation, no feelings”), where they hope to lay low and avoid the Novilla authorities who might or might not be looking for Davíd. The three end up on a farm, where Simón and Inés pick grapes, while Davíd plays with the other children, slowly becoming the leader of the group. The “gypsy” life doesn’t suit Simón or Inés but it certainly suits Davíd, whom they’ve “never seen so active, so full of energy.” The owners of the farm take particular interest in Davíd and suggest to Simón and Inés that this highly intelligent and gifted child be sent to school. As it is explained, there are four choices in Estrella: public education, which Simón and Inés tried in Novilla to disastrous ends, or the Academies—singing, dancing, and Atom. Davíd chooses dance, despite having no interest in dancing whatsoever.

At the Academy of Dance, however, Davíd becomes awestruck by his teacher, Ana Magdalena Arroyo, who is an ethereal beauty, with the kind of splendor that “stands up to closest scrutiny”; Davíd also takes quickly to the school’s cockamamie philosophy of “dancing the numbers.” “Just as there are noble metals and slave metals, there are noble numbers and slave numbers,” Ana Magdalena explains. “You will learn to dance the noble numbers.”

This numerology, this cosmology is explained over and over in the novel without much success—both Simón and the reader are left flummoxed. “The numbers are in the sky. That is where they live, with the stars. You have to call them before they will come down,” we are told. But “you can’t call down One. One has to come by himself.” This mystical rubbish leads Simón to declare Ana Magdalena to be a preacher: “She and her husband have made up a religion and now they are hunting for converts.” To which Inés undercuts Simón’s assertions by saying that is how you “teach small children.” In her previous life in Novilla, Inés says she too taught small children. She gave each letter of the alphabet a personality, “making them come alive.” The novel is unremittingly dialectic.

The relationship between Inés and Simón is fraught, tenuous, and unsatisfying on both accounts. They are indeed on opposite poles. There isn’t a modicum of chemistry between the two. In fact, they seem repulsed the other. In the apartment they share, Simón feels more like a lodger than an equal member of the family. Simón at every turn pushes Davíd to accept Inés, but she is a “hard-hearted” and clumsy mother. When Davíd moves out to become a boarder at the Academy of Dance, Inés is quick to suggest Simón find a place of his own.

After a rather subtle introduction, a character named Dmitri begins to insert himself into the lives of the three characters. Dmitri is an attendant at the museum next door to the Academy of Dance, and he, in is own words, “worships” Ana Magdalena: “I am not ashamed to confess it.” Dmitri is a man of passion. The children love him; he often has a pocketful of sweets for them after school. Simón reflects on Dmitri thusly: “How wholehearted, how grand, how true Dmitri must appear to a boy of Davíd’s age, compared with a dry old stick like himself!” Indeed, Dmitri is set up as a counter beat to Simón’s pragmatism. Lovely Ana Magdalena, however, treats Dmitri coolly. And initially, Dmitri doesn’t seem all that important to the novel, but in a “crime of passion” he kills Ana Magdalena.

After the death of Ana Magdalena, the story turns to an examination of how we are to know someone else, how are we to know someone’s true identity. In regards to Dmitri, Simón repeatedly warns Davíd that he doesn’t know why Dmitri takes him into his “confidence”—a word that reappears frequently—because “you don’t know what is going on in his heart.” After Dmitri’s subsequent trial and conviction, Simón, Inés, and Davíd try to reassess and reassemble their lives. In the messy aftermath, Simón takes a writing class of all things. He reveals (with near-comic results) in business letters and résumé cover letters that he has come to a “crisis” in his life, and that meeting Dmitri (whom he dislikes and, from a moral point of view, despises) “has been an educational experience for me.” He continues, “I would go so far as to list it among my educational qualifications.” To be sure, these are the schooldays of Simón as well!

IV.

Critics haven’t praised these novels quite the way they have Coetzee’s previous work, calling them “dry as sawdust” and an “ascetic allegory.” I personally enjoy the direction these novels are taking: they’re attempting something different in a landscape glutted with novels and stories just trying to exist within an established tradition. They remind me of Coetzee’s early novels—In the Heart of the Country, Waiting for the Barbarians, and Life & Times of Michael K.—with their rather alien environment and imaginative leaps.

In something more traditional, Dmitri’s trial and conviction might have make for a proper ending, but here the narrative is pushed forward to complete the novel’s theme, and the ending is more cerebral, a showdown between a man of science and a man of art, vaguely concluded on purpose, perhaps in agreement with Camus, who wrote: “solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity.”

Richly enigmatic, The Schooldays of Jesus leaves off precisely where another volume might be necessary to give us our final answers. The two novels are so much about this shaky lad and dad relationship that you want to see how it comes out in the end.

—Jason DeYoung

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Jason DeYoung
Jason DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Booth, Madcap Review, Corium, The Austin Review (web), The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Monkeybicycle, Music & Literature (web), and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Mystery Stories 2012. He is a Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq Magazine.

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Burning the Baby & Other Stories | Fiction — Kelly Cherry

Mar 062017
 

Kelly Cherry

 

Burning the Baby

Someone struck a match and the baby went up in flames. Members of the family choked on the sickening smell. The father was afraid to look at the mother: surely she would not have done this to her own child. Yet he remembered when his son, sixteen, slapped her in the face and she screamed at him, Edward, hit him, hit him. He could not bring himself to hit his son and she never forgave him for that. The mother looked at the father quickly, then looked down at the floor. He would not have done such a thing, would he? But the baby was burnt, there was no question about that. Sweet little babe, now blackened and flaking, now something like a tiny Christmas tree charred by lightning. The older brother made measurements, seeking to determine how much shorter the baby was post-burning. The baby’s legs, roly-poly and chubby, were burnt off at the knees, which meant it could not even crawl. Of course, being dead meant that too. The sister tried to comb the baby’s burnt hair but it fell out in bunches. The sister began to cry. The baby wouldn’t crawl or play with her. Had the sister done something wrong? What had she done? What? She tickled the baby but it still refused to laugh or squeal. She was in trouble, she knew. She was supposed to watch out for her baby sister, keep her happy, make sure no harm came to her. No harm! She wanted to die. She thought her parents probably wanted her to die. She didn’t dare look at them. They would be so angry with her.

§

Drought

Water is leaving us. It’s disappearing from water tanks, reservoirs, lakes and rivers. The water table is dropping. Plants are dying. The sequoias known as California redwoods, having flourished well over a millennium, are dying. In California, water is rationed. Bath water. Water for lawns. Water intended to accompany food. Jerry Brown, the governor, is not just worried; one can hear fear in his voice. His voice climbs just slightly higher when he talks about the drought in his state but the higher is enough to clue us in. What calamities will occur if the drought continues?

Will Californians continue to stay in their state? What if the forests catch on fire? But they already do. They are likely to do so again. Also likely is that at some point, as rationing increases, and water becomes more difficult to obtain barring the return of a rainy season, residents will leave for more congenial locales. Some, anyway, and no doubt later, more. Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada will not be among the places to which they move. Those who move will favor areas with sufficient precipitation. That is bound to mean the North, with its snow and rain. It’s true that there are storms in the South but there are also hurricanes and tornadoes in the South, and people looking to escape from one disaster won’t want to have to deal with another.

Animals also head north but thousands of them die along the way, especially the pets who were abandoned when people fled. The dogs and cats, especially the small ones, the turtles and the goldfish will not make it to the Far North. (The goldfish will be turned out of their fishbowls without ceremony, and before any of the goldfish realize what is happening.)

So the people move north and the population of Northern cities multiplies. People are crowding one another. There’s not enough room to breathe. Some people are angry about this. They buy guns or get out the guns they already have. Road rage is rampant. The homeless, packed in parks, sleep folded up in lobbies and thresholds and raid garbage cans for food but there is never enough food for all the homeless. Some jump fences, racing to flag outgoing planes but airline workers shove them back. Some ride boxcars, and a few of them make it to Anchorage or Fairbanks.

When they get there, they discover that Russians and Japanese are there, too. They will have come over the Bering Strait. They will wear shorts and tee-shirts. Snowpacks are melting. Snow is melting. Igloos are melting—and the Inuit designed them never to melt. To the Russians and the Japanese, it seems as if they themselves are melting.

South Americans, on the other hand, have followed the Andes mountains to the Drake Passage, hoping to get to Antarctica. But we will stick to what most concerns us.

All over the world, people head for the mountains. From the worn-out Appalachians to the Himalayans of Uttarakhand to the Kamchatka Peninsula. It does no good. Once, mountaintops were cooled by crosswinds, and people and animals were invigorated, refreshed; now the hot tongues of sunshine flick and lick until people and animals are fatigued, too fatigued to climb farther, and they look in vain for even an inch of shade before they crawl behind a boulder to die.

The constant sun enervates. Yes, night still arrives, but one’s skin is burnt so bad that sores appear on arms, legs, and bald heads. People give up on clothes, abandon their garments, for it is too painful to wear them. Everyone gives up.

Which makes everyone else want to give up. And why not? Humans cannot live without water. Yes, there  have been attempts to desalinate seawater. And some have worked. Briefly. Recycled wastewater is also promising. The problem is, neither works well enough to produce the quantities of fresh water that we need at the rate at which we need it.

Which is why these days you (who are you?) will find us dying, always in places that used to promise water. Just before we die, we often hallucinate. Images of waterfalls, running rivers, water fountains, and rain rain rain leave our tongues hanging out, our eyes popping, our throats dry as martinis or deserts. Dry as calcification. Dry as a ponderous pedagogue. Dry as a basement of vampires with no fresh throats to suck.

We hankered for salt. Could anything be more ironic?

Renal failure was common. It led to cardiac problems.

We were too exhausted to lick our own lips.

§

Derek

She named him Derek. It was the name that came to her, for no reason she could think of, and it had all the more urgency for having no reason. The name seemed to fit him. His mother had abandoned him. Mother bats often leave their babies behind; something frightens them and they save themselves before they stop to think about the baby. (There’s usually only one baby at a time; occasionally there are twins.) Or she may have died, perhaps in a heat wave, which can kill off huge numbers of bats.

She found Derek when she was digging out weeds next to the barn. She called a wildlife shelter to ask what to do. “Don’t touch it. Bring it in,” they said, and she did, but she had already touched it. In the shelter was a long row of bat babies, each one swaddled in a knitted scarf or dish cloth. Their wings were under these wraps. The darling creatures looked like little bat burritos—that is what they are called. To see a bat fly out of a chimney or across the moon can be scary: the bats are swift and their wings relatively huge. But tucked into their scarves, with their wings folded and only the little heads peeking out, they look like sweet, snuggly, sleepy babies.

She held Derek, wrapped up, in her hands, presenting him to the shelter workers.

“Derek?” they said. “Is he male?”

She didn’t know. It hadn’t occurred to her that he might be female.

They lifted him up for examination.

“He’s no Debbie,” they said, “so you’re in luck.”

A shelter worker was rubbing Derek gently on his stomach, though such a tiny stomach could only be a tummy. Then the worker picked up an eyedropper and squeezed some milk into his mouth. “You know they can carry rabies?” the worker asked.

“Yes,” she said, thinking, Derek doesn’t have rabies.

“Derek doesn’t have rabies,” said the worker, then added, “They’re called pups.”

“The babies, not the rabies, I assume.” She smiled.

The worker looked at her as if she might be mentally challenged.

“He’s falling asleep.”

“Pups do that. Especially when they’ve sipped enough milk. They are, after all, mammals.”

I knew that, she wanted to say. “Why are some of the others squeaking?”

“All bat pups have to practice echolocation. They have different calls and have to figure out which are theirs. They also have to learn to fly, just as birds do.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” She hadn’t known that bats had different methods of echolocation.

“Ever seen a microbat?”

She shrugged, not knowing whether she had or hadn’t.

“There’s a bumblebee bat.”

“That’s very alliterative.”

“Allit—? Sure. The bumblebee bat is maybe the size of a jellybean.” The worker glanced away from Derek and looked straight into her eyes. “It weighs about as much as a penny weighs. Actually, it weighs a little less than that.”

She stared back at the worker. “May I take Derek home now?”

“He’s probably better off here.”

“But I found him.”

“And you brought him here, where you knew he would be better off.”

“But he belongs to me.”

“Bats are wildlife. They don’t belong to anybody. I’m sure you can understand that.”

“It’s not a question of understanding. The fact is that Derek is mine. I found him.”

“Maybe I’d better get my boss. She can explain it to you better than—”

“There’s nothing to explain. Just give me back my bat.”

“I can’t!”

She swooped Derek up and put him in her shirt pocket. A little guano didn’t worry her.

The worker ran after her, shouting Stop! Stop!

Why would she stop? Derek was her baby. Nobody could tell her otherwise.

§

On Teaching

It was a nice day so I joined my kids on the playground. Shadows made the small cotton-ball clouds look scruffy, as if they were children with dirt on their faces. They needed to be scrubbed with a damp washrag. Children, children, I said twice, clapping smartly each time. They circled me. They surrounded me. I was shaken to see that they were drawing the circle tighter and I had become their prisoner. How had this happened? I was going to clap a third time but one of the children shushed me with a finger over her lips. I felt, I felt—outraged. Who were they to dictate to me? The teacher was I. The leader was I. They were the helpless children. Surely that’s right. Surely that’s how it’s always been. Is this a trick? A prank? Children have a habit of playing pranks, don’t they. A prank, then. A silly—

“Mrs. Morgan,” the girl who dared to shush me said.

“Yes. What is happening here?”

“Happening?”

“What is going on here?”

“Going on?”

They came closer and closer, the circle closing, their shoes scuffing mine, their sweetish breath—breaths—making my heart beat faster, making it hard for me to breathe.

One-love, two-love, three-love, four.
See the teacher on the floor.

One of them had tripped me, and though I wasn’t on the floor I was indeed lying on the ground, one of my shoes beside my hip.

Five-love, six-love, seven-love, eight.
See the teacher take the bait.

What the hell did that mean? Their chanting made me frantic. I stood up, holding the shoe that came off. With one shoe on and one off I had to shift from side to side.

Nine-love, ten-love, eleven-love, twelve.
Here’s a book you really should shelve.

They are telling me I should go shelve a book! Who do they think they are?

One-love, two-love, three-love, four.
Take yourself thence and come no more.

Because I had one foot in a shoe and the other in only a sock, I had to bob up on one leg and sink down on the other. They had stripped me of my dignity. “What do you want?” I asked.

“Take yourself thence and come no more,” they said as one.

At my desk in the schoolroom I wrote a letter of resignation and signed it with my good ballpoint. I handed in grades—all A’s, because I was afraid they might retaliate if I failed them. I cleaned out my desk drawers. I did feel a bit sad when I did that but the sadness didn’t last long.

—Kelly Cherry

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Kelly Cherry is the author of 25 books, 10 chapbooks, and two translations of classical drama. She is the former Poet Laureate of Virginia. Also: Emeritus Member, Poets Corner, Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, NYC. NEA, USIA, Rockefeller, inaugural recipient of the Hanes Poetry Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, Bradley Lifetime Award, Phillabaum Award, Weinstein Award, others. Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin Madison. Eminent Scholar, UAH, 2001-2005. Her new book Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Poem is forthcoming imminently.

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Cries of a mind…leaping out of its lodgings | Review of Drawn from Life, Selected Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Linda E. Chown

Mar 052017
 

michel-de-montaigne-006
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Drawn from Life, Selected Essays of Michel de Montaigne
Translated by M. A. Screech; Introduced by Tim Parks
Notting Hill Editions, London
185 pp, £14.99

 

One could easily diminish Michel de Montaigne (Michel Eyquem de Montaigne) (1533-1592) as being that inventor of the essay, that plodding form which considers and concludes.  Spanish painter Pablo Picasso once observed, “Yo no busco, yo encuentro” (I don’t seek after, I come upon).  Picasso’s observation could help us focus and situate Montaigne’s insinuatingly sinuous, uncannily accurate prose.  His focus is not result-oriented on content and conclusion but rather is maker-focused on composition and creating. Much of each essay magnifies its composition in a language.  Repeatedly, Montaigne thinks of his efforts as flawed, monstrous or distorted. To become his reader, I have had to become a kind of ventriloquist engaged in an act of translation and projection, of time, genre, gender, language and many translations.  It was only when I found how uncertain, fearful and tentative he was that I could begin to write of him wholeheartedly.  I came to appreciate that Montaigne struggled tremendously with how to think far more than with what to think.  In other words, he was not writing conclusions; he was coming upon what he found as it appeared. In order to be a seamless ventriloquist, in order to read and know Montaigne, I had to get as close to him as I could. In effect, I had to mimic now what he did with what he called his self: “The world looks always opposite; I turn my sight inwards, and there fix and employ it. I have no other business but myself, I am eternally meditating upon myself, considering and tasting myself. Other men’s thoughts are ever wandering abroad, if they will but see it; they are still going forward: for my part, I circulate in myself” (“Of Presumption”).  He chose to establish a singular intimacy with himself which I would I saw have to emulate as his ventriloquist.  At first, I felt overwhelmed and uninitiated when I received the beautiful Drawn from Life. At once, I asked myself how much in all did this great figure write, and when, and which of all his writings are in this volume, how do they change and what is his flag ship hobby horse, his daunting intellectual obsession?

There were three books of 107 essays of different length and tone.  These were essais, meaning attempts which indicate their spirit—not a finality, but a stab into the open.  The first volume “A,” including 57 passages written 1571–1580, was published in 1580 ; the second “B” included 37 passages written 1580–1588, was published in 1588, and the third “C,” often called the Bordeaux copy, with thirteen passages written from 1588–1592, was posthumously published in 1595 with the help of his adoptive daughter Marie De Gournay,  Now, in this Montaigne revival,  there are critical divisions between those liking the 1595 version and the 1588 Bordeaux heavily-edited copy.  Drawn from Life has eight essays from Book One, two from Book Two and three from Book Three.  Two substantial essays are not in Drawn from Life: his “Of Friendship, ”Chapter 27 in Book One, recounting the loss of his closest  friend, Étienne de La Boétie, whom he called his “double,” and ”Of Vanity,” Chapter 9 in Book Three. Their absence actually is important for an incrementally intimate reading of Montaigne, the one who ever incrementally attempts.   Now that I had fashioned this mechanical chessboard of chapters, I had to read and confront the first chapter which had two conspicuously different names in different translations: “We Search the Same End by Discrepant Means, or “That Men by Various Ways Arrive at the Same End”. The first chapter was at first like a hard tire; it retained an opaque, impersonal, even impenetrable feeling. As I kept reading his chiseled words, fruitlessly looking for a summation, I soon felt that the thing repeated, the hobby horse was fear, not of death or pain, but of losing mental control and becoming not oneself. All at once, I remembered Samuel Johnson in his 1751 Rambler, when he proposed his groundbreaking idea of the “invisible riot of the mind”. Throughout his essais, Montaigne considers and engages just such a riotous mind—searches for ways to distract it, ways to bring it under control, ways to exercise its dangerous powers more effectively.  In this of necessity highly condensed review, I hope to illuminate briefly and consequentially that 1) Invisible riot of the mind, 2) an always incomplete self and spirit, and 3) Montaigne’s clamorous awareness of writing.

Early on, Montaigne considers something new: what he calls “the close stitching of mind to body” (25). Indeed, he is introducing both to himself and his readers a vast and fear-inspiring, hitherto unaddressed uncertainty—that is the mind “whirring about, noting ….I can see something of all that in myself, depending on how I gyrate; and anyone who studies himself attentively finds in himself and in his very judgement this whirring about and this discordancy” (73). He is presenting the temporary mental derangement Johnson had called the “invisible riot of the mind”. In classical philosophy, the paradigm had been far more stable: “wisdom is a controlled handling of our soul, carried out, on our Soul’s responsibility, with measure and proportion” (93). In his plague-scarred, war-conflicted times, Montaigne encounters a new inner fear and, with no hesitation whatsoever, declares “It is fear that I am most afraid of” (9). He shows a terror of decision making taking over soldiers on the battle field, women in the dining room. This general fear is not of battle or physical pain of which he is intimately familiar given his insistent kidney stones. He explicitly refers to this fear as a “leprosy of the mind,” “a terrifying confusion,” “Inconstancy of his mind,” which can “dominate you and tyrannize over you.” in “an internal strife* (74, 139). The title of this review points to his exquisite awareness of mental displacement: “the cries of a mind which is leaping out of its lodgings” (92). Such loss of mental certainty is to him akin to the drunkenness when one “loses all consciousness and control of himself” (80). Montaigne’s second hobby horse is self or soul, or, what we now call consciousness.

Montaigne certainly introduces readers in a new way to self and soul with which he posits one should commence their studies. Interestingly, he feminizes “soul” throughout. He commits himself unequivocally to his life’s task which becomes these essays: “My own mind’s principal and most difficult study is the study of itself”. He virtually flexes with passion about this commitment: “For anyone who knows how to probe himself and to do so vigorously…reflection is a mighty endeavor and a full one: I would rather forge my soul than stock it up” (111).  Virginia Woolf sings his praises: “this talking of oneself, following one’s own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfection; this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne”. Ultimately, he confesses rather disappointedly that “I have nothing mine but myself, and yet the possession is, in part, defective and borrowed” (“Of Vanity”). This self-soul is incomplete, unstable, inescapable and imperfect, but it is all he has, all we have, to work with.  He calls this “self” many names (because it is many things): “oddments,” “bits and pieces,” “multiple forms,” but  In spite of these flaws, Montaigne tells his readers that he is and this is a book whose faith can be trusted, that ”it is his own self that I am painting” (xxii). In spite of uncertainties, he commits his life to that soul which “can see and know all things, but she should feed only on herself” (158). He says that he is not trying to study himself to make people think more of him:  I do so ”in order to bring mine lower and lay it down”. Such humility furnishes profound trust in what he says. He wants not a single unified soul or self to own: “What I would praise would be a soul with many storeys, a soul at ease wherever fortune led it” (115-116).  His is a remarkable acknowledgement of a gift–this awareness of himself as something he must forge rather than stock up (111). That is, he must make and create and modify that soul, that self which is his life’s study. In the process, he writes in such a way as to provide alternatives to others who might become inflicted with what he has called the “illness of our soul,” its distractibility, its dependence, its flamboyance and its passions (134). Souls “can be controlled and excited by some racing disembodied fancy based on nothing” (146). Overall, Montaigne’s nobility comes through in his courage in facing all of this: “Life is a rough, irregular progress with a multitude of forms” (110).

Ever a purposeful dreamer, Montaigne says of his prose, “I who am more concerned with the weight and usefulness of my writings than with their order and logical succession must not be afraid to place here a little off the track, an account of great beauty” (105).  His essays are flooded with digressions about his inadequate writing, how poor his memory is, how common the subject, how second-rate his diction. He laments that his “ability does not go far enough for me to dare to undertake a rich, polished picture, formed according to art” (107). They are, however, compellingly elegant, learned, unpredictable, intimate, experimental and morally important.  For one thing, he insists upon the need for writing what can happen rather than pompously showing a bombastic version of what had happened: “I have undertaken to talk about only what I know how to talk about, fitting the subject matter to my capabilities….There are some authors whose aim is to relate what happened: mine (if I could manage it) would be to relate what can happen” (28, 27).  One could undertake an in-depth study of his parenthesis and read forever better Modernist fiction. His interruptions combined with self-conscious links to what he had just been saying with a self-conscious allusion to his ejempla draw the reader trustfully to him. Sometimes, he denigrates his own “scribblings,” or, more graphically, “monstrous bodies of diverse members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or portion other than accidental…excrements of an old mind, sometimes thick, sometimes thin, and always undigested” (“Of Vanity”). Montaigne was aware that his writing was changing, perhaps to compensate for what he had perceived as their insufficiency. He would make up for it by his “intricacies,”’ and make chapters longer, “such as require preposition and assigned leisure” (“Of Vanity”).  One of the special beauties of Notting Hill’s edition is that it omits the longer, more reflective, essays from the collection, allowing the reader a free intimacy with his evolving voice over time in a plethora of highly varied topics.  An unexpected example of Montaigne’s modern sense of writing occurs in the history of the translation of the Horace quotation in “Of Friendship”: esinit in piscem mulier formosa superne. This is usually translated:  “a fair woman in her upper form ends in a fish”. The poet in me reading found something discordant, flatfooted and incomplete in that image, and I searched until I found that the point is that the woman was beautiful above and that her beauty became truncated and deformed below, since at the end of her body appeared that unappealing fish tail.  This contradictory image, “A woman, beautiful above, has a fish’s tail” emphasizes Montaigne’s persistent frustration in the artistic process, in the failure of scribbling to render it beautifully. With just this modern sense of fragmentation and incompleteness, Montaigne writing of his dearest friend, catastrophically concludes after his friend’s death, “I was so grown and accustomed to be always his double in all places in all things, that methinks I am no more than half of myself” (“Of Friendship”).

In the course of “scribbling” and revising his three hobby horses, 1) mental imbalance, 2) the challenge of the soul, self, consciousness, and 3) trying to write it all forth, Montaigne had come upon mercury, upon something bouncing, bobbing, rare, and uncontrollable. Recent splendid books, like Philippe Desan, Montaigne: a Life and Sarah Bakewell, Montaigne, How to Live remarkably Illuminate his haunting and significant contemporaneousness. What he found in those years of writing was indeed an independent awareness, or consciousness with which he tenaciously ever struggled, amidst physical pains, the turbulence and warfare of his times as well as his sense of incompleteness. Slowly, it came to me in an Archimedes moment that actually de Montaigne about one hundred years before René Descartes, was recognizing something similar to “Cogito, ergo sum; I think; therefore I am”. Across the centuries, these two men shook hands with what we now consider consciousness. Ever practical and isolated, Montaigne felt it his chore to get to be as ventriloquist close to the consequences of such cognition as he could, without vanity or didacticism.  He simply threw himself in, as a “mind which is leaning out of its lodgings”. That position indirectly led to the banning of his writings, since he came to know that in his new intimacies he wouldn’t hide truths about his sexuality, the inconstancy of the human soul and race, or the gluttonous materialism of his times. Knowing himself, his mind, and his consciousness to be his to control led him to find life far simpler and clearer.  Rather unexpectedly, he recognized quite openly, “my freedom is so very free” (28).  The design of this excellent Notting Hill edition offers us Montaigne pure and free, his language, his zigs and his zags, dubieties and vanities, without trying to give readers any predetermined intellectual conclusion or framework. This edition allows his essays to sing and play on, so that we readers may do what Picasso suggested: discover joyfully and not tediously seek after.

—Linda E. Chown

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 LEC2
Linda E. Chown has published three books of poems, Buildings and Ways, Inside In, and All the Way up The Sky, also a critical book, Narrative Authority and Homeostasis in Selected Works of Doris Lessing and Carmen Martín Gaite. She spent 18 years living, writing, and teaching in southern Spain where she was betimes a Fullbright professor of America lit, one year at the University of Deusto, one year at the University of Salamanca. Subsequently, she taught for many hears at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. She has published a multitude of talks and papers on the likes of Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Willa Cather, Kirsty Gunn, Katherine Mansfield, Oliver Sacks, Albert Camus, Susan Glaspell, and many others. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from from the University of Washington. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, did creative writing at San Francisco State University, and worked in the fabled Poetry Center. She now lives in Michigan. Her newest poems were recently published in Poethead.

 

 

The Promise of Intimacy | ask anyone: The Poetry of Ruth Lepson — Timothy Ogene

Mar 052017
 

Ruth Lepson
Ruth Lepson

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1.

It was Auden who once declared that “the only sensible procedure for a critic is to keep silent about works which he believes to be bad, while at the same time vigorously campaigning for those which he believes to be good, especially if they are being neglected or underestimated by the public.”[1] It is indeed pointless to invest time and meaningful pages outlining how a work is “bad” when the same resources could be used to promote “good” work. Implied in Auden’s remark is what one might call the social function of criticism which, in today’s world of mass cultural production, is to narrow the reader’s search to a handful of quality texts, works that will endure outside current modalities and antics of marketing, and in the process pave an angle of descent into said texts. With this responsibility comes the added burden of picking a critical trajectory, one that does justice to the work without tangentially downplaying the context within which it came into being.

Striking that balance, between a pure reception of the text and a careful interrogation of its context, can be daunting, especially when the writer deliberately places the self – through the work and paratextual material – as the material for the work itself. Thankfully, Ruth Lepson’s poetry does not plunge the critic into this awkward position. Of her private world we know very little, as all she allows us of herself is a small trace of her childhood, on her website:

Born in New York in 1949; a year later we moved to Princeton, as my father got a post-doc in math at The Institute for Advanced Study. My mother, who lived in Lithuania until she was twenty, became a mathematician, too, and a sculptor, and later wrote a (still unpublished) book on math as an art form. My father had studied music at Juilliard while getting his master’s at Yale in math and physics. He played bassoon and conducted. Any spirituality that developed in me came from my maternal grandfather, an Orthodox rabbi, and I lived on my uncle’s kibbutz for two summers, picking pears in ’67…[2]

She leaves us with her poems and the poems alone. Attempting a thematics-obsessed assessment of her work – holding up tropes and biographical anecdotes – is a futile venture, for her work manages to resist this kind of criticism, though resonant with poignant themes. It however consciously dispels and/or balances resonance and theme with the workings of syntax and the controlled use of aphorisms (that create context). Memory, as a recurring theme, is a prime example. It weaves in and out of her most recent collection, ask anyone, but does not stretch into a confession. Instead, the recollection/memory of love, lost or gained, is swaddled in tense (sometimes philosophical) insights that dissipate the affective possibilities love and its connotations. Consider this passage from ‘knowledge in black’:

I’ll tell you where the ocean ends it ends in
a particular place in space which continues
in blackness until that time
you’re swimming in the ocean when time becomes
space you no longer swim . as a body

are we done[3]

The poem itself will continue, leaving that lone line to simmer subliminally, ambiguously, jarringly, in the reader’s mind. It is almost impossible to contemplate what it might imply – a break up, an exit from a heated fight, an ultimatum – without an equal reflection on the sophisticated beauty of the lines above – the build-up to that lone line.  It becomes more complex, endurably so, when the first seven stanzas, including the one above, appear before that lone line:

the switchmen sleep with newspapers
across their chests

it’s true that in the country questions
are green green as pique as somber
stationary things

even later it’s still true and not true
that in the country questions are green
since in the country no one knows literature

and the wild’s of the lion’s mane are
decked with pleasures of all kinds stemming

from the green questions the questions
that are green

I’ll tell you where the ocean ends it ends in
a particular place in space which continues
in blackness until that time
you’re swimming in the ocean when time becomes
space you no longer swim . as a body

are we done[4]

With such a range of ideas, aphoristically shared, the concreteness of the lived experience suggested by the lone line, intense or fragile, evaporates or refuses to yield to our idea of what it might imply. In other words, “are we done,” and its suggestion of proximity to the self, to a dialogue with another, a gravitation towards a personal event, becomes a shadow of a larger idea of life itself. It is extraordinary how Lepson’s poems manage to achieve this feat, offering us the frightening “wilds of the lion’s mane” contrastingly “decked with pleasures of all kinds” in one helping. Perhaps it is her use of robust imagery, aphoristically rendered yet wary of cliché. Interestingly, those aphorisms, it seems, provide context:

you can sleep in the sun when you love
only the enlightened sleep over the sea
anyone who loves can swim in the sun

we fell on the plumes and the berries fragrances
grand and lilac-filled we rose
and the bowers tossed us all the way into the sun

who can sleep over the sea . no one .. only those
who’ve shed . . .
only they sleep[5]

While the first stanza offers a line of general context, “you can sleep in the sun when you love,” the second departs from that general idea and returns to the self, “we fell on the plumes and the berries fragrances,” and the third jettisons the self, returning to a general idea framed as a question: “who can sleep over the sea…” (26). These multiple transitions, towards and away from the self, are central features in Lepson’s work. When the poem moves away from the self, it does so with the intention of establishing or highlighting a strand of universal truth; and when it returns to the self, it is to apply said truth to an individual experience, without lingering on the experience itself (to the point of becoming overtly confessional).

Where have we seen this before? Creeley, of course, whose poems influenced Lepson’s work. Indeed, at first glance, a Creeley reader would see resemblances here and there, controlled enjambments and syntactic manoeuvrings, what – for most poets – would be a nightmare to accomplish without sounding like ducks playing the harmonica.

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2.

While Lepson’s latest collection is a controlled meditation on the self and its relation to objects, people, and existence, the overall tone is better understood by returning to her first output, Dreaming in Color (1980), where signs of what will eventually become her signature near-rendering of intimacies abound. Near-rendering, because the promise of intimacy is often dispelled by a deflection of said promise with, in most instances, an inserted call for critical inquiry.

Consider “Collage,” from Dreaming in Color:

In a corner of Boston –
a group of buildings,
above another group of buildings,
across the street,
in the distance,
pastel green and blue.
Under the full moon,
they remind me of San Francisco,
which reminds me of you.

Maybe they still are
and do.

I looked around.
No one was watching.
There was the trolley.
I put the moon in a box
and got on it.[6]

There is vulnerability and perceptible loneliness in those lines, but those feelings are not evoked by what is said – “they remind me of San Francisco, / which reminds me of you” – but by the cluster of distances and arrangement of objects that bracket those two lines: the buildings, the moon, the absence of watching eyes. The second stanza, strategically isolated, has a subliminal effect that accentuates the speaker’s own isolation in this collage of objects and distances. What we are therefore left to ponder is the very arrangement that elicits – in the reader – the narrator’s own feeling of isolation, not isolation in itself.

In Lepson’s work, thought reveals itself in the choice and structural placement of words and, in other instances, a reluctance to carry an emotion to an expected end. The goal, it seems, is to create a binary that balances overt emotions with critical deliberations. “Love Poem,” from Dreaming in Color, is a good case in point:

Outside it’s pale blue.
Inside it’s pale green.
There’s white muff
on the beige sofa of roses.
Let me smoothe your forehead.
Let my eyes soften.
Let me stop inquiring of everyone else
if I’m still alive.
I’ve been dulled for too long.
Let me show you
charcoal cats
wandering here,
gold bits of music,
the people of cinnamon and maroon.
Stay here.
Not as a woman would ask a man
I ask this, but as the moon
would ask the night.[7]

The first six lines are, in a sense, true of a love poem, for love evokes an image of tenderness, of vulnerability: “Let my eyes soften.” But then the insertion of “inquiring” temporally deflates the reader’s dreamy ride in a land of “pale blue” colors “on the beige sofa of roses.” To inquire is to actively conceptualize and articulate a question. To “stop inquiring” is even more complex, since it a choice to reverse the process. But then the poem takes us back to a place where “charcoal cats” roam, with “gold bits of music/ the people of cinnamon and maroon.” Soon enough, we return to “inquiry,” this time replaced with the word “ask:” “Not as a woman would ask a man/ I ask this, but as the moon/ would ask the night.” One could argue that Lepson would rather have us thinking than dreaming, or doing both simultaneously. This, perhaps, explains the poems in Morphology (2007), a collection that pairs photographs with poems gleaned from moments in the poet’s own dreams. The book itself is a tangible embodiment of Lepson’s aesthetic, that deliberate urge to strike a balance between what is dreamt and felt with a measure of critical detachment.

The poems in Morphology are dreams rendered in words. A dream, as we know, is an intimate thing, personal, remote and unreal. The telling/sharing of a dream is an intellectual process, an act of translation with a keen eye for the subtleties of narrative. First, the dream is recalled in bits and pieces, sometimes in completely mis-remembered chunks; then the dreamer shops for the right words to communicate her dream. In a sense, therefore, the impact of a dream rendered in words relies on the dreamer’s choice of words. And if dreams are abstract, narrating them to a listener or a reader is, in itself, a balancing act, since the abstract remains what it is in the dreamer’s mind, with a “real” equivalent as rendered in words. This, perhaps, accounts for the opening poem in Morphology:

Concepts and
facts are drifting
around in the
air. One at a time
they sizzle into fireworks.
Then I can’t see them be-
cause they’re inside me.[8]

While the dream remains, “inside” the dreamer, it however appear as “Concepts and/ facts . . . drifting/around in the air.” By employing the words “concepts” and “facts” to narrate a dream – for the poem itself is a description of an actual dream – the dream (an unreal thing) becomes a thought-thing expressed in “Concepts and/ facts.” Within the dream itself, as narrated, a duality is apparent: the free-floating “Concepts and/facts” that, suddenly, “can’t” be seen “be-/ cause they’re inside” the dreamer.

In subsequent pages, the reader is faced with unevenly shaped poems[9] – sometimes with wild, blank spaces – that textually concretize recalled moments from dreams:

Fanny Howe and I are go-
ing to … … … … … … . share a

… … … … … … … … … .. suite
… … … … … … .in a dorm
… … … … … … … … . with
two … … … … … … … … . oth-
er wom-
… … … en.[10]

If the shape of this section of the poem (above) mimics the non-linear, subjective nature of dreams, the poet’s recollection – reliable or not – offers us a rather objective picture of that dream. It is this duality, the non-linear and subjective (frail, intimate, sensitive) paired with, wrapped or rendered in objective terms, that marks Lepson’s poetry as “Fragile and objective,” as Fanny Howe says of Lepson’s work.

There is, therefore, a readily visible intellectual breadth in her poems, as that duality – its creation and intended impact – is in itself a product of the poet’s intellectual process. Most important, however, is the fierce grasp on the function and limits of language, where the poet does not merely play and experiment with language for its own sake but for an intended subliminal effect. That subliminal effect is accentuated by the not-quiteness of her poems, how they leave the reader sandwiched between a climax and a joyous longing for more, practically making us “want to think and dance at the same time” as Betsy Sholl says of Lepson’s poems.

In some instances, that not-quiteness appears in the form of a theme paused abruptly, perhaps for fear of slipping into excess. This is more visible in her new collection, ask anyone, where questions of power, politics, society, and life itself are undramatically presented, parcelled in carefully picked phrases that – in themselves –  dismiss ponderosity and pretension. This, to the critical eye, reveals the poet’s faithfulness to form as content in itself, and as receptacle for subject matter. This duality requires of the reader a fierce attention to the poem’s controlled movements and turns, from a central theme or idea to pure aesthetic preoccupation intended to complement or contextualize said theme or idea. Reading Lepson’s work, one sees how that movement is intertwined and brought to life within individual poems:

a shower of sounds –
missed the mist in the
air there tumbling
over the western sky
lifelong
rush tumbling of
climate end of peace

That last line of that excerpt, “climate end of peace,” is as ambiguous as it is poignant.  The reader can see the poet’s gesture towards political commentary, in the same way that – in other fragments of the same poem – the promise of intimacy is quickly dispelled by the use of open-ended language:

got a cup of coffee
for the pleasure of
keeping up with you
no solemnity
a day
worthy and shopworn

The texture of Lepson’s poems reminds one of Duncan’s spare, sharp lines that release small clusters of thought. It was Duncan who reminded us that poetry itself “feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse,” very much like what we see in Lepson’s work, where those strands – thought, feeling, impulse – are readily visible.

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3.

Reading Duncan, Creeley, and – now – Lepson, one is strangely reminded of pointillism. This, of course, raises the question: Can language, poetic language in particular, be equated with pointillism? I leave that for another study. Here my focus is not on the very act/process of creating images from dots, but on the subsequent subliminal impact of said image (as an assemblage of individual dots).

Once complete, a pointillist piece, elegant or not, finds itself competing for attention with the very process that brought it into existence. We are, for me in particular, fascinated by the amalgamation of simple color-dots. To see the image, therefore, is to see the whole dots at once; and to see the whole is to acknowledge the presence of individual dots. And this happens automatically, subliminally.

Consider Morning, Interior, Maximilien Luce’s painting of Gustave Perrot. While you see Perrot getting dressed – the morning light streaming in – you also see the collage of unique dots that form the image. There are, therefore, two images at once, though one stands out as the image. What the neo-impressionist does with colors, dots, and divisions, language poets and their descendants do with words. Lepson finds herself nestled, innovatively, between late modernist and early post-modernist aesthetic, at once accessible yet full of controlled inbetweenness.

Lepson is not an easy poet, I must add. This, however, does not imply complete abstraction or a deliberate obscuration in the name of style. In fact, there are poems where she remains accessible, dwelling on a single theme, nonetheless transitioning between moods. This is more visible in her new collection’s final poem, “we’re all small,” a piece for her dear friend and mentor, Robert Creeley:

really, creeley?

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were you alive

.

at one time

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who visits your burial site

.

I do … so do

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.

lots of others were you

.

merry – impossible query –

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complex as a bee

.

and a flower simultaneously

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.

you had it all still

.

lingering in sadness sometimes

.

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only one eye … with it

.

saw like a salamander

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with your existential why

.

bye bye I say it over and over

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I ask if you enjoy
the english landscape in

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mt auburn cemetery

.

where we walk and where

.

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they put you on tour

.

even in death

.

you’re on the tour

.

my my[11]

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4.

To the newcomer to Lepson’s poetry, I say two things: start from her recent volume, but be sure to read the rest. Then go to Creeley, Duncan, and Levertov.

— Timothy Ogene

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Timothy Ogene
Author photo by Claire MacKenzie

Timothy Ogene was born in Nigeria, but has since lived in Liberia, Germany, the US, and the UK. His poems and stories have appeared in Tincture Journal, Numéro Cinq, One Throne Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Tahoma Literary Review, The Missing Slate, Stirring, Kin Poetry Journal, Mad Swirl, Blue Rock Review, aaduna, and other places. He holds a first degree in English and History from St. Edward’s University and a master’s in World Literatures in English from the University of Oxford, and he is currently completing a master’s in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. His first novel, The Day Ends Like Any Day, is scheduled for publication in April 2017.

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Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 12.↵
  2. See http://ruthlepson.com/biography.↵
  3. Ruth Lepson, ‘knowledge in black,’ ask anyone (New York: Pressed Wafer, 2015), 25.↵
  4. Ibid. 24-25.↵
  5. Ibid. 26.↵
  6. Ruth Lepson, ‘Collage,’ Dreaming in Color (Cambridge: Alice James Books, 1980), 53.↵
  7. Ruth Lepson, ‘Love Poem,’ Dreaming in Color (Cambridge: Alice James Books, 1980), 25.↵
  8. Ruth Lepson and Walter Crump, Morphology (New York: BlazeVOX, 2007), 2.↵
  9. The shapes were arranged in collaboration with Christina Strong.↵
  10. Op. Cit. Lepson, Morphology 111.↵
  11. Ruth Lepson, ‘we’re all small,’ ask anyone (New York: Pressed Wafer, 2015), 68.↵

Dr. Griffitt’s Ginkgo | Poems — Maura Stanton

Mar 042017
 

maura-stanton-500px

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Fog Walker

…….misread rain blurred flyer

Trust me. I’m one who loves all fogs—
misty, yellow, blue, rolling or grey—
I’ll walk your fog down busy thoroughfares
at any hour, clean up its wet messes,
pull it away from streetlamps and hydrants
but let it sniff around in the shrubbery
or blow its light breath against a window.
Some of the shaggy ones like to lumber ahead,
while others twine and shiver around my ankles.
Some squat stubbornly on lawns, others gallop
so I have to run to catch up with them.
I’m experienced. I’ve chased the big ones
rolling down mountain valleys, or huffing ashore
to slobber a coastline. I like the challenge
of herding something that doesn’t have a shape,
that lets me step right through its middle
and walk inside it instead of beside it.
I used to live down in my parents’ basement
playing video games for hours but now I’m out
in the damp air with my wispy charges
floating around me, obscuring the treetops
or stretching themselves across a ravine.
Tear off my phone number from the bottom.
For a small fee, I’ll also feed your fog
so while you’re at work it won’t get anxious
roaming your apartment stripped to the basics
since your ex-wife left with the two kids.
Stay in your cubicle, eat another doughnut.
I’ll walk your fog until it gets so weary
it barely billows over the park’s swing set
where you used to push your kids on weekends.
I work all hours, but I prefer the dawn.
You’ll hear me out there with my jingling leash
tugging at dangerous fogs that loom and rush
across the country roads where drivers speed.

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Crooked Ruler

This ruler’s crooked—see!
It’s thin warped wood.
Lie it flat—no matter—
The line I draw is curved.

I plucked it from a bin
full of look-a-like rulers
so I could draw some columns
down the edge of a budget

and now I’m stuck with it.
Bold inches mark one side,
while centimeters like eyelashes
are painted on the other.

I could snap it in two pieces
but maybe I’ll adjust.
Inch by inch you can’t tell
and it measures scantlings.

It’s only wrong by the foot—
when you try for a straight line
you’ll end up with an orbit
pulling you out of plumb

like a promising politician
harmless as a candidate
whose trajectory turns oblique
once voted into office.

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Dr. Griffitt’s Ginkgo

Andersonville Prison Camp, Georgia

What was that slender tree, the leaves aglow
And rustling through the stench like ladies’ fans?
He nursed the Union soldiers starving in rows–
Slopped gruel against parched lips, held dying hands.

Marched out beyond the palisade, his wrists
Roped, his ankles chained, he gaped, amazed
At the golden tree, how it managed to persist,
Its bright leaves glittering through the smoky haze.

Untied to shovel clay for the mass grave,
He stooped for a leaf. The guard’s whip burned.
He vowed–if he survived–someday to return
And thank the tree for the fierce way it gave

Him hope that the unlikely might be true—
You could flourish even here, eat shit, drink dew.

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Roses in the Rain

All night the roses
Delivered too late
Held their poses
Under the lightweight
Florist wrap.
Left by the door
After a brief rap
That everyone swore
They hadn’t heard,
The roses I sent
Could speak no word
Of sentiment
As they grew chill
On the front stoop
While my mother, ill,
Sipped her hot soup
And the cat on her bed,
That heard the rap,
Curled back in the spread
To finish his nap,
And my sisters whirled
Out the back way,
Umbrellas unfurled
For the cold, dark day.

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Shadow Tissue

……….for Sharon

My sister finds a note pinned to her door
and tries to puzzle out handwritten words
part French, part English. She knows it’s a complaint.
But shadow tissue? That phrase is English.
She shows the note to waiters who just shrug.
No help from dictionaries so she tweets,
and followers love it, this shadow tissue.
It glows on screens, and slips into the mouth—
some like to whisper it on long commutes.
And isn’t it better not to understand?
Think sea foam, think clouds over the sea,
think the ineffable—that’s shadow tissue.

At last the note writer knocks on the door
and points to shadow tissue. It’s the awning.
The rain runs down the faded, striped canvas,
wetting the neighbor’s terrace just below
whenever it’s unrolled after a storm. . .
“please be careful opening shadow tissue.”
My sister agrees, and now that she’s back home,
she tells me her story about shadow tissue,
how she still loves the phrase—shorn of mystery.

But no, here it is, she’s passed it on to me,
light as a cloak stored inside a thimble,
a substance so right and strange that I tremble
as I unfold shadow tissue like a scientist
about to discover one of nature’s secrets.
How lovely, I think, as it flutters up
and drifts across the room in light-filled waves,
for this is surely the meaning of meaning,
shadow tissue, what it all comes down to—
if I can only grasp how it’s put together,
these shining lengths, these gauzy swatches,
so definite, yet impossible to wear.

—Maura Stanton

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Maura Stanton’s first book of poetry, Snow On Snow, was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and published in 1975. She has published five other books of poetry, Cries of Swimmers (Utah 1984), Tales of the Supernatural (Godine 1988), Life Among the Trolls (Carnegie Mellon 1998), Glacier Wine (Carnegie Mellon 2002) and Immortal Sofa (University of Illinois 2008), as well as a novel and three books of short stories. Her poems and stories have appeared in Southwest Review, Antioch Review, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, New England Review, River Styx, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review and many other magazines and anthologies. She has won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, an O’Henry Award, the Supernatural Fiction Award from TheGhostStory.com and the Nelson Algren Award from The Chicago Tribune. Her poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily and the BBC radio program Words and Music. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

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The Poetry of Antimetathesis: Essay — Yannis Livadas

Mar 042017
 

Yannis-Livadas 480px

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An adventure that you can neither embark on nor finish. You are, therefore, under duress, even within the illusion of a borderline, evergreen clearing. All you need do is work. Wanting to and, at the same time, not. By a causality that’s not a matter of will. It is a matter of principle. That principle instantaneously gives rise to a will by means of which you are liberated from the principle. You go up in the world, you gain faith, but you mainly take pleasure in losing more than you could possibly have lost.

To stand before chaos “out of which everything emerges,” you need to live in the present, not simply to relate to the present as one aspect of a descriptive system. Poetry is not framed by a narrative but by the poetic capacity and, therefore, by the poetic nature. It does not make sense through the absorbing of the shock of some kind of rhetoric or schematic ploy (which is the exact opposite of the shock created by the content, irrespectively of form) nor with the citing of chosen stylistic consequences. Even, that is, if you stand before chaos, you are at a disadvantage in relation to the one who eventuates, who continually emerges out of chaos. The present which assimilates the future.

Parthenogenesis does not exist, although “parthenophany,” the pretension of virginity, does. You go to sleep being the one and you wake up being the other. Nor will there be an outcome if you do not conceive why you went to sleep as well as why you opened your eyes again. You may close them once more.

Yet, what the thing is that one needs to depend on what you do or (predicated by a short-lived “unfortunately”) what you count on doing. By what penetration does the need ensue for this discussion? Is there more significant priority than the ability of mental penetrating, that is, revelation? Why be concerned with parthenogenesis when there is nothing virginal around? Since we presume nothing virginal has existed apart from what was created in order to concede the virginity of its reality.

So, then, how can the poetic revelations matter, since even a minute before you experienced them, you were a mere novice? And a novice every time, for the umpteenth time. Does this phenomenon make the poetic awe lesser or greater? This is also a state of virginity. A figure of poetic speech, or a statement in a poetic way, the sense of which is indebted, which may only exist as a trope, waiting in line to be shocked at yet a deeper level, in order to become dimensional and substantial. Even the foolishness of advanced experience could support more importance, where all these facts may sound amusing, where nothing is heard while one could be longing for a break of poetic silence. The so-called absent preexists. Poetry forges the senses into consciousness though not as metals. As molecules of air. Winged words of empty promises issuing out of ignorance.

Essence or beauty, depending on how you name the supremacy of the sacred, has been portrayed in words through the endless wandering in the alleys or the highways of basic notions, and the consecutive reading of such notions. These alleys and highways gradually become chains of the poetic naturalness. The real poetic erections are stretching these chains. If the chains do not resound, it means that the poet neglects or breaches his naturalness. When such a thing happens, all the traits of the basic notions, of the poetic state (that is, the void), dismiss its meaning, dismiss the inner bond with what is humane in poetry.

Then comes a pandemic of idle info-lovers, who invent pre-approved confrontations in order to use them as literary “ideologies.” Beguiling insinuations of a foundation under fate’s feet; that is why noble rivalry is so rare nowadays.

The more poetry resigns to itself, especially for no specific reason, the more it is empowered. The more it is recreated thanks to the providence of poets, the more the poets belong to the Arcanum. The poet illegitimately enacts his deadly nature so as to become a newborn crucial dead; i.e. deriving from within his poetic essence, not concerning his essence.

What is born is condemned to death and to being absorbed by the newly born. The newly born is more specifically regulated by death. The newly born is the exchange value of death. Life, is the daemon – poetry, is the teaching of the absolute nullity. The irreversible perforation of what has been poetically affirmed by those who are still spendable.

I observe an immense difficulty in the intellectual movements of most of the people who write poetry, a difficulty within flow. That difficulty is very important. Yet it can’t be dealt with by writing poetry. Poems may be created once people have become attuned with flow. In a similar manner, man can return to a developmental trajectory, to a tradition which, despite the rough patches, won’t be the heralded dystopia but some other, less preordained future necessity.

The fate of poetry rests with the fact that it doesn’t need to seek assessments of its testimony. Only human degradation requires something of that sort, since it itself constitutes the dominant factor, which claims to be transcendence: the labor of Sisyphus, but without the rock and the landscape. Where speech is not born out of transcendence, a macabre dismemberment intervenes. Everything crawls, everything is fragmented and scuttles away to form layers in the outer extremities

Most contemporary poets say, or imply that, they have conquered the ways of poetry, so everything can function as a prototype, everything can fend off the stereotype. Luckily though, the time of the signifying insinuation has been and gone, when it was occasionally expressed through the artful deterrence of paying extreme attention to it; as long as one is nowadays knowledgeable about the dichotomy between the mirror and the mirrored, so as to create poems rather than massify. Might as well, then, consider the plot of this story finished, along with all the rest of these disturbing facts; unless some imbecilic craving for legitimacy turns us into “chatterboxes of the universe.”

One of the typical forms of foulness of those pretending to be poets is the persistence of dishonest empiricism. Instead of decollectivizing and transforming concepts, they merely revise them. Essentialists, dedicated to the martyrdom of their monophonic identification with poetic practice, are not poets, even though their texts be considered “poems.” The subjugation of difference lends cohesion to their views, that is, the tendency to assimilate everything, the sacred offspring of fanaticism imposed via misrecognitions. In most of their writing, those far from naive petty tyrants care mainly about one thing: the condition of their self-definition in a construction of words.

They have given up life and are doing art, which is why they have neither. The texts are written to play the part of a bribed juror. The outcry of people who deserve an outcry. Criticism by people who need criticism. An attempt to enlarge the mouth that silently gapes so that it appears to swallow everything up, so that the subjugation can appear benevolent; so the spirit can be fettered at goodwill.

Yet, being right, just like being wrong, is a macabre means of consent in that those who bow to their spiritual tyrant (whether that is oneself or another) have also worked hard to establish him in power. Because although the process of denudement can often be understood, the denudement itself cannot.

Poetry is middleness, as much chaos as it mediates order. It only offers what is lacking and it is defined by the abolition of the dilemmas of creativity. The definition of poetry is fluid and risky, resembling its nature. The way of its attainment is equally fluid and risky because although poetry is a permanent thing, it avails itself of contingencies, through which it is sought and out of which, simultaneously, it proceeds.

Poetry is not a theory about things, or a danger-free method for approaching things. It is a non-theory: a practice, a structure and, alongside these, some, at least, of their records. The constitution of a poetic subject is possible only as an intervention. Imagination rather than philosophy. Wisdom rather than morality.

A text without qualms is the clear imprint of a person. A text full of qualms, that is to say a text that casts shadows on its own naturalness and serves up the imprint of someone else, though it may find easy acknowledgement and recognition, is nobody’s imprint. This evasion of an imprint gets a response through the readers’ already formed habit of being supportive towards imitation, copying, towards what is a permissible, i.e., widely acceptable. This is particularly the case when the “poems” are by the hand of a “specialist.” The text will be received as major because it will be satisfactorily occupied by the readers’ generic truths and, also, will full-heartedly contribute to the ongoing barrage of likeminded individuals.

If an imprint exists, it will wake up in the reader the consciousness of existence, which, as long as I find out, is neither pleasant nor desirable. It will automatically strand the reader without supporters or allies in the quagmires of information and sociability. And if a desire for an imprint manifests itself, it happens to the extent that the reader is allowed to control the text through his own way of thinking, so that, in case of emergency, i.e. when he comes face to face with poetry, there is always an escape hatch available.

But how can an antimetathesis[1] in the void work with anything that pales before the void? Even a remarkable style will come undone if it does not remain exposed to the forces that fuel it. Just like, for instance, an implication or an allusion can very well come to reliably augur boundless sentimentality if it fails to discern that honesty is the summit of transformation. Honesty forces you to address others only if you have already addressed the most dangerous otherness, yourself.

Almost everyone thinks that poetry is a buoying encounter of subjectivities, a transcultural narrative of existing encounters, yet that is not the case. If it were, the art of poetry couldn’t be the carefree endeavor which continually advances the unattainable; in contrast to strictly academic writing, slam poetry, hip hop ranting, poetry committed to ideologies, adherent movements, etc.

All kinds of accentuations reveal the extent of the familiarization which besets human nous: the familiarization with the thing represented, which stands for familiarity, of both the accentuation and the aforementioned division of the roles that are necessary for discharge; the intermezzo, the predetermined recycling of the entire phenomenon.

At a time when original, individual poetry, affects a non-ideological anarchism; it reveals the conjunction of aesthetics and ethos (which are the same thing) in the void. It enjoins without confusing and it distinguishes without dividing. A live address to what has escaped the notice.

—Yannis Livadas

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Yannis Livadas  is a Greek poet, born in 1969. His work constitutes the idea of experimentalism based on “organic antimetathesis” — the scaling indeterminacy of meaning, of syntactic comparisons and structural contradistinction. He is also an editor, essayist, translator of more than fifty books of American poetry and prose, and an independent scholar with specialization in American modern and postmodernism literature, plus haiku. He contributes to various literary magazines, both in Greece and other countries. His poems and essays have been translated into eight languages. He lives in Paris, France.

This essay is an excerpt from his book Anaptygma: Essays and Notes on Poetry (Koukoutsi Books, 2015).

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Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Ιnversion of the organic antithesis.↵

Elle on Tour | “Required viewing for anyone who wants to catch up on Canadian history” @ Metro Winnipeg

Mar 022017
 

Severn Thompson as Elle.

Here’s yet another news item out of Winnipeg where Elle, the play, is currently enjoying a three-week run (through to March 12).

The latest play at the Prairie Theatre Exchange is required viewing for anyone who wants to catch up on Canadian history usually shrouded in shadows. Elle is a touring production from Toronto-based Theatre Passe Muraille.

Severn Thompson stars as the titular character and Jonathan Fisher features in a supporting role. Thompson adapted the play from Douglas Glover’s 2003 novel of the same name.

“I discovered (the story) from a book in my grandmother’s bookshelf. It had won the Governor General’s prize, but I had somehow missed that in 2003,” Thompson said in an interview Tuesday.

“When I finally read it, it just was illuminating to me of a time in history that I thought was fairly – hmm, I don’t want to be rude – but fairly dull from my memory of early school days,” she said, laughing.

Source: Toronto play ‘Elle’ illuminates atypical colonizer-colonized roles | Metro Winnipeg

The Erotics of Restraint, or the Angel in the Novel: A Note on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park | Douglas Glover @ The Brooklyn Rail

Mar 022017
 

I have a new essay out in The Brooklyn Rail this morning, the upshot of an epic obsession, which has riddled my writing style with semicolons and taught me the value of plot triangles. Much gratitude to Wayne Hankey for his marvelous essay “Conversion: Ontological & Secular from Plato to Tom Jones (NC, July, 2014),” which introduced me to the word “kenotic” in regard to Fanny Price, to Laura Michele Diener, who taught me the meaning of “apophatic,” and to Jacob Glover for talking me through the ins and outs of absolutist ethics. You see, it was very much a Numéro Cinq co-production, though the obsession was all mine.

Here’s the closing section. Read the rest at The Brooklyn Rail.

What is truly paradoxical in Mansfield Park is the way it reaches beyond its satire on the marriage customs of Regency England, beyond the conventions of the romantic comedy, and beyond even its theological torque to tell a very modern story about the construction of a self. Much like Wolf’s Christa T., Fanny forges her self not in any positive way but in resisting imperatives, the forms imposed on her by her society and the gaze of the individuals around her. She is not simply a passive character; she is symbolic, fused with theme. I don’t want to, I can’t act, I won’t do that—Fanny Price’s refrain. She defines what action is by not acting. She defines morality by refusing to act.

The climax of Fanny’s non-plot is the sequence of scenes after the ball when she steadfastly persists in refusing to marry Henry Crawford. The fact that she cannot tell anyone that she loves Edmund, least of all Edmund himself, who is obstinately smitten with Mary, makes her appear irrationally stubborn. She remains cagey about her distrust of Henry. She can’t tell Sir Thomas about it at all; she confides in Mary (discreetly) and Edmund (explicitly), but Mary passes Henry’s flirtations off as harmless, and Edmund, too, minimizes Henry’s faults and suggests that time will prove his constancy (weasel words).

Above all, Fanny cannot escape their watchful, measuring eyes. Fanny is alternately cajoled, coerced, bludgeoned, and sent into exile, but she remains true to her principles. She is the poor, underclass cousin who has never stood up for herself before; but in these chapters she asserts herself against every authority, including the wishes of the man she loves. She even makes a speech (unique for Fanny) in which she enunciates what might be called the novel’s quintessential moral (in a novel full of moral discrimination).

“I should have thought,” said Fanny, after a pause of recollection and exertion, “that every woman must have felt the possibility of a man’s not being approved, not being loved by someone of her sex, at least, let him be ever so agreeable. Let him have all the perfections in the world, I think it ought not to be set down as certain, that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself. (292)

This speech reads like a feminist call to arms; those sentiments certainly existed. It asserts Fanny’s right of self-determination, and in the context of the novel, this radical selfhood stands against the ubiquitous dogma of property, propriety, income, estates, inheritance, class, and rank. By extension, it claims for any individual the right of refusal in the face of what the world offers. The basis of self is apophatic: the ability to say, I am not that, and I am not that either. What the world offers is contingent, mired in circumstance, calculation, and history, rated by pre-existing discourses (habits, traditions, forms). The soul proceeds by denial. Its struggle is less a matter of knowing itself as essence than of knowing when it is not itself. Sorting and discarding the trivia of life is the existential duty of the modern.

That Fanny (and the novel) can’t quite live up to this transcendent declaration is a sign of the tension that exists between Austen’s inspiration, the time in which she wrote, and her preferred genre, the romantic comedy. Fanny must marry Edmund Bertram despite the fact that as Edmund himself concedes, she is “too good for him.” Even the narrator is only dimly celebratory about the upshot.

With so much true merit and true love, and no want of fortune and friends, the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be.

This passage is sometimes construed as Austen’s ironic commentary on the romance genre or the institution of marriage. But we must wait another 150 years for a manifest critique of that ending in the form of John Fowles’s novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman in which the author offers readers the possibility, among others, that the disgraced, impoverished, abandoned female lead might continue to exist on her own and even prosper. When her lover finally appears after a gap of years, she remains cool, aloof – inviolable; she has her own life and no need of rescuing by a man.

Read the entire essay at The Brooklyn Rail: “The Erotics of Restraint, or the Angel in the Novel: A Note on Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park by Douglas Glover.

Uimhir a Cúig | Bad Weather Days: Memoir — Amanda Bell

Mar 012017
 

Amanda Bell

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When my grandparents retired they built a house in Mayo. It was tucked into the purple-veined crook of Lurgan’s elbow, gazing down over Lough Conn, with Nephin Beg rising up to the left – its mist-swathed summit a reasonably accurate gauge of the weather sweeping down towards the lake. If the top third of the mountain was hidden in cloud or mist it was a sure sign of good weather. ‘Good’ weather was showery and overcast, with a stiff but not too strong breeze – perfect fishing weather. Bad weather, on the other hand, was hot, still and sunny, peachy-scented with blossom, the air full of the sound of grasshoppers scraping and the sporadic popping of dry sun-ripened gorse pods spitting their black seeds outwards in ever-increasing circles. On bad weather days even the dogs were too hot to go rabbit hunting, instead throwing themselves down in exhausted hairy heaps in the shade of the porch with their pink tongues melting in coils beside them.

1. Nephin MountainNephin mountain 

‘Try and make those stupid dogs drink’, my grandmother would say. ‘They’ll get dehydrated’, and I would sprinkle drops of water onto their tongues for a while, watching their sides heave and their tails wag languorously. Because bad weather days were good for nothing else they were usually designated work days – days for brambling in the herb bed where my grandmother grew parsley and dill, cutting wood to thin the surrounding hedgerows, stripping and painting boats, or raking the gravel around the house. Such days usually ended in a barbecue. When evening fell we would congregate at the back of the house, sit on seats made out of old wine casks, and boast about our aching muscles, smearing ourselves with midge-repellent, and my grandfather, in his blue and white striped apron, would cook the dinner. Usually he barbequed steak, which he served with mushroom sauce – ‘grandpa’s special’. The recipe was a secret and only I, his pet lamb, was allowed to accompany him to the kitchen and watch while he sliced little piles of mushrooms, turned them in buttery meat juices in a pan, scraped the bottom with some brandy, and added a stream of cream and some white wine; other times he cooked fish, pink trout wrapped in tin foil. Mine would always be opened for me, the firm flesh peeled away from the bones and the steaming slippery skins thrown out onto the grass for the dogs.

Amanda Bell and daughter near summit of Mount Nephin_1Amanda Bell and daughter near the summit of Mount Nephin

One bad weather day, tired of brambling and of splashing water onto the dogs, I decided to help my grandfather, who was building a boat-house. This boat-house was to be built half-way up the lane, and would have a lean-to shed at the side for stacked logs and turf. I had watched my grandfather drawing the plans for it himself. Now he was working on the foundations, and would have to go down to the boat bay. The boat bay was where we kept our two boats – the blue one and the orange one. The women preferred the orange one because they could see it easily through the window with binoculars, and know when to put the dinner on. The men preferred the blue one because the fish couldn’t see it from the bottom of the lake, and so they caught more.

The boat bay was fringed with hazel scrub and thorn trees, and purple loosestrife and blue scabious grew in the coarse yellow sand. It was a very good place to catch grasshoppers and daddy-long-legs for dapping, and because I was small and moved quietly I was the champion hopper-catcher.

‘Mummy’, I called, running to where she lay reading in a deck chair, ‘I’m going down to the boat bay with grandpa, can I wear my yellow dress?’ The dress had been a present from my brother when he came home from the hospital, a thank you for letting him be born and an apology for distracting my parents’ full attention from me. It had a flared skirt and the bodice was ruched with elastic cross-stitches and dotted with tiny rosebuds of pink and green cotton. For a second the thought of washing the dress yet again flickered in her eyes, but Dr Spock’s advice about not alienating your first-born won out and she came into the house with me, leaving her book spread-eagled on the dusty canvas of the striped deck chair. I wriggled as she pulled the dress over my head, blinked while she caught my hair back in a slide to keep it out of my eyes. Then I tore up the drive, gravel shooting up from beneath my feet, shouting ‘I’m ready now, let’s go.’

Author 1971-72 doorway 480pxAuthor 1971 or 1972 

My grandfather opened the car door and I climbed in gingerly, careful not to let the sun-heated leather car seats burn my thighs or crease my skirt. I loved sitting in the front of the car – they never let me do it at home, only on holidays, because everyone drove slowly and there were no other cars around, only old tractors, rusty red with no safety frames. When we arrived at the boat bay I did a tour to see if I could find any dragonflies, then came back to supervise my grandfather as he threw shovelfuls of sand into the trailer, stopping occasionally to light a Players from the butt of its predecessor. My grandfather even smoked in his sleep. His pillowcases were patterned with brown-rimmed holes from the occasions when he’d failed to wake up in time to take the narrow pillars of ash from his lips and extinguish them in the scorch-marked scallop-shell on his bedside table. My grandmother had long since moved into a separate bedroom for fear of being set on fire. This year, I was allowed to share my grandfather’s bedroom because the baby was in with my parents. I loved it. We stayed awake late to listen to the long-range weather forecast and I watched him blow slow, looping smoke-rings towards the ceiling without taking his eyes off his book. He was a better smoker than my uncles, and his hands were yellower. I preferred cigarettes to cigars, or the cheroots my father smoked.

The author Pontoon 1972The author at Pontoon, 1972

They made his breath sour when he kissed you good night, and in the car it made you sick – worse than reading. My grandfather always asked about what you were reading. Our beds stretched out side by side with the bedside locker and his scallop-shell in between. I went to bed before him, because the grown-ups stayed up after dinner to play bridge, but I always stayed awake waiting for him. To undress he sat on the side of the bed furthest from me, his back turned, and slipped off his trousers and long white drawers while still seated, then pulled on his baggy pyjamas and buttoned them up before turning around and getting under the covers. The blankets smelt musty sometimes, if it had been cold and the radiators weren’t on, but in summer they were fine. I lay in my bed just like he did, with my book leaning on my thighs, and concentrated very hard on watching him smoke. I loved to watch the ash slowly lengthening and bending in his lips, waiting until it was just about to fall. ‘Grandad’ I’d whisper, thinking he was asleep. Then his eyes would snap open, watery blue without his glasses, and he’d take the butt between finger and thumb and lower it to the shell. An inch of ash usually fell on the carpet. ‘Just having a little think,’ he’d murmur, ‘not asleep yet. Good night pet lamb.’ Then he’d turn off the bedside light and we’d go to sleep.

Author's grandfather and brother collecting turfAuthor’s grandfather and brother collecting turf

When the trailer was fully loaded and the sand slid in tiny streams over its edges we got back into the car and drove back onto the road and up the lane towards the house. ‘Let me out here – I’ll race you.’ The hot leather scorched my legs as I slipped down and out the door. The lane was planted with tiny gorse bushes to either side, which my grandmother had transplanted from big thickets in the field – they were small enough to jump over. The blossoms smelt like peaches but they were too thickly surrounded by prickles to pick, unless you had gardening gloves and secateurs anyway. My mother said that we were lucky to have orchids in the field, but we mustn’t pick them because it took four years for them to flower again. I skipped along beside the car, hopping in and out of the field, singing to myself ‘red and yellow and pink and green…’ I leapt high into the air with each word to see my skirt balloon out around me as I descended, jumping higher each time to see how full I could make it spread. I could see my father’s bare back over the hedge where was sawing planks for the boat-house. It was shiny with sweat. In the car my grandfather had begun to gain on me now – even the trailer was ahead. I stopped my leaping and ran as fast as I could, till I was even with the end of the car, overtook it, strained to run faster still, then my shoe hit a stone and I fell headlong over the tow bar. The lane was bouncing up towards my face – baked clay to either side, clover in the middle, sheets of dried and flattened cow dung matting blades of grass together.

The author and her brother_1The author and her brother

I hung on tightly – my ribs crushed against the bar. I heard my father roar, then the car stopped and everyone came running, their sun-pink flesh bouncing, their mouths big black Os. I felt my grandfather catch me under the armpits and lift me off the bar but without looking at him I broke away and ran, over the gorse bushes, around the cattle-grid, and into the house. The tangle of dogs in the porch scattered, yelping in surprise, as I ran through them, down the corridor, not into our bedroom but into my parents’ room. I slammed the door behind me and crawled in under the cot with my eyes closed and my heart racing until I heard voices in the corridor. They murmured for a while, then the door opened and my father came into the room, eased me out from under the cot, lifted me up, and held me gently against his shiny shoulder. The hairs on his chest were matted with sweat and the cheroot smoke smell was hardly noticeable. He sat down on the bed and rocked me for a while, then took off my hair slide, which hung loosely near the end of a strand of hair, smoothed my hair behind my ear and replaced the slide. Then he asked me to come with him and apologise to my grandfather for frightening him. But I was the one who was frightened, so frightened that I didn’t want to see anyone, just stay in the bedroom until bedtime and then it would be tomorrow and it would be a good weather day and the men would go fishing and I’d stay in and watch the rain patterns on the window and do jigsaws with my mother, or we’d put on wellies and go out looking for flowers to pick, or maybe collect some eggs from the neighbour in my little blue bucket, and everything would be the way it always was.

4. Mayo roadMayo Road

But no, I had to go to the living room, because my grandfather was very, very upset, and I had to say sorry, so he’d know that I was alright.

We went to the living room hand-in-hand. My grandfather was in his chair by the fire – it was a tall-backed easy chair with a badly strung seat, and a little tray with spring-fasteners attached to the arm for balancing glasses and ashtrays. The fire wasn’t lit because it was bad weather. My mother smiled at me from across the room – she was pouring him a gin and tonic. My father pushed me gently forward and I climbed onto my grandfather’s knee, mumbling a barely audible apology with my chin down on my chest. I could see the rusty mark the tow-bar had left across the middle of my yellow dress. ‘There there pet lamb, that’s alright now,’ he said. But his blue eyes were looking out the window towards the lake, and that night in bed he kept them open while he thought, and he listened to the radio way after I’d fallen asleep, tipping his ash on the scallop shell.

—Amanda Bell

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Amanda Bell’s collection Undercurrents, a psychogeography of Irish rivers in haiku and haibun, was published by Alba Publishing in 2016. Her illustrated children’s book, The Lost Library Book, will be published this spring by The Onslaught Press, and a debut poetry collection, First the Feathers, is forthcoming from Doire Press. She is the editor of The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work: An Anthology of Poetry by the Hibernian Writers (Alba Publishing, 2015) and Maurice Craig: Photographs (Lilliput, 2011). Amanda is currently completing a middle-grade econovel. She works as a freelance editor and indexer. www.clearasabellwritingservices.ie/publications/

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Top of the Page

Mar 012017
 

In  the slider at the top of the page this month, we are featuring creative nonfiction selections from the magazine’s vast archives picked by the indispensable Laura Michele Diener (look her up: essays, reviews and her scintillating letter from Florence). In keeping with the magazine’s eclectic approach to creative nonfiction, Laura Michele’s choices are astonishingly diverse. But she’s found some gems: a Christmas sermon by Hilary Mullins, Melissa Fisher’s prize-winning “My First Job” essay, Natalia Sarkissian’s haunting photo essay on the annual Feast of Sacrifice in Alexandria, Egypt, Mark Jay Mirsky on reading Dante, Genese Grill’s essay on Italy and meaning (with illustrations), Domenic Stansberry on Leonard Gardner and his novel Fat City and Diana Whitney’s lovely essay “Kissing.”

NC Senior Editor Fernando Sdrigotti has a story collection out today

Feb 282017
 

Our eminent and irrepressible senior editor, Fernando Sdrigotti, has a new book out today! A collection of stories entitled Dysfunctional Males. With La Casite Grande Editores. Here’s the publisher copy:

Dysfunctional Males is a collection of five short stories set in contemporary London.

A satirical critique of the weaknesses and obsessions of the ‘stronger sex’, this ambitious work of fiction focuses on the misadventures of its characters to explore life and alienation in a contemporary megalopolis.

At times uproarious, at others pathetic and dark, the fables in the collection share a distinctive atmosphere beyond fantasy and realism, inviting readers to take part in an onward flight that could land them anywhere.

Check out the publisher’s website: Dysfunctional Males by Fernando Sdrigotti — La Casita Grande Editores

What’s in the magic box? | Numéro Cinq’s March Issue Preview

Feb 252017
 

Ceramic box by Michel Pastore

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I’m calling this issue the Magic Box, Numéro Cinq‘s magic box issue, mostly because I am so taken by the image above, a ceramic box by the Swiss artist (and fashion designer) Michel Pastore. Pastore, together with his partner Evelyne Porret, are a truly remarkable duo. They live on an oasis outside of Cairo, where they operate their studio and a ceramics school and live in exotic splendor. We have a ton of images from their desert hideaway, stunning objets d’art that are both utilitarian and dreamy, fantastic shapes and colouring. All courtesy of Rikki Ducornet, who knows the couple well.

But to paraphrase the excerpt from Agustín Fernández Mallo’s poem below, inside a box there is always another box, and another, and another…

Even I am astonished and the depth and variety in this issue.

Ceramics artists Michel Pastore & Evelyne Porret

Pastore/Porret house and studio at Fayoum, outside of Cairo

Rikki Ducornet

And from Rikki herself, an essay on Gnosticism, a dramatized evocation of the beginning of everything and the light.

Attempt to imagine – and the task is futile – an absence, as when the night sky is empty of her moon, of moonshine, of stars, of starlight. Imagine a void in which you are without purchase (there is no place to stand); a night as unfathomable as a pool of ink (there is no pool, no ink) in which the vast firmament has dissolved. There is nothing but absence. (And you, the one who attempts this imagining, are nowhere to be seen.) —Rikki Ducornet

Kelly Cherry

Kelly Cherry sent us a story with a promising title — “Burning the Baby” — of course, we’re publishing it. And more.

The constant sun enervates. Yes, night still arrives, but one’s skin is burnt so bad that sores appear on arms, legs, and bald heads. People give up on clothes, abandon their garments, for it is too painful to wear them. Everyone gives up. —Kelly Cherry

Carlos Fonseca

And something truly special, writer/translator Jessica Sequeira interviews Costa Rican/Puerto Rican novelist Carlos Fonseca on his brilliant novel Colonel Lágrimas.

Then again, you can never escape your obsessions. So the novel ended up addressing some of the ideas that intrigued me at the time: the idea of a history as a giant museum, the inability to pass from thought to action, the Borgesian notion of history being reduced to a giant encyclopedia or archive. And then, there is also the story of how – as an adolescent – I wanted to be a mathematician. Perhaps, now that I think about it, the novel was a way of rethinking my past. —Carlos Fonseca

Jessica Sequeira

Ben Slotky

Also inside the box this month, we have new fiction from Ben Slotsky, recommended to us by no less than Curtis White.

Flow, content wording, prioritize critical information, establish a model and keep it. These are precepts, they are tenets. Processes, forms. You are not paying attention. It doesn’t matter. There is too much, a wave, a wash, and it is over, over, and you are gone. —Ben Slotky

James Joyce & Sean Preston

From East London, we have a short story by Sean Preston, ex-pro-wrestler (among other things).

She had her habits. One of them was buying cheap furniture from places that were so fucking far away, by the time you paid for travel to the ungodly zones of south-west London, you hadn’t really saved much money at all. —Sean Preston

Maura Stanton

And we have poems — and then MORE poems — wonderful poetry by Maura Stanton, Susan Elmslie, Fleda Brown (who has a new collection just out), and, from Spain, the legendary Agustín Fernández Mallo translated by Zachary Rockwell Ludington.

Trust me. I’m one who loves all fogs—
misty, yellow, blue, rolling or grey—
I’ll walk your fog down busy thoroughfares
at any hour, clean up its wet messes,
pull it away from streetlamps and hydrants
but let it sniff around in the shrubbery
or blow its light breath against a window.

……………………………………….—Maura Stanton

Agustín Fernández Mallo

Underneath this skin is another skin,
and under that another, and another, and another,
and thus, as many layers as you like, until n∊N→∞
antecenter of the center which is finite.
That center is the mask.

……………………………………….—Agustín Fernández Mallo

Susan ElmslieSusan Elmslie

After the chaos there is silence,
a failure of words but not of sound,
which we know travels in waves,
and the speed of which is still the distance
travelled per unit of time.

…………………………………….—Susan Elmslie

Fleda BrownFleda Brown

Good, the blatant coffin, the procession,
the undertaker, the taking under.
To turn a body to ash—I can see how
it flies in the face of full-on facing
how slow the earth means to be.

………………………..—Fleda Brown

J. M. Coetzee

Our Book Review Editor, the inimitable Jason DeYoung, reviews the latest from that other inimitable — J. M. Coetzee.

By the way, no one in this novel is clearly named or called Jesus. Only the title teases that one of the characters is—perhaps—the historical Jesus. Perhaps post crucifixion, perhaps not? Perhaps this isn’t the historical Jesus at all—perhaps Coetzee is  playing a game on us. Perhaps not. But the reader can’t help looking for parallels. —Jason DeYoung

Anne Hirondelle’s Aperture 14, 16″ x 16″

Anne Hirondelle returns to our pages with a mix of drawings and ceramics. Readers loved her work last time, and she has a new show just opened.

Anne Hirondelle working in studioAnne Hirondelle

Cynan Jones

Mark Sampson reviews Cynan Jones’ “otherwise dark, brooding, brutal and devastating” novella, in which ducks appear.

In The Long Dry, Jones writes very well about ducks, their sex lives, and their feces. In fact, if there were an International Literary Prize for Writing about Ducks, Their Sex Lives, and Their Feces, Jones would easily win it. These passages are moments of levity in an otherwise dark, brooding, brutal and devastating novel –Mark Sampson

Show Girl in Hollywood page

J P McEvoy still from Woman Accused 1933

Also we have from Steven Moore, a vastly detailed (lots of images) and fascinating essay on the protean, prolific and once famous “avant-pop” novelist-cartoonist-screenwriter J. P. McEvoy.

But literary historians have overlooked a novelist from the same decade who deployed these same formal innovations largely for comic rather than serious effect, adapting avant-garde techniques for mainstream readers instead of the literati. —Steven Moore

Steven Moore

Montaigne

Linda Chown is a new voice at the magazine. She’ll be back. But first this lively review of a new anthology of essays by Michel de Montaigne.

Repeatedly, Montaigne thinks of his efforts as flawed, monstrous or distorted. To become his reader, I have had to become a kind of ventriloquist engaged in an act of translation and projection, of time, genre, gender, language and many translations.  It was only when I found how uncertain, fearful and tentative he was that I could begin to write of him wholeheartedly. —Linda E. Chown

Linda E. Chown

Yannis Livadas

The Greek poet Yannis Livadas, whose poems have appeared on these pages in the past, returns with an essay on the theory and inspiration behind his experimental work.

What is born is condemned to death and to being absorbed by the newly born. The newly born is more specifically regulated by death. The newly born is the exchange value of death. Life, is the daemon – poetry, is the teaching of the absolute nullity. The irreversible perforation of what has been poetically affirmed by those who are still spendable. —Yannis Livadas

Amanda BellAmanda Bell

From Ireland this month, we have a beautiful and evocative Childhood memoir from Amanda Bell.

The boat bay was fringed with hazel scrub and thorn trees, and purple loosestrife and blue scabious grew in the coarse yellow sand. It was a very good place to catch grasshoppers and daddy-long-legs for dapping, and because I was small and moved quietly I was the champion hopper-catcher. —Amanda Bell

Timothy Ogene – photo by Claire MacKenzie

The Nigerian poet Timothy Ogene (whose poems have appeared here) has written an essay on the American poet Ruth Lepson (whose poems have appeared here).

In Lepson’s work, thought reveals itself in the choice and structural placement of words and, in other instances, a reluctance to carry an emotion to an expected end. The goal, it seems, is to create a binary that balances overt emotions with critical deliberations. —Timothy Ogene

Melissa Febos

And our own Carolyn Ogburn pens a rave review of Melissa Febos’ memoir Abandon Me.

I’m told if you score a bullet across its tip with a pocketknife, first lengthwise then across, your shot will penetrate its target cleanly, but ravage the organs inside. I thought of this when reading the blunt, clean prose of Melissa Febos in her new memoir, Abandon Me. —Carolyn Ogburn

But there is MORE!

Elle on Tour | Alternately comic, tragic, and bracingly primal — Winnipeg Free Press

Feb 242017
 

First review from the Winnipeg run, and it’s good. Go Severn!

What makes it work as well as it does is that Thompson puts the narrative inside her heroine’s head. She comes to this new country with a completely inadequate dictionary of Indian words written by Cartier himself. By the time she meets a real native, an Inuit hunter named Itslk (Jonathan Fisher), she achieves equilibrium with him because he understands the woman’s new lexicon of dreams and visions as well as he happens to understand French.

The upshot of the play an be glibly summarized: You don’t inhabit the land; the land inhabits you.

But that would diminish the richness of the work, and especially of the character, brought to vivid life by Thompson’s performance, alternately comic, tragic, and bracingly primal.

Read the rest: Fight for survival in 1542 – Winnipeg Free Press

Elle on Tour | Banished and left to die — Winnipeg Free Press

Feb 232017
 

Here’s an interview with Severn Thompson, the actress and playwright who adapted Elle for the stage and who has made the role her own. This is in the venerable prairie newspaper, the Winnipeg Free Press. The play opens tonight at the Prairie Theatre Exchange and runs till March 12.

“She was somewhat rude and she had this impulsiveness. She had strong appetites, including sexual appetites, which get her into trouble,” Thompson says. “And like me, she resorts to humour when things get bad. That was one of her coping mechanisms and I just really appreciated that.

“She was shaped by the 16th-century aristocratic culture that she came from, but definitely lived on the fringes of it,” Thompson says. “She was a misfit.

“She had no interest in being a wife or a nun and those were the two options really available to her,” Thompson says. “In this account, she volunteered to go on this journey to see a new world. I don’t think she had plans to live there for the rest of her life. She wanted to have an adventure and see something she wasn’t familiar with.”She had no idea what she was getting herself into.”

Source: Banished and left to die – Winnipeg Free Press

Elle on Tour | Elle Opens in Winnipeg Tomorrow Night

Feb 222017
 

Elle, the play, opens in Winnipeg at the Prairie Theatre Exchange tomorrow (February 23) night. I am told that tonight’s preview performance is sold out (upwards of 300 seats). Go Winnipeg!

This is the Theatre Passe Muraille production on tour. With Severn Thompson as Elle (she adapted the play from my novel) and Jonathan Fisher.

Some very nice poster art to go with the play.

Winnipeg performances run February 23 – March 12. Tickets and schedule here.

 

 

 

Numéro Cinq at the Movies: Scott Cudmore’s film for Wintersleep’s “Amerika,” introduced by Sophie Lavoie

Feb 152017
 

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G rainy video and tinny sound are not what one expects from a professional music video, but the opening to Wintersleep’s video for “Amerika,” the anthem from their most recent album, melds form and content to make for an explosive one-minute prelude. A pale, young, red-headed woman informs us flatly of the apocalyptic decline of the human race, in a clear rejection of humans by nature, animals and trees. Then, an anonymous child’s voice details how members of a family are interconnected even when far apart. These are clearly trying times.

This video, released on January 8 of 2016, foretells Trump’s election ten months later. Although he’d been campaigning for a while, Trump was only nominated as the Republican candidate in May of 2016, four months later. A Trump speech is the third voice added to the narrative at the 4:29 mark, talking about his “incredible country,” on a fifties television, in a house that is half finished, drywall unpainted, a scattering of furniture. The setting clearly situates us in grassroots America, Trump’s electoral base.

In a corner of the room is a vintage poster for a 1942 film, Vengeance of the West. In this classic Western made by famed B-Movie director Lambert Hillyer, a masked rider called “The Black Shadow” helps a young woman find out who murdered her father and stole his property. Trump’s appeals are to the average American, whose country has also seemingly been stolen away by various (literal) “dark figures.”  Amerika’s “K” then is perhaps also foreshadowing the KKK’s support of Trump’s candidacy.

In the video, the repeated image and sound of a fireball rushing downward through a blue sky, but never reaching the ground, is followed closely by a burning barn, television reports of natural disasters, and right-wing religious figures raising their arms towards the cross in an otherwise empty church. Buildings burn throughout the video, as if in an enigmatic cleansing ritual while other religious symbols abound. It is only at the end of the video, from another a television report, that we discover that the fireball is a mysterious comet seemingly coming to destroy the planet.

The song lyrics, written by songwriter Paul Murphy, were inspired by Walt Whitman’s short poem “America” from his celebrated Leaves of Grass collection, first published in 1855 with 12 poems but revised throughout the poet’s life. The poem “America” was added to the so-called “deathbed” edition Whitman published in 1892 which contained 383 poems. Wintersleep’s song borrows the short poem’s verse, “Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love”:  “What am I trying to find? Are you alive, oh my Amerika? Perennial with the Earth and freedom, love, and law, and life. Perennial with the earth, my freedom, I don’t wanna die.”

In the Wintersleep song, Amerika, intentionally spelled with a K, is reminiscent of the German spelling and Kafka’s unfinished first novel, Der Verschollene, The Disappeared One, titled Amerika when it was published in 1927. Much like this video, Kafka’s novel uses “a technique that traces and abstracts reality as it attempts to portray the deeper motivations that surge below the surface of daily life” (Shields Dix).

While the protagonist in Kafka’s story is looking for a way out, an escape from war-torn Europe, Wintersleep’s “Amerika” does not really offer much optimism for change. Extreme solitude and isolation are reinforced by images of people mostly alone, in different locations: churches, diners, dining rooms, and bedrooms. Some moments of the video recall Edward Hopper’s famous Nighthawks painting from 1942, its artificially bright interior contrasting with the dark lurking exterior. Here melancholia and solitude prevail.

In the video, along with the imminent menace of the comet, sickness, disease, and death are everywhere implied, in one figure’s cigarette and another’s oxygen mask, drugged-up young men wielding guns, drug dens, bloodied faces, and gangsters. Young lovers look bored and unmoved, lying in each other’s arms. There is no life or joy portrayed or concealed in any of the actors’ faces.

Yet nature prevails. Near the end of the film, the mix of the sound of the crashing water from the falls and the whooshing wind blend to remind us again of the of nature’s power. This reverence is mirrored on the pimply-faced adolescent’s expression as he observes the waterfalls. It is only after the cleansing water that the video shows us gentleness, echoing the song’s refrain “I don’t want to die”: a shirtless man takes his young child in his arms, a woman takes another by the hand, and the young lovers clasp each other’s hands, as if in preparation for the apocalyptic conclusion.

The band Wintersleep, originally formed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and now based in Montreal, has been making music since 2001 and won a Juno in 2008. This song is from their most recent album, The Great Detachment, released in March 2016. The music video for Wintersleep’s “Amerika,” ranked in the top 50 videos of 2016 by Muchmusic, was written, directed and edited by award-winning Toronto filmmaker, Scott Cudmore. Co-recipient of the 2014 Arthur Lipsett Award, Cudmore is a member of Revolver Films.

–Sophie Lavoie

Works Cited:
Shields Dix, Douglas. “The Man Who Disappeared: Kafka Imagining Amerika” The Kafka Project by Mauro Nervi. http://www.kafka.org/index.php?aid=239

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Sophie M. Lavoie conducts research in the areas of women’s writing and social change in Central America and the Caribbean. Her studies focus on women in contemporary Nicaragua during the first Sandinista era (1970-1990), but she is also interested in other revolutionary movements in the area, such as Cuba and El Salvador and in women’s writing in Latin America. Her current research project focuses on the link between women’s writing, empowerment, and revolutionary action during the Sandinista era in Nicaragua. She has published articles in Canadian Women’s Studies/les cahiers de la femme, Pandora, Centroamericana, Cahiers d’Etudes Romanes and Descant. She is Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, NB where she teaches Spanish and Latin American Cinema.

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Something Survives | Review of The Némirovsky Question by Susan Rubin Suleiman — Laura Michele Diener

Feb 142017
 

susan-rubin-suleiman_photo-by-tony-rinaldo_373px

Irene Némirovsky is an odd choice for critics to attack and defend. Surely, in any political climate, let alone today’s, more obvious proponents of anti-Semitism exist than a woman who wore a yellow star and died at Auschwitz. But she asked uncomfortable questions in uncomfortable times that quickly became dangerous times. —Laura Michele Diener

nemirovskyquestion

The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France
Susan Rubin Suleiman
Yale University Press, 2016
376 pages; $35.00

“It is impossible, as many liberals believe, to belong to two nations, the Jewish and the French,” –Robert Brasilac, 1938, Je suis partout, French newspaper

“What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself”
–Franz Kafka, Diary

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Exquisitely erudite and boundlessly empathetic, Susan Suleiman’s newest book, The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France, is far more than a literary biography of Irene Némirovsky but rather a study of twentieth-century Jewish identity with one writer’s life as the fulcrum. Irene Némirovsky, now most famous for the miraculous posthumous adventures of her novel Suite Francaise, was during her lifetime, a respected and successful writer on the French literary scene. Born to a wealthy Russian Jewish banking family in 1903, after the Russian Revolution, she moved to France as a teenager where she wholeheartedly embraced the language and culture of her adopted country. Classified as a foreign Jew under the Vichy regime, she was arrested by the French police in July 1942, and subsequently transported to Auschwitz where she died a month later. The unfinished draft of a novel (actually two novels, the first of a proposed five) survived with her two young daughters, Denise, age twelve, and Elisabeth, five, to be published to acclaim in 2004. That year, it won the prestigious literary Renaudot Prize in 2004, the first time the award was bestowed on a deceased author.

First French, and then English speakers have adored Suite Francaise, two beautifully executed studies of French civilians under German occupation, rife with tender relationships and written in real time by a sharply observant narrator. World War II has become part of the collective consciousness of many Americans and Europeans, and with its portrayals of the quiet upheavals and wartime romances of an occupied village, Suite Francaise fulfills many twenty-first century fantasies of vintage wartime. Publishers seized the opportunity to reissue her older books and translate them into English, but their portrayals of prewar immigrant Jewish characters—particularly the 2007 translation of David Golder—struck some readers as more archaic and even disturbing. Its original publication in 1929 was Némirovsky’s first big break in the literary world, but she also received criticisms from Jewish readers who questioned the value of a story about an unscrupulous banker.

In the article, “Scandale Francaise,” that appeared in the January 30, 2008, issue of the New Republic, critic Ruth Franklin boldly and uncompromisingly states that “Némirovsky was the very definition of a self-hating Jew” who “made her name by trafficking in the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes.” Although she admits that Suite Francaise “is a fine novel,” she questions the absence of Jewish characters, suggesting that “perhaps Némirovsky was incapable of creating sympathetic Jewish characters. Franklin’s article followed other condemnations, including a review of The Dogs and the Wolves in the Times Literary Supplement by Naomi Price, and an article Jewish Ideas Daily, by Dan Kagan-Kans, titled, “Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Hating Jew.” In the end, the crux of these arguments rests on two points, the visibility of Jews and the invisibility of Jews in her fiction, neither of which critics find acceptable. Some of the reviews, like Kagan-Kans’, display an almost astounding blindness towards historical context (he writes scathingly of the absence of Jewish characters in All Our Worldly Goods, a novel Némirovsky published in 1941, when she was already wearing a yellow star and writing under a pseudonym, because Jewish authors were banned), and Susan Suleiman treats them with more politeness than they deserve. On the other hand, Ruth Franklin, herself the author of the recent well-received biography of Shirley Jackson (Shirley Jackson: A Haunted Life, Liveright, 2016) as well as a A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011) presents a conundrum. She has done her homework, and Suleiman’s book is partially a continuation of an in-person conversation at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, on December 12, 2008, which Suleiman describes as heated. Both women, like Némirovsky, are Jewish women writers deeply concerned about Jewish women as writers as well as women writing about Jewishness. The debate centers around Némirovsky’s views on Jewish assimilation into French society. As Franklin interprets them, assimilation in Némirovsky’s novels is doomed to fail because their inherently negative Jewish characteristics will inevitably surface. “Though the Golders [characters from the 1929 David Golder] have tried to assimilate into French society, Némirovsky makes it clear that Jews can never escape their identity.”

Suleiman carefully outlines the debate and rightly asks, “why reasonable readers can argue with such passion about the alleged self-hatred (or not) of a Jewish writer who has been dead for almost three-quarters of a century?” and why these reasonable readers have always been exclusively Jewish. Non-Jewish critics display little desire or interest to enter that inflammatory conversation. Much of Sulieman’s book examines Némirovsky’s writing as an exploration of deeply divisive questions about Jewish identities, a group as divided today by language, ritual, class, and politics in the 1930’s as they are today.

To do so, she delves into the thorny question of Jewish self-hatred, a concept dating back to the nineteenth century, when the political climate allowed a number of German, Austrian, and French Jews to escape the ghettos and enter mainstream society. The resulting identity crises among assimilated Jews contributed to the outpourings of Jewish artists and intellectuals. In every conceivable medium, Jews questioned who and what they were, and how they fit into the growing nationalisms of nineteenth-century Europe. Can a Jew be a good German? Or a good Frenchman? Or even entirely French?—the latter an incendiary question that burst into full-scale flame in 1894, with the Dreyfus Affair. In addition to questions of patriotism, for assimilated Jews, the even larger question loomed—What is a Jew? If a person distances themselves from language, ritual, and belief, what inalienable element continues to define them as Jewish, and somehow of a piece with other Jews? Suleiman explains:

It is this estrangement experienced by Jews themselves from other Jews that some people call self-hatred or Jewish anti-Semitism. But the fact is that it existed and continues to exist, not only among Jews but also among other devalued minorities, and not only in Europe.

Accusations of self-hatred have been leveled at a fairly respectable group of intellectuals and artists including Franz Kafka, Gertrude Stein, Hannah Arendt, Philip Roth, Joseph Roth, Isaac Babel—proving at least that Irene Némirovsky is in good company and perhaps that the definition of Jewish self-hatred, if such a thing exists, is so all-encompassing as to be meaningless. After all, anyone who explores their genetic and cultural inheritance with anything but the most unflagging enthusiasm could effectively be considered self-hating. Suleiman views the question of Némirovsky’s or anyone else’s Jewish self-hatred as insolvable, and certainly ahistorical, and argues that “rather than speak of Jewish self-hatred, it makes historical as well as philosophical sense to speak of the ambiguities and ambivalences regarding Jewish identity and self-definition during this period.”

The title of her book, The Némirovsky Question, plays on another nineteenth century concept, die Judenfrage, one that Suleiman proffers as “a useful alternative to Jewish self-hatred if one wants to think about dilemmas of Jewish identity in modern times.” Today, the Jewish Question possesses ominous connotations of cattle cars and concentration camps, but before the Nazis repackaged it as “how to get rid of the Jews,” Jewish intellectuals themselves, including Theodore Herzl, Oskar Jaszi, and Anna Lesznai interpreted the question as a series of inquiries into the place of Jews in mainstream society, Jewish group identity, and most acutely, how people characterized more by division than similarities related to each other.

As Suleiman argues, the Jewish question haunted Némirovsky, who lived out the complexities of interwar Jewish identity. Many of her Jewish characters were reflective of her own family members, eastern immigrants to France, wealthy, on the path to assimilation, but at most a generation away from the ghetto. Her father, Leon Némirovsky was from a poor Yiddish-speaking family near Odessa while her mother came from a wealthy Jewish family more assimilated. As in her family, so in her books, the choice of French, Russian, or Yiddish language declares affiliation. The family lived the elegant and fashionable life of the French upper class, and Némirovsky received her education first through a French governess and then the Sorbonne. She enjoyed close friendships with French Catholics, notably the siblings Rene and Madeleine Avot, who would care for her children after the war. But the husband she married at the age of twenty-three, Michael Epstein, was another Russian Jew from a banking family, and one more religious than her own. The couple converted in 1939 to Catholicism, sent their children to Catholic schools, and in their own words, considered themselves entirely French-Catholic. But waves of refugees from Nazi Germany as well as a growing antipathy to foreigners challenged their self-identification with their adopted country. Between 1920-1939, the number of Jews in France tripled, with many of the newcomers Yiddish speaking, religiously observant, and poor. In her novels David Golder (1929), The Dogs and the Wolves (1940), and The Wine of Solitude (1935), she considers the tensions between these groups ostensibly sharing an identity. In her short story, Fraternité, published in February 1937, these uneasy cousins literally confront each other in the encounter between a wealthy assimilated Jewish banker, brilliantly named Christian Rabinovitch, and a Jewish immigrant from Russia, also named Rabinovitch.

No character in Némirovsky is so successfully assimilated that they aren’t haunted by the specter of their poor religious antiquated Jewish selves. These internal tensions among French Jews play out against a context of French anti-Semitism, which in the end, renders issues of Jewish identity null. Ruth Franklin’s accusation becomes Suleiman’s explanation: “Though the Golder’s have tried to assimilate into French society, Némirovsky makes it clear that Jews can never escape their identity.” Sadly, her stories were prophetic, as she lived to experience. She moved through her life from exile to beloved and feted community member and, finally, to exile again, dying far from the home she had claimed. In 1942, she wrote chillingly, “I have written a lot lately. I suppose they will be posthumous works, but at least they make the time pass.”

The scope of Suleiman’s book extends beyond Némirovsky’s life and even her posthumous fame. She devotes the last third of the book to the story of Némirovsky’s daughters, Denise and Elisabeth, and along with them the collective stories of child survivors of the Holocaust. After the arrest of their parents, the girls spent the last two years in Occupied France living under false identities, constantly on the move, mainly under the care of their nurse Julie Dumot. They joined the more than ten thousand Jewish children who had lost one or both parents during the war, and Suleiman considers them as such, employing trauma theory and the literature on children with hidden identities to discuss their experiences. Through their own writing, particularly Elisabeth’s 1992 memoir, Le Mirador, and editing of their mother’s papers, Denise and Elisabeth, both raised and educated as Catholics, sort out their complicated legacies and memories. Suleiman’s own relationships with the family, especially Denise whom she interviewed extensively before her death in April 2013, form the heart of this section, which is entirely unique in terms of Némirovsky scholarship.

The Némirovsky Question represents the culmination (at least so far) of Suleiman’s prestigious academic career. A professor of comparative literature at Harvard, she has written seven books and edited three others on avant garde French literature, women writers, collective and individual memories of the Holocaust, and artistic expressions of trauma and exile. Suleiman portrays Némirovsky as a woman always writing from the middle, a place defined by difference, occasionally by unease, and like Némirovsky, although a generation younger, Sulieman shifted between the fluid identities in post-war Europe. As she reveals in her memoir, The Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook, she was born into a Hungarian Jewish family a few weeks into World War II, and spent her earliest years living under a variety of false identities before immigrating to America after the war. Her parents, with their varying degrees of faith, reflect the extremes of Jewish identities. Only as an adult with two children did she revisit the country of her birth and connect her fragmented memories of a disrupted past. Her familiarity with intercultural identities obviously predisposes her to empathize with Némirovsky’s Russian-Jewish-French-Catholics selves, and the book reads as a labor of love from writer on behalf of another.

Irene Némirovsky is an odd choice for critics to attack and defend. Surely, in any political climate, let alone today’s, more obvious proponents of anti-Semitism exist than a woman who wore a yellow star and died at Auschwitz. But she asked uncomfortable questions in uncomfortable times that quickly became dangerous times. As Suleiman writes about Christian Rabinovitch, which could well apply to Némirovsky’s other Jewish characters, as well as the author herself: “[He] may not be to everyone’s liking. But the questions his story raises continue to resonate.” Issues of identity predominate in the twenty-first century among Jews, for whom politics, particularly American-Israeli relations, even more so than faith, frequently become the dividing line. European Jews also grapple with renewed waves of anti-Semitism, particularly in France, where ultra-nationalists and terrorists make strange bedfellows. But Suleiman’s book reminds us that the Jewish question can become anyone’s question, whenever people struggle to define themselves against a majority society. In a 1934 radio interview, Némirovsky explained her choice of Jewish characters. “I contrive to depict the society I know best, which is made up of dislocated people who have left behind the milieu where they would normally have lived and whose adaptation to a new life is not without shocks and suffering.” Dislocated people, from a myriad of ethnic backgrounds, find themselves just as vulnerable in 2017. The surge of revolutions, occupations, genocides, and dictatorships doesn’t appear to be slowing down, and readers may find Némirovsky’s books increasingly relevant in a world that continues to yield refugees and exiles. One can only hope that they find a more welcoming society than she did.

—Laura Michele Diener

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Laura Michele Diener 2

Laura Michele Diener teaches medieval history and women’s studies at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. She received her PhD in history from The Ohio State University and has studied at Vassar College, Newnham College, Cambridge, and most recently, Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her creative writing has appeared in The Catholic Worker, Lake Effect, Appalachian Heritage,and Cargo Literary Magazine, and she is a regular contributor to Yes! Magazine.

Evening Primrose: Poems — Allan Cooper

Feb 132017
 

allan-cooper-cropped-imageAllan Cooper by Frédéric Gayer

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Just to whet your appetite. These are brand new poems by Allan Cooper. One of them — “I Have My Silence” — will be published in his imminent collection Everything We’ve Loved Comes Back to Find Us to be published by Gaspereau Press in April.

 

EVENING PRIMROSE

How often they’ve come back to me
in the tall house of summer
like the scent of the evening primrose
rising from the earth

men and women who worked the fields
and woods and kitchens,
who dreamed and loved and despaired
the same as we do, who held new infants

in their arms and rocked them
by oil light burning down
to a small flame, the rhythms
of their conversations

gone out further now
than any star we will ever see.
My grandfather opens
the woodshed door, a pail

in his hand, walking to the fields
where he will dig the new potatoes
before the heavy rains. My grandmother–
who at eighty taught me how

to clean the spring head
where the water flowed from bedrock–
is singing to me through my fever, her voice
mingling with the sound of the brook.

I swear my small body rose above the house
and looked down on the black roof,
the winglike shadows cast across the lawn
as if someone would come and carry me

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away, and maybe they almost did.
When my fever broke, I could feel the damp
cloth on my forehead, replaced again
and again throughout the night.

I could hear my grandparents
talking low in the kitchen. It’s good
when they come back to find us, hold us,
guide us. They loved us unconditionally.

Someone places a hand on my forehead,
then their footsteps fading down the hall
as I drift in the sound of the running spring,
the deep sleep of boyhood.

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GLENN GOULD PLAYING

My moods are more or less inversely related to the clarity of the sky
—Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould, in large rimmed glasses, is stooped low over the
piano
like a rider on a horse. His face is what music looks like
when it takes on a human form. His fingers are ten reins guiding
the notes,
eighty-eight of them, low notes as if rising from Hades,
high notes like the feminine tone of spring.

His hands change positions, the right playing the low notes
quickly,
like fox sparrows suddenly arriving in spring, the sounds
that a human heart makes when it’s totally in love with the
world.

Glenn Gould is playing, and he seems a little unsteady in the
saddle,
his chair a bit rickety, as if it might fall at any moment;
but it doesn’t, and he hovers so close to the keys he can taste
them,
coaxing the flavour and fragrance from each note. Now he’s
singing to the keys,
like a monk saying prayers, and the notes move faster,
almost too fast for us to follow;
it’s as if the piano could resonate at a certain frequency
and suddenly implode, the strings collapsing on the sound board,
the sound board falling through the wooden frame…

Things grow softer. These are notes we’ve heard before, but never
so gently,
feathery, like a father singing to a child, the last words we’ll say
to someone,
an entire barren field suddenly filled with volunteer poplars.

The notes begin to chase each other. They are waves breaking
over waves
on the shore of Lake Superior, thousands of neutrinos moving
through our bodies
at once. It’s a Bach fugue, and the sound is like losing yourself in
something
for the first time, the sound of cells dividing, and you’re nameless
again
as you were the moment you were born.

Glenn Gould is playing, and for the black horse of the piano
there is only one rider, and for that rider
there is only the light drawn from the gloom
and darkness clinging to the edges of the light.

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THE SNAIL AND THE ROSE

Is there a symbiotic relationship between these pale yellow-
green snails and the old Irish roses? This one has climbed over
three feet up a stem which is guarded by thorns that would
pierce my finger if I grasped it. The snail is about the size of a
quarter, although there’s no money in this snail’s life. He lives for
free, as most things do on this planet. I’ve seen them before,
clinging to a leaf, or making their way up through a wild jungle
of leaves.
More and more it is the quiet things around me that give me
pleasure. If this snail makes any music, or has a voice, I can’t hear
it. He lives in the heaven of his day, carrying his house on his
When he dies the house will be left behind a little while, like
the spinsters’ house with grey clapboard, the dolls in the cedar
chest still waiting for the whisper of a child.

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THE APPLE TREE

—in memory of Galway Kinnell

One afternoon in the 1940s, in summer,
a car from the Boston States or the Carolinas
or the tip of the Florida Keys
drove by this gravel bank,
and someone opened a car window
and threw out an apple core, that landed
precisely here, and one dark brown
seed, the oval of a water shrew’s eye, took root
and began to grow, at first a thin, small question,
then a wiry, almost defiant voice…

Its thick, squat trunk is as shaggy as a Shetland pony,
wild as those Zen Buddhist monks
who sit quietly, cross-legged,
smiling inwardly.

In late May or early June
the blossoms begin to open from taut buds,
at first a rosy pink, then
a rich whiteness blending in,
like cream poured into a china bowl.

And when the rain falls, the leaves
make a tapping sound,
like someone knocking lightly
at a door, someone who has
come a long way to be here, now,
in this world; someone rich
with the odour of spring, pungent
as wet earth, the first blades
of new grass, the smell of bark,
like an old keeper of small horses.

And an old woman, rich in perfume
that carries with it
rosewater to an altar
where the earth is worshipped,
and the transformation that will happen
when a winged one comes near
and enters a blossom…

A grandmother, who loved Evening in Paris,
gathered apples from the wild trees each fall
and carried them in buckets or bowls
to her steaming autumn kitchen;
she made apple sauce, apple
pies, apple strudel, apple crisp,
and baked apples in brown sugar,
where nothing is wasted.

So many wild trees at the side of the road,
in ditches, in sudden meadows and clearings,
growing from stone walls, cellar holes,
through ribs and femurs
gathered back by the earth.

And for every ancient tree that
falls, another takes its place,
and another, in the long lineage
of trees, one ring at a time, one
blossoming and fading at a time.

Apples ripen, and the deer come,
and some stand on their hind
legs like men reaching up
into the highest branches for
the sweetest and most coveted apples,
which have been kissed by the sky.

Old apple trees that, if they were love poems
would be both male and female, male and male,
or two young girls holding hands beneath the branches
as the rain comes down
on a day that will never end for them.

A day when the blossoms were ready
to fall, and high up
in the branches
three dozen cedar waxwings in a row,
and as one petal fell
it was taken in the beak of the nearest bird
and passed to the next,
and the next, male to male,
male to female, until it reached
the last waxwing at the end
of the branch, and she ate it…

Not one thing is wasted,
not one petal or word, like these words
that I pass to you now: compassion,
care, tenderness, hope, joy,
forgiveness; and love, that final word
at the end of our branch, the end of our rope,
that stubborn word we carry with us,
tough as a seed, the best for last.

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I HAVE MY SILENCE

I’ve lived a good time.
Not as long as a saguaro cactus
or a sequoia, but a good time.
One second can last a thousand years.
And no amount of study or joy can prepare us
for the ecstasy that Rumi and Mirabai felt.
I’ve seen and felt things
and remained silent.
I’ve watched the fox sparrows migrating in fall
and kept quiet, although inside
I’ve felt a wing rising,
moving out across the waters.

The last thing I like to do
at the end of the day
is walk out and greet the dusk.
I say nothing.
But I might just show
this multi-coloured coat
like Joseph’s, woven from everything
I’ve ever loved. Can you see it?
I’ve lived a good time.
I have work to do. I have my silence
as the sky does
every morning when the sun breaks over the hills.

—Allan Cooper
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Allan Cooper has published fourteen books of poetry, most recently The Deer Yard, with Harry Thurston. He received the Peter Gzowski Award in 1993, and has twice won the Alfred G. Bailey Award for poetry. He has also been short-listed three times for the CBC Literary Awards. Allan intermittently publishes the poetry magazine Germination, and runs the poetry publishing house Owl’s Head Press from his home in Alma, New Brunswick, a small fishing village on the Bay of Fundy.

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Oh, brave; New World! | Lincoln Kaye reviews Elle at the Vancouver Observer

Feb 122017
 

I don’t know Lincoln Kaye, but anybody who calls me a “CanLit superstar” is okay in my books and will no doubt find a special spot waiting for him in Heaven. The reviews coming out of Vancouver have been great, but this might be the best (and not just because he calls me a “CanLit superstar”). Here’s a quote. Follow the link below to read the rest.

And it’s as “Elle,” an unnameable, unimaginable “she”-bear, that she impossibly manifests in a Paris cemetery to maul to death the perfidious uncle decades after that ill-starred outbound Canadian voyage.

In Thompson’s commanding stage presence, all these “Elle” avatars nest within each other like Matryoshka dolls. Her body language and her stream-of-consciousness narrative slide fluidly backward and forward along the story-line, just like the text of CanLit superstar Douglas Glover’s novel from which Thompson herself adapted the script.

Read the rest of this scintillating  review at the Vancouver Observer.

The audience was “deliriously appreciative” — Colin Thomas @Mapping the Intuitive on Elle, the play

Feb 122017
 

Here’s a generous and smart take on Elle, the play, from a critic and writer — Colin Thomas — who saw it the second night in Vancouver. I like the part where he says the audience was “deliriously appreciative.”

As if that starting point weren’t already thrilling enough, Glover and Thompson have wrought a magical realist telling of Marguerite’s story in which they explore—poetically and with great humour—themes of female sexuality, colonialism, and our spiritual relationship to nature. As Marguerite struggles for survival, killing birds and eating books, as she starves and hallucinates, as she rubs up against First Nations cultures and experiences the pull of a different world view, the shadow sides of patriarchy and colonialism gain force. Marguerite’s femaleness, her untamable libido, the relentless beauty of the wilderness, and her growing understanding of the fluid relationship between humans and animals, between waking reality and dreams; all of this pulls Marguerite apart and reshapes her. She has heard, vaguely, of a First Nations god, whose help she solicits—at a price. “One god guarantees my faith is true,” she says. “Two makes it a joke.” Marguerite begins to turn into a bear. “You cannot inhabit,” she says, “without being inhabited.”

The play’s language is as rich as its ideas—and it’s unpretentious. The fog off the coast is “as thick and oily as fleece.” “The smell of this new world is so fresh it has almost no smell at all.” And I mentioned humour. When Marguerite sees human footprints in the snow, she says, “A man was here. And now he is gone. I am suddenly not dead. It feels like a social life.”

Read the rest at Mapping the Intuitive.

Elle transcends eras with tale of bravery, beauty — 24HRS Vancouver

Feb 122017
 

More press out of Vancouver. Here’s a quote, Severn Thompson talking about the process of adapting the novel.

“It’s the story of survival that most of us missed in our history classes,” Thompson explained.

An admirer of historical fiction, the actor quickly saw the potential of showcasing Elle on the stage.

“It was very visceral and rude and funny in a way that historical fiction isn’t usually allowed to be, especially when involving women,” she enthused.

It took more than two years for her to adapt the work. Full of literary references and philosophical tangents, Elle is a complex book.

“That was the hardest part, really: whittling away at all these wonderful aspects of the novel,” Thompson said. “But the play hopefully brings it even more to life. From what I hear from people who see it, they feel spent but inspired by the end of the piece.”

 

Read the rest 24HRS Vancouver.

Frantic fornication & Elle, the play | Interview with Severn Thompson @ Vancouver Sun

Feb 112017
 

Here’s a teaser from an interview Severn Thompson did with the Vancouver Sun.

Q: Elle opens with the main character engaged in what one review called “frantic fornication.” Was that also part of that early version?

A: Yes, with a chair. (Except for one other small part, Elle is a one-woman play, with Thompson occasionally using props). And he (Glover) came with his son. And my family was there too. I tried not to think too much about it.

Read the rest at the Vancouver Sun.

Elle, the tour begins & the champagne gala

Feb 112017
 

Outside the Old Town Hall Theatre in Waterford

The 2017 winter tour of Elle, the play, started in the Old Town Hall Theatre in Waterford, Ontario, January 26 – February 4. I’m a little reticent about the experience. More than I can translate into words. My ancient mother got to see the play for the first time (she remembered 2003, making the trip to Ottawa to see the Governor-General’s Award ceremony). My sons came on closing night. The play was better than a year ago. I thought I might be impervious, but it sucked me into the dream. There were standing ovations. There was a champagne reception. Keith Rainey came up to me after and I reminded him that when I was in Grade One, in the little stone one-room school house at Dundurn (eight grades in one room), he had played Bob Cratchit to my Tiny Tim in the Christmas concert. My father made me a crutch and a leg brace out of soup cans and old horse harness and we drank apple juice for wine and I got to say the words, “God bless us, every one!” My first brush with theatre.

dg

Severn Thompson as Elle

DG and Amber Homeniuk during the talkback after the last performance

Taking pictures during the champagne reception after the show

Top row l-r: Severn Thompson, Paul Thompson (legend of Canadian theatre, Severn’s father), dg, and Amber Homeniuk, master of ceremonies. Bottom row: Claire Senko, Old Town Hall Theatre artistic director, and Jonathan Fisher

DG with multiple NC contributors Jonah Glover and Jacob Glover

Elle’s magic-realist touches make this story of a “headstrong” heroine soar — The Georgia Straight

Feb 112017
 

And here’s another review of the Vancouver production of Elle, at the Firehall Arts Centre till February 18.

Thompson is a riveting performer with a rich voice and big emotional range, and director Christine Brubaker’s minimalist approach to the staging offers many pleasures. In Jennifer Goodman’s set, a structure of bent bars looms at the back of the stage, and a single piece of cloth becomes a sail, a hut, a fire, a bear cub, and so much more. Lyon Smith’s spare, otherworldly music is performed live by Jonathan Fisher, who also plays Itslk. And Goodman’s textured lighting enhances the magic-realist qualities of Elle’s story.

Read the rest at The Georgia Straight.

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