Douglas Glover

C(v)ulture meets Culture, Marketing meets Art

Nov 142010
 

At a certain level this is a false argument. Had the Giller Prize marketing types thought ahead, they could have informed Gaspereau Press well ahead of time and the books could have been available and thus the clash between hand-bound cottage industry publishing and the frenzy of capitalism could have been muted. (I seem to recall that this was the way the Canada Council handled the Governor-General’s Award when I won; my publisher had plenty of books ready when the prize was announced.)

The other thing to remember is that winning a prize like this is next thing to an economic disaster for medium and small publishing houses. They have to print more books at a huge expense and send them off to distributors and bookstores that don’t have to pay the publisher for the books for at a minimum 90 days (usually more). If the books don’t sell, they come back to the publisher who still has to pay for them.

The Giller Prize has often been criticized for not considering small press books (the book pool for the Giller is much smaller than the book pool for the Governor-General’s Award). The paranoid side of my brain thinks: this could be a setup meant to discredit small presses in general and drive a wedge between them and their authors (as has happened in this case).

dg

But there’s method in their madness, the guys want people to know. It has to do with vaunting culture over profit, of matching the greatness of the word with the greatness of the page it’s printed on — a concept probably few Canadians have considered when buying a book.

Sitting in his print shop in this Annapolis Valley town 100 kilometres northwest of Halifax, Steeves is sensitive to the criticism.

But if there’s one character trait in which the Gaspereau co-founder isn’t lacking, it’s conviction. He may look a bit bookish, nerdy even in his dust-tinged glasses. But wiry frame and penchant for plaid flannel belie a village lumberjack.

He frequently cites American writer Henry David Thoreau, who famously documented his simple life at the cabin he built on Walden Pond in Massachusetts.

via Don’t be pressing this publisher – thestar.com.

 

Essay by Michael Brodsky

Nov 142010
 

I happened upon a book of Michael Brodsky’s stories in one of the secondhand bookstores in Montpelier. Here’s an essay on the web.

 

dg

 

Mircea Eliade, in Shamanism, emphasizes the importance of the ladder as “an instrument of ontological passage from one mode of being to another—of transcendence—of attainment to the world of the gods, of power, of reality—a world saturated with being. In short, the world of the sacred.” Redemption is possible only through immersion in the warm bath of authentic being.As attested by the myths of the peoples of Africa, Oceania and North America, by Brahmanic sacrificers and by the instructions of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, “ladders facilitate the descent of the gods to earth and ensure the ascent of the dead man’s soul. Yet even if actual ladders and gangways appear frequently in Hafftka’s works, they may not be trustworthy or efficacious and, as proof of this, they seem either to be ignored or held in reserve as a last resort—if the performative activity of self as ladder fails. The self in transformative motion—the motion craved by Kafka’s agonizedly articulate ape—is the only ladder, up or down, that counts.

Grip ©1984

Congregation ©2001

via Critical essay by Brodsky.

New Statesman – Claude Lévi-Strauss: the Poet in the Laboratory

Nov 132010
 

Lively review of a new biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss, but this quote was the most interesting bit because it lines up with some of the ideas I tried to get across in Elle and The Life and Times of Captain N. The new technology of writing destroys oral cultures and we somehow feel nostalgic for those lost ways of being, but to think that any one culture is essentially less alienating than another is a sentimental mistake.

dg

Derrida showed that Lévi-Strauss’s position, far from breaking with a Eurocentric model, reproduced it. He demonstrated how the notion that the Nambikwara inhabited a different and better world, one before writing, reflected a long-held western prejudice that ignored the way in which any system of language had all the features of a writing system that Lévi-Strauss considered distinctively modern. The Amazonian enjoyed no more direct and unmediated a relationship with his surroundings than the western anthropologist…

via New Statesman – Claude Lévi-Strauss: the Poet in the Laboratory.

What it’s like living here — from Court Merrigan in Torrington, Wyoming

Nov 132010
 

A deeply shocking and poignant “What it’s like living here” from Court Merrigan in Torrington, Wyoming. Neither a former student, nor a VCFA graduate (he doesn’t have an MFA), Court is just a writer and a human being who joined the conversation and became part of the NC community. DG wishes there were more like him, more nominal outsiders who join the blog just because they like writing and a supportive camaraderie. We’re not a closed shop. This text reminds dg of something Tomaso Landolfi once wrote: “…is not this a world in which incredible things take place and, I would say, only incredible things?”

dg

WHAT IT’S LIKE LIVING HERE
by Court Merrigan

Bedside

Four extra bedtime stories for your daughter, five.  She grows fidgety and irritated, wants to be left alone to sleep.  Once she would have stayed up all night with you.  Now she’s three and those days are gone.  You trudge upstairs.  Your wife is in bed.  She goes to bed early nowadays.  It’s too early for you.  Time to get yourself occupied.

Two weeks it’s been.  Two weeks of closing your eyes to see Todd.

1.5 miles up Laramie Peak Trail

At first Todd looked like he was taking a nap, or had just leaned against the warm rock on that perfect seventy-degree day, looking across Friend Creek through a golden-leafed bough of aspens to the sheer mountain slabs across the rift valley.  I thought he was on the lookout for mountain goats.  He really wanted to see a mountain goat, kept on asking if we thought we’d spot one.

“Well, this is about where we expected to catch up with him,” my father said.

Irritated, I thought that he ought to be further along than this, that he was going to start talking about the goddamn mountain goats again – all he wanted out of Wyoming, it seemed – and at his trudging pace, it would be hours before we got back to the trailhead.  He was semi-retired and at his leisure, but I had a pregnant wife and a kid to get back to.

Then I noticed the odd angle of his neck, the wrist twisted behind his back, legs folded in an Asian posture he could not possibly have adopted at sixty years of age.  I began to run.  His face was slack jawed, sunglasses askew, lips a pale violet.  When I knelt and touched his face a skein of spit dribbled onto his new denim shirt, so new you could see the store creases, smell the store shelf.

Continue reading »

Hunter: Fiction — Ariel Smart

Nov 122010
 

 

 

I knew about the stories for years but had relegated them to that mental stack of things I never get around to for one reason or another. Only a series of accidents a few weeks ago induced me to buy a copy. I had no expectations when I started reading, which may be the best way to begin any book, perhaps to encounter other people.

The first five stories are set in the middle of almost nowhere, the Imperial Valley in Southern California, a place of deserts and fields and irrigation, the time around the ’60s. This is a good place to begin, too, with almost nothing, then see what you can discover, what you can add, as Ariel has done.

“Hunter,” below, is my favorite. It begins quietly, slowly, maybe innocently, and from that ground builds into a story that has engaged and haunted me as much as any I’ve read in a while. I didn’t expect that at all. The story is told in its images and in something else Ariel touches I’ll never be able to explain. Each time I reread I see small lights I missed the first time through.

I ran into Ariel a few weeks ago, and she gave what is the most compelling reason to write I’ve heard. She said she didn’t feel right inside when she wasn’t writing. It was this comment that moved me to buy the book.

Ariel Smart, in fact, grew up in the Imperial Valley, was born at the Green Lantern Motel, mentioned in this and other stories, and writes and teaches now in the San Jose area. “Hunter” was first published in Love and Sex in the 21st Century (New Mexico University, 1988), then in the collection The Green Lantern and Other Stories (Fithian Press, 1999). She has another collection, Stolen Moments and Other Stories (Fithian, 2003). Both are available, of course, at Amazon.

—Gary Garvin

 

Hunter

 

 

by Ariel Smart

 


Cabin Number 1 of Frank Harper’s Green Lantern Motel smelled of the after-breakfast aromas of fried bacon and eggs and smoky-tasting coffee. The sound of a bulletin being read from the California Farm Labor Bureau droned from a radio placed on top of the refrigerator. Delia Harper put aside her book, Lad, of Sunnybank, and watched her father prepare the lunch she would take with her to her fourth-grade class at Acacia County School five miles from El Centro. His dark face, browned from the sun, was intent and purposeful at a perfunctory task. With a steel-bladed butcher knife, he carved cold beef from the Diamond Jim pot roast he customarily simmered on Sundays with fresh tomatoes, green Anaheim chili peppers, yellow onions, cloves of garlic, and red beans.

He placed an ample wedge of sliced meat between two thick slices of bakery bread. “Want horseradish?”

Delia turned up her nose, shaking her head vigorously. Her dark, brown hair, which her father had plaited into one thick braid, swung behind her neck down to her waist.

“Okay for you. More for me,” he said good-naturedly.

“Tell me again about Uncle Les’ work horses.”

“Not about his twenty-six milking cows? Named alphabetically, Alice through Zelda.”

“Horses.”

Continue reading »

Theology: Poem — Dave Margoshes

Nov 122010
 

 Dave Margoshes is a poet, novelist and short story writer from Saskatchewan. I won’t go on about him or my long and checkered past with Saskatchewan because Dave has already appeared on these pages and I would be repeating myself. The last time I saw him my son Jonah was about six and he and I went on a reading tour of Saskatchewan, driving up and down the province in a little  rented car, meeting old friends, exploring abandoned homesteads, peering at distant bison, clattering around cluttered wayside museums. I miss Saskatchewan sometimes. Its astringent landscape is always exciting to watch and the people are delightful. When I used to edit Best Canadian Stories, I seemed to put a Dave Margoshes story in just about every other year. And now he has a new poetry collection just out with Black Moss Press (which published my first little book of stories, yea, these many years ago). “Theology” is from the new collection Dimensions of an Orchard and is particularly apt as it dovetails nicely with my Bible-reading thoughts these days. I love, here, God’s refolded tour map and “the illusion of unintended routes” and “against his own idea of tide.”

dg

 

Theology

 

A quarter moon hangs low in the morning sky,
a thumbprint reminder that night is not through
with us, oh no, not yet. Day, night, light, dark,
the cycle carries on with tedious regularity, each
extreme laying a trail of clues leading inextricably
to the other. The seasons too pass in their cycle,
and the ages, infancy to infirmity and through
the transmigration of souls into infancy again
if that’s what you care to believe. The tides rise
and fall, the leaf buds, greens, browns, withers
all according to plan. And where is God in all
this? Puppetmaster, enmeshed in his own strings,
or tourist, folding and refolding a map? The creases
are worn thin from this incessant folding, creating
the illusion of unintended routes, a false cartography.
Like any man, God is reluctant to ask directions.
He batters on, against his own idea of tide,
seeking a way.

—Dave Margoshes

Just for fun, see also “The Persistent Suitor.”

Mood-Changing But-Constructions in Annie Dillard’s “Seeing” |Craft Essay — Adam Arvidson

Nov 112010
 

Annie Dillard, self-portrait

Annie Dillard’s “Seeing,” a philosophical, literal, and historical romp through the seemingly simple act for which the piece is named, is packed with but-constructions.  They appear in nearly every paragraph, sometimes two-to-a-graph.  They fall into two clear types: “action/description buts” and “mood change buts.”  It is easy to distinguish between the types because, almost without fail, the action/description ones appear within a sentence, while the mood change ones are the initial word in a sentence.

The action/description buts don’t particularly stand out.  They occur within sections of basic storytelling, rather than in the more philosophical passages of the essay.  Some examples:

I wandered downstream to force [the blackbirds] to play their hand, but they’d crossed the creek and scattered.

I bang on hollow trees near the water, but so far no flying squirrels have appeared.

When you see fog move against a backdrop of deep pines, you don’t see the fog itself, but streaks of clearness floating across the air in dark shreds.

In all these examples, the ‘but’ is necessary to accurately relate the action or accurately describe something.  They make for nice sentences, but don’t have great symbolic value.

Dillard’s other type of but-construction, the “mood-change but,” is the main method she uses to swing the essay from the thrill of seeing something new to the despair of not being able to see something, and back.  This “ocean swell” rhythm, from optimism to pessimism, hinges on the ‘buts,’ which occur at the crests and troughs. These “mood-change buts” typically also employ a more complex grammatical structure, which effectively breaks the flow of the essay and turns it in a different direction.

There are numerous examples, but the two discussed here include more than one “mood-change but” in rapid succession.  The essay begins with a short section about how a young Dillard used to hide pennies in the public realm.  The second section flashes to the present and, within the first two paragraphs, there are four “mood-change buts.”  The text begins (after the section’s two opening sentences):

The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.  But – and this is the point – who gets excited by a mere penny?

Then a sentence that introduces some natural elements into the mix, then:

It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny.  But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

Then a few short connecting sentences, then:

I used to be able to see flying insects in the air…. My eyes would focus along that column of air, picking out flying insects.  But I lost interest, I guess, for I dropped the habit.  Now I can see birds.

Then several sentences about nature and Thoreau, then:

I cherish mental images I have of three perfectly happy people.  One collects stones.  Another – an Englishman, say – watches clouds.  The third lives on a coast and collects drops of seawater, which he examines microscopically and mounts.  But I don’t see what the specialist sees, and so I cut myself off, not only from the total picture, but from the various forms of happiness.

The first “mood-change but” turns the mood down, from the happiness of a world studded with pennies to pennies being worthless.  The 2nd turns the mood back up (pennies can be valuable); the 3rd turns it back down (Dillard can’t see flying insects any more); and the 4th — an instance that actually packs two ‘buts’ into one sentence — brings it into a deeper trough (the inability to see as specialists do).  In each case, the ‘but’ begins a sentence.  It is an abrupt change of course from the previous sentence: one mood, full stop, second mood.  Even reading only the ‘but’ with the end of the preceding sentence, the impending mood change is apparent: “…generous hand. But….”  “…won’t stoop to pick up a penny.  But….” “…picking out flying insects.  But….”  The period and the big capitalized ‘B’ serve, in written form, as the verbal inhale-and-pause people use when delivering news (either good before bad or bad before good).

The second example of “mood-change buts” occurs in the last paragraph of section 4 (page 700 in Lopate’s book).  The grammar here is even more complex, and an initial reading might not make clear whether the ‘buts’ are meant to turn down the mood or turn it up.  Here is the text:

Oh, it’s mysterious lamplit evenings, here in the galaxy, one after the other.  It’s one of those nights when I wander from window to window, looking for a sign.  But I can’t see.  Terror and a beauty insoluble are a ribband of blue woven into the fringes of garments of things both great and small.  No culture explains, no bivouac offers real haven or rest.  But it could be that we are not seeing something.  Galileo thought comets were an optical illusion.  This is fertile ground: since we are certain that they’re not, we can look at what our scientists have been saying with fresh hope.

The feel here is dreamlike, and both sentences that have a ‘but’ also contain a negative.  The first, however, transforms the hopefulness of the first two sentences into dejection.  It concludes “looking for a sign” with “terror.”  The second ‘but’ sentence looks pessimistic, and read alone it could be interpreted as such (as in, we’re missing something important).  This little sentence, though, moves the passage from a scary dark place (with no “haven or rest”) to the possibility of understanding (“fertile ground”).  By suggesting that “we are not seeing something,” Dillard is stressing the “something:” there is something there to see, and that’s a positive thing.

But, says Dillard throughout the essay, it’s not always easy to see, and this paragraph grammatically parallels that challenging journey.  There are adjectives after nouns (“beauty insoluble”), an expected second verb (in the first sentence) that never appears, vague descriptions (“things both great and small”), and the sudden introduction of a real person (Galileo).  This is a tricky paragraph (including the five following sentences not transcribed above), and the “mood-change buts” reinforce its up and down tone.  The tension is resolved after the section break that follows this paragraph, when Dillard turns the narrative to a long discussion of a book about blindness and sight by Marius von Senden.  That entire section contains not a single “mood-change but.”

It is worth noting one more use of ‘but’ in this essay.  Near the end of the piece there are two sections that begin with the word.  These are the only two sections that do so, and both deal with the same topic: seeing by letting go.  This, Dillard admits, is the most difficult type of seeing.  To introduce it, she creates the shortest section in the entire piece, and begins that section with ‘but’ (“But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go”). Then she writes a section with a specific experience of seeing fish flashing in the sun in the creek; a section that contains not a single ‘but.’ Then the idea returns in the next section with another initial section ‘but’ (“But I can’t go out and try to see this way”).  If the “mood-change buts” as described above are the inhale-then-pause, these section-beginning ‘buts’ are the inhale-then-pause-then-look skyward-then-sigh.  They physically jump out from the page and create the most prominent moments in the essay (especially the first, short section).  They are used to begin the essay’s conclusion and to highlight the most true (say Dillard and Thoreau) way of seeing.

Interestingly, the final one-paragraph section includes two “mood-change buts,” both turning the mood up.  Unlike all other “mood-change buts,” the ‘buts’ here are inside their sentences, perhaps signaling an end to the rise and fall of the essay:

The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power.

And, three sentences later, the last sentence of the essay:

The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.

—Adam Arvidson

 

Spy Profile: Robert Day on Writing, Printing and Memory

Nov 102010
 

Okay, I lied in the previous post when I said I would stop posting about Robert Day. The OCD has me in its grip. The drugs are not working. Here’s a lovely very recent video interview with Robert Day. This is the man who taught me at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He did a so-called Forms class which I attended. The first day of class he walked into the room and, without saying a word, wrote in large letters that took up the whole length of the blackboard across the front of the room: REMEMBER TO TELL THEM THE NOVEL IS A POEM. As I mentioned, oh too recently, I wrote about this and the effect it had on me in an essay called “The Novel is a Poem” in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son.

dg

Students and colleagues have described Washington College professor and writer Bob Day as incorrigible, controversial, impossibly stubborn, radical, and egomaniacal.

via Spy Profile: Robert Day on Writing, Printing and Memory.

Robert Day: Talk to Strangers

Nov 102010
 

Another little piece from my teacher Robert Day about his teacher William Stafford. I know, I know, I get little OCD now and then. No more Robert Day after today.

dg

“I was Bill Stafford’s student because I learned from him about writing and life: Do it all and do it all now. The beginning may not be the beginning. The end may not be the end. These aphorisms applied not only to his craft and mine, but to the way we lived.”

via Robert Day: Talk to Strangers.

“Wings Over Arda” Film Diary 4: Writing the Fight by Richard Hartshorn

Nov 092010
 

Philip Hartshorn as Dior; Juan Carlos Tapia as Celegorm

A lot goes into writing a fight scene – sometimes.  Our challenges for the fight scene in this film came in many forms, the first of which was the source material’s ambiguity concerning the situation surrounding it.  The following is Tolkien’s text in The Silmarillion concerning the final outcome of the Sacking of Doriath.

“…Celegorm stirred up his brothers to prepare an assault upon Doriath.  They came at unawares in the middle of winter, and fought with Dior in the Thousand Caves; and so befell the second slaying of Elf by Elf.  There fell Celegorm by Dior’s hand, and there fell Curufin, and dark Caranthir; but Dior was slain also, and Nimloth his wife, and the cruel servants of Celegorm seized Dior’s young sons and left them in the forest to starve…” -Tolkien, 242

This book in particular is written in a similar fashion (stylistically) to the Norse Myths (Kevin Crossley Holland’s translations come to mind).  The story of Dior is expanded in The Book of Lost Tales 2, but this draft was very clearly “un-canonized” by Tolkien before his revisions of the former book, so the above is all we had to work with.  I interpreted the scene into the screenplay as a confrontation between Dior and the three brothers as Dior is attempting to get his family (namely his daughter) out of the burning city.

The text from my first draft of the script concerning this scene was equally vague.  I scrawled out something about Dior killing Curufin and Caranthir, then dueling Celegorm.  I knew this wasn’t exactly how I wanted it, but I was afraid to go further, for the reasons of A) I knew I was going to let my brother choreograph the movements, and B) How was all of this going to happen?  Where is Nimloth, and how can I incorporate what happens to her?

I decided to write the death of Nimloth as a separate scene, which gave attention to the characters involved and built up the tension and relationships – both sympathetic and antagonistic- of surviving characters before the end.  This worked very well in terms of sets, locations and the focus of the actors.

Take a look at this video, which concerns my brother(our fight choreographer)’s enthusiastic efforts to materialize this scene.

Production Report: The First Stages of Fight Choreography

Putting this thing together was a tall order.  The above video was filmed in the later parts of summer when we were brainstorming just how the hell we were going to pull off any of this.  As our final weekend of shooting ended this past Sunday, the fight has been done and awaits the cutting room in a currently-crowded lobby.  Here are a few sneak peek photos (I’m keeping the fight relatively under wraps) of what came out of the final product.  Please note that these photos are captured from the raw footage of the film: nothing has been added or edited (yes, the sparks are real).

What we’ve got is a high-risk, quick-paced, colorful, 360-degree spectacle involving real swords, acrobatics, drama, and gorgeous mountains below.  At least, that’s what we’ll have after a few good days at the editing desk.

See also:

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Danielle Dutton–from her recent novel Sprawl

Nov 092010
 

Here is a writer worth meditating upon. Sprawl is her second book–a collection of stories preceded it. Just note in this teaser the skillful transition from idea to suburban detail to metaphor and back to the idea (this time encased in metaphor). Note also the deft informality of the prose and the sly humour. This is lovely writing.

Here is a good introduction to Dutton and her book.

dg

We have arrived at a place based on the idea that the past never existed. We set out intentions for public imagination, educational software, rumpus rooms, etc. Haywood makes dinner on an indoor grill. A bee flies up and down outside the window, bumping the glass, hovering above plates on the patio. Fruit is rotting on the trees, and the bee lives on after the death of the fruit. He is rejuvenated by past forms in my yard.

via Everyday Genius: Danielle Dutton.

After Reading Heidegger and Seeing a Dead Rat, Translated into Latin — Jacob Glover

Nov 082010
 

DG realizes that this may be a stretch for some of you. A couple of weeks ago NC published Jacob’s poem “After Reading Heidegger and Seeing a Dead Rat” which has proved amazingly popular, partly because it’s a witty poem and partly because it gets a certain number of hits every day from people searching “dead rats” on Google (who would have thought this was an underground hot topic?). DG took off the “rat” tag, but that hasn’t stopped the deluge. In any case, this is neither here nor there to Jacob who wrote the poem for fun and who has since translated it into Latin for fun. The fact that he has a mind for this is a continual delight to his father.

dg

After Reading Heidegger and Seeing a Dead Rat

Vidi id in bestiolam via
Secundo die autumno
Bestiola, quae bestiolae fuit, sed
Nunc nihil non fuit, sed
Aliqua non Ens
Bestiola habuerat, sed nunc
Tenebras firigidas rigidarumque habet.
In via, secondo die autumno
Enti cinctus est, in Ente,
Idquod bestiola, non iam ens, fuit
Olim, Ens in Bestiola fuit
Olim Ens fuit hac bestiola, quando ea
Fuit ens.
Sed nunc, Ens nihil non est, abfuit,
Ex hac bestiola, utique, ergo abisset.
—Jacob Glover

We’ll Always Have McSorley’s: an essay by Robert Day | The American Scholar

Nov 082010
 

Here is a lovely essay by my long ago teacher Robert Day, the same man as wrote the words REMEMBER TO TELL THEM THE NOVEL IS A POEM across the blackboard that first day of classes in Iowa more years gone than I care to remember. I wrote about him in my essay “The Novel is a Poem” in my book Notes Home from a Prodigal Son.

dg

I was trying to be a writer. I had my portable Remington; the professor said I could use the kitchen table as my desk. To warm up, each day I’d add to my letter to Lola, typing on the small sheets of yellow sketchpad paper she had given me. After a paragraph or two, I would put what I had written into Mitchell’s McSorley’s as a sort of bookmark. Then I’d begin my own work—a novel set on the western high plains of Kansas into which I stuffed as many grotesque details (coyote hunters bringing into town bundles of ears, each attached by a strip of skin, to claim the bounty at the county office) and as much profanity (“He’s lower than snake shit at the bottom of a post hole”) as the prose could carry in hopes that one day a famous multi-adjective professor would lecture that western Kansas cannot be all that bizarre and profane. He, too, would be wrong. Neither the novel nor the letter was ever finished.

via We’ll Always Have McSorley’s: an article by Robert Day | The American Scholar.

Five Paintings — Lynne Quarmby

Nov 072010
 

Lynne Q summer 2008

Lynne Quarmby is an old friend, an eminent gene biologist with a lab at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, an outdoorswoman, and a painter. She paints with water colours and what comes out often looks genetic, looks biological, looks like an image of life filtered through a microscope, rhythmic, patterned, explosive.

dg

focal plane high res

Focal Plane (14”x10”)

Star Island

Star Island (14”x10”)

Continue reading »

What it’s like living here — from Cynthia Newberry Martin in Columbus, Georgia

Nov 072010
 

cindy2 019_2_4

Cynthia Newberry Martin takes time from her writing and from her splendid writing blog Catching Days (one of Powell’s Books “Lit Blogs We Love”) to let NC know what it’s like living in Columbus, Georgia. Catching Days is a fascinating site with links to Cynthia’s own publications, reviews, and an ongoing series of posts in which noted authors describe a typical working day. See the latest, “A Day in the Life of Bruce Machart,” here. Cynthia has been commenting on NC from the very beginning, a generous, helpful presence.

dg

What it’s like living here

From Cynthia Newberry Martin

in Columbus

Dear DG,

In Columbus, the seasons change, but they take their sweet time about it. First summer doesn’t want to let go, and then the leaves cling to the trees. Not until late October do the golds, oranges, and reds sprinkle this over-green world with color.

 

 

The river and Carson McCullers

The Chattahoochee River, the western border of Columbus, floods the city with the mood that gave rise to Carson McCullers:

I want – I want – I want – was all that she could think about – but just what this real want was she did not know.

And to Ma Rainey:

Thought I’d rest me, I couldn’t hear no news. I’ll soon be there ’cause I got the walking blues.

The words and the blues flow together and join the river. And these days, you gather your want and walk your blues for miles and miles on the Riverwalk, a narrow park that edges the banks of the river. You spend a lazy day beside the water, your thoughts swirling with the current. You see Alabama on the other side, and you imagine the rest of the world out there somewhere. You cross the bridge and look back at Columbus with perspective—not a lot but enough.

Red brick

Columbus wears its clay-red brick well. The old buildings, only two or three stories high, allow plenty of light to reach the sidewalks and plenty of air to breathe. Downtown streets are divided by a grass median the width of what could have been another lane. Statues hide benches inside. The place of art in the world is valued, as is a good place to rest and watch that world go by. And downtown, the train still chugs through the middle of the street, right in front of the modern eleven-storied Government Center. You hear the whistle and stop to watch. Each time, it’s hard to believe.

Row houses and the wash

Columbus used to be a mill town, but most of the factories now lie in empty disrepair. Living here you become fascinated by the beauty of abandoned buildings, the simplicity of row houses, and the openness of laundry hanging on lines to dry. These images stay with you and recur in your stories.

The people

Friends bring supper when you’re sick—pimento cheese and egg salad, country captain, fried chicken. The people who come to your door care about you too. Dale is your FedEx guy. He gives you a package and shows you a picture of his twin granddaughters, Layla and Dakota. He gives you his cell phone number so if you need to sign for a package, you can call and find out where he is. The UPS guy is a real person as well, knocking on the door to ask if you’re supposed to receive a new printer three days in a row. It’s a long story, you say. He smiles.

foxThe little fox

Sitting at your desk, you watch deer graze—whole families. The doe, the buck and the fawns. You take a picture, and their white tails flash through the woods. A hawk lands on top of the old wooden swing set where no one plays anymore. But it’s the little fox who wins your heart. He doesn’t know he’s not supposed to play for hours in the middle of the grass right in front of your window, distracting you from the words. You look up from your computer more often, hoping to see him. You watch him learn to sit like a fox is supposed to sit. And then, one day, he doesn’t come out. You miss him. Back to the words.

Family

Your husband is the reason you’re here. Long ago he sweet-talked you into moving to the town where he grew up and where he plans to stay. Your children live in other places now—Texas, Scotland, California. Only one left at home. You’re hoping for the Northeast.

And in Columbus, the unhurried life is the perfect soil for words. Take your time, it says. You have plenty of it. Fall is your favorite season, the harsh heat of summer behind you and nothing but cold mornings and dark, early nights ahead. Bare branches. Fires inside and out.

—Cynthia Newberry Martin

Seven Poems — Goran Simic

Nov 052010
 

Foto_by_Dixon

 

I only know Goran Simic by reputation and by the power and beauty of his poems (which is to say that at a certain level I know him well). Since he came to Toronto from his native Bosnia  in 1996, a year after the war ended, he has been a stalwart of the poetry scene, that rare thing in North America, a man-of-letters, an indefatigable  promoter of other writers and their books, and a moral beacon. He has won numerous awards including a Helman/Hammet grant (for writers who have been victims of political persecution) and a PEN USA Freedom to Write award. His poems and stories about the war he lived through and the Siege of Sarajevo are incredibly stark and moving.

The river carries the corpse of a woman.
as I run across the bridge
with my canisters of water,
I notice her wristwatch, still in place.

Someone lobs a child’s shoe
into the furnace. Family photographs spill
from the back of a garbage truck;
they carry inscriptions:
Love from …love from…love …

(from “The Sorrow in Sarajevo”)

It’s a great pleasure to display here seven poems from Goran’s new book Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman which will be published by Biblioasis in December.

(And for Goran’s poignant essay on coming to Canada, on being an immigrant and on becoming visible, click here.)

dg

What I Was Told

When I was born everybody rejoiced.
This is what I was told.
I was also told that in his notes my father the King
described hundreds of tents in front of the castle
for the common people’s celebration of my birth.
For months wine flowed and roasted quail were eaten
until the wine started to sour
and quail started smelling of wine.
My father the King invited the best fortune tellers in the country
to read my kingdom’s fate from my baby palm.
Some of them were richly rewarded.
No trace of the unfortunate others was found in my father’s notes.
When I grew tall enough to touch my father’s shield,
he issued a state decree ordering
the people of our kingdom to build a castle for me
on the hill. I could smell the sweat
of those who pulled stone slabs up the slope
while I lolled on my throne.
Those who survived the ten years of work
are mentioned in my father’s notes. This is what I was told.
Those who didn’t were buried in the castle’s foundation
and were not recorded in my father’s notes.
I forgot the name of my bride.
The taste of matrimonial wine lasted no longer
than the wedding night
when I had to lead my army to war with our neighbours.
My father told me to follow the tradition
and that I will find reasons once I learn how to read.
Sitting on my black horse, watching graves being dug in our wake,
I wondered why people called my army the Virus of Death,
why the sunset scares me
even after the leaves under my horse’s hooves
changed colours ten times.
Once my sword acquired the scent of burnt homes and rotting flesh,
I returned to my kingdom in a golden carriage.
But when I arrived
nobody was there to decorate my exhausted soldiers with garlands.
Only wretched old men and witches were begging forgiveness
for failing to predict my return.
The plague had eaten my father the King,
and my darling whose name I lost in the roll call of my generals.
All I had left from my kingdom were neglected fields
and a notebook that I couldn’t read.
Now I sit in my tower with a crown on my head.
I watch storks leaving the cold chimneys of my kingdom,
while I listen to the wind riffling the sheets of my empty bed,
leafing through the pages of my father’s notebook.
In this very moment I would happily exchange
my glory and my golden crown,
for someone who would teach me to read.


Continue reading »

Chaos Again, by Richard Farrell

Nov 042010
 

Joan Miro, "Nocturne"

I haven’t done any ‘spontaneous posting’ in a long while on NC.  Not since this wonderful site gained a steady following.  Now I write my posts out in MS Word first, and edit them, and read them again and again.  But DG keeps talking about the ‘renegade’ aspect of NC, the need to be playful and have fun.  So here goes.  Maybe the key is to keep it short.  I hope I still have a ‘job’ tomorrow at NC.

I woke up at 1:38 this morning, wide awake, to the sounds of a homeless person rummaging through recycle bins in the alley.   I’m going through a period of crisis over my graduation lecture.  I don’t like the damned lecture anymore, even if it’s been pre-approved (like a home loan?) by my advisor, so I came down to peck away at it again.  But how can this fact, my ‘crisis’ over a lecture in two months, begin to compare with that other person’s reality, that other person, out there in the alley, also awake at this ungodly hour, digging through garbage bins for scrap tin cans?

I brought my copy of Words Overflown by Stars to my five year-old son’s soccer practice the other day, with kids running willy-nilly, chasing that white ball wherever it went in spite of their coach’s warnings to spread out, to pass.   Eight little boys and girls simply chased, colliding, falling down, laughing, sometimes crying, but always chasing.  After the requisite time as a doting father had passed (about 4 minutes…I coached high school sports for 8 years…parents shouldn’t even be at practice…if they are present, they should be out-of-the-way, silent, not shouting…let the kids have fun, they aren’t there for you, they are there for themselves…do something with your time…read a book…trust the coach…yes, even at five!…sorry for the rant)  I flipped my book open to Jack Myers essay, “Collaborating with Chaos.”  It seemed, considering the shouting parents and crazy kids, a most appropriate choice.  Just a few selections from this essay:

The secret of artists and other creative people throughout the millennia-whether they are conscious of it or not-is that they know how to collaborate with chaos.  Yet, oftentimes, it is the very presence of chaos and confusion that leads to the fear of failure and instills resistance in us at the very beginning of the creative process.  The most oft-cited characteristic of creative people (aside from popularly being thought of as slightly crazy) is their ability to remain open during the rain of uncertainty, to embrace the difficult states of paradox, opposition, and ambiguity that are gateways of opportunity.

There are as many entrances into chaos as there are kinds of people entering it.  But there is only one way out, and that is the ‘con-fusion’ of disparities.  That’s why every time we make a new poem or story it seems as difficult to do as it did the first time.

…if you think writing poetry is like making a hamburger, that there’s some specific method to be learned and repeated over and over again, you’re in the wrong business.  Like everything else in creation, we, too, have been thrown into and live in uncertainty and indeterminacy.  There is no one, safe answer or secret to writing.

…complexity and simplicity  are not things, but ephemeral results of an interaction of these processes within other larger and smaller processes, within other larger and smaller processes, etc.

This is a wonderful, short essay that resonates with much larger issues.  It brought me a moment of calm amidst the chaos of that hour at the soccer pitch.  The best writing can do that, can open up a space for us to crawl inside.  My lecture’s still a mess.  I will go back to writing more carefully edited posts on NC, if I still can.  Parents will continue to believe that screaming at their five year-old is important, that it teaches competition, even though it masks something else: the fear of failure, the resistance, that Myers talked about, to chaos.  Homeless men will continue to eke out an existence on the detritus of others, of me.

It’s three fifty-one now.  Time to go back to bed and dream.

-Richard Farrell

Contributor’s Note: DG posted a tribute to Jack Myers after attending a memorial for him at the last residency.  Read that tribute here.

Bird at the University: Poem — Micheline Maylor

Nov 022010
 

Micheline Maylor comes from Windsor, Ontario, but lives in Calgary where she writes poetry, teaches writing at Mount Royal University and edits FreeFall Magazine. Some of these names may be familiar to you. Apparently, Micheline is quite good at getting dg to do things. He is judging a fiction contest for FreeFall and Micheline’s student Gabrielle Volke recently interviewed dg for an essay she is writing and the resulting dialogue appeared on Numéro Cinq and will appear in FreeFall. Micheline Maylor is also an accomplished poet. Her first collection Full Depth: The Raymond Knister Poems was published in 2007. (Raymond Knister was an early 20th century Ontario poet, story writer and novelist, something of a cult figure in Canadian literary circles for his early promise and the tragic way he died. His daughter used to live in Waterford, dg’s hometown, and he chatted with her there in the drugstore, oh, maybe three or four years ago now.) It’s a pleasure to be able to introduce you to Micheline and print one of her new poems, a kind of memento mori, a stern vision of death,  in Numéro Cinq.

dg

Bird at the University

By Micheline Maylor


Four months, it takes, for the sinew
to release bones from skeleton.
A whole semester.

From August, I walk back and forth past the bird
one hundred and twenty-two times.

I think of me and you, us,
while this elegant architecture called bird
disintegrates.

He’s belly-up, beak to the north,
wings splayed to the poles.
In two days, his eyes are sockets,
in four days, his under-feathers scatter to the east.
The gentle wind detonates
a downy bomb on still, green grass
only a few stray flight-feathers cling to the skeleton
in the mud beside the late pansies.

November snow covers everything.
Stray footprints press him tighter to the earth.

Much exists in my lexicon that was not there yesterday,
last week, last month, last year.
In this new normal, grief accumulates
with that first rime
with that first staying snow.

Yet, like the bird,
I learn to relax,
wings open,
to all these elements.

—By Micheline Maylor

Montaigne’s Motifs, Part 3: Writing as Conversation, with a Modern Nod to Patrick Madden — John Proctor

Nov 012010
 

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the third in a four-part series of essays on Montaigne.

To read the entire series, CLICK HERE.

———-

I teach writing to college students. It’s a great job – only two or three days on campus, I get to teach what I do, and I’m paid to talk about things that matter to me. I teach at a small liberal arts college, so by necessity I teach writing in many of its variants – media writing, academic writing (the Art Formerly Known as Composition), creative writing – and, partially because of this, I tend to see many overlaps in these disciplines. Take the personal essay, for example – as a form of creative writing it was given, about 20 years ago, the nomer “Creative Nonfiction (CNF)”; in the media world it wears such hats as “literary journalism” and “immersion writing”; the realm of academic writing (populated primarily by wide-eyed freshmen) it usually gives it lip service as “personal narrative,” usually the only assignment freshmen find remotely enjoyable to write.

As I read more and more personal essays, creative nonfiction, literary journalism, what-have-you, I’m finding the overlap to be instructive. The separation between these forms comes not from fundamental differences in the writing, but from the need – in both academia and the publishing marketplace – to categorize and delineate. Perhaps due to this realization, I find it almost a rebellion to concentrate more on the similarities. This search for common ground, for conversation, is in fact the taproot of the personal essay. The form is essentially a written conversation between the essayist and the world, the essayist’s sources, and the essayist’s self.

To give this argument a touch more humanity, indulge me in an analogy: I think of the world of the essay as a big party, and reading an essay as mingling. As a reader I think of every writer as a person at this big party, and each essay as a conversation with this person. The first thing to turn me off to an essay is essentially the same prompt for me to excuse myself from polite conversation – listening to people talk only about themselves is boring. This could be why I’ve never liked Proust, or to be more specific why I once threw Swann’s Way across the room after 90 pages. There’s one guy I’d never want to corner me at a cocktail party – I can imagine him over a tray of hors d’oeuvres , explaining in excruciating detail what childhood trauma each piece of food reminded him of. Just as boring, I suppose, is just talking about the world – small talk.  While many times the beginning of a substantial conversation, it’s never a replacement for it, at least if you’re looking for anything but small talk. And of course, the blowhard who only talks about what he’s read tends, in the short term, to seem pretentious, and after awhile makes the reader/listener wonder if he has anything original to say.

So, then, the most successful essays are the ones that converse organically with all three of these things, engaging the reader on each level. Another challenge for the essayist, as with the conversationalist, is to make it seem natural, like all of these conversations come easy.  I say all of this to introduce the element of Montaigne’s work that he’s perhaps best known for – his conversational style –  and to contextualize it with the trifecta of interlocutors I’ve mentioned – his world (including the reader), his sources (primarily drawn from his voluminous library), and himself.

The essayist is a student of the world; for reinforcement of this, one need look no further than the first of Montaigne’s Essays, “We reach the same end by discrepant means,” in which he compares many of the conquering heroes of his time, using the term “assay,” a cognate of essay, three times, not in relation to himself, but to his subjects:

The soldier, having assayed all kinds of submissiveness and supplications to try and appease him, as a last resort resolved to await him, sword in hand. (6)

Now these examples seem to me to be even more to the point in that souls which have been assaulted and assayed by both these methods can be seen to resist one without flinching only to bow to the other. (6)

None was so overcome with wounds that he did not assay with his latest breath to wreak revenge and to find consolation for his own death in the death of an enemy. (8)

This introduces a key element of Montaigne’s writing style that was different from the styles of any of his contemporaries I’ve read, which has become a seminal characteristic of the personal essay form –just as a soldier or leader assays his courage and fortitude in battle, the essayist assays his ideas in conversation with other ideas. This example may seem a bit feudal, but keep in mind that Montaigne writes mostly about soldiers and leaders in this essay – including Prince Edward of Wales, Emperor Conrad III, Dionysius, and Alexander the Great – as heroes who became noble through testing, or assaying, their mettle in physical attack and rebuttal with other heroes (or potential heroes). Analogously, the essayist tests the value of his ideas, conjectures, and stories most thoroughly through direct discussion with other ideas.

This bring us to sources, which in Montaigne’s case were primarily readings from his prodigious library. In “On solitude,” Montaigne expresses an opinion on choosing sources that can best be described as alternately cautionary…

Spending time with books has its painful side like everything else and is equally inimical to health, which must be our main concern; we must not let our edge be blunted by the pleasure we take in books: it is the same pleasure as destroys the manager of estates, the miser, the voluptuary and the man of ambition. (105)

…and lackadaisical:

There are branches of learning both sterile and prickly, most of them made for the throng: they may be left to those who serve society. Personally I only like pleasurable easy books which tickle my interest, or those which console me and counsel me how to control my life and death. (106)

Of course there is considerable cheekiness to be read into each of these passages, as there is in the voices of most personal essayists after him. Essaying oneself in conversation with other writers, to Montaigne, is built on associations rather than formal transitions. As a telling example of this pellmell in-and-out assaying of ideas in relation to each other, his 64-page “On some lines of Virgil” spends the first eleven pages citing and/or referring to Ovid, Martial, Plato, Seneca, Cicero, Horace, Catullus, Pseudo-Gallus, Bishop Caius Sollius Apollinaris, George Buchanon, Ravisius Textor, Plutarch, Erasmus, Nicephoros Callistos Xanthopoullos, St. Augustine, Origen, Hippocrates, Diogenes Laertius, and Aristotle before actually getting to any lines of Virgil! But in “In Defense of Seneca and Plutarch,” for example, he reveals  a sincere appreciation for the sources he assays himself against, defending Seneca from what he sees as false analogies to King Nero and faulty characterization by the historian Dion (186-187) and, in response to what he sees as egoistic responses to Plutarch, he takes to task those who either can’t or won’t transcend their own subjective prejudices when reading or encountering others:

We must not judge what is possible or impossible according to what seems credible or incredible to our own minds…It is nevertheless a major fault into which most people fall…to make difficulties about believing of another anything which they could not or would not do themselves. It seems to each man the master Form of Nature is in himself, as a touchstone by which he may compare all the other forms. Activities which do not take this form as their model are feigned and artificial. What brute-like stupidity! (190-191)

In segueing into Montaigne’s conversations with himself, it’s worth noting an analogy he makes between fatherhood  and writing towards the end of “On the affection of fathers for their children”:

Now once we consider the fact that we love our children simply because we begot them, calling them our second selves, we can see that we also produce something else from ourselves, no less worthy of commendation: for the things we engender in our soul, the offspring of our mind, of our wisdom and talents, are the products of a part more noble than the body and are more purely our own. In this act of generation we are both mother and father; these ‘children’ cost us dearer and, if they are any good, bring us more honour. In the case of our other children their good qualities belong much more to them than to us: we have only a very slight share in them; but in the case of these, all their grace, worth and beauty belong to us. (165)

This correspondence with the self that produces writing, then, is not necessarily a challenge or assay like the conversation he creates between himself and his sources, or even himself and the world – it’s intimate, consummate, and capable of producing a life that proceeds from the intercourse in the form of the essay. Then, carrying on the metaphor of Writing as Family in “On three good wives,” after telling the story of Seneca’s wife finding that her husband was to be bled to death and arranging the same fate for herself, Montaigne cites the essay as the Good Wife who gathers man’s stories together and making them beautiful:

If any author should wish to construct them into a single interconnected unity he would only need to supply the link – like soldering metals together with another metal. He could by such means make a compilation of many true incidents of every sort, varying his arrangement as the beauty of his work required. (200)

*            *            *

In “Remember Death,” a not-as-morbid-as-the-title-implies essay in Patrick Madden’s 2010 collection Quotidiana, Madden refers to the skull in St Jerome’s study, a symbol many writers of the Renaissance and probably earlier always kept nearby to remind them of their own mortality. That same skull, or one nearly identical, adorns the cover of my copy of Montaigne’s The Essays: A Selection. Madden follows his mention of St. Jerome’s skull with the same quote (different translation) from“Of Three Good Wives” by (his nomer) Papa Montaigne. The connections to Big Papa don’t end there. Like Montaigne’s essays, Madden’s flow like cream, so that the reader finishes a twenty-page essay in roughly a half hour (longer, if you’re as slow a reader as I am), then realizes how rich and full the prose was. His style, like Montaigne’s, is conversational in the best sense. His voice  – learned but not stuffy, confident but self-effacing – holds the reader’s interest by letting us in on the conversations he’s having with the world.

Take, for example, “Panis Angelicus,” his essay that gets its title from recording he has of his grandmother singing an old Catholic hymn in Latin. He sets up the discourse of the essay by defining Catholic mass as a process of spiritual transubstantiation:

In the Mass, transubstantiation is the change from bread and water into the body and blood of Christ…But transubstantiations happen all the time: food into muscle and blood and bone, water to vapor to snow back to water, ideas and images into words and images and ideas in another head.

I’ll be the first to admit that my idea of transubstantiation was fuzzy at best before reading this, but Madden manages to not only define a relatively opaque term but to include the reader in the discussion on whichever level we choose – spiritual, physical, or academic. The connections he then makes in the essay, between listening for the first time to his grandmother’s  voice as an adult with his children and extended family, to his father’s survival of Vietnam, to a busker he hears singing “Panis Angelicus” on a bus in Uruguay while on a Fulbright Fellowship. Everything in the world, he implies, is connected, as are we.

Madden’s choice of sources is just as varied than Montaigne’s. He juxtaposes literary, critical, and historical references with mathematical formulas, condensed narratives, lists, quotations, and pictures (including one of Montaigne himself) – and that’s all just in the essay “Gravity and Distance.” Another essay, “Asymptosy” (another new vocabulary word for me), essentially about words and numbers and images and the relationship between them, is set up in sections that seem to be a set of riddles and puzzlers. And the essay “Singing” starts each section with a general statement, sometimes aphoristic, sometimes personal – that he then expands on, including:

Singing is at once natural and unnatural.

And:

One time I and two other motorists, whom I could see in my rearview mirror, were singing the same song at the same time.

And my personal favorite:

Cantar es disparar contra el olvido.
[To sing is to fight against forgetting.]

Each of these is a sort of call-and-response, like a musical convocation or a work holler. And as always, he’s finding connections – my personal favorite is his discovery that “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and the ABC song share the exact same tune, a discovery that I made as well recently with my daughter. We were sitting outside a coffee shop and I was humming “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” to her, when a little girl next to us who must have been four or five years old started practicing her ABC’s.

And finally there are the conversations Madden has with himself, most notable (for me, at least) in the final and longest essay of Quotidiana, “Finity,” which he starts by relaying his obsessive-compulsive counting of the grapes he bought at his local supermarket:

There are 172 grapes in the bag I bought from my local Smith’s supermarket. One-hundred-sixty of them look to be in good shape, four of them are undeveloped, six of them are deflated, and two were hiding underneath the drain in the sink where I washed them yesterday, thus upsetting the nicely round number (a prime number multiplied by ten!) I thought I had.

In itself, this literal recounting of his inner compulsions might be offputtingly Proustian, but Madden uses this compulsion to numerate the stars in the sky; possible grains of sand in the world; the progeny of Abraham, Brigham Young, Niall Noigiallach, Genghis Khan, and his own forefathers; surnames of his family; and the world population. But he also interjects this numeration with the stories that underlie them – of Abraham’s struggles with his own faith, for example – and punctuates the juxtaposition by reminding the reader that we no longer need to count grapes, people, or grains of sand:

Once we see the expanse of this vast world, once we can know, almost instantly, the tragedies our brothers and sisters are facing halfway around the globe, once our fruits come to us no matter the season and from far away, more temperate places that grow things we could not have otherwise, we no longer wonder, at least not so much, how many there are of things.

If this all sounds a lot like the dialectic of list and story I covered in Part II, I’ll chalk that up to another level of the conversation.

—By John Proctor

See also

Montaigne’s Motifs, Part 2: The Dialectic of List and Story, with Joe Brainard in Tow

Montaigne’s Motifs, Part 1: Integrating Universal Ideas with Personal Narrative (With a Glance at Joan Didion as a Contemporary Example)

Wendell Berry’s Use of But-Constructions in Nature Writing: Craft Essay — Adam Arvidson

Oct 312010
 

Institute for Southern Studies, www.southernstudies.org

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Ah, you useful little “but.”  You have been discussed at length in craft books, lectures, advisor phone calls, and, of course, critical essays.  So much is embodied in your unassuming three letters.  You can almost stand alone (and in French you often do: “Oui, mais…” [insert pursed-lip ‘pfffssst’ here]).  You are king among conjunctions.  You are worthy of an ode:

Oh, but, inherent contradiction,
You give my work such pleasing friction….

I won’t go on.

Recently, I looked at how but-constructions operate not just poetically or grammatically, but functionally, through the course of entire essays.  I examined : Wendell Berry’s “An Entrance to the Woods,” which is about a two-day hiking trip into Kentucky’s Red River Gorge.

In “Entrance to the Woods,” Wendell Berry uses but-constructions to bring himself and his own thought patterns into the narrative.  Out of necessity, he spends a great deal of time describing the landscape through which he hikes, but that landscape triggers his own musings on the interface between civilization and wildness.  The essay, therefore, moves back and forth between rote descriptions of nature, such as, in the 2nd paragraph:

It is nearly five o’clock when I start walking.  The afternoon is brilliant and warm, absolutely still, not enough air stirring to move a leaf.  There is only the steady somnolent trilling of insects, and now and again in the woods below me the cry of a pileated woodpecker.  Those, and my footsteps on the path, are the only sounds.

And more inward-looking sections that are essentially philosophical, such as, midway through the 2nd section:

Wilderness is the element in which we live encased in civilization, as a mollusk lives in his shell in the sea.  It is a wilderness that is beautiful, dangerous, abundant, oblivious of us, mysterious, never to be conquered or controlled or second-guessed, or known more than a little.  It is a wilderness that for most of us most of the time is kept out of sight, camouflaged, by the edifices and the busyness and the bothers of human society.

Thirteen times, however, Berry explicitly uses the word ‘but’ in very close conjunction with the personal pronoun.  These could be considered “But-I” constructions.  Some examples:

That sense of the past is probably one reason for the melancholy that I feel.  But I know that there are other reasons.

And now, here at my camping place, I have stopped altogether.  But my mind is still keyed to seventy miles an hour.

Perhaps the most difficult labor for my species is to accept its limits, its weakness and ignorance.  But here I am.

And so I have come here to enact – not because I want to but because, once here, I cannot help it – the loneliness and the humbleness of my kind.

Notably, most of these thirteen instances even have sentences that begin with ‘but’.  (There are two other instances that fall into this same “but-I” category but use ‘though’ as their contrast word.)

Berry uses “But-I” constructions to introduce a questioning, a lack of assurance, into the essay as a whole.  It seems Berry is puzzling out the answer as he writes.  Though he may be on sure footing with the calls of the woodpecker, he is communicating that he is less sure about the broader questions of wilderness in the context of human culture.  In the above examples, note the use of ‘probably’ and ‘perhaps’ and ‘I cannot help it.’  These words note a less clear-cut view of reality and they appear in nearly every “But-I” circumstance.  The use of “But-I,” therefore, especially when ‘but’ originates a sentence, signals an entry into Berry’s mind’s eye, where the answers are less sure.

In one interesting dual contradiction, Berry uses the “But-I” (in the 8th paragraph) to suggest confidence in his knowledge: But here it has a quality that I recognize as peculiar to the narrow hollows of the Red River Gorge.  Several pages later, however, he introduces the construction again, to essentially contradict that confidence: But I am in this hollow for the first time in my life.  I see nothing that I recognize. He even repeats the word ‘hollow’ in both passages.  The second example introduces a philosophical section about the transience of his presence and doubt about the importance of his very existence: the lack of assurance, again.

There are, however, four instances where the ‘but’ is not accompanied by the first person.  These happen in two pairs – one pair near the beginning of the piece, and the other about two-thirds of the way through.  Both pairs deal with nature, but in different ways.  Here is the first:

I pass a ledge overhanging a sheer drop of rock, where in a wetter time there would be a waterfall.  The ledge is dry and mute now, but on the face of the rock below are the characteristic mosses, ferns, liverwort, meadow rue.

Five following sentences further describe the ravine into which Berry is hiking, concluding the paragraph.  Then:

Finally from the crease of the ravine I am following there begins to come the trickling and splashing of water.  There is a great restfulness in the sounds these small streams make; they are going down as fast as they can, but their sounds seem leisurely and idle, as if produced like gemstones with the greatest patience and care.

In contrast to the “But-I” constructions described earlier, these are far simpler.  They include point and counterpoint within the same sentence.  They further describe the natural elements at hand by establishing the contrasts inherent in them. What seems to be one thing is in fact another.

But there is another message to this pair (to use a but-construction of my own).  These two passages signal the two inherent contrasts that Berry discusses throughout the entire essay.  They introduce the two key themes of the piece.  The first (about the ravine) references the passage of time. The ledge is dry, BUT was once wet.  Berry deals with this theme in addressing the changing landscape.  He begins four paragraphs later by saying the landscape he is in is “haunted” by the ghosts of “ancient tribesmen,” “white hunters,” and “seekers of quick wealth in timber.”  Later, while on the high ridge the next day, Berry sees an inscription on the rock from 1903 and begins to imagine the history of the view he sees.  He addresses the change (over time) in wilderness from being dominant to subservient in relation to human culture.

The second ‘but’ in the first pair (about the stream) references the pace of life. The streams move quickly, BUT they sound leisurely.  Berry regularly brings up the contrast between the expressway and the woods, for the first time just six paragraphs later.  Through the essay, Berry gradually transitions from the high-speed world of his office and the highway to the slower world of the wilderness, and he thinks at length about that transition.

The second pair of nature-centered but-constructions bring the discussion of the passage of time, the pace of the world, and the interaction between humans and wilderness together, thereby forming the crux of the essay (even though there are still pages to go).  The text reads:

On a day like this, at the end of September, there would have been only the sounds of a few faint crickets, a woodpecker now and then, now and then the wind.  But today, two-thirds of a century later, the continent is covered by an ocean of engine noise, in which silences occur only sporadically and at wide intervals.

From where I am sitting in the midst of this island of wilderness, it is as though I am listening to the machine of human history – a huge flywheel building speed until finally the force of its whirling will break it in pieces, and the world with it.  That is not an attractive thought, and yet I find it impossible to escape, for it has seemed to me for years now that the doings of men no longer occur within nature, but that the natural places which the human economy has so far spared now survive almost accidentally within the doings of men.

There are a few things of note here.  Though the first person appears in this passage, it does not appear in direct relation to the ‘buts.’  The contradiction refers to culture and nature, not Berry’s mind’s eye.  There are specific mentions of time (“the end of September” and “two-thirds of a century later”) and speed.  These, of course, refer back to the initial pair of nature-centered but-constructions.

Following this passage, Berry concludes a long paragraph with what can justifiably be called a rant.  This is the height of the essay’s anti-civilization, pro-wilderness rhetoric, even concluding with the unusual (for this piece) mention of specific human evils: “the poison spray, the hugging fire of napalm, the cloud of Hiroshima.”  The ‘buts’ that introduce this section are used to describe today’s wilderness by contrasting their former glory with their current demise.  Long ago there would have been only crickets, BUT now there is engine noise. Once, man was enveloped by nature, BUT today it is, sadly, the other way around.

Interestingly, just as this rant is about to spiral out of control (at Hiroshima), Berry reins it in by using another but-construction – even though he employs a ‘though/still’ combination here instead of ‘but.’ After Hiroshima there is a section break, then Berry returns to the “But-I” technique to, as he has done throughout the essay, cast doubt on his own train of thought.  That passage reads:

Though from the high vantage point of this stony ridge I see little hope that I will ever live a day as an optimist, still I am not desperate.  In fact, with the sun warming me now, and with the whole day before me to wander in this beautiful country, I am happy.

 Where the preceding paragraph was nearly devoid of the first person, instead delivering a treatise on the ills of civilization, the introduction to the next section, in which Berry returns to the pure happiness of being in the woods, presents the ‘I’ several times in rapid succession.  And, to mesh with the dismal viewpoint right before, the contrast moves from pessimism to optimism, low to high.  I am a pessimist, BUT I am still happy.  From this point to the end of the essay, the mind’s eye grows silent, perhaps exhausted, perhaps indicating the author’s final transition to the wilderness.  There is only one “But-I” construction left, and it deals with Berry being physically tired at the end of the hike.

In essence, then, the two pairs of nature centered but-constructions open and close the philosophical section (the opening two-thirds) of the essay.  Within this section are numerous “But-I” constructions that explore both sides of the nature/civilization discussion.  After the 2nd pair of nature ‘buts’ is a long denouement during which Berry simply revels in being in the wilderness.  He lets his mind rest, seeing only nature as it is.  He puts the ‘buts’ away.

—By Adam Arvidson

Remembering Bruce Chatwin by William Dalrymple – TLS

Oct 312010
 

Strange & instructive how the world of literary fashion works. Bruce Chatwin, once lionized, is pretty much derided and overlooked these days. Read this and think about it.

dg

 

That friend turned out to be Bruce Chatwin, and the lunch was one of those encounters that happen only once or twice in a lifetime and that really do change the direction you end up taking. Chatwin, I thought, was simply astounding. As we sat in the panelled dining room, surrounded by whispering pin-striped clubmen, my small fragments of glazed tile were the starting point for a conversational riff that moved from the nomads of Mongolia in the thirteenth century and cantered over the steppes to Timurid Herat, then leapt polymathically to Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, Sufi sheikhs and the shamans of the Kalahari bushmen; before long we were being told about Taoist sages, Aboriginal “dreaming” pictures and ancient Cycladic sculpture and thence, as coffee came, via Proust and Pascal and Berenson, to Derek’s portraits, and the latter’s story about sharing a railway carriage with Robert Byron who performed a pitch-perfect imitation of Queen Victoria, using the train’s antimacassar as the Queen’s mourning veil.

via Under the Sun: The letters of Bruce Chatwin, reviewed by William Dalrymple – TLS.

A Right Like Yours: Short Story — Steven Heighton

Oct 302010
 

Herewith a startling and idiosyncratically romantic Steven Heighton short story “A Right Like Yours.” Many of you know Steven from previous appearances on the pages of Numéro Cinq, including his lovely poem “Herself, Revised” (very popular here), his novel excerpt from Every Lost Country, his book of essays The Admen Move on Lhasa, which Rich Farrell wrote about here, and his handful of Horace odes in translation, which you really ought to take a second look at for their grace and intricacy. Of these odes, David Helwig wrote to me in an email: “They seem to me technically brilliant. And therefore moving.” (Remind me to ask him if I can quote him.)

dg

A RIGHT LIKE YOURS

By Steven Heighton

 

He is short but he has shoulders and I think he wears the flattest shoes going, cheap sneakers of some kind, and that is attractive, that he doesn’t try to elevate himself in any way. His look is shy though, maybe cold, with green eyes that don’t meet your eyes but look at your mouth or chin in the same way as, when you’re in the ring, the other girl will stare a little below your eyes. So maybe he does it to practice. Always be in the ring, Webb Renton tells us.

I choose to think he is just somewhat shy.

It started because I was training for my fifth fight and my sparring partner had hurt that ligament in the knee that’s called, I think, cruciate but we just say crucial because that’s what it is. The other girls at the club are either on the little or the huge size and Trav is about the same weight as me, though he is shorter, and toward the end of a workout Webb yelled at him to get in there and give me a couple rounds. Trav’s face then—like someone told him to throw himself on a grenade. People started gathering ringside. Like I said, it was the end of the night, and I would have been interested too. I don’t think the coach had ever put a girl and guy in to spar that way.

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What it’s like living here — from Shelagh Shapiro in Burlington, VT

Oct 292010
 

Radio

Another Numéro Cinq What-it’s-like-living-here piece, this time by Shelagh Shapiro, a Vermont College of Fine Arts graduate, short story writer, author of that lovely Novel-in-a-Box Contest entry Infinity Falling,  and producer/interviewer for her own amazing radio show Write the Book. Listen to her latest show, an interview with Richard Russo here.

dg

What it’s like living here

From Shelagh Shapiro

The View From The Baby’s Room

You moved here – out to the country – nineteen years ago. One-year married and seven months pregnant, you slid the moving boxes around and directed other people where to carry the furniture. The mosquitoes got so bad with doors open all that day, you took to vacuuming them out of the air. When you first looked over the property, you woke up a raccoon in the barn. Groggy and comfortable, he didn’t bother you. That night, you and Jerry slept in the baby’s bedroom at the back of the house, because the water bed wasn’t filled yet in your room. (All the next day, the bed would fill, that sixty-foot hose snaking up through the bathroom window.) The baby’s room faced the pond—as it does still—and the peepers lulled you to sleep.

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Excerpts from The Committee on Town Happiness: Fiction — Alan Michael Parker

Oct 282010
 

AMP

Alan Michael Parker is an old friend and colleague from my stint as the McGee Professor of Writing at Davidson College in North Carolina. (Coincidentally, we have two Davidson graduates who appear frequently on Numéro Cinq—Contributing Editor Gary Garvin and Cynthia Newberry Martin of Catching Days.) Among his many claims on my affection, Alan had the good taste to marry a Canadian, the painter Felicia van Bork. He is a prolific poet and a novelist, a poet-novelist, a wry, energetic presence with a gift for teaching and satire. His most recent book of poems is Elephants & Butterflies (BOA Editions) and his most recent novel is Whale Man (WordFarm Books) which is due out February, 2011. It’s a great pleasure and delight to introduce him to the pages of Numéro Cinq. These three excerpts are from a new novel in progress, The Committee on Town Happiness.

dg

 

All Swimming Pools

No diving. No skipping. No three-legged competitions. No talking to the lifeguard from behind the lifeguard stand. No eating in the shallow end. No keys in the water. No unlabeled towels. No food dyes.

All swimming pools are to be skimmed daily with the use of skimmers attached to telescopic poles, those good ideas made better. All swimming pools are to employ regulation geometric symbols: triangles for fish, circles for rescue rings, squares for the Snack Hut, rectangles for chaise lounges, etc. Color coding may apply. Primary colors may apply, given the recent popularity of goggles.

No hiking boots inside the fence. No pets in water six inches above their heads. All swimming pools offering consumer services shall employ kitty corner entrances and exits—the latter through the gift areas, to encourage community. When we buy together, we are together. No indecency. No metal belts.

All swimming pools shall appoint a Wildlife Officer who shall successfully complete Level Three Wildlife Training. All swimming pools shall post the hours of All Swim. All swimming pools shall offer shallow ends and deeps, to remind us of our progress in life, with demarcations clearly marked in graduated units, to remind us of all we trust.

In case of emergency, all swimming pools shall be prepared to accept displaced persons; all Snack Huts must be equipped with sleeping bags and hurricane lamps. Sterno and a flare gun, safety cones. One torch per every three employees. In case of inclement weather, T-shirts may be awarded. “I Survived…” slogans are acceptable. No underwater lighting. No realistic inflatables.

The Marching Band

Petitioned by the Active Mothers in Support of the Marching Band (AMSMB), we considered previously undirected funds. Granted, the timing of the request seemed carefully timed, raising more than one eyebrow, our fiscal year concluding, earmarked monies marked for non-displaced expenditures and needing to be spent. We saw there were expenses, naturally: the unfortunate state of the glockenspiel, for example, and the need for eighteen sets of snap-on straps. No one mentioned the excessively woolen caps. Was it all so serendipitous? Is serendipity to be believed? We wondered, when the AMSMB was joined in an amicus motion by the Pre-Holidays Happiness Sub-Committee (M. Barriston, W. Weiss). Of course, every petition has petitioners, every dollar its admirers.

If only. In the subsequent filing period, the “cooling off,” due diligence and discoveries. Around the practice field, an empty trombone case, a bell. Two uniform shirts balled in the trash behind the former Sewing Notions store (now boarded up with cardboard, tightly X-ed with tape). Then there was the unfortunate bassoon that no amount of cleaning would unclog. And the note intercepted from the clarinetist: such antipathy between a first and second chair.

After four, we could still hear the muted, brassy airs from far away, drums quick as a rabbit’s heart. Not that anyone would deny a child music, but. Who was that playing, considering the recent losses? The AMSMB appeared perplexed. So we voted, 5-2, to wait. “Maybe they can march in place,” quipped F. Czerniwicz, not all that helpfully.

Report from the Committee on Town Happiness

It would not have been feasible to keep adding members to our ranks, even though we had our feelings and our losses, so we voted, 4-2, not to open up the rolls (S. Avumito and W. Weiss abstaining, since they were so new). When the vote was tallied, we were wide-eyed. There was the outside prospect of a pall.

But on to business: the Committee on Town Happiness has been thinking about the Community Garden. All those mirrors of our personalities; who grows the cukes, who the cosmos, who the daffodils, who the ornamentals; who comes to dig at night rather than go home. Who composts, who sprays and with what. Who shares. We have voted, 6-1 (M. Barriston recused, due to her portfolio) that Community Garden plots shall hereby be awarded based on the applicant’s commitment to the Community Garden Market. We have voted, 6-1, to establish a Community Garden Market, staffed by volunteers who already work for the town. Not strictly “in this time of need,” although the phrase was entered into the minutes.

We think that growing and marketing vegetables and flowers together will bring us all together. Our bodies are what we have in common, after all. The organism business, the willingness to participate as people. We voted, 5-3, to recognize the relationship between togetherness and happiness—and maybe, as M. Espinoza said, the tightness of the vote was telling, but maybe not.

We, the Committee on Town Happiness, would like to thank the three representatives from the Community Garden who came so promptly despite the sirens, and who shall henceforth be recognized as the three representatives of the Community Garden Market. We thanked them formally, 8-0. The smiles accompanying our unanimity were what we most encouraged all to see.

–By Alan Michael Parker

 

Anton Chekhov’s short story: Terror

Oct 282010
 

Steve Lindstrom (former student) mentioned this on his Facebook wall, so I read it this morning. A stunning story.

dg

What chiefly frightens me is the common routine of life from which none of us can escape. I am incapable of distinguishing what is true and what is false in my actions, and they worry me. I recognize that education and the conditions of life have imprisoned me in a narrow circle of falsity, that my whole life is nothing else than a daily effort to deceive myself and other people, and to avoid noticing it; and I am frightened at the thought that to the day of my death I shall not escape from this falsity. To-day I do something and to-morrow I do not understand why I did it. I entered the service in Petersburg and took fright; I came here to work on the land, and here, too, I am frightened. . . . I see that we know very little and so make mistakes every day. We are unjust, we slander one another and spoil each other’s lives, we waste all our powers on trash which we do not need and which hinders us from living; and that frightens me, because I don’t understand why and for whom it is necessary. I don’t understand men, my dear fellow, and I am afraid of them.

via Anton Chekhov’s short story: Terror.

The First Annual Numéro Cinq Rondeau Writing Contest

Oct 272010
 

 

 

ENTRIES ARE OFFICIALLY CLOSED

Entries close midnight Sunday, November 21.

 

The First Annual Numéro Cinq Rondeau Writing Contest opens for entries November 1 (midnight tonight as of this writing). The rondeau is a slightly intricate little form (see preamble and definitions below). You should not attempt to write one under the influence of intoxicants or while using a cell phone (unless you are writing it on your cell phone). Also do not attempt to operate heavy machinery while composing your rondeau. Don’t shy away from trying a rondeau just because you consider yourself a rhyme & rhythm-challenged prose-writer. Fiction and nonfiction writers always need a dash of form in their lives, something to make them sit up straight (or just to jar the gears loose). As with all the NC contests, there is a method behind the madness. Beyond the discipline of form, we discover the freedom of aesthetic space. Every contest is a teaching moment, a formal lesson, and a moment of unleashing (paradoxical as that seems). Also, if you look at our previous contests, you will see that they are fun. Submit entries by typing them into the comment box beneath this post.

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Absinthe Minded: Franzenfreude

Oct 262010
 

Here’s a perspective on Jonathan Franzen that seems fresh to me.

dg

Like everyone else, I have been eagerly awaiting Jonathan Franzen’s new novel. “Freedom” has been nine years in the making. Franzen just gave his first reading in New York City; he appeared on public radio, and his photograph made the cover of Time magazine with the caption “Great American Novelist.” Sam Tanenhaus in his New York Times review calls the book a masterpiece. He compares Franzen to Thomas Mann. Chick-lit author Jennifer Weiner, irritated by this ample publicity and the lack of such for many talented female writers, complained to her 15,000 twitter followers and termed the literary hashtag Franzenfreude.

Was she driven by what Germans call Futterneid (envy)?

via Absinthe Minded: Franzenfreude.

And see this from Pankaj Mishra in the UK Guardian Books which seems more superficial and conventional in its thinking.

A strange hysteria, originating in New York, swept across America last month. I am not referring to the anti-Muslim campaign led by extreme rightwingers and abetted by an unprincipled media. No: this particular mania was marked by loudly competing eulogies rather than cacophonous malignity. The “hallowed ground” was American literature, and the monument quickly raised on it by broad and vigorous consensus was to Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom.

via Pankaj Mishra on American literature | Books | The Guardian.

In Flanders Fields, tiny dg memoir

Oct 262010
 

lieutenant-colonel-john-mccraeThe first poem I can recall, aside from nursery rhymes, was a rondeau written by a Canadian artillery officer (and medical doctor), John McCrae, in 1915. It’s also the first poem I ever memorized. I can still remember the words written on the blackboard. This was a different world. We still sang God Save the Queen before classes started and recited the Lord’s Prayer, and there was always a Union Jack and a picture of the Queen prominently displayed. And every November there would be men or women in blue blazers and berets at the bank door in Waterford with trays of poppies. I remember being very proud of myself for memorizing the poem. And on Remembrance Day, we were all (brothers & parents) going to town for the ceremony at the cenotaph. We stopped to pick up an elderly neighbour who lived alone in a little house at the edge of our farm. He was a retired teacher and classicist, living quietly with his books. I was sitting in the backseat with my father and brothers and cheerfully began to rattle off the poem in a boyish singsong. My father gave my arm a squeeze and shushed me and whispered: “Not now. His son died in the war.” I shut up, confused, suddenly aware, acutely aware, that literature isn’t just words on a page but somehow rooted in our personal lives, in our deepest feelings about love, loss and death. I think it hadn’t occurred to me before that people actually died in the war. I didn’t, of course, know the poem was a rondeau, but the form itself has sunk deep into my brain. McCrae was born in Guelph, Ontario, a university town about 50 miles from where I grew up. He had fought with the Canadian artillery in the Boer War but spent his civilian years as a pathologist in Montreal. When the First World War broke out, he went back into the artillery. He was still with the guns when he wrote the poem (the story goes that he wrote it sitting in an ambulance after watching a friend die). But soon after he was called to hospital duty where he subsequently died of pneumonia at the age of 45.

dg

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

 

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