Douglas Glover

News from the Dark Side, the Editor’s Perspective

Aug 212010
 

Okay, this topic evolves out of the comments attached to the “What I think” post below. Court and Gary and others are frustrated with the current literary scene, finding it difficult to get a toehold in terms of publication. The idea here is to try to establish a forum for NC readers and lurkers and the editors we have in the community. Vivian Dorsel is the publisher of upstreet. Robin Oliveira is the fiction editor (hopefully she can join in). I edited fiction at The Iowa Review during my stint at the Writers’ Workshop. I edited Best Canadian Stories for over a decade. I’ve judged innumerable contests. We can start here.

This is me talking from my experience as an editor, not as a writer or a teacher. Years ago, when I was at The Iowa Review, I easily received 50-70 stories a week, from writers like Joyce Carol Oates down to complete neophytes. The magazine then published four times a year, with 4-6 slots for short stories, at most 24 stories could find a place in a year (so, yes, obviously LENGTH makes a difference, a fact of life and economics). I suspect the odds are a lot worse now with the proliferation of writing programs. Typical for editors at this level, I was not paid well (the English Department gave me a research assistantship) and it was a part-time job. Most literary magazine editors and readers make nothing. With those kinds of odds you can afford to have a hair trigger rejection finger. You read so many awful or mediocre manuscripts (let’s be honest here) that it gets easy to say no to perhaps 80% of those 50 or more stories a week. Most of those stories you don’t even read past the second page. A cliché, a lame sentence, or a grammatical error automatically knocks them out. (Also sending clips and a c.v. along with that 3-page cover letter guarantees rejection—sure signs of an amateur.) It’s a simple as that. Ask yourselves a) How perfect is my first page? b) Is there enough panache and intelligence evidenced in my first two pages to make me stand out from the herd? After the first 80% of the stories (or essays or poems—it’s the same) get turned down, the work begins. The next 19% are the stories you come to loathe because they are often earnest and competent and second-rate to the core. These stories have plots that start up pretty decently and characters that move through their paces the way they should and they express the regular story-like emotions. But they are ordinary. They have no panache, no real surprises, no blazing excitement. Often you have to read right to the end of these stories because, you know, you’re rooting for the author, hoping against hope that he or she will pull off the terrific ending or suddenly bring a character to life. Sad truth is they never do. And the other sad truth is that there will be enough stories with panache, surprise, intelligence, and delightful linguistic turns, etc. that you can safely reject this 19% as well. The final, final sad truth is that even with that 1% of stories left to read, you know you’ll have a hard time filling the magazine slots with stories you really think are first class, superlative, all the way through—they are so rare.

There really is a perspective trick here. From the writer’s point of view, here is a story he has rewritten 20 times over three months, polished and perfected, and he looks out at the current scene and sees all the schlock that gets published here and there, and he thinks, My God, I am going to save the publishing world with this story! Editors are going to greet me as the saviour! And then that envelope or digital submission shows up at the editor’s desk along with 200 other equally earnest and brilliant (from their author’s perspective) submissions (and there will be MORE tomorrow!). Think of it. Two hundred Messiahs a day! But from the editor’s point of view it’s a triage situation, wave after wave of awful to pretty good stories, all looking about the same after a few months on the job, most of them DOA.

This shouldn’t discourage anyone, except those who want an excuse. I don’t think it’s ever been different. To stand out for an editor you have to be very, very good. And not just very good in spots—all the way through the text. That’s the key. Competent and nice aren’t enough. Tryers go to the end of the line. Stories need to ring with truth, linguistic pizzazz, mystery, life, passion and excitement from the first word. This isn’t to say that there aren’t bad editors, sycophants, people led by fads, provincials, people driven only by marketing models and bottom lines. And lots of schlock gets published—although that’s mainly because certain kinds of schlock actually sell well to an undereducated market that likes schlock (yes, honestly). And, yes, editors often lean toward established names, partly because those established names have figured out how to separate themselves from the herd (not just because names sell). And some magazines and editors have preferences in terms of style (e.g. avant garde or conventional realism)—we all have different tastes. But most editors are trying to fill their magazines with good exciting writing. It’s not a conspiracy.

But it is awfully hard to get published, to get started, and even to keep getting published over a lifetime. The art is difficult and long to learn, and the competition is brutal. And there certainly have been cases when editors have missed a work of genius (scary thought). And, yes, if your work is eccentric, or out of the mainstream in some way, editors will have an even harder time deciding if you are really good or not. And there certainly are cultural troughs and bents that militate against certain kinds of art (classicism yields to decadence and vice versa over time). All this comes and goes, lean times and fat (pretty lean right now). The main thing is to learn to write well and drive yourself with a realistic sense of how good your work has to be to attract an editor’s attention. The rest is in the hands of the gods.

dg

A Sentimental Education

Aug 202010
 

DG and the blue dog heading into the woods together

Strange the things that educate our emotional responses to life. I just finished a draft of the story called “Uncle Boris up in a Tree.” One of the characters, Bjorn, the straight arrow, buys a bright yellow Land Rover. The yellow Land Rover is, for me, a dream image, a symbol. But the “Land Rover” part doesn’t seem right. I think and think. I realize I meant it to be a yellow Rolls Royce. Rolls Royce seems right. And later I remember that when I was a kid I loved that movie The Yellow Rolls Royce, that for years I played the soundtrack over and over. The Yellow Rolls Royce is an unusual movie. It’s a triptych,  three different love stories connected only by the object, the image, the yellow Rolls Royce. I think the dramatist Terence Rattigan wrote the script. Very romantic, sentimental, sad. So then I realize that this movie, and the emotional education I derived from it, stands unconsciously behind the story. The yellow Land Rover is the clue. And I think there is a certain attitude to life and love that I try to get at in the story that comes from the feelings I got from that movie and the music, when I was a kid (and maybe I haven’t grown up so much).

Here are two of the songs from the soundtrack. “Forget Domani” and “Now and Then” (this one still shakes me). I think Riz Ortolani wrote the music. Katyna Ranieri sings.

dg

Mariska’s Tongue: Fiction — Jason DeYoung

Aug 192010
 

Jason DeYoung

It’s a pleasure to offer here this shocking and deeply comic little story by my former student and recent VCFA graduate Jason DeYoung (above with his son Harrison). “Mariska’s Tongue” was originally published in Gargoyle, No. 53 (2008).  It reads like a cross between a segment from The Twilight Zone and something Donald Barthelme or Julio Cortazar could have written. Chief among its charms is the evidence herein of a deeply disturbed mind at work (would that we could all find our inner cannibal and let it out on the page).

dg

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When I saw it on the menu, I knew I had to have it.  Tongue. When the waiter came to fill my water glass, I asked him what kind of tongue was it. “Human,” he said. I believe I gasped a little like some expectation had been fulfilled.  I was not nonplus, however.  The waiter had answered curtly, and when he picked up my water glass, he parried my eyes, and I sensed he didn’t want to give any explanation for this item.

In general, on a menu the indelicate items appear below what are the best things at the restaurant, maybe in the lower left column or tucked in among more mundane, unsatisfying things—squash salad, yuck. There is a rule I have: Order what the restaurant specializes in.  For instance, if it’s a steakhouse, order steak.  I do not stray from this rule, typically.

Everything conspired against ordering the tongue, the listing for which occupied a section of the menu that fully conveyed that it wasn’t the restaurant’s specialty.  The tongue dish wasn’t cheap either at $25.00 a serving, and I was short on cash.

Looking up, I saw that the waiter was still filling my water goblet; the dark hair on his rock-colored fingers looked like hunched, over-fed horseflies, and his eyes were narrowed on the goblet’s sliver-clear rim.  “Do you recommend the tongue?” I asked, when he was finished pouring.  “For some,” he said.  He was terse and respectful.  He turned on his heels and limped back into the kitchen.

I looked again at the un-dramatic listing for tongue, and then put my menu down and sipped a little of the ice-water.  How could I not take this opportunity to have human tongue?  My god, what would it be like, taste like? What would it be served with?  I looked back to the menu.  It would come with a side tomato salad and wild rice.

When the waiter returned and asked if I was ready to order, I said, “I’ll have the tongue.”

“And how would you like it cooked, sir?”

“How do you suggest?”

“It is very lean meat.  I would said medium rare, for you.”

“For me?”

“Yes.”

“What does that mean?  For me?”

“With respect, you do not seem to be the type to eat his meats cooked at a rare temperature.”

I smirked at the waiter, and asked him how he knew I didn’t eat rare meat, thinking he would give some observation about me, something keen and complimentary, something I’d secretly cultivated about myself but that no one else had picked up on or said anything to me about.

He tapped his nose with the ball end of his pen and gave an overly familiar smile: “You are a tourist, sir.  I can smell a tourist.”

What gall! “I live here, in the city, the same as you,” I stammered.

“Very well. Rare tongue,” he said, without missing a beat, without a hint of reproach.  He was obviously practiced at giving obsequious responses to petulant outrages.

“No, no.  I do not eat my meats rare. I want it medium rare. I’m not a tourist.”

“Of course.” He limped back to the kitchen.

I sat there stewing, wondering if I should just leave. I furious over the waiter’s presumptuous attitude, and how he’d said tourist like it was an insult.  It was true, in a way.  I’d just moved here from a stay in Russia.  I’d just broken it off with this curly-headed, overweight Russian woman I’d been with since my second year out of college.  Though she was much older than I, she wanted me to marry her, but she had terrible habits that I couldn’t stand, such as that she plucked her gray pubes and collected them on the dark tile sink counter as if she was planning some wig or weaving.  I’d say, “Mariska, what the hell!  You think there’s some hair fairy for the middle-aged?  What’cha gonna do when you got a whole gray bush?”  She’d say, “I do not und’rstand you ‘Merry-cans.”  Then she’d come over and rub my head and press her sweat-moist jelly body to mind.  I liked her.  She was generous and loving.  But have you ever seen a collection of glossy gray pubes plucked from a soft bed of blond hair?

The waiter returned finally, his face much swarthier than I remembered, my meal plated in the dishes he carried.  He sat the plate and bowl down without care, but not without decency—they didn’t rattle as they settled. There before me was a heat-swollen, grilled tongue that sizzled and smell wonderfully, nestled within tan long-grain wild rice with a side tomato salad.

I tried to put Mariska out my head.  But she was there now, she was on my mind, and though I don’t know why, the tongue reminded me of her all the more.  Its length, its readiness, its presences was too much like Mariska.  In some grime outpost of my imagination, I thought of it as Mariska’s tongue.

I stared at it, a long, un-sliced meaty tongue.  Its sizzles subsided.  I needed a moment, so I started with the tomato salad and then nibbled on the wild rice around it.  But I was starting to have difficultly bringing myself to look at it. A human tongue.  No, no: a human’s tongue. Right there on my plate. Sanctioned by the restaurant, and by the state, I suppose.  I looked around at the other patrons in the restaurant.  I didn’t see another serving of tongue on anyone’s plate.  They all had companions, and they all looked contented.  As I scanned the room, I saw only one other person alone, and he sat two tables across from me.  He had a jowly toad’s face, and winked knowingly at me as I noted his meal.

I stopped looking around and finished my side dishes. I even sopped up the oil and vinegar in the bottom of the salad bowl with bread before I took a long glance at what I thought of as Mariska’s tongue.  It took on the stale, wizened appearance of something you’d want to flush.  It just made me think more about that jolly gal who loved me, and who I knew would take me back without a second thought.

I’d left her, I thought at the time, like an outlaw.  On the night of our first anniversary, we went to a Turkish restaurant and ordered everything we desired on the menu.  We ate our feast with the speed and intemperance of trough-fed pigs.  Afterward we went home for a bread pudding I’d made earlier that day.  As she kissed the back of my neck and swore her love, I stirred together a simple syrup to go on top of the bread pudding.  We test tasted the syrup many times.  She giggles, “You have stuff on you face.”  “Your,” I corrected, and let her lick the syrup from my cheek. As she moved back, I caught an unflattering glance of her.  Her face looked beaded in blemishes and jaundiced. I stepped back.  She was a crone in the poor Russian lighting. She giggled. I hurried her through dessert, making her drink as much imported Cognac as I force down her throat.  She could hold her liquor, and it just made her more randy.  The drunker she got the more clearly her flaws presented themselves to me—every stray hair, every small blemish, all of the imperfections coalescing into something utterly grotesque that unpleasantly spread across a glowing face-palette of ruddy flesh. Before she got a chance to force me to bed, I slipped into the kitchen, tucked the un-tallied rubles she kept hidden in a container in the refrigerator into my satchel, and bolted for the apartment door, all the while she was refreshing herself for me.  I ran practically stark mad across the winter grey courtyard of her Soviet-era apartment building under the gloom of the midnight sun.

“Is there something wrong, sir?”  I look up and there was that laconic and insulting waiter, hanging over me like a gawking spectator.  I could see the dirty black hairs that jutted out of each dark nostril like the soot-covered bristles of a chimney sweep’s broom.

“How can you serve this kinda thing?”

“It is what you requested, is it not?”

“Aren’t there laws against serving human flesh?”

“Not in this country, sir.”

“What about natural laws?  What about the laws of decency or respect.”  Sweet, plump Mariska, welcoming and jovial, weighed heavily on my mind.

“Please sir, temper your voice.”

“Fuck my voice. You served me a human tongue!”  The other patrons now looked up.

“But that is what you ordered.”

He had me there.  I had ordered it.  Just because it was available to me, I still had the choice not to order it.  But I loved the exotic.  Exotic.  Poor Mariska.  She was Russian, and I was not (I’d fuck a Martian).  I looked back down at the tongue.  It was dry now except for a thin layer submerged in its own bloodied juices.

“Sir,” —the waiter was unflappable, by now I’d be calling me all sorts of ugly names— “can I get you something else.  Perhaps a stiff drink?  A hamburger or a steak?”

“That drink sounds good.”

“Of course, and consider it on the house.”  He turned and limped toward the bar.  He left the dished tongue there in front of me.  I pushed it away.

But I won’t lie.  Across the table, out of my immediate reach, it seemed to attract me. I wanted it. I pulled it back and picked up my knife and fork. I steadied myself over it.  It was here, after all. There was no giving it back to the owner to have it reattached.  I closed my eyes.  Natural laws be damned.  Rebel, rebel: the outlaw moaned in my head.  And just then I felt a hand clap me on my back.  “You from out of town or something?”

I look up to see the man who’d winked at me making his way around to the chair at the opposite end of my table.  He sat down slowly—he spoke slowly.  “You don’t cut tongue,” he said with the grace of man who had never been hungry.  “That’s not how you eat it.  You take it in your hand.” He demonstrated by outstretching his fingers like he was holding a large invisible hotdog.  “You show it respect.  Someone will never speak again for your gullet’s pleasure.”  His broad, moonlike face smiled over the table at me. He was the type of man I admired, the kind who never seemed to suffer damp wrinkles in his shirts or a moment of uncertainty while making plans.  I did as he instructed. I picked up the char-stiffened meat; its tip hanging slightly wilted. “Yes, that’s right.”  The man gave me a proud smile. My god, his teeth were prefect.

Like a last kiss from a lover, I put the tip of the tongue in my mouth and tasted its juices.  Spiced and sweet.  The waiter arrived with my whiskey, as I was about to sink my teeth into the tongue.  He stood there with a slight smirk on his face peering at me.

What can I say?  I ate it.  Sweet Mariska on my mind the whole time.  The outlaw in my head singing a happy saloon song as every bite of that tongue was chewed and tongued by my own and pushed down my throat. As I ate it, the waiter told me that the best tongue comes from those in their twenties, after salvia had tenderized it, but before it toughens.  “Yet, generally, what is served here is of somewhat lower quality.”  I wouldn’t know the difference, I told him.

I got to know the waiter and the other patron a little. We made paced and protective conversation. The broad-faced man had traveled through Russia, too.  I told him a little about Mariska.  He said, “I do love the Russian woman.  Dirty in the sack, dirty in the kitchen.”

The waiter asked how the tongue was.

“It was very good.  It reminded me somewhat of skirt steak, but with a more workaday texture.  It was really quiet exciting to eat, however.”  Sated and enjoying myself, the guilt I felt over Mariska and eating human tongue had vanished. “I was a little surprised that I had difficulty eating it at first.”

“Most do. You shouldn’t worry so.  And I apologize about the ‘tourist’ remark.”

It was like we were old pals now.  I’d learned both their names and knew they were both unmarried, like myself.  “Would you like to see how we prepare tongue?” the waiter asked.

“Would I!”

They took me to the kitchen.  I considered this a rare treat, much like the tongue.

In the kitchen, a pair cooks dithered over stoves and prated to one another. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Their aquiline, heat-scarred faces were ruddy in the brightly lighted kitchen.  The waiter walked to a prep station in the rear of the kitchen and lifted what looked to be garden sheers.  He scrutinized their cleanliness.  He took a small sponge, rubbed out a spot on the tool, and then beckoned me to come closer.

“This is what we use to remove the tongue.”  He held aloft the large pair of cutters. “We have to make sure it is clean to avoid infection.  We’re not in the murder business, you know.”

“Intriguing,” I said. “So you remove the tongues, here, in the kitchen?”

“Yes, and this is what we use to hold the tongue.”

“Whoa.” It was a pair of pliers with imbedded spikes that sparkled like polished jewels.  He held both tools.  The cutters were in his right, the pliers in his left.

“If you like, I could demonstrate on you.”

“That’s okay.” Not taking him seriously in the least.

“But sir,” he came closer. “Someone gave up her tongue for you.”

“But I’m not that giving.”

“But she was.  And that is how it works.  You get tongue only if you give it.”  The waiter lunged toward me. “You tourists never know the rules!”

I ran for the door only to find the moon-faced man and the two ruddy-cheeked cooks standing in front of it.  “Out of my way!” was the last thing I said.

—Jason DeYoung

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Library in a Canoe

Aug 182010
 

Jonah, The Scarlet Letter, notebook, and coffee inside the tent one morning

What we read on the EPE (Epic Canoe Event): Jacob reread Dante’s Inferno, Jonah read The Scarlet Letter, dg brought along Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary, Volume One. Jonah finished The Scarlet Letter early which was a problem (dg had, perhaps too hastily, ordered him to leave behind the Richard Dawkins hardcover he had wanted to bring). But then one lovely night dg got to listen to Jacob reading three cantos of The Inferno out loud by flashlight to his brother (with glosses and explanations). Throughout the trip there was much animated campfire discussion of The Scarlet Letter as Jonah waded through: the frequency of the word “bosom,” Hester’s personality, the demonic epithets applied to little Pearl, the peculiar role of Chillingworth (the “black” man, healer, and a man who consorted with Indians), and the nature of Dimmesdale’s wound.

dg

What I Think: A Credo

Aug 182010
 

In regard to various and sundry culture critiques animadverted within the NC garden walls (this little Eden, refuge from the bad world), it might be helpful to enunciate a positive credo.

A person writes because, through writing, he comes to know himself and the world better. A person may write for money or fame or to achieve social position by posing as a writer, but these are secondary and, to some extent, inauthentic motives that often result in inauthentic and second-rate writing. Inauthentic motives result in second-rate writing because they interpose someone else’s point of view between the writer and the work. The writer writes to an audience conceived loosely as a market. He writes to formula instead of form—and don’t be fooled: there are some very slick and intelligent-seeming formulas out there. Many people who want to be writers do not know themselves well enough to be able to sort out their motives. Again, don’t kid yourselves: most of what gets published is second-rate recyclable literature at best. (Why this would come as a surprise, or even be noteworthy to anyone in his right mind I have no idea.) If you write to know yourself and the world better, as a means of becoming a better version of yourself in your writing, then certain questions need to be answered in the writing. Who are you? What does it mean to be a person? How can a person relate to other persons? What is real and how do you know the thing you think is real is real? What do you want? How do you differentiate, evade, quell, and dismiss all the false demands of fad, formula, packaging, expectation, received opinion, ideology, and commerce to achieve your own unique answers? How do you translate the answers into words on the page? And, perhaps most importantly, how can you make this fun? If you use your writing as a mode of inquiry, if your plots are dramatic collisions between self and other or between self and the real (always with the preceding questions in mind), and if you are brutally honest with yourself and your characters, then you have a shot at writing well.

dg

The Official Winner of the First Annual Numéro Cinq Translation Contest…

Aug 162010
 

720

The photo dg calls “Swimming With the Loons,” also the title of his next book. It shows the now famous NC blue dog Lucy anxiously watching her fearless master (large dot) as he swims further and further into the lake in the company of a pair of loons (two smaller dots) whom he befriended. Initially, he gained their trust by mimicking loon calls and diving under water for extended periods. This is on Misty Lake in Algonquin Park, Day 9 of the EPE (Epic Paddle Event). (No animals were injured during filming. All stunts were performed by the author.)

It was during a moment of sublime unity with Nature such as this that it occurred to dg that the winner of the First Ever Annual Numéro Cinq Translation Contest had to be Gary Garvin, not just because of his hilariously parodic official translation but also (as Jacob suggested in his People’s Choice vote comment) because of his incredibly witty first response, that passage of Chinese characters (when he quite correctly noticed that dg had neglected to stipulate the language of the final translation–see all the entries here). Congratulations, Gary. Please feel free to fly out here at any time, and bring Rich Farrell’s bottle of Talisker when you come.

The other finalists were nearly equally brilliant and this is what flummoxed the judges for so long. The level of attack, of wit and arrogance, far exceeded our expectation. (See the finalists here.)

With this out of the way (luckily, most of you will have forgotten the contest, so we expect no protests), we can now push on to other literary competitions.

dg

The Possum: Essay — Douglas Glover @ The New Quarterly

Aug 162010
 

John Brock Here are the first few lines of a new essay “The Possum,” about dg’s great-grandfather, just published in The New Quarterly.

My great-grandfather John Brock killed himself with an overdose of laudanum in St. Williams on the North Shore of Lake Erie in March, 1914, the day before he was to appear in court to answer a charge of alienation of affection and criminal conversation. This was in an era when marital rights yet bore the flavour of property rights. Alienation of affection and criminal conversation referred to actions that deprived someone of his spousal relationship. In practice, the phrases meant anything from merely counseling a wife to leave her husband to seduction and adultery.

Today St. Williams is a sleepy hamlet on a sand and clay bluff overlooking the Inner Bay between Turkey Point to the east and Long Point to west, a beautiful and mysterious place, in summer especially when the lake surges languidly under the harsh sunlight and the trees on the point shimmer like a mirage along the horizon. In the early 1900s, lotus beds choked the shoreline and the bluffs were scrubby and bare except where the remains of the great timber flumes swooped down to the beach. For years, the McCalls (my mother’s family) had been engaged in lumbering, furniture making, boat building and general retail but mostly, as my mother’s father once observed, in shipping all the forest roundabout across the lake to Cleveland and Buffalo.

In 1914, the farms around St. Williams were turning to blow sand and dunes, and the McCalls turned necessity into virtue by lobbying the provincial government to buy their land and open a reforestry station to help put the trees back. The family businesses had been in gradual decline since the depression of 1873-78; we were the early victims of what is now called globalization, in this case the first wave of corporate bloat and centralization that coincided with the late Victorian era. When the railway finally extended a tentacle through St. Williams in the late 1880s, instead of inspiring a boom, it sucked all the money out of the village overnight. But in 1914 the family still thought a lot of itself, and those homes, with ivy crawling up their sweeping verandahs, stood with immaculate hauteur against the internal erosion of the economy and ecological ruin.

Buy the magazine and read the rest.

dg

#3 of The Top 10 Things I Learned Last Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Aug 102010
 

Deficiencies of Desire:

Simply stated, we are creatures of desire.  Doug helped me focus this idea into my writing.  He told me that my characters should desire something, almost obsessively, and that someone (or something) should resist this desire.  Desire plus resistance creates a dramatic arc, which plays out again and again in a story, until the character either achieves her desire or fails in that quest.  Think of two characters locked in a closet and fighting it out, until one or the other either wins, loses or calls it a draw.  (This is DG’s image from his essay on SS structure.)  Subtext should echo from the central conflict to create unity in a story.   I’m not going to belabor the details of this.  Read the essay on short story structure or just spend tend minutes with DG and you’ll become acutely aware of it.

What I’m going to talk about, instead, were my particular problems applying this concept to my writing.  My desire deficiencies, as it were.

I kept running into a problem when I wrote: I  understood the concept of strong desires but I couldn’t seem to enact that concept on the page.  I submitted eight short stories last semester: six new ones and two revisions.  (This is fuzzy math: the total stories would be 7 because one story was brand new and revised once…this is why we write and don’t study calculus.)    I’m going to briefly summarize the desire lines in each to offer some idea of how it went.

One huge problem for me was finding desire motifs that were ‘story worthy.’  Hell, they often weren’t even scene worthy.  My first story involved a Navy pilot who was heading home after quitting flight school.  The main thing he desired, to quit flying and return to a simpler life, happened in backstory and memories.  In the front story, I had a lot of people standing around doing nothing, a lot of ruminating and anticipating.  The problem was that my character’s strongest desire had already been acted out and the drama was over.  Those careful NC readers will recognize this as a ‘bathtub’ story.

My second attempt wasn’t a whole lot better.  A married couple lost a baby late in the wife’s pregnancy. The husband desired to talk with his wife to repair the damage, but she wouldn’t open up about this tragedy.  There’s a slight improvement here, because at least the desire is apparent, but what happened on the page was a lot of ‘not talking.’  (Reminds me of that great line in Christopher Guest’s movie, Best in Show, when the woman says, “We can talk, or not talk, all night.”)  DG told me that not talking usually creates no drama, and that it takes a really experienced writer to pull it off.

By my third story, I hit upon an idea.  If my characters’ desires could be played out in historical settings, when wars raged, where the conditions of life beleaguered the characters, then survival itself could become a desire.  I wrote two stories set in various battles during WWII.   My most simple attempt involved sticking two soldiers in a foxhole during the siege of Leningrad.  These soldiers were fighting each other over a stolen pair of gloves.  They desired things intensely, like food, water, a pair of gloves, because conditions were so dire.  Of course DG shredded the story itself (though not the structure…a minor, though hard-fought victory) because historical fiction quickly descends into tired imagery.  Mention the Neva.  Mention the Hermitage.  Throw in a few Nazi’s and some snow, and voila, a Potemkin village of historical fiction.  Clearly, in order to create an effective story, I’d have to inhabit the place, not just pop in for a visit.  Hence the story did not work as written, but the desire motif was clarified.  The other historical story I wrote also had a strong desire component but suffered for other structural reasons.

In order to create strong desires in contemporary stories, my work became highly sexualized.  The remaining three stories all involved adultery, betrayal, or dangerous sexual behavior.  I basically  defaulted to one of the strongest desires humans feel.  (I suppose it could have been worse: I could have defaulted to stories about eating, sleeping or going to the bathroom!)  There was nothing wrong with using sex to play out desires, and it was kind of fun, but I began to realize that these stories were some of the lower fruit on the fiction tree.  It was hard to find ways to say new things.  They also ran another risk: titillating rather than exploring the human condition. But at least with sex, I had found a strong, comprehensible desire motif that allowed me to explore characters, plots, and themes which otherwise had been getting lost.

So what’s left?  I read a lot of stories that work without sex, without war, without betrayals of trust, but I still struggle to find ideas for my own writing.  I recently finished Robin Oliveira’s novel, My Name is Mary Sutter.  Her character desires to become a surgeon and that desire carries most of the novel.   (Though interestingly, much of that desire can only occur because the story is set during the American Civil War, when women couldn’t become surgeons.  Robin, however, fully inhabits the time period.  No Potemkin villages in Mary Sutter. )  Another favorite story of mine is Lorrie Moore’s “Dance In America,” which operates entirely without sex or violence and seems to replace a clear desire motif with a ‘life-force’ motif.  So it can be done.  My characters don’t have to be tying each other up to bedposts, cheating on their spouses or fighting a battle to enact desire.  But I haven’t found a balance yet.

Last point:  I often found the desire motifs worked for a page or two before I gave up on them and shifted into some other area.  This creates a huge problem for story unity.  Finding a central desire to carry the story remains one of the great challenges going forward.

I know there are many other types of stories that do not work directly off the desire/resistance model, but it was a useful tool.  It helped me generate dramatic action on the page.  It helped me push stories forward.

Up Next:  #2, Verbs, verbs, verbs.

-Rich Farrell

See earlier posts in this series beginning here.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Questions Game — Richard Hartshorn

Aug 052010
 

The following is a scene from Tom Stoppard’s film adaptation of his own play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.  The scene, which involves Gary Oldman (Rosencrantz) and Tim Roth (Guildenstern), illustrates some interesting things about language, specifically the game of Questions (has anyone ever played this?  I think it’s a good exercise for writers).  Note the specific “fouls” in the game and try to see if they apply to anything you’ve written lately.

Throughout the film, Rosencrantz is the man who sees everything and understands nothing. Making these “discoveries” in the game room, he believes he will simply be able to do it or make it work, as though he invented juggling and came up with the theory that two objects will fall at the same rate when dropped from the same height. But for anyone that has taken eighth grade science, we know that the feather is the one exception to the rule. Guildenstern, on the other hand, seems to be so wrapped up in his own ego that he thinks he understands everything.  (Just some observations.  I love this film.  The Questions game is what I really wanted to share).

RH

Adrift in the Interhuman

Jul 302010
 

I just had to write a tiny piece on what I am currently reading to go with a new essay of mine coming out in The New Quarterly. No reason not to share it here.

I’m reading Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary Volume One (1953-1956). Before that I read his memoir A Kind of Testament. Gombrowicz lived in Argentina starting just as the Second World War broke out, then eventually, in the 1960s, moved to France and married a French-Canadian woman and died soon after of asthma. In the diary, which isn’t really a diary–it was more like a blog, written regularly for publication in a Polish magazine, he’s funny, confessional, awkward, arrogant and amazingly smart. He compulsively turns and returns to various motifs: Poland and expatriates, Polish writers, the realm of the interhuman, and the deformation of form. The Polish material resonates in my mind because, of course, for various reasons having not much to do with choice–mostly circumstance–I live outside my country. Gombrowicz thinks this is okay. Being outside your country puts you at a distance from which you can see more clearly. Also, in the end, you realize your country is in you–this is where your art comes from. He’s also very good on the communal construction of the self in the interhuman. For centuries and right up to the Existentialists, we have too blithely taken the existence of an integral self for granted. But Existentialism is a reductio. At the moment of decision, self-creation, the self disappears (this is very clearly described in Camus’ novel The Stranger). Better, as Gombrowicz says, to accept that much of what we call a self is created through the desires of others and through communal forms and expectations. Only if we accept this do we have a chance to forge a new and firmer sense of self not based on blindness and denial. And finally Gombrowicz is a kind of formalist who makes himself as an artist (and a person–he liked to chase boys in Buenos Aires parks) by rejecting form (often in parody).

dg

#4 of The Top 10 Things I Learned This Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Jul 262010
 

#4:  Use Caution When Exiting the Bathtub: Shy and Retiring Plot Problems.

Why is writing a good plot so difficult?  Shouldn’t crafting a solid plot be almost mechanical:  A leads to B which leads to C which ends with D?  But it never turns out this way for me.  My A leads to Q which turns into a 6.4, which leads back to J.  I’m not trying to be complicated, but it always seems that when I write, plot quickly gets away from me.

I found, perhaps through a twist of karma,  that even writing this blog post was elusive.

I tried half a dozen times to write this entry.  I worked on three drafts that compared plot to the game of golf.  All three attempts failed miserably.   I tried ignoring this post, hoping it would go away.  I spent an entire weekend watching DVDs of Mad Men to avoid thinking about it.  I’ve even considered switching topics.  Who would notice?  Why should I chronicle my personal struggle with something so basic in writing?

Most of my previous posts have come easily.  The lessons I learned seemed clear, the application straight forward (though not easy) and my posts on NC were quickly dispatched.

Not so with this topic.

I’m still lost on the elements of how to move a story forward.  I’m still trying to understand plot, and it seems to be the most basic, most elemental part of fiction writing.  Oh, I’ve read all the books and I’ve tried all the exercises.  I’ve not ignored it by any means.  I have books on master plots and I’ve read countless essays on structure and the importance of plot.  I worked with Glover, for crying out loud. Shouldn’t I get this by now?  Shouldn’t this be a lesson so deeply ingrained in my neocortex that stories just coming flying off the keyboard?  How the hell do I talk about this on Numero Cinq?

I suppose I should start with my own struggles.

From day one last semester, Doug hammered me on story movement.  The first two stories I submitted were bona fide ‘bathtub stories,’ a Gloverism which has driven me mad ever since I learned it.   I’ll let Doug’s words explain: A bathtub story is “a story which takes place almost completely as backfill in the mind of a single character (who often spends the whole narrative sitting in a bathtub—I am only being slightly facetious).” (Glover, “Short Story Structure: Notes and an Exercise,” p. 166.)   Thankfully, none of my characters were ever actually in a bathtub, but they did mostly sit around thinking about events that happened off the page.  Lots of lyrical rumination but no drama.

Okay, that was easy enough to fix.  Make something happen.

By packet three, I had more or less remedied the bathtub issue, but then a new problem arose.  Now Doug told me to “stop PLANNING quite so much.”  He said that I seemed to have a more dramatic story, but that I had simply put my characters through their paces with the end in sight.  He urged me to be less structured with my plot.  Doug wrote, “I’d be even more pleased if I felt you letting go of the reins a little bit, surprising yourself, not seeing the ending before you get there.”

I began with over-written bathtub stories.  Then I planned, had more drama, but I over-planned.  Was this madness?  Was my advisor screwing with me, trying  intentionally to confuse me?  I didn’t know.  When I finally let go (in my last packet), the result was predictable: I drifted back into the bathtub model.  Too much backfill, not enough drama.

I submitted a revised version of a story for workshop this summer, the packet 3 story I had worked on with Doug, the first non-bathtub one.  The workshop participants told me they wanted more context, more backstory and depth.  They said I was going too fast.

To me, these are plot problems, pure and simple.  No matter how many times I sit down to write a story, I end up wandering off into digressions that aren’t useful, backstory that isn’t dramatic, or over-contemplative characters who sit around and do nothing.  Conversely, if I achieve a dramatic story, it becomes too thin, too quick, and the story glosses over the deeper, more salient points of character, setting, theme, etc.

What is the solution, I keep asking myself?  What balance of dramatic action and interior access will result in a well crafted story?

The conclusion I’ve reached in finally writing this blog post is that I still don’t know.  Perhaps that’s why I struggled for so long to write it.

One of the great things I learned from Doug last semester was the importance of keeping the story’s present forward moving action dramatic.  Something has to be at stake in every scene.  Desire and resistance.  There has to be vertebrae for the story, a dramatic skeleton, as it were.   (Another great Gloverism is the “broken backed story,” in which a timid writer loses confidence in the central conflict and switches to another conflict…I’ve been guilty of this, too.) Without this underlying structure, the story can’t move.  Robert Olen Butler (among others) calls it ‘yearning’.

With this desire/resistance motif in place, the character returns again and again to situations in which the drama is played out.  When there is a resolution to this central conflict, the story is over.  It sounds and seems so simple, but the execution has continued to prove elusive.  I see how dramatic stories work  now, when I read, when I watch Mad Men, even when I begin to write a story, but somewhere along the way I still get lost.  They say the first step on the road to recovery is admitting you have a problem.  Well, there you go.  I have  plot problems.  Now someone give me a twelve step booklet to solve it.  I’ll yield the floor for a more eloquent explanation.

John Mortimer, an English writer, says this about plots:

Plots are essential, but plots are the hardest part; at any rate I find this to be so.  Everything else about writing can be done by turning up regularly on the empty page and starting the performance.  Plots are notoriously shy and retiring. With luck they may visit you in unexpected places, in the bath or while waiting in the doctor’s surgery.  Very often they stay away altogether and are always out in a meeting and don’t return your call. Then it’s no good sitting and waiting for them, you have to start writing, you have to begin to create characters.  And then, as a character begins to talk, or comes into conflict with another, the plot may start working; because it’s important that the characters perform the plot and the plot doesn’t manipulate the characters.  This process is a mysterious one and the most exciting part of writing fiction. (Mortimer, John.  “Plot Luck,” as found in The Agony and the Ego, ed. by Clare Boylan.)

Up Next:  What I Learned About Desire:  (The Return of Paris Hilton)

-Rich Farrell

See previous posts in this series beginning here.

Translation Contest Judges Return from Monastic Retreat

Jul 232010
 

Roman blue dog

The 18 remaining judges in the Numéro Cinq Translation Contest have returned from a monastic retreat in Las Vegas, a city known for its religious and literary meditation centres. We are informed that a decision is in the offing. The management apologizes for the amount of time these drunken louts, er, gentlemen have taken. You have to admit they have a difficult task.

dg

p.s. This post is in response the Gary making a big fuss. Thanks, Gary. Almost everyone had forgotten. Dg was busy inventing a new contest. Now this!

Coming Soon: #4 of The Top 10 Things I Learned This Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Jul 212010
 

“Go dig a hole, kids. Daddy needs a nap. I mean, to write. Daddy needs to write.”

I’m finding that being a “stay-at-home dad” considerably more difficult when my kids are actually at home.  Was this in the contract?  Did someone say something about kids?  Details, details.  I prefer the title, “Writer-in-Residence,” but my children don’t seem to grasp that this means I have to write in the residence.

“Daddy, why are you on the computer again?” they say.  I refer them to Numero Cinq, but for some odd reason, they prefer Nickjr.com.  Kids!

I’ve begun working on the next installment of my series (I use this term loosely), but at this pace, I will be lapped by the current students.  I’m sure the NC readership is waiting with bated breath for the next post.  Patience, I urge.  I’m also a bit worried that my generous NC grant will expire.  I wonder if the NC moderator would consider an extension of the monthly stipend (and, since we’re at it, an extension of the lease for the Benz…I swear the miles will come off if I drive it in reverse.)  More to follow…time to make oatmeal.

—Richard Farrell

A Canadian Moment

Jul 202010
 

Driving back and forth to Canada, knocking about the farm and Port Dover, listing to Fred Eaglesmith CDs—all this made me think of Stan Rogers who once wrote a song about the fish plant in Port Dover (now for sale again) called “Tiny Fish for Japan” and that reminded me of “Northwest Passage,” our favourite driving song for years. Even now the boys and I are apt to lapse into a chorus or two as the miles click by…

See also BBC piece on Sir John Franklin and the Northwest Passage here.

dg

Writers At Play — The Paris Review interview

Jul 142010
 

TPR: You’ve published many works of fiction and nonfiction. What we want to know is how a terrific writer like yourself spends his spare time. Reading great books? Memorizing hard words? At art museums? Playing chess?

DG: Jonah and I played nine holes of golf yesterday. We learned several important skill sets. 1) 4 balls are not enough. 2) Though I play hockey and baseball left-handed, I play golf right-handed. Thus we did not need 2 bags of clubs. 3) Do not play golf with the pencil stuck behind your ear. You will lose it and then you can only etch the score into the score card with the tip of a tee.

TPR: Fascinating. I imagine your golf skills are pretty high. What is your handicap?

DG: I have an artificial knee. (Next time we’re going to rent two of those golf cart thingies and race each other on the fairways.)

TPR: Ugh.

DG: Let me finish. Also I was handicapped by the large number of water hazards. I had to wade into one festering swamp up to my knees to retrieve a ball. Jonah thought this was funny. He took some very good video of one my best drives which ends with a large waterspout in the distance. Also, as mentioned above, we were handicapped by a shortage of balls. The last hole we started with only one ball between us which is pretty difficult. Jonah hit his tee shot and then ran over and marked his spot and threw the ball back to me and then I hit my tee shot and marked that and  threw the ball back to him. This makes golf an arduous and time-consuming sport.

TPR: Is there any similarity, in your mind, between golf and writing?

DG: Yes.

TPR: Could you expand on that?

DG: Yes.

TPR:  Now?

DG: In writing as in golf, I seem to hit my drives into the water traps or they end up on the wrong fairway or they get lost altogether. Also both writing and golf depress me.

TPR: We imagine that you thought about writing a lot as you played and that there was considerable intellectual byplay–witty remarks, etc.

DG: Jonah was very witty.  At one point, he observed that what consoled him through the ordeal was the thought that no matter how awful things got he’d still be able to beat Stephen Hawking.

TPR: Er, thank you. That will be quite enough.

DG: So when will this be published?

TPR: Never.

Shelagh Shapiro interviews dg

Jul 132010
 

VCFA graduate Shelagh Shapiro does a weekly radio literary interview show Write The Book in Burlington, VT. She interviewed dg during the residency and the podcast is available here. Check out her other podcasts as well.

I would write more about this, and will, but my current internet capabilities are very low.

dg

#5 of The Top 10 Things I Learned This Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Jul 122010
 

#5:  My Love Affair with Abstractions

-From Packet Letter One, Doug Glover to Rich Farrell, Feb. 7, 2010: “Over and over you deliver abstractions over concrete substantive details.  Abstraction in the form of generic verbs and actions, in the form of vague figurative language, abstraction in the form of disembodied voices.”

 

Let me be perfectly clear about this: abstractions are fun.  I’ve wallowed in them with a deranged delight. They’ve tempted me like the unencumbered enthusiasm of a nineteen year old girl lounging by a blue pool, drink in hand, asking me to rub suntan lotion on her lithe, brown shoulders.  I know nothing about this girl, only the shimmering veneer of her youthful body: her curves, her flowing hair, brown shoulders, perfect skin, nary a tan line to be seen.  She invites me closer.  I smell coconut on her skin.  She confuses me with her beauty, uncomplicated by reality.  She confuses me with brown shoulders.

I convince myself that abstractions are not simple-minded fantasies.  I tell myself that abstract writing is capable of rising to sublime heights, standing on the (untanned) shoulders of great writers, capable of lifting my stories to stratospheric altitudes on flights of faux literary fancy.  Wasn’t Joyce abstract?  Didn’t Virginia Woolf raise abstract imagery to an art form in some of her novels?  I tell myself so.  I tell myself that a lyrical voice hides in the mysterious tones of abstraction; by keeping the writing vague and out of focus, a poetic energy must murmur just beneath the muddled surface.  It must.  I tell myself that this nineteen year old girl by the pool might be a fucking genius; she might be Sylvia Plath in a string bikini.

We swim, Sylvia and I, joyously in the pool.  My sentences, paragraphs, scenes, even whole stories, splash in abstract language: sloppy verbs, unspecific images, overused pronouns. Who cares! I never once consider the consequences of our hedonistic little existences.  Goddamn it, abstractions are fun!

I love abstractions because of those glittering surfaces, because they sometimes sound so wonderful, so lyrical, so different than the tired prose of everyday, so different than the working-class language of my roots.  Abstractions must evince a broad intelligence, sure signs of good writing, of potential, of an emerging poetic voice.

But of course, abstractions delivered on very few of their promises.  In the end, my heart was broken.   Sylvia turned out to have leprosy.

In my first packet letter from Doug, he used the word ‘abstraction’ (or abstract) eight times to describe my writing.  Eight.  He wrote it six more times on the hardcopy of my story.  I challenge any of his new advisees to top my record.  Fourteen ‘abstractions’ in one packet.

My knee-jerk reaction (like all good lovers) was to initially defend this style.  I’d often been told that my stories were “over-written,” and I once took that to be a compliment.  It was not.

Eventually, reluctantly, I yielded to reality.  Doug beat me enough that I finally believed abstractions were mostly disembodied, confused, muddled, and potentially hazardous things.  They softened, perhaps even crippled, the backbone of a story.

I abused abstractions.  I know this now.  They were easy, safe, and uncomplicated.  They ginned up my limp stories.  Abstractions allowed me to throw weak things onto a page, then fluff them up with vague, foggy language, albeit pretty at times, curved and free of tan lines. I labored over the sound, the cadence of a sentence for days, narcissistically, often arriving at a relatively a good sentence, but one that did nothing to help the story, which withered away in a death rattle of cliché, ineptitude, or worse, utter nonsense.

Good  Abstractions vs. Bad Abstractions:

Good abstractions reach toward ineffable ideas.  Toward things the writer/reader wants to grasp but can’t.  Existential questions.  Big questions, with a capital B.  Why are we here?  What is love?  Etc.  Bad abstractions are feeble, lazy, and attempt to short-circuit the thought process by appearing flashy on the page without any substantive depth: the 19-year-old in a bikini with a killer tan.  Here is a good example of a bad abstraction, taken from one of my stories:

We don’t like the sun, his eyes say when they speak.  They tell him they want darkness, rest, and a release from the prison of sight.  It’s a tiresome, thankless job, they say, this constant work.

This was the opening paragraph.  My intent was to create an eerie mood, to take the reader quickly inside the character’s head, and to disorient the characterization.  My intent was to create a ‘good’ abstraction, but instead I have this.  Notice how none of the pronouns have antecedents.  The reader is immediately lost.  Who’s talking?  Who’s the ‘him’ in the story.  There is nothing precise in this opening.  It’s impossible to understand what the hell this even means.  Instead of disorienting the characterization, I put the disorientation in front of character.  All that’s left is a mess.

Of course, I understood what these things all meant, because I knew who was talking, what my own intentions were, and how they related to the rest of the story.  But none of this is conveyed to the reader.  Sadly, I repeated this pattern throughout.

In the Slovenia workshop, I submitted a story I drafted later in the semester.  One of the most frequent criticisms was that I didn’t go deep enough into the characters’ heads.   I’m pretty sure I began to excise my bad abstractions so much that I stopped looking towards the good ones, the ones readers and writers want to explore.

(Note:  Thanks to Gary & Doug for helping me clarify this point.)

Continue reading »

From The Robot Cafe

Jul 112010
 

The Robot Cafe, Port Dover, Ontario

DG writing from The Robot Cafe in Port Dover, Ontario, next door to the Hobo Java CD and guitar shop on Main Street. A live middleaged band playing mid-afternoon to an audience of three teenage girls (one dressed like a boy with a surfer haircut and a boy’s bathing suit, one pretty hefty in a zebra stripe dress) who between sets get up and sing “I’m A Little Teapot” into the microphone. Scifi movie posters on the walls. They Came from Outer Space. Tobor the Great. Girls in bikinis and tshirts walking in off the beach. This is Fred Eaglesmith‘s hometown. They are selling his CDs at the counter. Jonah is trying to repair a music website, but the wifi  is inadequate. We could have been watching the (yawn) World Cup. I imagine you can tell from this that dg won’t be posting much for a few days. Have fun on your own–don’t get into trouble without me. dg

Slovenia: East Montpelier? or What’s a 200M Sinkhole doing in Vermont?

Jul 082010
 

This isn’t Montpelier?

On Comings and Goings:

After 22 hours of flights from Trieste to Rome to Charlotte to San Diego, life has returned to some semblance of normal.   The Slovenian residency had much to offer: wine, travel, good food, wine, beautiful vistas across the Skocjan valley, trips to Italy, wine, Croatia,the amazing Soca valley in northern Slovenia, and more wine.  What the Slovenian residency lacked in intensity (Vermont has the lectures, readings, and workshops…we had those things, too, just not as many) it made up for in scenic and cultural beauty.  I returned energized and motivated to begin 4th semester.  Did I mention they had wine in Slovenia?

On Readings & Hooligans:

We had two student readings, the first at a restaurant in Betanjc, the little village just on the left side of the church in the above picture.  We read outside, in the dim light of dusk.  When it was my turn to read, a group of rowdy, drunken soccer fans descended on the table next to ours.  I read in darkness, holding a pen light over my story, and shouted for the entire 5 minute reading!   I think Uruguay won the match.  I also think no one heard my story, except for the word “blowjob”, which apparently was heard clearly across the entire restaurant.  I feel that such an experience can only help me for the upcoming graduation reading in Montpelier.

—Richard Farrell

2010 Numéro Cinq Translation Contest — And The Winner Is…

Jul 072010
 

Chariot Race, Norfolk County Fair (ok, this has nothing to do with the People's Choice competition except, you know, it's a competition)

The votes were split up and spread around in a confusing way. How can a person tabulate results when a voter votes for X or Y? But by a resounding margin the winner of the First Ever Numéro Cinq Translation Contest is Shy Anonymous for the following entry (see votes and commentary here):

Ja, er dreigde iets. En hij bleef daar zitten, ziek van angst, làf, zonder
Oi, the dredged nets. In the bleeding dark night, the bleakness of angst, the laughable and yet yonder

geestkracht, zonder moed…. Er dreigde iets en hij voelde het
untouchable geschtalt, yonder mood of ease. Here the dredged nets and the night-holding heat

naderen, hem overvallen, met hem strijden op leven en dood, in
are born, here the ovaries swell, having met the stream of life and dread, in

eene overspanning van wanhoop: hij voelde zich wankelen,
the ever-spanning war whoop. Here the fields awaken,

nederzinken, hij voelde zich gerukt worden uit de fluweelen
the unborn children frolic, here the fields are rich with wooden flowers,

zachtheid van zijn leven, neergesmakt worden op straat, zonder dak,
holding the sin and sang, the yin and yang, the wooden markets up this street,

zonder iets … Wat behoorde hem toe! Het linnen aan zijn lichaam,
down that…. What harm beholds the toe! The linen and the lichen,

de schoenen aan zijne voeten, de ring aan zijn vinger, het was van
the school totems, both wrung with vinegar, all in the name of

Frank. Het souper daarginds, zijn bed boven, het was van Frank. Zoo
Frano. Here was the super tamarind, the unmade bed, the name of Frano. He was too

was het geweest een vol jaar lang en als hij ooit weg zoû moeten
large for even himself to fathom or believe in,

gaan met alleen het zijne, dan zou hij moeten gaan … naakt, in den
here a man who towered over mountains, yes, even in

winter. En hij kón niet meer zijn, als hij geweest was in Amerika,
winter. Here was a man that was tall enough to see all the way to America,

dienstbaar scharrelend van den eenen dag op den anderen. Zijn lijf
that barren wasteland of flat days and wandering weeks. Indeed, life

en zijne ziel waren beide als geweekt in een bad van lauwe weelde;
was barren of joy and zeal besides the gefilte fish and the baths of laurel weeds;

hij was geworden als eene kasplant, die, gewend aan de vochte
His was a garden of eggplant, and yes, the voice of Gwenda

warmte der serres, vreest in de open lucht te worden gezet. Want het
the warm and severe, asleep in the open light of the wooden gazelle. Do you want

dreigde, gruwzaam, onbarmhartig: geen seconde was die bedreiging
to hear more, my guzzywam, my heart and barn warmer: three seconds and the man died, suffocated in the wrung bedsheets,

van hem af, en, in de lafheid zijner verweeking, wrong hij er zachtjes
snuffed, and in the last remaining weeks of those left behind, the zealots chose wrong,

zijne witte handen om, en drupten er twee tranen langs zijn strak
writing on the wrong hand, and thus disrupted the wee track lines of hope, striking

masker van wanhoop.
the mask of the venerable Master of war whoops.

Louis Couperus

Several entries received first place votes: Anna Maria Johnson, Gary Garvin’s first entry in Chinese characters, Julie Larios and Claire Wilkshire. Jacob Glover got a third place vote despite the fact that there is no third place. Shy Anonymous also got two second place votes (even though there is no second place).

The original passage is in Dutch. It’s a paragraph from Louis Couperus‘s 1891 novel Noodlot (Destiny or Footsteps of Fate). I’m sure you all knew that right away.

Now, of course, we await the judges’ decision in the official contest. Two judges have been treated and released from hospital. One is receiving drug therapy–mostly Thorazine. One has resigned.

2010 Numéro Cinq Translation Official Finalists (not to be confused with the People’s Choice Award)

Jul 052010
 

First Light (click on the photo for more information)

The judges have sent a message. Their minion, the ineffable Kaplovsky, tapped obsequiously on my door last night (he is always cowering, shying from the blow he knows must fall) and delivered a list of finalists culled from the official entry list. For three days they have laboured without food or water (with the exception of a freezer full of lime vodka, a bag or two of whole wheat crackers and a wheel of Vermont cheddar). The task has been difficult, fraught with violence and recrimination. The first aid kit was needed more than once. Here is their short list of finalists in no particular order. Honours and laurels to these well known and sometimes anonymous contributors.

And over and above these illustrious authors of insane and melodramatic versions of a false truth who can forget Claire Wilkshire’s heart-rending cry “Behold, what a toe!!!” and her “master of whoop-whoop” or this sentence from Vivian Dorsel “What behooved me to! That linen and silk charm, the shoes and silken veils, the ring on her finger, that was for Frank” and her gorgeous “wordy as an eggplant” simile? Or this riff from Steve Axelrod, master of the startling and outré comparison “…laugh through their misery like farting crippled geese, trampled by toddlers … it degrades these nihilists of the Veldt, rope-throated troglodytes…”? Or Natasha Sarkissian’s cool psycho-sexual spaghetti-eating scene: “Frank squeezes my hand while we wait. ‘You can have a bite of mine,’ he says…”? And the anonymous X’s triple XXX, sultry version: “What behooved him to! He kneeling and sin licking, my shining sins devoted, my ring turned to vinegar by sin, but he was my Frank.” Or Sheila Stuewe’s talking wombat and Gwen Mullins’ (winner of the 2010 Numéro Cinq Villanelle Contest) horrific chase/birth scene “…even as I finally find moisture; running down my thighs in streams, salty, dripping wet against dry heat, signaling a taste of pain and torture that is birth. I feel my legs buckle, weak, failing: the mission was doomed from the start, but, even as the sun consumes both of us, I know the mission that was doomed was my own birth, calm in our adobe hut while my mother screamed and my father paced the floor”?

And others…

But here, as I say, are the five finalists, two with the original text (has anyone figured out where it’s from?). (And remember to vote for the People’s Choice Award here.)

Continue reading »

The residency so far

Jul 042010
 

Memorial reading for Jack Myers last night. I spent 10 days with Jack, twice a year, for over a dozen years, but I didn’t know Jack as long as some faculty members (30-20 years), and Mark Cox was with him over the last days. It was lovely, sad, and poignant to be with his friends and hear his words and sit there leafing through my mind for my own memories. Among others: the Tang Night all-male faculty ritual Chinese buffet pig outs with Jack, Mark, Syd Lea, Walter Wetherell, Francois Camoin, and others; long evenings in Noble Hall dorm rooms with Jack and Mark sneaking cigars by the window and the vivid witty talk flowing; the night Jack talked about the Buddhist idea (I think I remember this right) of the little self that is the needy, compulsive, selfish side always tripping up the larger aspirations of the better self (I’ve thought about this a lot in life); the day he got me to start reading James Hillman, lending me his copy of one of the books; the crisp white shirts he often wore to readings; his scalpel like poems and pool-playing; and more. It was something, last night, hearing Jack’s poems and then Mark’s simple eloquent rehearsal of the last days of an old friend.

dg

The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders — Richard Farrell

Jul 022010
 

Aleksander Hemon‘s story, “The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders,”  works as a list story.  Alphonse Kauders is a Zelig like character with access to some of the past century’s worst men.  Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Tito and Gavrilo Princip all have direct contact with Kauders.   Kauders  even impregnates Eva Braun.  The story basically involves a series of philosophical musings about Kauders likes and dislikes, about his predilections for pornography, about his fascination with fire, and about his hatred of watches and horses.

Like other list stories I’ve read, Hemon uses repeated images and patterns to substitute for traditional structural devices.  There were many memorable lines from this story:

One of Alphonse Kauder’s seven wives had a tumor as big as a three-year old child.

Alphonse Kauders was a Virgin in his horoscope.  And in his horoscope only.

Alphonse Kauders  said to Eva Braun: “Money isn’t everything.  There is some gold too.”

“Since the day I was born, I have been waiting for Judgement Day.  And the Judgement Day is never coming.  And, as I live, it is becoming all to clear to me.  I was born after the Judgement Day.”

The strange, perplexing part of this story comes at the end.  There are a series of explanatory ‘Notes’ at the end of the story.  In these notes, the author (apparently directly) gives historical context and commentary on some of the real people who figured in the story as well as on various books and historical events.  I’m not sure what to make of these notes.  Are they supposed to represent some kind of ironic statement about the story?  Is the author of the notes Hemon?  Is the author of the notes someone else (in the sense of the original story, say an absent narrator?)  The strange thing for me was how the notes (which take up almost 4 pages) seem to be really outside the formal construction of the story.   Yet when you read the notes, they seem straight forward and un-stylized.  Here’s an example:

Richard Sorge was a Soviet spy in Tokyo, undercover as a journalist, eventually becoming a press attaché in the German embasssy.  He informed Stalin that Hitler was going to attack the Motherland, but Stalin trusted Hitler and disregarded the information.  The first time I read about Sorge I was ten and, not even having reached the end of the book, decided to become a spy.  At the age of sixteen, I wrote a poem about Sorge entitled “The Loneliest Man in the World.”  The first verse: “Tokyo is breathing and I am not.”

Is the ‘I’ of this note Hemon, commenting directly on this historical figure (who also appears in the story) or is it something else?  Part of my dilemma with this is that the notes seem obvious and basic, while the story is strange.  Does the reader really need an explanation of the Yalta Conference?

It would be interesting to see how Hemon approaches the story for a reading.  Does he read the notes too?  Anyway, this has plagued me now for a few days.

—Richard Farrell

Gödel, Hofstadter, & the Self: A Critical Review of Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop — Adam Westra

Jul 012010
 

Adam-Westra1Adam Westra

It’s a huge pleasure to introduce Adam Westra to Numéro Cinq readers. Adam is a philosopher and translator and he happens to be studying Kant. This amazing essay proves that good writing exists in many forms and many arenas, that there is beauty in clarity, that vigorous, surprising prose is not just the province of the novelist and memoirist. Adam grew up in Calgary, with a year-long interlude in southern France at the age of seven, after which he went to a French Lycée, then Western Canada High School. He escaped to the Netherlands for a year before heading to the University of British Columbia, where he did a B.A. in Honours Philosophy (2003-2007). Thence to Montreal to do a Master’s in Philosophy at the Université de Montréal (2007-2009; thesis title: La Critique de la raison pure, une oeuvre inachevée). Now working on his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Montreal and Berlin on the role of analogy in philosophical thinking, with a particular emphasis on Kant.

dg

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Douglas Hofstadter is an author worth reading: he has something to say, and he says it well. This fact jumped off the page with the 1979 publication of his brilliant, Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (GEB). This eccentric, eclectic and electrifying book fascinated all kinds of readers for all kinds of reasons, and its audacious young author was instantly hailed as a one-of-a-kind, ‘geeky genius’. [1]  The irony, as Hofstadter himself points out, in both the Preface to the 20th anniversary edition of GEB (1999) and again, in the Preface to his most recent work, I Am A Strange Loop[2] (2007), is that while his first book’s success allowed him to capture the attention of a wide audience, as well as to secure an exceptionally free and well-supported academic position (notably the ‘Fluid Analogies Research Group’ at the University of Indiana) for pursuing his ideas, the most central – and original – insight contained in GEB, namely, “the parallel between Gödel’s miraculous manufacture of self-reference out of a substrate of meaningless symbols and the miraculous appearance of selves and souls in substrates consisting of inanimate matter” seems nevertheless to have gone unheard, like “a shout into a chasm” (SL, xiii). His goal in Strange Loop is therefore to reformulate, re-explain, and also to explore new aspects of this very insight – and this time, with “maximal clarity” (SL, xvii). [3]

Indeed, one of the very first, and most significant, points that Hofstadter makes in this work is that what he says and how he says it, (and also that it is he who’s saying it), are inextricably bound together. In particular, Hofstadter takes analogy “very seriously”, having spent the greater part of his career studying its role in human thought:

“[…] I specialize in thinking about thinking. Indeed […] this topic has fueled my fire ever since I was a teen-ager. And one of my firmest conclusions is that we always think by seeking and drawing parallels to things we know from our past, and that we therefore communicate best when we exploit examples, analogies, and metaphors galore, when we avoid abstract generalities, when we use very down-to-earth, concrete, and simple language, and when we talk directly about our own experiences” (SL, xv).

And virtually all of the points, major and minor, that are made in the subsequent 350 pages are accordingly expressed by means of more-or-less explicit analogies (the formulations “just as … so”, “similarly”, “by contrast”, etc., are ubiquitous) and an amazing variety of concrete imagery, often drawn from everyday life.[4] Now, in both this important descriptive claim about the analogical/metaphorical nature of human cognition (“we always think”), as well as the consequent normative claim regarding the optimal form of conceptualization and reasoning (“we therefore communicate best”), Hofstadter’s starting-point and consequent approach to the study of the mind differ fundamentally from the “Snow is white” propositional model of human language and thought that is often used as a paradigm in contemporary analytic philosophy. In fact, this view of his actually comes much closer to that of the emerging “embodied cognition” movement – despite the curious fact that he never mentions the latter specifically – whose representatives, such as Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, argue – like Hofstadter, on the basis of neuroscientific research, and, again like Hofstadter, to a relatively wide audience – that all human thinking, including philosophical reflection, emerges from the body via a metaphorically-mediated process of abstraction. In any case, Hofstadter’s recognition of the importance and power of analogical thought is in itself a remarkable and distinctive contribution to a philosophical scene in which analogy is largely dismissed or ignored.

The book’s twenty-four chapters (each one divided into idiosyncratically titled sections) can, grosso modo, be divided into two main parts: in chapters 1-14, Hofstadter gradually builds up his theory of the Self (or “soul” or “I” or “consciousness” – all synonymous terms for him); in chapters 15-24, he draws some consequences from his central insight, responds to objections, and takes a stab at some traditional and contemporary philosophical problems.

The core ideas of the book all come together in Chapter 20, featuring a dialogue (a form familiar to GEB readers), between two characters, Strange Loops #641 and #642, who represent, respectively, Hofstadter and an imaginary skeptic. Now, the challenge for Hofstadter is to make comprehensible (without necessarily proving) how the notion, nay even the feeling of identity – that there is “something it is like” to be me – emerges from a merely physical substrate, such as – but not necessarily limited to –  the human brain, which is composed of neurons, which are in turn composed of molecules, and so on all the way down to quantum particles – which, for Hofstadter, is where the “true causality” of the physical universe ultimately resides (SL, 297) – and this, without having recourse to any form of metaphysical or supernatural dualism. To the skeptic, then, who balks at the very prospect of providing an account of consciousness in such a framework, he offers the following hypothesis:

I sympathize with your sense of the barrenness of a universe made of physical phenomena only, but some kinds of physical systems can mirror what’s on their outside and can launch actions that depend upon their perceptions. That’s the thin end of the wedge. […] When perception takes place in a system with a truly rich, fluidly extensible set of symbols [e.g. a non-embryonic, non-infantile human brain], then an ‘I’ will arise just as inevitably as strange loops arise in the barren fortress of Principia Mathematica (SL, 282).

Now, the “symbols” invoked here do not designate arbitrary tokens, nor the images encountered in myth or dream, but rather the physical correlates (in the case of a human brain, the specific neural structures) ‘triggerable’ by certain abstract concepts; “perception” is just the ‘triggering’ or activation of such structures, whether through sensation, memory, or imagination. For example, the specific brain structure activated when you see or think of the Eiffel Tower is your “Eiffel Tower symbol”, and this activation is just what it is to perceive the Eiffel Tower (SL, 76). Crucially, the human brain’s system of symbols is so complex that it possesses a virtually unlimited or “universal” representational capacity (in Turing’s sense of “universal computability,” described in Chapter 17).

This is where the central analogy with Gödel’s ‘Incompleteness Theorem’ comes in: according to Hofstadter, Gödel’s great discovery consisted in showing, by means of a sophisticated mapping technique, that the formal system contained in Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica inevitably produces, because of its universal representational capacity, certain self-referential statements, or “strange loops”. An analogous phenomenon is just as inevitably produced in the brain, and this, combined with humans’ “innate blindness” to the inner workings of our own brains, i.e. “our inability to see, feel or sense in any way the constant, frenetic churning and roiling of micro-stuff, all the unfelt bubbling and boiling that underlies our thinking” (SL, 204) effectively makes us hallucinate an “I”, a Self which – or rather, who – seems to run the show, i.e. whose apparent causal agency according to beliefs and desires feels like the “realest” thing in the world (SL, 202). In a word, the “I” is not the starting-point, but rather the gradual outcome of a complex process of perception that twists back on itself, thereby giving rise, over time, to an ineradicable, yet indispensable, illusion: “I” (SL, 204). Again, Hofstadter is not necessarily trying to prove this claim as a definitive theory of consciousness, but rather sees himself as offering a new perspective on the mind, a sort of ‘Copernican Revolution’[5]: “My claim that an ‘I’ is a hallucination perceived by a hallucination is somewhat like the heliocentric viewpoint – it can yield new insights but it’s very counterintuitive, and it’s hardly conducive to easy communication with other human beings, who all believe in their ‘I’s with indomitable fervor” (SL, 293). More fundamentally, Hofstadter offers a distinctive vision of the human condition (or at least a new variation on an ancient and recurring theme): insofar as we cannot help believing in the “story” we tell ourselves – namely, that each one of has, or rather is, an “I” – it then follows that “the human condition is, by its very nature, one of believing in a myth” (SL, 295).

The skeptic’s recurring objection to this picture is the following: “Where, in this picture, am I? Where is the something-it-is-like to be me? Where are my qualia[6]?” In a paradoxical vein, Hofstadter (i.e. Strange Loop #641) replies that this ‘special feeling’ combined with the skeptic’s very resistance to the idea that the “I” could merely be the product of blind and invisible particles, just are the illusion he has described; furthermore, the I arises only out of a special kind of physical system: one characterized by an abstract, recursive pattern called a “strange loop,” analogous to a Gödelian self-referential statement.

It is at this exact point, I believe, that this crucial analogy between the strange loop in the brain and Gödel’s strange loop is at its weakest. Specifically, one could object that the ways in which the self-referential patterns emerge in the two cases do not seem to be analogous at all. On the one hand, Hofstadter is committed to saying that the Self emerges from the brain “automatically,” or “inevitably,” as only in this way can the emergence of consciousness be envisaged as taking place under the strictly physical, deterministic laws that constitute the “true causality” of the universe; otherwise, some sui generis mental substance (which he mockingly dubs “feelium” or “élan mental”) would ostensibly be required to explain the insertion of the “I” into the otherwise barren physical universe, devoid of properly ‘mental’ phenomena. Now, Hofstadter repeatedly justifies this claim by analogy with the way in which Gödel’s “strange loop” arises, as at the end of the longer passage quoted above (SL, 282), and again quite clearly here:

Consciousness […] is an inevitable emergent consequence of the fact that the system has a sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories. Like Gödel’s strange loop, which arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once you’ve got self, you’ve got consciousness. Élan mental is not needed (SL, 325, my emphasis in bold).

But does this analogy really hold? More precisely, does it make sense to say that a self-referential Gödelian statement “arises automatically” qua “natural and inevitable outcome of the deep representational power” of Principia Mathematica’s formal system (SL, 161)?

The trouble is that such an interpretation of the analogy does not appear to be consistent with Hofstadter’s own characterization of Gödel’s proof. In Chapters 8-12, Hofstadter mounts an impressive attempt to explicate Gödel’s procedure and to convey his own sense of its significance. According to this picture, however, Gödel’s “strange loop” seems to be the very opposite of “natural and inevitable”: indeed, the sophisticated and recondite procedure by which the young Austrian mathematician painstakingly crafted his proof appears entirely artificial and arbitrary. And crucially, it is this very procedure that constitutes the “why” of Gödel’s strange loop: the latter did not “automatically” emerge from within Principia Mathematica’s formal system, but was, rather, intentionally produced from the outside. As Hofstadter himself writes: “Gödel carefully concocted a statement about numbers and revealed that, because of how he had designed it, it had a very strange alternate meaning” (SL, 171, my emphasis in bold). In other words, the representational power of the formal system described in Principia Mathematica is merely the condition of the possibility of the emergence of a strange loop, not its cause (in logical terms: a merely necessary, not a sufficient condition). Therefore, one cannot say that the strange loop is a “natural and inevitable” product of the formal system itself; rather, it is clearly the artificial and arbitrary product of Gödel’s artificial and arbitrary design which, it could be argued, clearly presupposes a deliberate act of consciousness to begin with. In other words, while the formal system may indeed talk about itself, as Hofstadter insists, it does not do so by itself, but only because Gödel makes it speak. So, returning to the analogy with the brain/consciousness, we must now ask: if Gödel’s strange loop does not in fact arise “automatically” from a substrate of meaningless formal symbols, then why should we think that consciousness emerges “automatically” from a substrate consisting of inanimate matter? Indeed, we could even invert the analogy, in true Hofstadteresque fashion, substituting ‘God’ for ‘Gödel’: just as Gödel’s strange loop only emerges as the product of his consciousness, so are the strange loops constitutive of our respective ‘I’s produced in the consciousness of God! From Hofstadter’s physicalism we end up with full-blown idealism à la Berkeley. We need not go so far, of course; the point is just to stress that Gödel’s intentional mathematical procedure does not seem to be an adequate analogue for the blind physical process through which consciousness ostensibly arises.

Now, Hofstadter would surely respond to the above objection as follows: while the ultimate source of the Self does indeed reside at the level of physical particles governed by universal causal laws, the strange loop as such only arises at a much higher level of abstraction, namely, the level of perception, categories, and symbols:

The sole root of all these strange phenomena is perception, bringing symbols and meanings into physical systems. To perceive is to make a fantastic jump from William James’ “booming, buzzing confusion” to an abstract, symbolic level. And then, when perception twists back and focuses on itself, as it inevitably will, you get rich, magical-seeming consequences. Magical-seeming, mind you, but not truly magical. You get a level-crossing feedback loop whose apparent solidity dominates the reality of everything else in the world (SL, 300, my emphasis in bold).

The most obvious objection here, from an idealist-phenomenological perspective, is of course that this symbolic, meaningful perception presupposes consciousness: meaning is not ‘read off’ the raw data of sensation, but rather ‘read into’ the latter. The same presupposition holds, a fortiori, for Gödel’s proof of the Incompleteness Theorem, qua deliberate cognitive act: Gödel’s strange loop only arises as a meaningful statement to the extent that it has been consciously constructed, i.e., produced by an intentional “act” or “arbitrary synthesis,” to use Kant’s terms[7]. Obviously, explaining consciousness with consciousness can’t be what Hofstadter intends, as it amounts to begging the question, and even worse, begging it in the wrong way, as all true, ‘non-magical’ explanation, for him, must ultimately be in physical terms. But this makes the following question all the more pressing: in what sense are we to understand his claim that perception, qua abstract-physical process, will “inevitably” twist back on itself? Exactly what kind of necessity is being invoked here? Are we talking about the blind necessity proper to the physical substratum of the universe or we are talking at the abstract, symbolic, meaningful level? In the first case, we retain “inevitability” qua “true causality” of the universe, but on the other hand we lose abstract perception at this unfathomably lower level of neurons and seething particles. In the second case, we keep all of the ingredients for self-referential ‘strangeness’, i.e., perception, abstract categories, symbols, etc.; however, at this higher level of abstraction, we lose any meaningful (i.e. physical) sense of “inevitability”. However, these two levels are – indeed must be – incommensurable: recall that perception, and with it, the very possibility of ‘strangeness’, according to Hofstadter, depend on our “blindness” to the physical substrate of our thinking (SL, 204, quoted above). Whence the following dilemma: self-referential “strange loops”, as such, can only arise inevitably to the extent that they are not strange and, conversely, can only be strange to the extent that they are not inevitable. In other words, consciousness and physical necessity, as characterized by Hofstadter, do not seem to be conceptually or ontologically compatible. The fundamental question that Strange Loop was meant to answer must be posed anew: Whence the “fantastic jump” from the physical substrate to consciousness?

In the second part of the book, Hofstadter goes on to confront this perspective with the conceptions of other philosophers of mind (such as ‘Descartes’[8], John Searle, Derek Parfit, David Chalmers, and Daniel Dennett) and tackle some traditional and contemporary problems in the philosophy of mind (e.g. mind-body dualism, the so-called Inverted Spectrum Hypothesis, the free-will problem, etc.). In so doing, he makes heavy use of outlandish “thought experiments”, making this section of the book quite stimulating. He also engages with the conceptual creations of other philosophers, cleverly showing how ambiguous and misleading some of these rival scenarios can be (the ones concocted by Searle, in particular). But the sword is double-edged: after a few such skillful deconstructions, one can’t help but view his own conceptual scenarios with the same measure of suspicion. [9]

Moreover, Hofstadter’s treatment of certain philosophical problems (especially the ones he dubs the ‘Sacred Cows’) can come off as facile. For example, he seems to attack the – inappropriately named – ‘Inverted Spectrum Hypothesis’ as if it were just that, i.e., an empirical hypothesis about more or less rare cases involving human perception, and proceeds to put its empirical plausibility into doubt. It could be noted, first of all, that the slightly milder hypothesis that human beings perceive colours differently as a result of slight variations in their sense organs is not at all implausible from an empirical point of view; it is an established fact. More fundamentally, however, the Inverted Spectrum Hypothesis, from a properly philosophical point of view, has nothing to do with its empirical plausibility (a license that Hofstadter frequently claims for his own thought-experiments). The purpose of the thought-experiment (as employed by Wittgenstein, for example) is rather to paint a logical picture, as it were, from which one ‘reads off’ the conceptual links between ostensible mental states or ‘qualia’, on the one hand, and language, on the other. E.g., how and what am I ‘referring to’ when I utter the sentence: “The stop sign is red.”? Is it philosophically justifiable to invoke qualia here (i.e. the felt ‘redness’ of the sign to me, ‘in my head’, so to speak) or will some form of social convention offer a more plausible account (say, that the ‘redness’ of the sign consists in its use in a particular language-game: in this case, to indicate that one must stop one’s vehicle at the sign)? In the latter case, moreover, the ostensible qualia drop out as irrelevant anyway, empirical (im)plausibility notwithstanding.

Hofstadter is far more insightful, convincing, and at times even poignant – both intellectually and emotionally –when he wrestles with the mysteries of everyday life, his own in particular. Thus, the idea that other people to some extent live on inside us (that we are able, to a certain extent, to reproduce foreign “strange loops” in our brains) can come off as merely bizarre in the imaginary “Twinwirld”, but suddenly becomes, not just more plausible, but deeply insightful, even poetic, in Hofstadter’s passionate and earnest wrestling with the sudden loss of his wife Carol, his own “soul-mate”. Indeed, the earnestness and beauty of these reflections bear witness to the fact that Hofstadter’s work is more than merely idiosyncratic (even if brilliantly so); in reality, he has, in his distinctively playful way, something serious – because deeply personal, and hence genuinely human – to say. And for this reason, perhaps more than any other, his Strange Loop is well worth incorporating into your own.

—Adam Westra

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Adam Westra’s web page is here.

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Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. If I permit myself this expression, it’s only because I have the feeling that Hofstadter himself wouldn’t be insulted by this appellation, and might even be pleased by it.↵
  2. Douglas Hofstadter, I Am A Strange Loop, New York: Basic Books, 2007. 412 pages. Henceforth abbreviated as SL. All italics in quoted passages are Hofstadter’s.↵
  3. While he does intend to contribute to the philosophical debate on the nature of mind and self, Hofstadter explicitly forswears attempting to prove his point of view, finding the typical ‘proofs’ that philosophers tend to give of their theories to be ultimately futile. His primary purpose is not to convince, but to communicate, and only thereby to change his readers’ way of looking at things (in this case, at them-selves).↵
  4. In the Index, under the heading “analogies, serious examples of”, Hofstadter lists close to one hundred entries! Some examples: “between the author’s mind and others’ minds”; “between dog looking at pixels and Russell looking at Gödel’s formula”; “between gems in Caspian Sea  and powers in Fibonacci sequence”; “between mosquito and flush toilet”; “between self-symbol and video feedback”.↵
  5. Hofstadter seems to have arrived at this analogy independently of Kant, who is never mentioned. See the Preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (B xvii) for the latter’s famous “Copernican Revolution” in metaphysics, also presented as a justification for a change of theoretical perspective.↵
  6. The felt quality of certain states of consciousness, often, but not limited to, sensation; e.g.: the ‘blueness’ of the light coming through a stained-glass window, the ‘tastes-like-cheap-coffeeness’ of a cheap cup of coffee, the ‘pastoralness’ of the note F-major, etc.↵
  7. See the chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason on mathematical method, “On the Discipline of Pure Reason in Its Dogmatic Use” (A 712-738 / B 740-766), as well as the paradigmatic example of ‘Thales’ proof’(B xi-xiii)↵
  8. That is, the so-called doctrines of “Cartesian dualism” and the “Cartesian ego” which are widely bandied about, seldom with adequate reference to their original context.↵
  9. That being said, Hofstadter’s ingenious playfulness, unfortunately rare among philosophers, is only to be encouraged; indeed, this aspect of his writing is more reminiscent of the intelligent and creative playfulness exhibited by certain artists and musicians (Glenn Gould comes to mind).↵

Hear My Call: Sermon — Hilary Mullins

Jul 012010
 

Up!
Herewith a sermon by VCFA graduate Hilary Mullins, not a former student of mine, though she was in a novel workshop with me once, just a friend, but an old and good friend who comes up to the campus every residency to visit and sits in for a lecture or two or a reading. I has fond memories of long evenings spent in Francois Camoins’ room in Noble with Hilary and Ralph Angel and any number of students and faculty rotating in and out. Good friends, good conversation.

I offer this sermon in the Numéro Cinq spirit of subversiveness and outlawry. Once upon a time, the sermon was a hot nonfiction form. Books of sermons were routinely published and became best sellers. Nowadays, creative nonfiction is pretty narrowly defined and almost all literary prose has turned secular. I offer this sermon to remind you of a form, now too often ignored, a vibrant form that by definition looks to the deepest places of the human heart. Also to remind you to look to the side, to avoid defining yourselves, your reading and your writing too narrowly.

dg


Hilary Mullins, Author’s Note:

Sermons are a great form, and–as a writer addressing other writers–I am here to tell you it’s a form you do not have to be ordained to practice. You should be informed  of course, but that is not the same as being ordained. In my case, I’ve taken a couple of seminary classes plus a three-year lay training program in Vermont where I live. I have also studied a fair amount on my own. But that is all. And yet it’s enough.

Naturally, since I also run the services I preach at, my sense of the sermon’s  potential exceeds the parameters of theHilary Mullins-background changed sermon itself. For me the form is the whole service: from the prelude and call of worship, to the first hymn and prayer, to the sustained silence that comes next, and on and on, each element flowing along in the larger structure of the liturgy, creating an ongoing rhythm that, if you do it right, wakes people up—to themselves, to each other, to the deeper  river running through all things.

But as for the sermon itself, it has its own dynamics as well. Even more obviously than a short story or an essay, the sermon is a wonderfully flexible form that you can shape shift in just about any direction that will serve, mixing facts and figures with quotations or poetry, alternating straight-up exegesis with story. And in the liberal denominations I work in, which are Unitarian Universalist and Congregationalist, I have the freedom to work with texts beyond the Bible. For instance, when it comes to picking scripture for a Sunday, I have often paired a Biblical passage with a poem, using works by Rumi, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Some denominations won’t allow this, it’s true. But the limitations are not in the form itself.

Then there are effects that, though they don’t play in a reprinted sermon, work well in person with a congregation before you. Smile when you stand up, and they’ll smile back. Then as you get going, talk quiet or talk loud, slow up, slow down, use your body. Speak as if you were a channel for something good and something good can happen. And maybe best of all, the thing that other writers so rarely get to do: look in their eyes. Worlds are there. And they will come forth as they look back at you.

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2010 Numéro Cinq Translation Award — The People’s Choice Competition

Jul 012010
 

Rampant enthusiasm as voters line up to cast their ballots

Entries for the 2010 Numéro Cinq Translation Contest have officially closed.

At this stage the competition splits into two streams: the official competition (adjudicated by competent and illustrious judges) and the people’s choice (adjudicated by, er, you). The judges have been sequestered at a secret location in Vermont (of all places) where they will have no contact with the outside world until they have made a decision (no food, water or conjugal visits). I don’t think any of you have a clear idea of the pressure, the loneliness, and the sacrifice that are the lot of a Numéro Cinq contest judge. Most of you are not aware of the death threats, the offers of bribes, offers of marriage, offers of first born children–the whole shoddy display of anxious, desperate writers who will do anything to win a coveted Numéro Cinq literary award (dg has to think of a name for the little statuette–he is thinking of the Golden Cockroach or the Blue Dog). (NB Some of your bribes are not getting through. Please write ATTENTION: NC on the envelope and mail it to dg directly. Best to send cash.)

Meanwhile, members of the Numéro Cinq community and the great unwashed (ie. anyone who wants to) can vote for their favourite translation by inserting a comment on this post (click on the comments button, upper left corner). It’s helpful to add supporting commentary. It is also helpful (but not necessary) to read the entries before voting. Remember wit and arrogance are the supreme values on Numéro Cinq. The official entry sheet is here (click on this sentence, yes, this one!). As with our previous contests, you can vote for anyone except dg. You can vote ONLY once (many Numéro Cinq members seem to get this wrong). You CAN change your vote as long as you make this clear when you vote. You can vote from July 1 to midnight July 6.

dg

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