Just the thing to lift the heart on a cold Sunday morning — Milenita

Jan 262014
 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvr_3ni6Kgk[/youtube]

When I took Lucy out for a walk this morning, snow had blown up against the railway bridge across the frozen river. Sun behind me, white/gray clouds beyond the bridge, and the bridge appeared as a criss-cross of bright white bars outlined in black.

Milenita is a Bulgarian singer/actress, born in Havana, Cuba. The first song is “Piya za Maria.” Then just below, a song in English, “Sitting on the Fence,” delightfully mischievous, goofy, amoral, cheerful. And below that is her first hit, “Black Cats.” I dunno. I just like this stuff. My new plan is to retire to Bulgaria and learn to play the piano.

dg

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mySlO4dGjyE[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTxGp0EaWnM[/youtube]

 

Out & Back: Writers on the Picket Line

Jan 212014
 

Len Falkenstein & Mark Anthony JarmanLen Falkenstein & Mark Anthony Jarman

The University of New Brunswick faculty strike is still on! Jeff Picka of the Mathematics Department took this photo of NC multi-contributor Mark Anthony Jarman (my roomie, with the beard) and playwright Len Falkenstein in the English Department. This was over the weekend. Much colder now. I was talking to guys on the line this afternoon; they had icicles hanging from their beards. No negotiations; nothing new.

dg

How, After All, Does One Become A Good Writer? — DG Interviews Harold Bloom

Jan 202014
 

harold-bloomvia Artmark

Here’s an interview I taped with Harold Bloom in 1994 after the publication of his book The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. As with some earlier interviews I have posted here, this comes from a box of tapes in my basement, dating from a time when I produced a weekly radio interview show. I talked to Bloom shortly after the birth of my son Jonah (I mention thinking about The Western Canon while sleepily trying to find his mouth with a bottle) and I was tired and nervous, hence my annoying lisp in the opening sentences.

This is a fascinating and touching interview, which starts with a evocation of the “belatedness” of the Modern, the sense that we have come too late, that the great ones have preceded us. Bloom calls himself a “last stand aesthete,” “a solitary and passionate reader,” and castigates “the ideology of the camp of resentment, which is against imaginative art,” tracing it back not to Marx or Freud but to Plato’s argument against Homer. This was at the peak of the great ideological and canonical debates that swept English departments in the 80s and 90s, a debate that has somewhat died away (as have many English departments) in the aftermath (or afterthought). But Bloom’s easily-worn erudition and his love of books soon lead us to a less tendentious and more personal plane of discussion. We move on to the writer’s relationship to the canon, the idea of competition and contest in art, Nietzsche’s strong writer, and the role of misreading of the ancestor work in the creation of art. Bloom asks, “How, after all, does one become a good writer?” Then he answers the question. And he ends with a beautiful riff on what a reader/critic should ask of a text: not what did the writer hope to accomplish for himself or herself, but what he or she hoped to accomplish as a writer.

dg

Interview with Harold Bloom Part I

[podloveaudio src=”http://numerocinqmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Harold-Bloom-dg-edited-part-1.mp3″]
Interview with Harold Bloom Part II

[podloveaudio src=”http://numerocinqmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Harold-Bloom-dg-edited-part-2.mp3″]

Jesus Stolen, Then Returned, Thank God!

Jan 142014
 

Schmalz jesus statueWhatsoever You Do — Timothy Schmalz

This happened in early December (but I am slow). Timothy Schmalz’s life-size statue of Jesus “Whatsoever You Do” was stolen from the venerable Anglican Church of Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields in the Kensington Market area of downtown Toronto. This is significant in several ways, paramount to the NC community is the fact that the minister at Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields is Maggie Helwig (novelist, essayist and poet) who published a sermon, “Now the Green Blade Rises,” here in March, 2011. Maggie is an old friend; years ago we co-edited the annual anthology Coming Attractions. In fact, I was just in the church in September when I was in Toronto on one of my book promotion jaunts (unfortunately, I missed Maggie). The statue was outside next to the sidewalk, beautiful and touching.

Then, a few days later, the thief returned the statue (secretly, in the night) with a note attached: “I’m sorry, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

I leave you to read into this what you will.

Timothy Schmalz is a well-known Canadian artist. He made headlines a few days before the theft when his “Homeless Jesus” was blessed by the Pope in Rome.

dg

Out & Back: Exciting Times As My Writer-in-Residence Gig Takes A Dramatic Twist

Jan 122014
 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvVWWFRW0mw[/youtube]

This is exciting and nothing I bargained for when I bargained for the Writer-in-Residence job at the University of New Brunswick, but it seems possible/probable (you never know with negotiations) that the faculty bargaining unit at the university will go on strike tomorrow. At noon, I think. As Writer-in-Residence, I am betwixt and between; I am not a member of the bargaining unit and thus am not going on strike. But, of course, Mark Jarman and Rob Gray (NC at the Movies), my roomies on Waterloo Row, and many other friends will be on the picket line.

I have been getting emails and instructions. (And, really, I may have some of this wrong.) It seems that if the strike proceeds, the university email system will shut down (at noon). I am getting a flurry of emails from colleagues sending me alternate email addresses. This got me excited; I started sending out alternate email addresses myself. I’m going underground.

I’ve been instructed that, though the faculty is on strike, my classes will continue (this was a general instruction to non-faculty faculty, temporary instructors, etc.). This doesn’t really affect me since I don’t conduct classes; I only have meetings with students and members of the public in my office on campus. I was also told that I should be able to cross the picket line without any trouble but that I didn’t have to cross the picket line if I felt threatened or in danger. There is a lengthy instruction sheet about this. I have visions of large scale labour violence based on too many Hollywood movies. The video at the top is from John Sayles Matewan. The one below is the trailer for The Molly Maguires.

I mean my humour here to be gently ironic and not disrespectful. I am mostly surprised at the turn of events. I used to belong to a journalists’ union when I worked at the Montreal Star (in ancient times), and I recall the pleasant sense of security it gave me to be affiliated with a large group of people and colleagues who took my working rights seriously. I wish all my friends well.

Here is Rob’s Twitter feed. @rw_gray

And here is his Facebook wall.

Here’s the AUNBT Facebook Page (a good place for keeping up).

Here’s the AUNBT site.

And here’s the Community Support Page on Facebook.

dg

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJyZjWfyPR4[/youtube]

Barrett & Lloyd — An Ollie Jones Video

Jan 102014
 

Lloyd and Barrett

Just for fun — because the weather is so awful and this will lift your hearts — here’s a video of my nephew Barrett Olson-Glover dirt biking with his dog Lloyd on Brohm Ridge last summer. The video was shot and edited by Barrett’s friend Ollie Jones. Barrett and Lloyd live in Whistler, British Columbia. Lloyd is a stray Barrett befriended while working at a construction camp in the B.C. interior. Among other things Lloyd is famous for confronting a bear in the backyard one day. See photo below.

dg

Lloyd and the Bear

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/73754364[/vimeo]

“If there were any doubts that Douglas Glover is one of Canada’s best prose writers, then Savage Love will surely extinguish them” @ Free Range Reading

Jan 032014
 

Savage Love Cover

Savage Love, by Douglas Glover: “If there were any doubts that Douglas Glover is one of Canada’s best prose writers, then Savage Love will surely extinguish them. The fact that this collection braids so many modalities, so many tonalities, together into a cohesive whole speaks to the author’s immense talent. These stories are skillful yet breathless, and deserve any and all accolades that may come their way.” Review forthcoming in Canadian Notes & Queries.

via Free Range Reading.

“This was, hands down, the best book I read in 2013” — Steven Beattie @ The National Post

Dec 272013
 

Savage Love Cover

Best of 2013

Savage Love by Douglas Glover (Goose Lane Editions) Shuttling from the 19th century to the present, and running from a brief five lines to a sprawling 50 pages, the stories in Glover’s collection are stylistic marvels, testing the tensile nature of language as they explore the more outré – and, yes, savage – aspects of love in all its forms. This was, hands down, the best book I read in 2013.

via Shortcuts: Things Withered, and Someone Somewhere | National Post.

“Douglas Glover, the mad genius of Can Lit” |Globe Books 2013 — The Globe and Mail

Dec 272013
 

Savage Love Cover

Douglas Glover, the mad genius of Can Lit, came out with Savage Love, a grab bag of everything the form can do, in turns hilarious, intriguing and truly chilling. Intellectual pleasures abound just by recognizing the playful way Glover gives the nod to Borges, Thomas Bernhard, Cormac McCarthy. But Glover also seizes your soul. At the end of Tristiana, his McCarthyesque tale of a 19th century murderous duo roaming the American West, I scrawled in pencil, “I will never recover…”

via Globe Books 2013: Long story short, it was a remarkable year for short fiction – The Globe and Mail.

“What’s the matter, jurors, too much to handle?” | Savage Love on Susan G. Cole’s Top 10 Books | NOW Magazine

Dec 242013
 

Savage Love Cover

4. SAVAGE LOVE

Douglas Glover (Goose Lane)

This was supposed to be the year of the short story, but these brilliant tales – often brutal, always beautiful – were criminally ignored by prize juries. The last story, Pointless, Incessant Barking In The Night, is one of the best I’ve read in years. What’s the matter, jurors, too much to handle?

via Susan G. Cole’s Top 10 Books | NOW Magazine.

The Boneless Skin Art of Francesco Albano

Dec 222013
 
Albano 3

Ophelia

Francesco Albano is a skin artist, also Italian, though he lives in Turkey. He’s been creating such a stir of late that Huffington Post has anointed him. Click on the images or his name to  see more. They are icky, horrible, funny — discomfort makes you want to tell jokes. Surprising, because, of course, you’re used to the skin with bones and flesh inside. Here we have boneless skin or partial bodies or skin and fat but no bones or just skin and bones (no flesh). All this is obvious. What is less obvious and more beautiful is the sag of gravity, the lush heaviness of the unsupported skin, or the fat folds, or the bulging density of knees, the tension between what should be there and isn’t, between up and down (or between standing up and being strung up). Skin also the seems simultaneously both a puddle and a rock, marble. The artist mixes classical techniques with conceptual headstands. The effect is amazingly energetic, startling. My first thought:  Francis Bacon meets the bug in Men in Black (putting on his human skin suit) — yes, I had to make joke, but I am restraining myself.

dg

Albano1

The Age of Games Has Gone

francesco albano

On the Eve

Scene/Dialogue: An Object Lesson

Dec 212013
 

A little tour de force of TV writing (cute, self-consciously witty, knowing, just a tad smug). But still very energetic, a great scene. Why? Because it shows the characters THINKING. The scene has a plot and it uses what I call the Device of the Third Thing; it’s a two-character scene made immensely richer by the reader/audience seeing the scene reflected periodically in the eyes of the silent man.

dg

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lElf7D-An8[/youtube]

Handel’s Messiah

Dec 202013
 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuGSOkYWfDQ[/youtube]

Sir Colin Davis conducts the London Symphony. Just awful commentator, unless of course she is doing a parody, always a possibility. Amazingly, she tells us at least twice, Handel wrote the piece in just 24 days. This is apparently the most remarkable thing about it. Her name is Verity, truth, which I like. She asks Sir Colin why he thinks the piece is so popular (she wants him to say because it was written in 24 days). He is clearly stumped. All he can come up with is a lame answer: Because it’s good. I will name my next child Verity.

In any case, ignore the commentary; it’s not a football game.

dg

i Modi, The Postures: Renaissance Naughty Art (Parental Dis….oh, who cares?)

Dec 192013
 

Marcantonio_Raimondi_i_modiParis and Oenone, Marcantonio Raimondi

Just a reminder that art doesn’t have to be proper (have I mentioned this before? moi?). The i Modi is a series of Renaissance engravings of erotic mythological encounters, wildly energetic and wonderfully sumptuous, very naughty indeed. The image above is Posture One (Paris and Oenone) from the original set by Marcantonio Raimondi. The images below are from an 18th century version by Agostino Carracci. Click on the links to see multiple postures and versions. Clarissa Hurley sent me the site; she wrote:

…the 16th century engravings, i Modi (The Ways or The Postures), by Marcantonio Raimondi, based on drawings by Giulio Romano. It’s sort of of an Italian renaissance Kama Sutra. Later the salacious poet-satirist Pietro Aretino composed naughty sonnets to go with each image. They are a fairly well-known series for those of us who toil at the lunatic fringes of Italian Ren & Baroque studies, but I assume are less known to normal humans.

This site is pretty good: Eroti- Cart: The History of Erotic Art, and there is a recent print edition by art historian Lynn Lawner, I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures — An Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance.

dg

b154772f076fa0d766935d8827f3c2dc.image.439x550.Pandora__Click_Image_to_ClosePandora, Agostino Carracci

2317b91a7727a829c1af5e36f75e376a.image.455x550.Posture_05_(Polyenos_and_Chriseis)__Click_Image_to_ClosePolyenos and Chriseis, Agostino Carracci

 

 

Lives of Girls and Women: Photographs by Alessandra Sanguinetti @ Feature Shoot

Dec 182013
 

Alessandra_Sanguinetti_13

Gorgeous, haunting photographs of two Argentine girls/women taken by San Francisco photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti. There are many more images at the site.

Again, Clarissa Hurley sent me this link. Many thanks.

dg

Alessandra_Sanguinetti_17

Alessandra Sanguinetti tells the story of two young girls living in a rural province south of Buenos Aires in book one of her ongoing series The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and the Enigmatic Meaning of their Dreams. The San Francisco-based Magnum photographer spent her childhood summers at her father’s farm, and found herself drawn to the sisters as they navigated their way from the innocence of childhood to the complexities of puberty—although not at first—Sanguinetti says of her subjects: “Beli and Guille were always running, climbing, chasing chickens and rabbits. Sometimes I’d take their picture just so they’d leave me alone and stop scaring the animals away, but mostly I would shoo them out of the frame. I was indifferent to them until the summer of 1999, when I found myself spending almost everyday with them. They were nine and ten years old then, and one day, instead of asking them to move aside, I let them stay.”

via Magical Photographs Follow the Lives and Friendship of Two Argentine Girls | Feature Shoot.

The best book of 2013 you probably never heard of — Savage Love @ Toronto Star

Dec 162013
 

Savage Love Cover

Savage Love by Douglas Glover (Goose Lane)

The best book of 2013 you probably never heard of. How such a terrific collection of short fiction, perhaps the liveliest and most exciting yet from this master of the form, slipped under the big prize radar is a mystery.

via Books for the holidays: 15 of the most intriguing of 2013 | Toronto Star.

A Girl After My Own Heart|Bloody Bloody Boudoir Ladies @ Hyperallergic

Dec 162013
 

Check out these uncanny figurines by Scottish artist Jessica Harrison. Something deeply and hilariously disturbing here. Just the sort of thing I like. Great site, too.

dg

Harrison in particular has a rather unsettling take on this with her series of ghastly ladies, the ones on view in MAD just being her most recent. She’s also crafted “skin” furniture complete with real sprouting human hair (ideal decor for the salon of the uncanny valley), a miniature piano full of red tongues, and, um, used fly legs as fake eyelashes. In contrast to some of this prior work, her figurines in this show — with their severed heads dripping on their petticoats, wearing neck wounds like just another fine necklace — seem rather refined. But their slasher-movie carnage rips through the fiction of mass-produced sophistication.

via Bloody Bloody Boudoir Ladies: Turning Kitsch Ceramics Into Horror.

J.S. Bach – Christmas Oratorio

Dec 152013
 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFnW_CrPUlA&amp[/youtube]

Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Monteverdi Choir
and the English Baroque Soloists in a performance
of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.

Salvador Dalí Illustrates Don Quixote | Brain Pickings

Dec 142013
 

Oh yes! Dali illustrations for Don Quixote. Clarissa Hurley, who just read The Enamoured Knight (bless her heart), sent me this link. This also reminds me that once in Paris (Christmas, 1969) I saw Dali emerge from a black limousine-like car with a  fancy woman dressed in furs. It was morning, yet they seemed dressed for the evening. This is my memory.

dg

Salvador Dalí was no stranger to literary illustration, from his heliogravures for Alice in Wonderland to his drawings for Montaigne’s essays. But arguably his most elegant take on a literary classic comes from this rare 1946 edition of Don Quixote De La Mancha (public library) by Miguel de Cervantes. (Cervantes’s exact birthday remains uncertain — September 29, 1547 is the commonly agreed upon date, but there are no surviving birth records; the only official record is that of his baptism on October 9, 1547.)

Scrumptiously surrealist, Dalí’s drawings — a combination of black-and-white sketches and watercolors — are the best visual take on the Cervantes classic since Spanish graphic design pioneer Roc Riera Rojas’s 1969 illustrations.

via Salvador Dalí Illustrates Don Quixote | Brain Pickings.

Romancing the “Mysterious Bonds of Syntax”: Allegory and the Ethics of Desire in Douglas Glover’s “My Romance” and “Iglaf and Swan” —Adam Beardsworth | Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne

Dec 142013
 

This is a scholarly essay about two short stories of mine that I only just now noticed is available online. (Many academic journals, lately, seem to be adopting a new openness to readership that can’t help but be a good thing.) It appears in a journal called Studies in Canadian Literature (one of the editors, John Ball, has an office just down the hall from my Writer-in-Residence office at the University of New Brunswick). The stories are “My Romance” (about the baby dying and the husband having an affair with his wife’s OB/GYN and then trying to kill the monkey) and “Iglaf and Swan” (about a pair of artsy writers who manage, via self-obsession, to drive their daughter to tattoos and suicide). The stories are in my books 16 Categories of Desire and the U.S. collection Bad News of the Heart. The author, Adam Beardsworth, is an astute and intuitive reader of my work, none better. He is especially good at parsing the philosophical ideas that underpin my very strange plots.

dg

—

THEORIZING THE AMBIGUOUS RELATIONSHIP between desire and experience, Jean-Paul Sartre realized desire’s precarious, if not paradoxical dependence upon the tension between presence and absence: desire’s very insatiability testifies to its origins beyond objective conciliation. It is upon this philosophical premise that Douglas Glover hinges his short stories “My Romance” and “Iglaf and Swan.” In both stories, Glover explores the epistemological problems that arise when those objects that we desire most are traumatically displaced only to reveal the lack that lies at the core of being. Reluctant to revel in post-modern incertitude, Glover’s stories demonstrate a compelling movement from a confrontation with desire and nothingness, to a realization that the only redeeming desire, however ephemeral, is that which one finds in an “other,” or in the recognition of a mutually intrinsic desire for the infinite in one’s object of love. Demonstrating a concern with the proximity between the compulsion to satisfy sensual appetite and the inclination towards linguistic expression, Glover allows his exploration of longing to extend beyond the parameters of his narrative and into the realm of allegory. From the self-reflexive title “My Romance,” with its coy allusion to both narrator and author, to Iglaf and Swan’s tragic conflation of the desire for the other with the will for literary acumen, Glover’s stories foreground an ostensible preoccupation with the link between desire, art, and death. Recognizing language as central to all experience, Glover, in “My Romance” and “Iglaf and Swan,” allegorically invokes writing as a medium compelled by insatiable desire, a manifestation of our human impulse to objectively inscribe our fascination with the pure loss, death, trauma, and love at the limits of human experience.

Read the rest at Romancing the “Mysterious Bonds of Syntax”: Allegory and the Ethics of Desire in Douglas Glover’s “My Romance” and “Iglaf and Swan” | Adam Beardsworth | Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne.

End-of-Year Praise for Número Cinq

Dec 132013
 

NC Logo

End-of-the-year praise for NC from Daniel Davis Wood, who teaches in Switzerland and is the editor of a recent collection of essays by Edward P. Jones. Wood also praises Music & Literature, which is edited by my former student Taylor Davis-Van Atta (also an NC contributor now and then).

dg

…Douglas Glover’s Número Cinq, online since 2010, was a wonderful new discovery for me this year…. Most impressive about Número Cinq is the material being collected in its Book of Literary Craft, especially Jason Lucarelli’s two long pieces on the aesthetic legacy of Gordon Lish (one, two) which led to an equally impressive discussion on that subject between Lucarelli, David Winters, and Greg Gerke, available at The Literarian.

via End-of-Year Pleasures and One Disappointment | Infinite Patience.

Neoliberal Fatalism and the Seeming Dearth of Ambitious Art — Tom Faure

Dec 122013
 

Great post up at Jacobin today by Sam Gindin on, among other things, the lack of politically effective art today.

Part of the problem is a lack of ambition in both politics and art—the left seeming, especially since the 1990s, unable to proffer sufficiently ambitious radical projects:

The primary focus on protest carried with it an inclination to ignore and in some cases even scoff at seriously considering what it would take to fundamentally challenge capitalism and eventually replace it. Unable to think big, these protests have increasingly been unable to even win small. Unable to act more ambitiously, they are largely limited to defensively protesting the latest specific attack on our lives.

Gindin bemoans the lack of progress since the potential watershed of 1968. Drawing on Brecht’s confrontation of fatalism, Gindin suggests good activist art must re-embrace the somewhat abandoned Marxist critique of capitalism. Without it, an artist falls into disillusionment as easily as your average neoliberal young thinker-consumer. Gindin is not reinventing the wheel, here, but placing an important emphasis on the problem of fatalism, of falling into the neoliberal fallacy that capitalism is the only possibility:

It would be a shame if art, taking fatalism as a fixed reality, was reduced to consoling us in our despondency.  On the other hand, it would be naïve to expect too much from art. Though the years since Berger issued his challenge have confirmed that the soul-destroying world that capitalism more and more offers us is a fundamental barrier to human development, art itself cannot overcome this situation. Art can move us emotionally and intellectually, but however valuable it can be in this regard it cannot on its own transform the power relations of society. Such a radical change demands the development of radical political institutions and practices. Addressing this means that artists have to step out beyond their studios and workplaces to act in the world as directly political people.

Activist art must become both grounded in everyday life and embrace the incertitude of “possibility and experimentation” (Gindin’s words—I would suggest Keats’ negative capability). Until then, Gindin says, art will remain a “shill for the status quo.”

Read the rest at Jacobin Magazine.

—Tom Faure

Robert Hughes on Marcel Duchamp and the Large Glass

Dec 122013
 

Here’s a segment from Robert Hughes The Shock of the New (1982) that deals with Marcel Duchamp (using some clips from the BBC interview with Duchamp I posted earlier). Part way through, Hughes does a fascinating analysis of Duchamp’s “The Large Glass” or what he called “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.”

320px-Duchamp_LargeGlassImage via Wikipedia

Hughes sees the work as a kind of allegory of the psychosexual two-world concept that has haunted the history of Western philosophy. The bride is in the top pane, beautiful and inaccessible (like God, Truth and Quixote’s Dulcinea); the bachelors are in the bottom pane, mechanically grinding out their sperm-like product which, yet, can never reach the bride in the top pane. Bottom pane=existence; top pane=Being. At least, this is what Hughes seems to be saying.

My recent Duchamp obsession derives from discussions between Stephen May and Paul Forte, both of whom contributed essays on art to NC in the last two issues. Duchamp is at the heart of their debate, it seems. And the debate speaks to many currents in art theory and history over the last century or so (it is a century since Duchamp started painting).

Here are the relevant posts collected.

dg

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpgR_Uv_hgM[/youtube]

Salty Ink’s Chad Pelly Picks Savage Love @ ShortLitCrit’s Favourite Short Story Collections of 2013 | FOUND PRESS

Dec 112013
 

Savage Love Cover

But I have to give it up to Douglas Glover for Savage Love, if only because it’s such a showcasing of why short fiction exists and what writers can do with the form. The stories are punchy, experimental, daring, dark, and funny in ways a novel or a poem cannot be. Oh, and they’re also really damn good. You’ll laugh, be appalled, cringe, and cringe, and cringe. — Chad Pelly

via ShortLitCrit’s Favourite Short Story Collections of 2013 | FOUND PRESS.

William S. Wilson on Structure in Joseph McElroy’s Novels

Dec 112013
 

joseph-mc-letter-left

“And the field was him,” a sentence in Plus, a novel by Joseph McElroy, warrants an inquiry into field and the novel. The novelty of McElroy’s fiction grows from the attempt to use the structure of a novel as itself a field, presenting actions which occur within fields. He displays field as aesthetic structure, and field as content of aesthetic structure. So within the novel, events which occur within a field can also be seen as themselves constituting a field. In both field as structure and as content, the hero is intelligible as a region of a field, not as a sphere or core of individuality which passes through a field in fulfillment of a destiny.

In an ordinary story, choices among possibilities reduce the number of possibilities to probabilities, and choices among probabilities reduce the probabilities to necessity. In a field-novel, instead of an order of succession from beginning possibilities, middle probabilities, and concluding necessities, possibility can be preserved as such, because it is a quality of the field. A field provides a different and all-over distribution of energy and attention from a structure with a hero or heroine at the center.

When field is a structure as well as thematic content, field-fiction can draw the reader into its field through diction and sentence structure which evoke experiences in reading which are self-evidently different from reading a linear plot. Any detail in a conventional novel is significant as it bears or does not bear upon the life or destiny of the hero. But any detail in a field-novel can have, as part of its meaning, its position in a spatio-temporal field. Without the hierarchy of importance to the hero, details cannot easily be arranged in hierarchies, and any hierarchies which survive fluctuate wildly. Even triviality can become important when the triviality of any detail becomes part of the theme.

Read the rest: Joseph McElroy: Fathoming the Field

—Jason DeYoung

The BBC Interview with Marcel Duchamp

Dec 102013
 

Duchamp.3

DuchampLargeGlass2The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even (The Large Glass),
1915-1923; notice the cracked panes in the bottom half.

The Forte-May debates on Numéro Cinq have tipped me over into a fascination with Marcel Duchamp. Whenever people get into a debate, it’s always good to dive beneath the surface and teach yourself something and come to an individual conclusion. Here’s the second interview I’ve put up here in two days. Duchamp is surprisingly personable and amiable, and, as he tells his story, quite reasonable. Watching these interviews  you get a sense of traditions and movements clarified through his history and his relationship with movements. This interview is in English and doesn’t display any images.

dg

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwk7wFdC76Y[/youtube]

Two Episodes from the Life of Hubert Aquin: A Film by Jacques Godbout

Dec 092013
 

Aquin

“There is only one possible law of style: write to the maximum of intensity and incantation.” That’s Hubert Aquin, from his 1968 novel Trou de Mémoire (Blackout in the English translation). It’s the only rule you need for writing and for life. And the novel itself is astonishing for its combination of obsession and rupture.

I wrote an essay about Aquin, “Difficulty and Revolution,” which is in my essay book Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, but you can also read it online in Dalkey Archive’s magazine Context.

And here is a Jacques Godbout documentary about Aquin; Godbout, an eminent novelist and filmmaker, published two of my books in French in his capacity as editor of éditions du Boréal in Montreal (Les Pas de L’ourse and Seize sortes de désir)

dg

Two Episodes from the Life of Hubert Aquin by Jacques Godbout, National Film Board of Canadaé

Marcel Duchamp Interview at UBUWEB

Dec 082013
 

marcel_duchamp

urinal

Click to View: Jeu d’échecs avec Marcel Duchamp (1963)

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Much talk of Marcel Duchamp on NC lately. Read Stephen May’s essay “Beauty & the Brothel of Illustration: An Impractical Guide to Making Art” and Paul Forte’s essay in this issue “Visual Thinking and Cognitive Exploration.” I thought it would be helpful to see the man himself, hear his words and follow his life. This is a remarkably sumptuous filmed interview that tracks Duchamp artist through his life and influences (among other things, he rather hilariously recommends getting married).

dg

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