Out & Back: DG in New Brunswick, An Interim Retrospect

Dec 072013
 

Heading home after the first semester as Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick. I’ve been living at Mark Anthony Jarman‘s house just across the street from the Saint John River in Fredericton, about a 10-minute walk from the campus, also a 10-minute drive from the university’s research woodlot where I walk the dog often. R. W. Gray lives just down the third-floor hall from me. Both Mark and Rob have new books of stories coming out. According to legend, the house is built on property once owned by Benedict Arnold. Photos by dg, maj & ch.

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DSCF6934From the back

DSCF7031Up to the third floor where dg lives

DSCF7028Third floor sunlight, R. W. Gray’s door on left

DSCF7030Second floor landing looking out on Waterloo Row and the river

More dawg (Lucy) 087The house dawg

DSCF7032Second floor hallway

DSCF7037Living room and TV room beyond, new pellet stove at far right

Lucy & ClarissaLucy and Clarissa

Lucy and FifiLucy and Fifi

DSCF6893MAJ and Clarissa

DSCF6880Lu in the university woodlot

DSCF6876Woodlot

Clarissa and LucyLu and Clarissa’s shoes

DG One of the “Fabulous Judges” for The Fiddlehead’s 23rd Annual Literary Contest

Dec 062013
 

dg and Lucy at Lawrencetown Beach in Nova Scotia

The Fiddlehead is one of the grand old Canadian institutions, a literary magazine that first published in 1945, that published me regularly back in the days when I was a young strip of a writer just starting out (in those days the fiction was edited by Kent Thompson and  Roger Ploude). Now Ross Leckie is the editor; his office in the English Department at the University of New Brunswick is just down that hall from mine. Mark Anthony Jarman and Gerard Beirne are the fiction editors; the summer fiction issue has become a major publishing event of the year under their inspired leadership.

dg

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Introducing the Judges for The Fiddlehead’s 23rd Annual Literary Contest

The Fiddlehead‘s annual literary contest is now closed, and we’re pleased to announce this year’s fabulous judges.

Fiction Judge
Douglas Glover
Douglas Glover’s newest book, a collection of short stories called Savage Love, appeared in the fall of 2013. He has won the Governor General’s Award for his novel Elle as well as the Rogers Writers’ Trust Timothy Findley Award for his body of work. He edited Best Canadian Stories from 1996 to 2006. He teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts and is the current Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick. He edits the international online arts magazine Numéro Cinq.

via The Fiddlehead Blog: Introducing the Judges for The Fiddlehead’s 23rd Annual Literary Contest.

Fashion, Insomnia & Savage Love — Butane Anvil

Dec 042013
 

Butane Anvil

Savage Love Cover

Butane Anvil, aka Amber Homeniuk, is a friend from Norfolk County where I grew up. She’s also a chicken-owner and expert who advises my mother on her flock. She likes to dress up and take pictures. She also writes poems — see a selection we published on NC. Re. insomnia — it seems to be going around these days.

I dunno. I love that name, Butane Anvil. I wish I had thought of it.

dg

An exceptional read this fall was Savage Love by highly esteemed Canadian author and my friend Douglas Glover. In contrast to the aforementioned extremely terrible yet effectively soporific vampire novels, the stories in Savage Love more easily encourage a deliciously unsettling insomnia as they tend to stick to the ribs, or in many cases between them, being keen-edged with interpersonal horror, levity, and relentless skewering.

via Butane Anvil: And Its Heart So Savage.

Insomnia Dreams

Dec 032013
 

Last packet of the semester done, last writer-in-residence student conference done, reference letters written, residency lecture almost done, dog snoring beside me on the bed, snow all around outside the window, a couple of belts of good old Auchtentoshan Scotch under the hood, and the man feels, well, he feels like this.

dg

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg_XS0HDtR0[/youtube]

 

 

 

 

The Christine Schutt Interview | Quarterly Conversation — David Winters

Dec 022013
 

Here’s a teaser to David Winters’ terrific interview with Christine Schutt at Quarterly Conversation. We’ve been reading about her on NC as part of our focus on Gordon Lish and his influence on contemporary fiction. This interview a  wonderful addition to the ongoing discussion.

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CS: “’Reality,’ of course, is man’s most powerful illusion; but while he attends to this world, it must outbalance the total enigma of being in it at all.” So says Erik H. Erikson, but reality does not for me “outbalance” the bewildering experience of being in the world. Add the scrim of memory and incessant excursions into the past, and the most I can do to construct a world is to stitch together sensations of it. I do not want an impenetrable style but prize compression and music. I abhor quotidian easy speak, psychobabble, brands, news and slogans—a “writner’s prose” as Gordon Lish once described it. Mine calls for close, hard readers of fiction. This year in reviews of Prosperous Friends, I was bumped up from being a writer’s writer to being a writer’s writer’s writer; either way, it cautions challenging prose ahead. A lot is left unsaid and must be inferred simply because I want to avoid the dulling effect of belated language.

via The Christine Schutt Interview | Quarterly Conversation.

Three Pages to the Wind, or How I Spent Saturday Night: A Report from the Trenches

Dec 012013
 

BeethovenBooksBeer-page-001

Just so you know, the Saint John Free Public Library event last night was a blast (too bad for all of you who missed the chartered buses out of Boston, New York and Toronto). When I arrived at the door a couple of hours early to check things out, there was a SOLD OUT ribbon across the poster. I was told they could have sold an extra 50 tickets. I have never been party to a SOLD OUT event in my life.

There was food and wine and beer. The beer was a special one-of-a-kind whiskey pale ale invented by Big Tide Brewing Company brewmeister Wendy Papadopoulos for the occasion — it was called Three Pages to the Wind (I am certain now that this is the reason for the SOLD OUT sign). I naturally started out the evening resolutely insisting that I could not drink because I was going to have to drive back to Fredericton through the moose-haunted dark highways of New Brunswick after. But then someone said the magic words “whiskey pale ale” once too often and I am afraid I succumbed.

Then the Saint John String Quartet started to play and I discovered the truly zen experience of sitting in a library with books all around and a glass of whiskey pale ale in my hand and four lovely people playing stringed instruments for me (I dunno, everyone else seemed to be talking). They played for 45 minutes which, you know, required a second whiskey pale ale and then Wendy Papadopoulos got up and gave an entertaining talk on how she came to invent Three Pages to the Wind (which was, really, so entertaining — the woman is a genius — that I could have listened to it again as there was still beer left).

And THEN I was called up to read from Savage Love, which, was a little frightening because there were three steps up to the lectern and I wasn’t sure by then that I could navigate them. I was told after that I performed creditably and several nice people bought books to make me feel better. Later there was some helpful confusion (no doubt due to the prevalence of whiskey pale ale); I was given clear instructions on how to navigate (I have used the word “navigate” twice — the whole idea of navigation had become problematic for me at this stage) out of the city though somehow I got lost driving out of the parking garage and took ages to find my way back onto the moose-infested highway (I think I was using some sort of echolocation technique at the end).

Of all my reading experiences lately this was the best — what I remember of it. And the words “whiskey pale ale” are forever burned into my brain.

dg

Savage Love | Chatelaine Book Club: Best books of 2013 by Books Editor Laurie Grassi

Nov 292013
 

Savage Love Cover

A collection of stories contemplating the vastly different types of love. Don’t expect soppy sentimentality: These wildly creative tales reflect the ferocity of love, how the unexpected, forbidden, illicit and illegal play out on our psyches, how love begins and what is left when it abandons us.

via Chatelaine Book Club: Best books of 2013 by Books Editor Laurie Grassi.

Natalie Helberg Joins the Numéro Cinq Masthead as Contributor

Nov 272013
 

Helberg reviewer pic

Natalie Helberg is joining the Numéro Cinq masthead as a contributor. Wonderful to have her (along with the two other recent new hires, Gerard Beirne and Adam Segal). Natalie’s first contribution to the magazine was the deliciously smart review of Adrián Bravi novel The Combover in the current (November) issue.

It’s worth adding that not only does Natalie join the masthead, she joins the extended NC community of editors and contributors, a cadre, so to speak, of alert, intelligent, creative, bookish, adventurous individuals who, despite living at the far corners of the continent (and beyond) manage to commit to the magazine, form friendships, foster an esprit de corps and, often, be very funny communicating with one another. It’s a little world, highly entertaining and inspiring.

dg

Natalie Helberg is from Edmonton, Alberta. Some of her experimental work has appeared on InfluencySalon.ca and in Canadian Literature. She recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing with the University of Guelph.

 

“Glover has produced some of the most stylish, adventurous fiction this country has ever seen” | Savage Love, One of the BOOKS OF THE YEAR @ Quill & Quire

Nov 262013
 

Books of the Year

Savage Love Cover

Okay, for sheer outrageous panache (“the Gordian Knit, the Holy Trinity…” and me) this might be one of the best sound bites so far. Re. my obscurity: Luckily, I am not alone in the world. My dog still recognizes me. Although, okay, she is not much of a reader. Her favourite character in literature is Spot.

dg

Certain mysteries abide in this world: the Gordian Knot, the Holy Trinity, and the literary obscurity of Douglas Glover. Over the course of a career spanning three and a half decades, Glover has produced some of the most stylish, adventurous fiction this country has ever seen, and yet he seems to be continually passed over for recognition (a 2003 Governor General’s Literary Award for his historical novel Elle notwithstanding). The reason for this oversight is frankly inexplicable, outside of a general nervousness when confronted with technically brilliant fiction.

Read the rest at Quill & Quire » Savage Love by Douglas Glover (Goose Lane Editions).

DG is “a frank and bold writer…not for the squeamish…the perfect writer” @ The Library of the Found Inkwell

Nov 262013
 

Savage Love CoverI particularly like “not for the squeamish.” There should be a Surgeon General’s Warning label on my books. “The book may be injurious if taken in large doses. Keep out the reach of children and small furry animals. May cause irreparable psychic harm if you don’t have a sense of humour.”

dg

Glover is a frank and bold writer. His stories are not for the squeamish and can be difficult to read at times but if a reader wants an honest understanding into the dark elements of the human psyche, he is the perfect writer.

via Review: Savage Love by Douglas Glover. (2013) Goose Lane Editions

My Mambo King — Philip Graham

Nov 252013
 

Hijuelos

“Oh yes!…The sweet summons of God to man. That’s when He calls you up to His arms. And it’s the most beautiful thing, a rebirth, a new life. But, just the same I’m in no rush to find out.”
― Oscar Hijuelos, Mr. Ives’ Christmas

Oscar Hijuelos, an old friend, died in October. I knew Oscar mostly through his visits to Yaddo, just down the road from where I live, and through mutual friends. He and Steve Stern and I had some uproarious times, not to be forgotten. I also interviewed him for the radio show I used to produce in Albany — this was in 1995 when he published the novel Mr. Ives’ Christmas. He was a generous, gentle man, also very funny, and a passionate, brilliant writer, best remembered nowadays for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Mambo Kings Plays Songs of Love.

Philip Graham knew Oscar much better than I did. And he has written a very personal and poignant elegy that you should all read. Then you should all go out and buy Oscar’s books and read them.

Thanks, Philip, for this.

dg

Of all the photos taken of him, the image above captures best, I think, the man who was my friend for thirty-eight years. Oscar Hijuelos and I met in graduate school at City College in 1975, two young writers in Frederick Tuten’s fiction workshop. Oscar was shy, even deferential to the other writers in the workshop, but when he first read his work to us in class, his head bowed over the pages on the desk, his voice low, everyone recognized his enormous talent.

We became friends, visiting each other often in his apartment on the Upper West Side or the house I was renting with old college friends north of the city. We read each other’s manuscripts (and continued to do so over the years), discovered that we were born within two days (and only a few miles) of each other, and we talked about our life-or-death love of literature, drank and joked and ate at any Cuban-Chinese restaurant we came upon in New York. To say Oscar had a good sense of humor is not quite right—he had a great sense of amusement, about everything in the world (and he also had a great curious appetite for everything in the world), and when I hear Oscar’s voice in my mind (and I listen to him a lot these days), I can hear his restrained chuckle, or the casual bemusement in the very tone of his speaking. That slight, gentle smile in the photo says it all.

Read the rest at Philip Graham » Blog Archive » My Mambo King.

Mockingbird, A Debut Novel by Filmmaker Julie Trimingham

Nov 252013
 

Trimingham_Julie

Filmmaker and author Julie Trimingham’s new book, her debut novel, Mockingbird was recently released from MP Publishing.

91SCxrxOUIL._SL1500_

You might remember Julie from my Numéro Cinq at the Movies post on her gorgeous triptych of films Beauty Crowds Me.

Aritha Van Herk describes the book as

“teeming with yearning, with the indescribable smells and tastes of Cuban ardor. This tale of passion and its smudged fate, its undeniable allure, intensifies with each improvised move, so that readers have to gasp for breath, yet cannot help but follow this impossible seduction, and the center of gravity that shapes the beauty known as longing.”

You can see a trailer for the book here:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgpsKTNWK9s[/youtube]

Congratulations, Julie.

— R . W. Gray

 

 

 

Gerard Beirne Joins the NC Masthead as Contributing Editor

Nov 232013
 

GerryBeirne

Gerard Beirne is joining NC as Contributing Editor. Gerry is going to curate a new special feature called Uimhir a Cúig, which is Irish for Number 5. Uimhir a Cúig will showcase the finest in Irish literature and culture; from now on there will be a little corner of NC that is Irish. The first item, in the December issue, will be a gorgeous hybrid piece: text by last year’s winner of the Dublin IMPAC International Literary Award, Kevin Barry, and the Galway video and installation artist, Louise Manifold.

dg

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Gerard Beirne is an Irish author who moved to Canada in 1999. He is a past recipient of The Sunday Tribune/Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award. He was appointed Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick 2008-2009 and continues to live in Fredericton where he is a Fiction Editor with The Fiddlehead. He has published three novels, including The Eskimo in the Net (Marion Boyars Publishers, London, 2003) which was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2004 for the best book of Irish fiction and was selected as Book of the Year 2004 by The Daily Express (England). His poetry collections include Digging My Own Grave (Dedalus Press) which was runner-up in The Patrick Kavanagh Award. His personal website is here.

A Sentimental Education: Ne me quitte pas

Nov 202013
 

images

I was 20 and in Paris, Christmas, 1969, and I remember a fire-eater walking up and down the street across from La Coupole in the evening blowing flames out of his mouth and the smell of roasting chestnuts in the street and drinking hot grogs at the Select. The musical Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris had come out the year before in Greenwich Village and I liked the title without knowing who Jacques Brel was and I seem to recall seeing posters in Paris and wondering what he was doing there and why we were worried about him being alive and well (but perhaps this is a backward construction). Later when I was working at the Evening Times-Globe in Saint John, I would borrow LPs from the library. I borrowed a Rod McKuen record with this song on it and fell under the spell. I was young and a guy and it captured something of the self-dramatizing melancholy I was sure I felt most of the time.

dg

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N0KLu4vfkE[/youtube]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfziQHKQpfc[/youtube]

 

 

The Fundament of Western Culture: Guèrin (early 13th cent.), Bèrenger of the Long Arse

Nov 182013
 

Do we forget that Chaucer learned his chops reading the French and the French were writing what? Little poems about ass-kissing, cuckolds and powerful women! Wait a second!

It’s late. I’m tired. I have to take the dog for a walk. It’s dark. If you get the pun in the title and connect it to the poem, you win two NC bonus points toward the Grand Prize. If you can write an essay in which you reveal the christological allegory in the subtext of the poem, you get three NC bonus points.

dg

“Young man, my name will never be concealed;
But such a name was never found;
None of my family bears it but me.
I am called Bèrenger of the Long Arse,
Who puts all cowards to shame.”

via Guèrin (early 13th cent.), Bèrenger of the Long Arse; fabliau (French, tr. into Modern English); distant analogue of MilT..

Stupidity, Being Towards Death, Art (on Dostoevsky’s Idiot) @ Robert Musil: Attempts to Find Another Human Being

Nov 182013
 

Totentanz

I just discovered the post and this site through the good offices of Judith Stout on Twitter (@judithstout1). The blogger is Genese Grill, author of The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities: Possibility as Reality, and the site is full of fascinating items. And this is just a taste of what Grill has to say about Musil and stupidity; she has written a full length paper which you can read here in the journal Studia Austriaca.

dg

While looking for images of Death I discovered that not only is stupidity often a woman, but death (which is not a feminine noun in German) often is too. In this image (Totentanz by Karl Ritter, 1922) she may merely be death’s lure, if not herself the one condemned to die. Well, woman, at least, is effective, rousing to life, to frustration, to anger, challenging passive man to sin, to madness, leading him to distraction, destruction, eventually to death.

Read the rest at Robert Musil: “Attempts to Find Another Human Being”: Stupidity, Being Towards Death, Art (on Dostoevsky’s Idiot).

Douglas Glover, Beethoven & Beer — November 30 in Saint John, NB

Nov 172013
 

BeethovenBooksBeer-page-001

Hmmmmmm. My kind of event. I hope I get past the beer tasting to my reading. It’ll be touch and go. It could be a wild reading. I’ll have to get someone to point me toward the audience (but who knows what condition the audience will be in?). So far I have not yet been asked to sit in with the String Quartet, but I expect an invitation at any moment. I don’t know what Beethoven is going to do, read from his new book? I hear he brings his own stein to these events and gets morose and quiet near the end and needs a cab ride home.

Actually, it will be fun to return to Saint John, scene of many youthful hijinks (I taught philosophy at the university campus there when I was 22 and then worked at the city daily, the Evening Times-Globe).

1971

I used to haunt the great old Andrew Carnegie public library when I lived in Saint John, not the same building as I am going to read in unfortunately. But there is a ultra-brief sex scene snippet in my story “The Obituary Writer” that takes place in the stacks. You might want to look it up; it’s in my book A Guide to Animal Behaviour. Perfectly tasteful and not auto-biographical, I might add, as are all the scenes in my books. All I did at the library was read. That story, “The Obituary Writer,” is set in Saint John; the city becomes a character in the story in a sense. And also, of course, the name Numéro Cinq comes from that story.

dg

§

BEETHOVEN, BOOKS & BEER.

Saint John Free Public Library, 1 Market Square, Saturday November 30

7:00 pm. An after-hours event. Words and music in celebration of the Library’s 130th anniversary. The Saint John String Quartet will be playing, Governor General Award winning author Douglas Glover (and Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick) is booked to do a reading from his new story collection Savage Love, and Big Tide is set to cater and supply a specially crafted beer. Tickets: $10 and include one drink and snacks. There will also be a silent auction. Tickets are available at Central, West, and East Branches of the SJFPL.

This is the kind of audacious work our literary juries should be acknowledging. Where were they on this one? | Savage Love @ NOW Magazine

Nov 142013
 

Savage Love Cover

Douglas Glover always pushes the envelope. Every story in Savage Love is outrageous, creating farce – and something beautiful – out of human foibles….

This is the kind of audacious work our literary juries should be acknowledging. Where were they on this one?

Read the whole review at Savage Love | NOW Magazine.

Tim Parks on the End of Style @ The New York Review of Books

Nov 132013
 

There is a style of writing novels that is not style; I call it novelese. The language skitters along the surface of things in a lively pastiche of known phrases and ideas and reference without plumbing the depths. There is even novelese for “plumbing the depths” in a superficial, unadventurous, non-threatening way. Depth that only vaguely looks like depth, Ideas that look like ideas but aren’t. Tim Parks doesn’t give it a name, but his idea of contemporary non-style is similar to mine.

Read this essay next the two Andrew Gallix essays on the tired conventions of literary realism: “The End of Literary Realism” and “Of Literary Bondage,” and read my essays “The Novel as a Poem” and “Difficulty and Revolution,” and you’ll begin to see a density of argument and a critical vector that should lead you to consider or reconsider your approach to writing and reading.

dg

Such is the future of literature and literary style in a global age: historical novels, fantasy, vast international conspiracies, works that visit and revisit the places a world culture has made us all familiar with; in short an idea of literature that may give pleasure but rarely excites at the linguistic level, rarely threatens, electrifies, reminds us of, and simultaneously undermines the way we make up the world in our own language. Perhaps it is this development that has made me weary with so much contemporary fiction. In particular I have started reading poetry again. There indeed things can still happen with the language, and writers are still allowed to produce texts that are untranslatable and for the most part unprofitable.

via Literature Without Style by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.

The end of realist stories — Andrew Gallix @ theguardian.com

Nov 122013
 

Or “Fuck Realism” as he says on his blogpost linking to the essay, which, yes, is an impassioned cry against the reductive, prosaic monotony of the what Northrop Frye called “low mimetic” realism, the realism of the middle of the road, market driven, read-and-toss, consumer fiction of our day (and days before). Gallix is a leading new Modernist (I keep trying to come up with a tag that will fit the bill—this one is provisional), founder of 3AM Magazine in the UK, and contributor to Numéro Cinq. Put this new essay from the Guardian together with his essay “On Literary Bondage” from our August issue and then throw in my essay “The Novel as a Poem” and figure out where you stand.

dg

Literary fiction is dead – or if not dead then finished, according to the Goldsmiths prize-shortlisted writer Lars Iyer, who argues it has become a “repertoire, like The Nutcracker at Christmas” and suggests that novelists should spread the word that “the time for literary novels is over”. But literary fiction has always been dead, has always needed the mould-breaking writing which the Goldsmiths prize celebrates.

Ever since its birth, writers have been suspicious of the novel, reaching for the authenticity of the real – often presenting their work as memoir, à la Robinson Crusoe. For Scheherazade, storytelling is, literally, a stay of execution. For the rest of us, it is merely a pastime; a distraction from our ultimate destruction. Ashamed of its frivolity, fiction drapes itself in the gravitas of non-fiction.

If literature needs to be something more than just storytelling, then perhaps one could argue with Maurice Blanchot that it only truly becomes grown-up when it “becomes a question” hanging over the space separating it from the world. By showing its sleight of hand, the novel can live up to Adorno’s definition of art as “magic delivered from the lie of being truth”, but it loses its innocence in the process. No longer is it possible for a serious novelist to go back to the “good old days” when – as Gombrowicz put it – one could write “as a child might pee against a tree”.

via The end of realist stories | Books | theguardian.com.

Savage Love remains one of the strongest, most refreshing short fiction collections of 2013 @ backlisted

Nov 102013
 

My favourite line from a review so far: “…positively sick with the imagery of lust unfettered…” That’s exactly what I was aiming for, more or less, almost, sort of, well ballparkish.

dg

“Shameless” touches upon the ways children diverge from expected paths in life, and the different ways love and lust can and will shape one’s experience. (The story also includes an incredible six-page paragraph positively sick with the imagery of lust unfettered, unsatisfied, having taken over and been taken over by the mistakes in one’s past.) It’s the final story, however, that proved to be my favourite in the book. “Pointless, Incessant Barking in the Night” is perfunctory in its absurdity, like a mid-life crisis bottled and vigorously shaken with an unhealthy dose of spunk (yes, that). By the end of this story, reflecting on The Comedies in its entirety, it feels as if Glover has addressed the ridiculousness of love and connection from all possible angles, thus clearing the table for something new.

Read the rest at Review: Savage Love, by Douglas Glover | backlisted.

The Sun Lord & The Royal Child: Reading Tour Aftermath — DG

Nov 102013
 

Savage Love Cover

Timothy Taylor (a terrific writer whom I put in Best Canadian Stories when I was editor) chaired one of the panels I was on at WritersFest in Vancouver last month. As I was jetting away on Monday, he emailed me saying that he’d had his advance fiction class at the University of British Columbia read “The Sun Lord and the Royal Child” from Savage Love and would I care to add some thoughts to the discussion preemptively by Wednesday. (He didn’t use the word “preemptively,” but he did say it was an “insane” request since I was in a jet and he needed the comments the next day.) In particular he was interested in the way I comically torqued the idea of celebrity around my rock star forensic archaeologist character and my use and abuse of history.

So I wrote the following:

A quick note then: That story in part comes out of my fascination with the part of southwestern Ontario where I was born — history, geology, prehistory.

Here’s the link to a collection of quotations selected from my research in general.

Some of the items here feed into the story directly including the probably apocryphal Neutral oral history pieces by the McMaster University scholar named Noble. The Southwold Earthworks have always fascinated me (though I have never driven over to see them, just keep saying I am going to every time I am on the farm — thus they are much bigger in my imagination than they are, no doubt, in reality).

I am also very interested in the uses we make of the natives and their prehistory, such that pretty much most of what comes out as history, especially what is commonly understood as native history, is already wrong and spinning off in some over-romanticized, hygienic, idealized image of natives, who, after all, are just people, too.

Thus the forensic archaeologist  in question is a celebrity because he is wrong.

One of the patterns of the story, aside from the irony of celebrity, is the inner corruption of contemporary Ontario (which is about the same as Texas sometimes in my mind in terms of Tea Party politics and philistinism). Although, of course, that’s a joke as well and doesn’t represent a thoroughgoing attitude or belief on my part, a bit of whimsy based on impressions that are always countered by other impressions, as I am sure you know.

And then there are doubles, double betrayals, a pattern of plot multiplication, the webbed toes (which go with my ongoing thoughts on mermaids–there is another southwestern Ontario mermaid story in the book).

 Hope this helps the class

—Douglas Glover

I Can’t Make Basketball Practice Because of Proust

Nov 102013
 

proust

Ah, such lovely words. Though most of my time is spent teaching English, I also coach Varsity Girls basketball, and it was with dismay and wry pleasure that I received this excuse from a player who would be missing practice Sunday:

I can’t make basketball practice because of Proust.

That was it—no elaboration. Not exactly “my dog ate my homework.” Seriously, could there be a better excuse? What has Proust done?! It turns out, some of my students from the French-American School of New York will read during “Swann’s Way: A Nomadic Reading,” a week-long homage to the French writer’s sprawling In Search of Lost Time (a.k.a. A Remembrance of Things Past), published Nov. 14, 1913.

The novel’s long, complex, sinuous sentences will surely challenge the 120 or so readers recruited by the French Consulate to celebrate the centennial. For example, count the commas in this rumination on the tasting of a madeleine:

Mais, quand d’un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l’odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir.

In French, we don’t really have “run-on sentences.” Proust’s dense prose style possesses a poetic rhythm (note the runs of parallel constructions in the passage above, the calmer bits, and then the insistent repetitions). It’s syncopated and jazzy, like Ella Fitzgerald. The kids and other readers will be up for the challenge, provided they’ve practiced!

So if you want to bail on your plans this week, just blame Proust. And yes, there will be madeleines.

—Tom Faure

Lynn Coady Wins The Giller Prize

Nov 062013
 

In our January, 2012, issue, NC published a play by Lynn Coady. NC’s taste seems prescient now since, last night, Lynn won the $50,000 Giller Prize in Toronto for her latest story collection Hellgoing. Click on the link to view her acceptance speech. Click below to read her hilarious play.

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Okay—I think if you cross Aristophanes with Samuel Beckett or Eugene Ionesco, you might end up with something like Lynn Coady’s irreverent fringe play Mark. Or, if you cross tag-team wrestling with the Battle of the Sexes—the play actually has a club called the “slap-stick” and a very large phallus. Mark is a delight and a lovely addition to Numéro Cinq‘s growing collection of plays and screenplays, a section of the magazine that is unique as far as I can tell.

via Mark: Play — Lynn Coady » Numéro Cinq.

Andrew Gallix on Oulipo @ The Guardian

Nov 062013
 

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Oulipians are into literary bondage. Their fetish is predicated on the notion that writing is always constrained by something, be it simply time or language itself. The solution, in their view, is not to try, quixotically, to abolish constraints, but to acknowledge their presence, and embrace them proactively. For Queneau, “Inspiration which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery”. Italo Calvino (who was co-opted in 1973) concurred: “What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration or intuition is nothing other than finding the right road empirically”. Choosing the “right road” from the outset, instead of stumbling upon it haphazardly, is the Oulipian way: once the Apollonian structure has been circumscribed, Dionysus can work his magic. “I set myself rules in order to be totally free,” as Perec put it, echoing Queneau’s earlier definition of Oulipians as “rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”.

As Gabriel Josipovici argues in What Ever Happened to Modernism?, modern literature was forged out of a refusal to submit to external constraints, with the novel a “new form in which the individual could express himself precisely by throwing off the shackles that bound him to his fathers and to tradition”. The flipside of this emancipation of the writer (or privatisation of writing) was, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, isolation. No longer the mouthpiece of the Muses or society, novelists could only derive legitimacy from themselves. “Going back to the world of genres is not an option, any more than is a return to the world of the ancien régime,” writes Josipovici. The Oulipo escapes the Romantic cul-de-sac of unfettered imagination (or its Surrealist avatar, chance) by reintroducing external constraints, which are self-imposed.

Read the rest here.

—Jason DeYoung

Marjorie Sheard, J.D. Salinger’s Early Pen Pal, May Have Been First To Meet Holden @ NPR

Nov 042013
 

Sarah Sheard commented on Timothy Dugdale’s review of Salinger in the current issue of NC and brought to my attention this fascinating NPR story about a young writer and her correspondence with J. D. Salinger. The young writer in question was Marjorie Sheard, Sarah’s aunt. Wonderful to get this cross-reference, the little story, the moment. You can also read Tim’s review and view Sarah’s comments.

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Salinger’s first letter to Marjorie Sheard is dated Sept. 4, 1941.

“Dear Miss Sheard,” he writes. “Your warm, bright letter just reached me. Thanks very much. It’s unfair to authors that you write only to Aldous Huxley and me.”

Sheard had written to praise stories of Salinger’s that she’d seen in Esquire and Collier’s magazines. Like Salinger, she was in her early 20s and wanted to write fiction. He gives her advice: “Why don’t you try writing something for Mademoiselle or one of the other feminine magazines? Seems to me you have the instincts to avoid the usual Vassar-girl tripe those mags publish.”

He put his parents’ address (1133 Park Ave., on 91st Street in Manhattan) in the upper-right corner. He has typed the letter neatly — no cross-outs or erasures.

“He would have made a great secretary,” Kiely says.

Salinger, clearly thrilled to get a fan letter this early in his writing career, ends his note this way: “I hope you’ll always read my work with pleasure. So glad you liked the Esquire piece. I write for Marjorie Sheard and a few others. The fact that Esquire’s circulation is 600,000, and Collier’s is in millions is purely coincidental.”

Kiely thinks these letters reveal who Salinger was before Catcher in the Rye made him a literary star.

Read the rest at Pen Pal Of Young ‘Jerry’ Salinger May Have Been First To Meet Holden : NPR.

My hero: Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer @ The Guardian

Nov 012013
 

I was drawn to Albert Camus because he looked so cool in his trenchcoat, because the Cure wrote a song inspired by one of his books (The Outsider), because he and his pug-ugly friend Sartre were existentialists (which seemed related, somehow, to the trenchcoat). Their falling-out could hardly have been more acrimonious but, as can happen, the rupture contained a measure of agreement: both accepted that Camus had never really been an existentialist. For him this was a matter less of intellect than of temperament, of the defining facts of his early life: being born (100 years ago this week) into a world of sunlight and poverty in Algiers.

Read the rest at My hero: Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer | Books | The Guardian.

Turning the issue over, late evening thoughts…

Oct 312013
 

On the 32nd floor of the Harbourfront Westin in Toronto with a room overlooking the lake and the Billy Bishop Airport runway (from which I will fly from here Sunday morning if they let me). Surrounded by writers, kind of like a dystopian movie with writers instead of zombies. The elevator doors open and out steps a writer. In the lobby, there are writers standing in nervous groups hungrily sizing up newcomers (is that x who just won the y and can we eat him?)

No, no, really they are nice people. I exaggerate.

Door prize question: Who was Billy Bishop?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nC15aF6Ixc[/youtube]

 

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