DG has been hiding out on the farm for a day and a half between events, dreaming nightmares of being chased and shot at (typical reading tour dreams). The fields are worked up and pocked with leftover tomatoes, the woods are noisy with black squirrels skipping about happily (apparently, it has been a good “nut year”). The Aged Parent is also skipping about, much repaired after breaking her hip in the spring.
Off to Toronto shortly. Below we information for the second Toronto event.
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Yes, yes, still touring. I am afraid earlier reports of my disappearance during a celebrity writer bus tour of the pulp mills of Nanaimo were exaggerated. It is true however that hotel security did prevent me from escaping into the writer-free zone beyond the perimeter last night (I was beaten with wet manuscripts in places where the bruises won’t show during panel discussions). There are legends, whispered in the corridors, that somewhere beyond the walls, people actually live undramatic, non-narrativized lives of peace, love and domesticity without ever talking about a book or how they get their ideas.
Catching a flight to Toronto at noon. The International Festival of Authors beckons. Friday I am reading with the lovely Cynthia Flood who has appeared in NC twice (see the fiction contents page).
Click on the image below for more information or tickets or for the hell of it.
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Ann Ireland alerted me to this two-part Swedish video. The first short bit is the trip over from Sweden and arrivial in Canada, mostly in Swedish. The second, longer bit is Alice Munro being interviewed after her Nobel Prize in English. Lovely to watch.
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[youtube]http://youtu.be/4ty4dTNg1xg[/youtube]
[youtube]http://youtu.be/pNDXxF_GQMk[/youtube]
In this book, Glover takes us far, far out into a vast sea of imaginative possibilities, shadows, violence, and twisted logic. There is a persistent questioning of the real consistent with his post-modern precursors, but there is also a disappearance into myth and mystery, which isn’t a denial of the world in a swirl of signifiers, but an embracing of its ultimate instability. It is a world that is knowable in fragments; it’s just that the fragments keep falling apart. Glover has always embraced the absurd, but he’s more grounded in facts than Kafka—witness the unlikely and extremely intriguing title of an earlier short story, “Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon.” Glover’s catalogue of opening sentences would nearly make a book on its own. He is a master at setting up the awkward and the curious, often romantic, situation that demands explication. The frisson of desired transcendence lost in repeated failure veers seemingly inevitably toward catastrophe. Carol Shields used to say that Alice Munro’s stories don’t end, they swerve into mystery. Glover’s stories enter mystery early and never leave. Readers are drawn along for the journey on slipstreams of luminescent prose.
Read the rest at Savage Love | Music & Literature.
To buy tickets click on the post body or here.
DG is on the road again later this week. My first appearance in Vancouver is Saturday morning at the Vancouver Writers Fest, details above. Click on the post to buy tickets, or go here. If you’ve been following my wanderings, you get a sense of what these tours are like. Elizabeth Ruth and I were on a panel together Thursday in Calgary; Nancy Jo Cullen and I were on the Sexual Politics panel in Calgary the same day; Wayne Johnston and I read together Thursday night. It’s a traveling road show. This aspect of the book tour thing can be quite pleasant; new and old friends, catching up. And there is always a hospitality suite in the evening after the events are over.
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Hubert Aquin
Here is an essay of mine from my book Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, also published in Dalkey Archive’s magazine Context, which you can find at the link below. It used to be online but then disappeared when Dalkey reorganized its website. Now it’s back. The late, great French-Canadian novelist Hubert Aquin was a huge influence on me: he was a pyrotechnic genius, a black romantic, a revolutionary spirit and a suicide. He burned hard and bright. Nothing like him anywhere else.
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1. Why are some novels more difficult to read than other novels? Why do some authors choose to write difficult books when they could just as easily write so-called well-made books, books that would presumably have a better chance of achieving a wide audience and commercial success? If writing a book, like speaking, is a form of communication, then doesn’t difficulty rather defeat the purpose of writing at all? What is the difference between a difficult book and a well-made book? And how do they both relate to the not-writing of a book, to unwriting, to silence?
Read the rest at Difficulty and Revolution | Dalkey Archive Press.
Robert LaFosse – NYC Ballet
bill hayward is famous for his artist/author portraits. I have mentioned this before: he has invented a unique way of collaborating with his subject that redefines the notion of portrait. He invites his subject to the studio, provides an immense continuous roll of white paper for backdrop(s) and buckets of black paint and let’s the subject play, dance, perform, paint (background and self) and act out (himself/herself) in ways that burst the stoic frame of picture-taking. See his amazing book Bad Behavior for examples. Now, in conjunction with his new show at the Martin Art Gallery in Allentown, PA, he has published his manifesto.
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1. The entire “portrait of the collaborative-self” process is predicated on
possibility and the play of the unconscious mind.
2. Permission. The “portrait of the collaborative-self” portrait process/
experience is about allowing one to reclaim the authority of one’s
imagination. Imagination being the only source of real freedom we possess.spacer-1inch3. These images are created/built/painted/constructed out of open ended
conversation between myself and the subject…possibility. These images are
built out of the play of imagination in and with paint and/or paper. All of
the marks are made by the subject…their art, their heart.
Read the rest at bill hayward’s blog :: new york photographer, filmmaker, choreographer, and performance director
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A lovely, loving, sweet essay on reading and children by an old friend.
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Where to begin? I remembered a book I had loved in my teens, an obscure Jack London novel, Before Adam, about a modern man haunted by intense dreams of an earlier, ancestral existence as a proto-human named Big-Tooth. The book combined rollicking pre-historic escapades with serious issues of developing consciousness and what it means to be human. Though a bit skeptical at first, Nathaniel agreed to my proposal. And so one evening, as he sat on a chair by the fireplace and I settled on the couch across the room, my son and I read of Big-Tooth and his friend Lop-Ear, the implacable Red-Eye, the desirable Swift One, saber-toothed tigers, wild boars, packs of wolves and, lurking in the background, the dangerously advanced Men of Fire.
Read the rest at The Millions : Silently, Side by Side: Reading with My Son.
Packing to go on the road again tomorrow. Ask me how much I want to get on two airplanes and fly across the continent tomorrow.
Long time NC readers will recognize the line, from a Phelps Putnam poem, my favourite line in literature, at least tonight, at this moment. A poem I return to in moments of high stress.
There’s a question for you. How many know who Phelps Putnam is? Raise your hands.
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For more information go to Thursday Night Showcase at Wordfest.
For more information go to Sexual Politics at Wordfest.
For more information, go to Thursday Bookmarks, Writers Book Club.
Melinda Roy – NYC Ballet
Thirty images from bill hayward’s “the human bible” at the Martin Art Gallery, Muhlenberg College, Baker Center for the Arts, 24th and Chew Streets, Allentown, PA. October 16-November 9. Not to be missed. Charter planes, trains, ponies and buses. Walk if you must.
Watch his blog, linked below, for more news, images and manifestos.
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bill hayward’s “the human bible”…an evocative and compelling mix of deeply personal communication and portraiture” – Geoff Gehman
via bill hayward’s blog :: new york photographer, filmmaker, choreographer, and performance director.
Relaunching the NC at the Movies page, which, yes, has been needing a bit of a facelift for a while. Holiday weekend, nothing to do but —
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Numéro Cinq’s unique and unparalleled collection of short films and commentary edited and (mostly) written by R. W. Gray. Other contributions from Jon Dewar, Sophie Lavoie, Philip Marchand, Megan MacKay, Jared Carney, Erin Morton and Taryn Sirove.
via Numéro Cinq at the Movies | Edited by R. W. Gray » Numéro Cinq.
Must read. Not only because it’s about Kafka, but also because it is by John Banville. See my Banville reviews and interview here.
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What are we to make of Kafka? Not, surely, what he made of himself, or at least what he would have us believe he made of himself. In a letter to his long-suffering fiancée Felice Bauer he declared: “I am made of literature; I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.” This was a constant theme of his mature years, and one that he expanded on in a highly significant diary entry from August 1916: “My penchant for portraying my dreamlike inner life has rendered everything else inconsequential; my life has atrophied terribly, and does not stop atrophying.”
Of course, Kafka is not the first writer, nor will he be the last, to figure himself as a martyr to his art—think of Flaubert, think of Joyce—but he is remarkable for the single-mindedness with which he conceived of his role. Who else could have invented the torture machine at the center of his frightful story “In the Penal Colony,” which executes miscreants by graving their sentence—le mot juste!—with a metal stylus into their very flesh?
Read the whole essay at A Different Kafka by John Banville | The New York Review of Books.
As if you all didn’t know by now.
For the first time in history, the Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to a Canadian. Alice Munro, one of the world’s most respected and admired writers, was announced this morning as the winner of the prize in an especially notable year: one in which she has announced her retirement.
The 82-year-old author of 14 books of short stories is only the 13th woman to win the world’s most prestigious literary award. Earlier this year she announced her intention to stop writing, stating that her most recent book, Dear Life, would be her last.
via Canadian Alice Munro makes history with Nobel Prize win for literature – The Globe and Mail.
I published an essay, “The Mind of Alice Munro,” in Attack of the Copula Spiders. It had appeared in the magazine Canadian Notes & Queries and is still on the 0nline site there. I published here as a reading aid my marked up and annotated copy of the story.
Alice Munro — “Meneseteung” annotated
Just in care you’re interested.
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A review of Savage Love by Jonathan Ball in The Winnipeg Review that also contains, parenthetically, one of the most hilarious summations of the work, although the reference is a bit obscure to non-Canadian readers:
Glover reads like a crack-addled David Arnason — take that as a compliment to Arnason and Glover both. If you took The Circus Performers’ Bar apart, added crystal meth, and put it back together, you might wind up with something like Savage Love.
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At times, Glover mocks the conservatism of other authors openly:
Someone had replaced the Price Chopper muzak with a Stevie Ray Vaughan selection. Shelby loosened his scarf. He said something about the magical charm of atmospheres how things might change for no reason except that you suddenly felt better, because of Stevie Ray Vaughan and a little 420 action in Price Chopper and customers turning into people, against all odds, and holding conversations. Although you could never write a story like that.
Almost every one of Glover’s stories is, in some way, “a story like that” (not to mention, of course, this particular story of repeating love triangles), in which an atmosphere of harried terror is at the selfsame time a sort of comic respite.
Savage Love is Glover’s fifth collection of short stories, and it confirms his longstanding mastery of the genre. As the title indicates, Eros and Thanatos are the proprietary gods of this textual cosmos, the psychic demons flagellating the characters, and the stories veer between these extremes, chronicling homicidal rampages, ravaging libidinal entanglements or, by far the worst possibility, some mutant hybrid of both pathologies (at least one story could be accurately described as an orgy of death). In concrete terms, this book contains both the most gruesome encounter with deliquescing corpses and the most exquisitely literary orgasm (male) likely to be experienced for the foreseeable future. Such a menagerie will come as no surprise to readers familiar with Glover’s fiction, because this is vintage Glover, and if you haven’t yet tuned in, Savage Love affords an excellent chance to get up to speed and find out what you’ve been missing.
Read the rest at The Los Angeles Review of Books.
For his most recent book, Savage Love, a collection of short stories released by Goose Lane Editions last month, its weddings that preoccupied his imagination.
“I’ve just been thinking of literature as a whole and became a bit obsessed,” says Glover. “I realized that if you stick a wedding in at the end, you immediately insert a sense of optimism.”
Glover’s fascination evolved in opposition to the obsession that forced him to write his 2000 book of stories, 16 Categories of Desire. That collection was inspired by a comment made to him during a tour of Soviet Union in the 1980s: “All my life has been an effort to liberate myself from love.” The idea was so counter-intuitive that he kept returning to it for more than a decade. But when the book was finished, he told himself he had to move on.
Telegraph-Journal Salon: Mike Landry on Douglas Glover & Savage Love
In the latest edition of “The Lonely Voice,” Peter Orner focuses on short story writer Breece D’J Pancake. Pancake’s tale is a sad one: dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, he published only six stories while alive. These stories, and a handful of others, were collected posthumously for the book, The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. Full of loss and moments of deafening silence, Pancake’s narratives truly are to be admired.
— Benjamin Woodard
So today I read “First Day of Winter” slow, the sun hardly up, the house quiet. When I finished, I put the book down on the kitchen table and went outside. A cold dawn in Bolinas, and I wished we had snow here like they do in West Virginia, or in Chicago for that matter, but the rising wind in the trees was enough.
I thought about Hollis and his fading parents.
The sun was blackened with snow, and the valley closed in quietly with humming, quietly as an hour of prayer.
Pancake paid close attention to the silence between his characters and also to the silence between sentences, between words. In the last paragraph of the story, Hollis listens to his mother hum as his father weeps himself to sleep. All the pressures closing in on what’s left of this family are—for a few moments, anyway—stayed. “First Day of Winter” is short, at least in terms of pages. It took me less than an hour to read and reread it, and yet it is the sort of story that lives on after the last period. Maybe this and this alone is the true test of any story. Does it remain after it is over?
Read the rest at The Rumpus
Salter’s time in the film world is simultaneously glamorous and repellent, erotic and appalling. In Rome, he meets directors, movie stars, and their mistresses, and has an affair of his own; in New York, he explores the city with Robert Redford and enjoys the ambiguous pleasures of celebrity. (“When I went into restaurants with Redford,” he recalls, “eyes turned to watch as we crossed the room—the glory seems to be yours as well.”) In his recent Profile of Salter, “The Last Book,” Nick Paumgarten describes Salter’s disappointment with his film career.
Of sixteen screenplays, only four were produced. There had been travel, money, beguiling women and fascinating men, and entry into rooms that might otherwise have been closed to him: stories more for the dinner table than for the page. He considered all this time squandered.
Read the rest at The New Yorker
There is absolutely nothing prosaic about Savage Love. These stories engage in a process of aggressive defamiliarization, wreaking havoc with readerly sensibilities and exploring — deliberately and insistently — the extreme possibilities of language. Glover’s collection is bracing, angry, violent and funny. It is, regardless of genre, one of the best books you will read this year.
Read the rest at Shortcuts: Oh, My Darling, and Savage Love | National Post.
Here’s the date, time and place for short story panel — Short Break — in which I am a participant at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.
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Théodora Armstrong, Kevin Barry and Douglas Glover debate the merits and complications of the short story form. Hosted and moderated by Tim Conley.
Saturday, November 2, 2013 – 2:00 PM
Round table: IFOA
York Quay Centre – Brigantine Room
235 Queens Quay West
Toronto M5J 2G8
Cost: $18/$15 supporters/FREE students & youth 25 and under
Here’s the date, time and place for my International Festival of Authors reading. Wonderful to be reading with Cynthia Flood who has twice published fiction here at NC.
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Authors George Elliott Clarke, Cynthia Flood, Aminatta Forna, Douglas Glover and Charlotte Gray share their latest works. Hosted by Helen Guri.
Friday, November 1, 2013 – 8:00 PM Reading: IFOA York Quay Centre – Studio Theatre235 Queens Quay WestToronto M5J 2G8Cost: $18/$15 supporters/FREE students & youth 25 and under.
Savage Love is an accomplished, funny, and inventive book that readers should rejoice in…By any measure, Savage Love deserves to be recognized as one of the best Canadian books published this year. —Quill & Quire
Before meeting with Douglas Glover to discuss your creative work, it would save time and create a common set of assumptions and a vocabulary for ongoing discussion if you would read through some of his/my published work on writing and the Writing Resource and Craft Book sections on Numéro Cinq. While these readings are not a requirement, it makes sense (and is an act of courtesy) to familiarize yourself with what has already been said and written before asking the same old questions.
Read the rest at University of New Brunswick Writer-in-Residence Meeting Guides.
The first big (the Toronto Globe and Mail) review of Savage Love, and it’s beautiful, intelligent, well-written and perceptive (if I do say so myself). I could not have asked for a better reading. I am touched. The reviewer knows my work well enough to gauge the differences between my last book of stories and this one, the modulations of theme, and so on. He does a wonderful job of illustrating the emotive range of the texts. It’s rare to get this kind of adult attention, let me tell you.
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Douglas Glover is a distinguished member of the tribe of Nabokov. Glover is as gifted a writer as Canada has ever produced and the source of his strength is the ferocious quirkiness of his sentences.
Glover’s new story collection, Savage Love, is an astonishing book only partly because of the loopy and incessant inventiveness of his narratives. The 22 stories range daringly in space and time, taking us from a stomach-turning battle scene during the War of 1812 to a contemporary farm family whose sheer wackiness, condensed into 25 pages, puts to shame any eccentric clan one can think of, whether it be J.D. Salinger’s Glass family or Wes Anderson’s Tenenbaums.
These stories are rich in plot, full of love triangles, murders and descents into madness. The appalling events Glover describes might, in the hands of a lesser writer, seem like mere attention-grabbing sensationalism. Yet his stories leave a genuine emotional scar, because the words he uses are sharp enough to claw into us.
Read the rest at Douglas Glover comes out swinging, prose first – The Globe and Mail.
Packed house, fresh chairs had to be brought in, vivid paintings all around the walls, bad lighting for photos (sorry). The first question in the aftermath was whether DG used psychotropic drugs to write the stories in Savage Love. Answer: Absolutely. (Actually, DG is a total innocent, embarrassingly so; he might as well have been a monk.) (Actually, actually, you should believe nothing DG says about anything.) Post-reading, NC writers Mark Jarman, Sharon McCartney and Gerard Beirne and Sharon’s dog Jack (among many others, and, to be absolutely precise, Jack is not an NC writer yet) adjourned to Alden Nowlan’s former home, now a student pub just off campus, where DG partook of the Barking Squirrel to assuage his shattered nerves.
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I dunno. Sometimes I overshare.
Also, this terse description may be a bit confusing. John Metcalf was a bystander and observer. My argument was with someone else entirely — just in case you thought otherwise.
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Well, there was the time I got into a fistfight in the bar at the Frontenac Hotel in Kingston, Ontario, during a conference organized by John Metcalf, Leon Rooke and David Helwig. This was in the early 1990s. I still remember the look on John’s face as the bouncers pulled me away. The next time I was invited back to Kingston, the organizers had to pay the hotel a damage deposit before they could book me a room. Naturally, I expect nothing like this to happen in Vancouver as I have mellowed over the years.
via Douglas Glover | Vancouver Writers Fest.
