Tiara Winter-Schorr’s Childhood Essay Featured @ Utne Reader’s Altwire

Feb 012013
 

NC Contributor Tiara Winter-Schorr’s “Childhood” essay, in the January issue, has been featured on the Utne Reader Altwire site. Congratulations, Tiara. Break out the Talisker, Rich.

Utne Reader — The Best of the Alternative Press.

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New Year’s Day, the beginning of Numéro Cinq‘s fourth year of publication — we have a lovely example of a set essay, a beautiful, poignant, shocking evocation of a Manhattan childhood from Tiara Winter-Schorr. NC publishes three set essays: Childhood, What It’s Like Living Here and My First Job. And by set essay, I mean an essay written to our guidelines, not exactly free form (though, of course, in the hands of a terrific writer the set essay always departs in imaginative ways from its guideline roots). We have had some wonderful results from this project. See the slider at the top of the page for more stellar examples of the Childhood series

via Childhood — Tiara Winter-Schorr – Utne Altwire.

Rondeau from Henry Purcell’s Abdelazar, or the Moor’s Revenge

Feb 012013
 

Jonah found a CD of Baroque hits in a used bookstore the other day and has been listening to this over and over. It was written as incidental music for a play by Aphra Behn, a 17th century English dramatist, a woman who made her living by the pen.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajIYjnqm5kE[/youtube]

Here is the whole piece from which the Rondeau is taken.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNHH5uYV3Eg[/youtube]

And again, a performance video.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZHyiwzJuV8[/youtube]

Abdalazar; or, The Moors Revenge was one of the last plays for which Purcell composed incidental music. First staged in 1695, the year of Purcell’s tragically early death at the age of 36, it was the work of Aphra Behn, one of a several prominent women playwrights who contributed to the vital and frequently bawdy (Behn was herself criticized for “lewdness”) theatrical scene in Restoration England. The music Purcell composed for Abdalazar consists of nine pieces scored for strings: Overture; Rondeau (Hornpipe); Air; Air; Minuet; Air; Jig; Hornpipe; Air.  (Excerpted from All Music)

Freedom of the Madman: On Thomas Bernhard and his publisher @ The Nation

Feb 012013
 

A great piece about Thomas Bernhard and his publisher. They don’t make publishers like this anymore, or writers, for that matter.

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Bernhard knew that he existed on a thin and arbitrary boundary between sanity and insanity. Comparing himself to his friend Paul Wittgenstein, who did several long stretches in a mental hospital, he wrote that Wittgenstein “has so to speak been overcome by his insanity; while I have taken advantage of and controlled mine.” Bernhard also had a keen sense of Unseld’s perception of his “neurosis” and sought to make the most of it. During a walk with his neighbor and friend, a pork wholesaler named Karl Ignaz Hennetmair, the writer confided, “With Unseld I have the freedom of a madman (Narrenfreiheit), I can do whatever I like.”

Safety Net: On Thomas Bernhard and Siegfried Unseld | The Nation.

Deborah Treisman interviews George Saunders @ The New Yorker

Jan 302013
 

My first two books, especially, came out of a kind of shock at the realization that life could be hard and capitalism could be harsh. And that it could be harsh to me. I don’t know why that was a revelation to me, but it was. Those stories tended to be located around the places where things went wrong, and people were cruel to one another, and so on. They reflected what was probably the most urgent truth operating in me at that time: oh, shit, things can go wrong, and if they do, people get hurt, and I might be one of them, in spite of the fact that I am, you know, me.

via On “Tenth of December”: An Interview With George Saunders : The New Yorker.

A brief survey of the short story @ The Guardian UK

Jan 302013
 

Here’s a 46-part short course on short story writers, beginning with Chekhov and ending with Roberto Bolaño. Each segment concentrates on a particular writer. Some wonderful biographical details and odd angles of vision. I love this bit on Robert Walser, for example.

Despite writing several novels, it is in the short form that Walser excelled. Many of his pieces defy conventional expectations of short stories – William Gass describes him as “a kind of columnist before the time of columns” – while he himself referred to them as “shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced up or torn-apart book of myself.”

Click the link below for the series.

dg

A brief survey of the short story | Books | The Guardian.

What do I see stirring around that gibbet?

Jan 262013
 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moFE_x7TrR8[/youtube]

Serendipity: the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for; also : an instance of this (Merriam-Webster).

A week ago Melissa mentioned Aloysius Bertrand who influenced Baudelaire; she was reading Paris Spleen. At the time this did not quite register on my tracking mechanism. But early this morning, sleepless as usual, I was looking at Unjustly Unread (which you ought to read daily with your eggs and bacon) and happened upon the video of Ivo Pogorelich playing Ravel’s “Le Gibet” from Gaspard de la Nuit. Who could not be drawn, before dawn, to something called “The Gibbet?” I hunted around and discovered it was from a group of poems by Aloysius Bertrand. You can find the whole thing in French on Project Gutenberg. I found a translation by Nancy Bricard. E.g. “…the bell that tolls from the walls of a city, under the horizon, and the corpse of the hanged one that is reddened by the setting sun.” I listened to other piano performances and discovered that Pogorelich really has the most lorn and mournful affect.

Unjustly Unread lives in a cluster of other sites well worth looking at (most sites seem to live in clusters of like minded author/curators — an observation of Internet anthropology). So see also Will Schofield’s 50 Watts and Stephen Sparks’ Invisible Stories.

dg

 

LE GIBET

Que vois-je remuer autour de ce gibet?  —Faust

Ah! ce que j’entends, serait-ce la bise nocturne qui glapit, ou le pendu
qui pousse un soupir sur la fourche patibulaire?

Serait-ce quelque grillon qui chante tapi dans la mousse et le lierre
stérile dont par pitié se chausse le bois?

Serait-ce quelque mouche en chasse sonnant du cor autour de ces oreilles
sourdes à la fanfare des hallali?

Serait-ce quelque escarbot qui cueille en son vol inégal un cheveu
sanglant à son crâne chauve?

Ou bien serait-ce quelque araignée qui brode une demi-aune de mousseline
pour cravate à ce col étranglé?

C’est la cloche qui tinte aux murs d’une ville, sous l’horizon, et la
carcasse d’un pendu que rougit le soleil couchant.

Raymond Roussel’s technique of “prospecting” —Tynan Kogane @ Idiom

Jan 252013
 

Some years before writing Impressions of Africa, [Raymond] Roussel discovered a poetic technique he called prospecting, which became his trademark compositional method, as well as the foundation for Impressions of Africa. As he explained in his posthumously published How I Wrote Certain of My Books (1935), he would find two almost identical words with separate meanings, and put them inside two almost identical phrases. Then he would establish a connection between the two different phrases, however disparate and roundabout they might be, and write the narrative that linked them together as realistically as possible. For example, the marksman Balbet is a synthesis of two phrases: “1ST Mollet (calf) à gras (fat); 2ND. mollet (soft-boiled egg) à gras (Gras rifle); hence Balbet’s shooting exercise.” And the zither playing worm: “1ST Guitare (title of a Victor Hugo poem) à vers (verse); 2ND. guitare (guitar, which I replaced with zither) à ver (worm).” Foucault described Roussel’s procedure as “a certain way of making language go through the most complicated course and simultaneously take the most direct path in such a way that the following paradox leaps out as evident: the most direct line is also the most perfect circle, which, in coming to a close, suddenly becomes straight, linear, and economical as light.”

Roussel’s prospecting forms images, plots, and characters with a numerologist’s calculated serendipity. At once demystifying and absurdly complicated, his methods inspired Foucault to question the nature and limitations of language and the Oulipians to create their own complicated linguistic procedures.

via Self-made Enigma: Raymond Roussel | Idiom.

Vladimir Godar’s Sonata in Memory of Viktor Shklovsky

Jan 242013
 

Taylor Davis-Van Atta who founded and edits the new magazine Music & Literature and who also contributes here occasionally just alerted me to this amazing piece of music. I think I introduced Taylor to Viktor Shklovsky, as I try to do with all my students. Theoretically Shklovsky is the inspiration behind much of what we try to do here at NC, art as device, art as content filtered through a mesh or organization or system of techniques. This sonata is lovely and tortured. It brings to mind that wonderful phrase in Joyce’s “The Dead” — “thought-tormented music.”

dg

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGQvnbM2aFc[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49thhelGM_0[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23X58zt3mbw[/youtube]

Four DG Micro Stories In Fence

Jan 232013
 

FENCE27

Four of my micro stories — “The Poet Fishbein,” “Wolven,” “Splash” and “Dear Richard” — are just out in the new issue of Fence. I can’t give you a taste because that would be pretty much the whole story. They are so short they are not flash fiction but subatomic fiction. They are to the short story what caviar is to ostrich eggs.

dg

Pathos: Lars Iyer | Full Stop

Jan 232013
 

Another of Full Stop‘s Pathos interviews about the writing life, this time with Lars Iyer author of the new novel Exodus. This is wonderful.

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‘A creator who isn’t grabbed round the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator’: Deleuze and Guattari write that. I’m not sure if I could say that I was grabbed round the throat by a set of impossibilities as a part-time lecturer and before, but I was no creator, not then at least. I found the stress of living as one of the ‘precariat’ too great for any sustained task of writing.

via Pathos: Lars Iyer | Full Stop.

Late night, writing all day, shut up in the house alone with the dog, this is what you get

Jan 222013
 

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3Fa4lOQfbA[/youtube]

French singer, songwriter and poet Serge Gainsbourg and the British actress Jane Birkin were together from about 1968 to 1980. This song was released, I think, in 1969 and became instantly famous and scandalous. One of their children is the great French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. In 1969 I was starting a graduate degree at the University of Edinburgh. I used to wear a National Fire Service pea coat surplus from the Second World War. Despite the fact that it’s falling to pieces, my son Jonah now wears that coat around the University of Waterloo. The Sixties run through the family like a great river.

dg

AUTHOR! AUTHOR! — NC Editors Sydney Lea & Douglas Glover in Reading Extravaganza by the Lake

Jan 212013
 

Douglas Glover & Sydney Lea

Numéro Cinq‘s own Douglas Glover and Sydney Lea (also Poet Laureate of Vermont)  are on the marquee for a reading EXTRAVAGANZA in Port Dover, Ontario, April 12. (Imagine Port Dover as the Riviera of southern Ontario, sort of.) The reading has been organized by our mutual friend, the poet John B. Lee (who has contributed poems and translations to NC). You should all fly up for the event. Talisker will be flowing in the gutters. It will be epic!

 

So you wanted to be a writer? — Pathos: Andrew Gallix | Full Stop

Jan 212013
 

There is a certain pathos in the practice of the literary arts. You spend hours alone, locked away from loved ones and friends and colleagues (oh, how I have sometimes yearned for a colleague). When you come out, you’re often in a bad mood, having just spent hours measuring yourself against an impossible ideal. And nowadays being a writer means struggling to find time to write in the cracks of the day, between job and family (or worse, errands! getting the clutch fixed, picking your kids up from school, buying toothpaste) — only the very young or the extremely lucky get to write stress free. This is an interview with 3AM Magazine editor, reviewer, author Andrew Gallix who despite the gallant teaser below has not escaped the wars unscathed. The interview is part of series at Full Stop on the consequences of following the writing trade.

dg

Sartre claimed that he began writing to make up for his ugliness and impress women. We all want to be loved, and writing is always a love letter of sorts. As Richard Brautigan put it, “Just because people love your mind, doesn’t mean they have to have your body” — but one lives in hope, of course.

via Pathos: Andrew Gallix | Full Stop.

There Might Be Angels — A Note on a DG Story from Long Ago

Jan 192013
 

It’s always nice when people say complimentary things about you. This is Marc Christensen on The Malahat Review site recalling a 1981 issue that contains a story of mine called “There Might Be Angels” — subsequently reprinted in my second collection Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon (Talonbooks) which, amazingly enough, is still in print. I wrote the story in Saskatoon and in Santa Fe in the winter and spring of 1980 before attending the Iowa Writers Workshop that fall. I was thinking of that George C. Scott movie (not the band) There Might be Giants in which a psychiatrist, played by Joanne Woodward, decides to enter her patient’s mania rather than try to cure him, finding the insanity more truthful than the so-called real world. The movie script was based in part on Don Quixote, which somewhat explains my long obsession with that novel. But the film also seemed to reflect the concerns of the great cracked Scottish psychoanalyst R. D. Laing, who treated his schizophrenic patients by honouring the truth of their delusions. So the ending of the story is an inversion of the normalcy/insanity discourse that governs the preceding nine-tenths of the text. There is also a nice little folktale I invented about three angels traveling incognito on a train together. And, of course, everyone in the story is an angel. When Christensen writes “abroad” he is, in part, referring to the fact that the story is set in Mexico.

dg

…but it seems best to highlight the story written by Ontario-born Douglas Glover, who takes his CanLit background abroad both literally and figuratively to study and challenge the traditions of classical literature. His contribution begins as a railway encounter between an aging, comfortable abbot and a tramp, a set piece that exceeds the expectations inherited from both canon and context several times over – providing a brief but convincing case for the value of homegrown talent in a context of longer ages and wider places.

–Marc Christensen

via The Malahat Review.

W.G. Sebald’s Advice on Writing

Jan 192013
 

Via Richard Skinner’s website, here’s a fun little compendium of writing advice from the German writer W.G. Sebald.  Compare this list with the Gordon Lish Notes,  (via The Art of Tetman Callis) another wonderful ‘crash-course’ in fiction writing for the cyber age.

Particular pearls of Sebaldian wisdom that stood out:

There is a species of narrator, the chronicler; he’s dispassionate, he’s seen it all.

The dispassionate chronicler is never shocked or sentimental, yet he retains a sensibility that might well qualify as wise and compassionate.  This is the modern condition. Unless you’ve been living on an iceberg for the last 50 years, very little will surprise.  And yet storytelling still demands a narrator.  I’ve been reading Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s  memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, which is a lovely but highly narrated book.  First published in 1939, Saint-Exupery could get away with a more heavy-handed narrative style.  But the contemporary reader is less willing to trust the author these days. So the all-knowing, omniscient narrator might well be a thing of the past, like Saint-Exupery’s open cockpit bi-planes.  But the post-modern trend toward killing the author (and by extension, the narrative voice) often makes for a jumpy, cinematic effect. Sebald’s dispassionate chronicler might be something to ponder as a narrative device.

I also found this thought enlightening:

Particular disciplines have specialized terminology that is its own language. I could translate a page of Ian McEwan in half an hour—but golf equipment! another matter. Two Sainsbury’s managers talking to each other are a different species altogether.

The lively language of specialized labor often makes for wonderful reading.  I recently finished reading “Effleurage: The Stroke of Fire” by Barry Lopez (in  About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory), in which Lopez intricately describes the process by which a group of Oregonian potters work a communal kiln.  Now, all things being equal, if someone had told me that I was about to read a thirty page essay on pottery, I would have gladly offered to take out the trash and scrub the hardwood floors instead.  Yet Lopez creates one of the most mesmerizing essays I’ve ever read, in part because he takes the reader inside the highly specialized process of these potters.

– Richard Farrell

Someone’s Knocking at My Door — László Krasznahorkai @ NY Times.com

Jan 172013
 

Here’s a taste of the hot new thing in the world international letters, a lyric essay (as the author calls it) by László Krasznahorkai commissioned for the New York Times (an institution not immune to the BUZZ) and translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes. (Szirtes is a prolific Twitter-author; he cracked me up a couple of days ago when he tweeted, “Egrets? I’ve had a few, but then again too few to mention.”) Krasznahorkai is a voluptuary of melancholy. Three of his novels have been published in English by New Directions. You can read a terrific interview with him here at the UK Guardian.

dg

I’ve been living in complete silence for months, I might say for years, with just the usual dull sounds you hear at the outskirts of town, the occasional echo of steps in the corridor and, further off, in the stairwell, someone dragging a sack, a carpet, a package, or a corpse, God knows what, along the ground; or the sound of the elevator as it slows, stops, opens, then closes and starts to rise or descend. Every so often a dog barks briefly, someone laughs or shouts. But everything dies away, soon lost in the constant low-level murmur of the street outside. That is what complete silence is like round here.

via Someone’s Knocking at My Door – NYTimes.com.

NC Contributing Editor Sydney Lea has a new book out

Jan 162013
 

Sydney Lea Book Cover

Skyhorse Publishing in New York has just released a third book of North Country reminiscences, outdoor essays and stories by Numéro Cinq Contributing Editor Sydney Lea. As we here know, Sydney writes some of the most perceptive, intimate, deeply felt, and sometimes hilarious essays about the northeast woods you will ever read.

These days Sydney is nothing if not prolific. The University of Michigan Press recently issued A Hundred Himalayas, a sampling from his critical work over four decades, and his eleventh poetry collection, I Was Thinking of Beauty, will be out later this year from Four Way Books.

 

George W. S. Trow: Within the Context of No-context : The New Yorker

Jan 152013
 

Here is the George W. S. Trow essay Steve Almond quotes in the piece Jason DeYoung cross-posted yesterday. Actually it’s not the entire essay, but some boiled down core of it. The entire essay was published in the New Yorker in 1980 and shortly after as a book. In itself, this boiled down bit is an amazing discovery. But then delve into George W. S. Trow himself. Here is a New York Magazine profile well worth reading.

dg

 

WONDER

Wonder was the grace of the country. Any action could be justified by that: the wonder it was rooted in. Period followed period, and finally the wonder was that things could be built so big. Bridges, skyscrapers, fortunes, all having a life first in the marketplace, still drew on the force of wonder. But then a moment’s quiet. What was it now that was built so big? Only the marketplace itself. Could there be wonder in that? The size of the con?

via Reflections: Within the Context of No-context : The New Yorker.

Novelist Ann Ireland joins NC as a Contributing Editor

Jan 142013
 

It’s a great pleasure to announce that Canadian novelist Ann Ireland has joined the Numéro Cinq masthead as a Contributing Editor. She has a new novel, The Blue Guitar, just coming out; we published an excerpt from the work in progress last March. She lives in Toronto near my brother which is a great help in case I have to hound her for copy. She is an old friend and a welcome addition to our burgeoning community of artists and writers.

dg

Ann Ireland‘s most recent novel, The Blue Guitar, will be published by Dundurn Press in early 2013. Her first novel, A Certain Mr. Takahashi, won the $50,000 Seal-Bantam First Novel Award and was made into a feature motion picture  called The Pianist in 1991. Her second novel, The Instructor, was nominated for the Trillium Award and the Barnes and Noble’s Discover These New Writers Award, and Exile was shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Award and the Rogers/Writers Trust Award. She is a past president of PEN Canada and coordinates Ryerson University’s Chang School of Continuing Education, Writing Workshops department. She lives most of the time in Toronto and part of the time in Mexico.

 

Limericks, Degraded Modernism and The Tunnel: DG Interview with William H. Gass

Jan 132013
 

Here’s an interview I did with William H. Gass shortly after the publication of his immense & controversial novel The Tunnel in 1995. 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 did a weekly radio interview show. I had a lot of fun with this interview, partly because some heavy-hitting critics just tore the novel apart (I loved especially the ones who said it wasn’t a novel at all), and partly because Gass is a philosopher (a field of interest we share) and the book is dense with thought, history and wit. We cover the ground. We firmly place the novel in a tradition (when the critics mostly scratched their heads and said it didn’t fit anywhere), we talk about Nietzschean ressentiment, the spirit of the age (think: the Tea Party), about aphorisms and the form of the limerick (and the political implications thereof), and we talk about the vast comedy of the novel which critics also largely failed to notice.

I think these sound files should be listenable (is that a word?). They are reproduced from old tapes stored in a box for years and transferred to digital media with my usual haphazard, seat-of-the-pants approach to technology. Some people have complained (in regard to earlier interviews) that the sound stopped and then continued a lot. My sense is that this is just your computer loading the file from the Internet and is not a problem with the file itself. I also checked and this sound player works fine with Ipads.

—Douglas Glover

[podloveaudio src=”http://numerocinqmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/William-Gass-1.mp3″]

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[podloveaudio src=”http://numerocinqmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Gass-2.mp3″]

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See also my interviews with John Hawkes and Gordon Lish.

 

 

Blood & Aphorisms — Nietzsche

Jan 102013
 

It always makes me nervous when Nietzsche starts talking about things like writing with blood because, well, it doesn’t sound like a healthy writing practice. But what he says about readers and writing for readers makes me think.

dg

—–

From Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (tr. R.J. Hollingdale):

Of all that is written I love only that which is written with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit.

It is not easy to understand the blood of another: I hate the reading idler.
He who knows the reader does nothing further for the reader. Another century of readers–and spirit itself with stink.
That everyone is allowed to learn to read will in the long run ruin not only writing but thinking, too.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.
He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.

Sydney Lea joins NC as Contributing Editor

Jan 092013
 

It’s a great pleasure to announce that Sydney Lea is joining the magazine as a Contributing Editor. Syd was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 2000. He founded New England Review in 1977 and was the editor until 1989. He has published 10 books of poems, a novel, essay collections and short stories. He is currently Poet Laureate of Vermont.

dg

Sydney Lea is Poet Laureate of Vermont. He founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. His poetry collection Pursuit of a Wound (University of Illinois Press, 2000) was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Another collection, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize. In 1989, Lea also published the novel A Place in Mind with Scribner, and the book is still available in paper from Story Line Press. His 1994 collection of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home, was re-issued in paper by the Lyons Press in 2003. Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont College of Fine Arts and Middlebury College, as well as at Franklin College in Switzerland and the National Hungarian University in Budapest. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other periodicals, as well as in more than forty anthologies. His selection of literary essays, A Hundred Himalayas, was published by the University of Michigan Press in September, and Skyhorse Publications just released A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters and Wildlife. His eleventh poetry collection, I Was Thinking of Beauty, is due out in April from Four Way Books.

The Millions : How Charles Portis Got Made: On Escape Velocity

Jan 032013
 

So I am sitting in the basement of the Gary Library, surrounded by the psychology collection, shivering in my down coat and Peruvian hat, conversing with one of my new semester students, and I started talking about True Grit (which I taught to a student last semester) and Dog of the South, and then I went online and checked my Twitter feeds and there was a link to this great Bill Morris review of Escape Velocity, A Charles Portis Miscellany @ The Millions. Terrific read, especially if it takes you back to the Portis novels.

dg

 

1. Wisdom in the Wit

If you share my fascination with the mysterious ways writers get made, you’ll be thrilled by a new book called Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. Edited by a long-time Portis devotee, the Arkansas-based writer Jay Jennings, this collection is a virtual connect-the-dots diagram of how Portis the novelist was forged in the newsrooms of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, the Arkansas Gazette and the New York Herald Tribune, the papers where Portis worked as a reporter and columnist from the late 1950s until the mid-1960s. After a year as the Herald Tribune’s London correspondent, Portis left newspapering in 1964 and went back home to Arkansas to set up shop as a novelist. Over the next quarter-century, he produced five novels that are universally regarded, by those who bothered to read them, as classics.

via The Millions : How Charles Portis Got Made: On Escape Velocity.

Ilya Kaminsky Reading

Jan 012013
 

Watched/heard Ilya Kaminsky read tonight in the chapel at College Hall, Vermont College of Fine Arts, from Dancing in Odessa and his elegy for Osip Mandelstam. Something that must be shared. Of course, I don’t  have video of tonight’s reading, but I found some others on the web.

But to start with here is a snippet from a great Thomas Lux profile of/interview with Kaminsky:

I wanted to know more about his coming to America, and he said, “I can only speak for myself, since my family came to a place only a few immigrants ever come to: upstate New York. If we came to Brooklyn, we would be a different story. But in upstate New York, when our plane landed and the cab took us to our apartment, it was snowing, it was Saturday, and there were no people on the streets [emphasis his]. Coming from Odessa, which is pretty cosmopolitan, I honestly never before experienced the situation when you drive down the street in the broad daylight and there is not a single human being walking. My first experience of USA was surreal. Like there is an atom bomb attack and everyone’s just disappeared. It’s a lonely country. Of course, I got used to it.”

You can read the whole profile at the San Diego Reader.

dg

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/25153618http://vimeo.com/25153618[/vimeo]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxCH2Qi2Jb0[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1iOgYxFkGc[/youtube]

 

 

In theory: the death of literature — Andrew Gallix @ Guardian Books

Dec 272012
 

“We come too late to say anything which has not been said already,” lamented La Bruyère at the end of the 17th century. The fact that he came too late even to say this (Terence having pipped him to the post back in the 2nd century BC) merely proved his point – a point which Macedonio Fernández took one step backwards when he sketched out a prequel to Genesis. God is just about to create everything. Suddenly a voice in the wilderness pipes up, interrupting the eternal silence of infinite space that so terrified Pascal: “Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been done.” Rolling His eyes, the Almighty retorts (doing his best Morrissey impression) that he has heard this one before – many a time. He then presses ahead with the creation of the heavens and the earth and all the creepy-crawlies that creepeth and crawleth upon it. In the beginning was the word – and, word is, before that too.

via In theory: the death of literature | Books | guardian.co.uk.

On Derrida: Deconstruction (among other things) Explained, Jacques the Tormentor

Dec 222012
 

Jacob pointed me to this very entertaining lecture, part of a series, by Wes Cecil who teaches at Peninsula College on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. I listen to this and recall how much I loved the Paralogisms of Pure Reason{{1}} [[1]]See “Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought“[[1]] section in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason wherein Kant demonstrated the paradoxical nature of reason (language) which can both prove and disprove the same proposition thus reducing any claim to Correct Thinking or Truth to ashes. This lecture is often very funny while not being entirely sympathetic to its subject. Also a window on American cultural history, history of ideas, Derrida’s reception, etc.

dg

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGCiqqT9uo8[/youtube]

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Numéro Cinq Author Amanda Jernigan Included in Best Canadian Poetry 2012

Dec 192012
 

 

Numéro Cinq is delighted to announce that Amanda Jernigan’s poem “Aubade” was selected for the 2012 edition of the annual The Best Canadian Poetry in English. The guest editor for this edition is Carmine Starnino. The continuing advisory editor for the whole series is Molly Peacock.

Amanda’s book Groundwork, from which the poem was excerpted, was named one of the top five poetry books of 2011 by NPR.

Congratulations all around but especially to Amanda. NC readers are advised that this is one of those occasions when it is appropriate to raise a glass of Talisker or two or three.

dg

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