Touched By The Dark

Dec 152012
 

I don’t know if this is the right thing to do. But NC is a community, somewhat distant at the edges, and yet a lot of us know each other. When you read someone here, you’re, briefly, in his or her heart. The Newtown, CT, shootings came very, very close to us yesterday. Sophfronia Scott and Darryl Gregory, both of whom have published here, have a son who was in the school at the time of the shootings and escaped unharmed. I met their son at lunch in New York last spring, a bright, cheerful boy drawing pictures on the placemats while the adults talked. Think of them tonight and tomorrow and the day after. And think of the poor parents who lost their children. Beyond this, words fail.

dg

Talking Cricket With Samuel Beckett @ Geekosystem

Dec 142012
 

There is just something so wonderfully bizarre about this connection—Samuel Beckett used to drive André the Giant to school.

Beckett offered to drive André to school in his truck—a vehicle that could fit André—to repay Rousimoff for helping to build Beckett’s cottage.

—Jason DeYoung

Let’s be alone together » 3:AM Magazine

Dec 132012
 

The whole point of 3:AM was to foster a community of literary loners; to create a space where we can be alone together. […] There is no party line, although we are rather contrarian, hence our tagline (a nod to Groucho Marx, the Ramones, and Adorno): “Whatever it is, we’re against it.” It sounds rather pedantic, I know, but what I consider to be real literature is always, at some level, a writing against itself. 3:AM is a very broad anti-church. Personally, I think we should publish fiction that has the inevitability of death.

via Let’s be alone together » 3:AM Magazine.

Causing Damage — Captain Fiction Redivivus: DG Interview With Gordon Lish

Dec 112012
 


Photo by Bill Hayward

I interviewed Gordon Lish years ago, 1994, I think, when I had a weekly radio show. We knew each other as author and editor. He had published a story of mine in The Quarterly and also had been my editor for The Life and Times of Captain N (Knopf, 1993). Shortly after my novel appeared, Lish was let go at Knopf (I do not think there was a cause-and-effect relationship, but you never know). This interview took place in the aftermath of both events.

The interview touches on Lish’s relationship with Knopf and, earlier, Esquire, where he was dubbed Captain Fiction; also his lightning rod personality, his friendship with Don DeLillo, his own writing, the virtues of throwing away and cutting, and the difference between mystery and information in art. It is always a treat to hear Gordon speaking extemporaneously; his deep-voiced, rhythmic orotundity and his talent for finding the precise if unexpected phrase are inspiring as oratory. Best of all, he speaks of life, fate and art in ways that inscribe those subjects with a desperate significance, even heroism.

I found the old tape of this interview, along with others, in a box in storage. There is some extraneous noise for which I apologize.

—Douglas Glover

 

Interview with Gordon Lish Part I

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

Interview with Gordon Lish Part II

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

Douglas Glover Podcast @ CJSW in Calgary

Dec 092012
 

Here’s the podcast of an interview I did at CJSW with a woman named Sky Hornig in Calgary during WordFest in mid-October on writing, reading, stupid people, and Attack of the Copula Spiders.

dg

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[podloveaudio src=”http://numerocinqmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/The-GG-Podcast-–-Douglas-Glover.mp3″]

The GG Podcast – Douglas Glover

via Douglas Glover – CJSW – Calgary’s Independent Radio 90.9 FM.

Plorn & the Rest: The Dickens Scandal — Elaine Showalter Reviews Three Books About Charles Dickens’s Personal Life | The New Republic

Dec 072012
 

Robert Gottlieb takes up the story of the Dickens children, seven sons and two daughters, about whom Dickens woefully observed: “You don’t know what it is to look round the table and see reflected from every seat at it … some horribly well remembered expression of inadaptability to anything.” Dickens’s conviction of his children’s “failed lives” contradicts the legend of his domestic saintliness.

via Elaine Showalter Reviews Three Books About Charles Dickens’s Personal Life | The New Republic.

Kurt Vonnegut term paper assignment from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. – Slate Magazine

Dec 012012
 

This course began as Form and Theory of Fiction, became Form of Fiction, then Form and Texture of Fiction, then Surface Criticism, or How to Talk out of the Corner of Your Mouth Like a Real Tough Pro. It will probably be Animal Husbandry 108 by the time Black February rolls around. As was said to me years ago by a dear, dear friend, “Keep your hat on.

We may end up miles from here.”As for your term papers, I should like them to be both cynical and religious. I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be. “This above all …”

via Kurt Vonnegut term paper assignment from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. – Slate Magazine.

DG’s Story “The Sun Lord And The Royal Child” Just Out in Best Canadian Stories 2012

Nov 262012
 

This year’s edition of Best Canadian Stories (Oberon Press), edited by John Metcalf, just arrived on the doorstep with the afternoon mail. DG’s story “The Sun Lord and the Royal Child,” originally published by Philip Graham in Ninth Letter, is included in a stellar list which also contains an amazing number of Numéro Cinq writers: Lynn Coady, Caroline Adderson & Steven Heighton. That means four out of the ten stories included in Best Canadian Stories this year were written by authors we’ve published on these pages. This tells you something about the quality of the work we’re publishing.

Here’s the opening of the story. You can order the book online from Chapters/Indigo.

dg

———-

The Sun Lord and the Royal Child

By Douglas Glover

.

I went to see my friend Nedlinger after his wife killed herself in that awful and unseemly way, making a public spectacle of herself and their life together, which, no doubt, Nedlinger hated because of his compulsive need for privacy and concealment, a need which seemed to grow more compelling as his fame spread, as success followed success, as the money poured in, so that in later years when he could no longer control or put a stop to his public notoriety, when it seemed, yes, as if his celebrity would eclipse his private life entirely, he himself turned reclusive and misanthropic, sought to erase himself, as it were, and return to the simple life of a nonentity.

You will recall that Nedlinger began his career as a so-called forensic archaeologist specializing in the analysis of prehistoric Iroquoian ossuaries in southwestern Ontario and it was then, just after finishing his doctorate, before lightning struck, as it were, that he met Melusina, at that time a mousy undergraduate studying library science, given to tucking her unruly hair behind her ears and wearing hip-length cardigan sweaters with pockets into which she stuffed used and unused tissues, note cards, pens, odd gloves, sticks of lip balm, hand lotion and her own veiny fists, her chin depressed over her tiny, androgynous breasts–in those days she wore thick flesh coloured stockings and orthopedic shoes to correct a birth defect, syndactyly, I believe it is called. Only Nedlinger, with his forensic mind, could pierce the unpromising surface, the advertising, as it were, to the intelligent, passionate, sensual, fully alive being that hid in the shadows.

— Buy the book, read the rest.

Out & Back, DG’s East Coast Reading Tour, November 2012

Nov 252012
 

On Lawrencetown Beach north of Halifax, NS. Note that dg is wearing his trademark heirloom baseball cap purchased in Venice during the 2008 VCFA residency in Slovenia. Also camouflage cargo pants purchased at Walmart.

————

Apologies for being somewhat absent from the pages of NC. I’ve been on a reading trip to the East Coast, traveling by car with the dog. Stopped in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where I stayed with Mark Jarman in his grand house facing the Saint John River (on land once owned, yes, by that famous American patriot Benedict Arnold). NC Senior Editor R. W. Gray also lives in that house. And that night we three went out to the Lunar Rogue Pub and met up with Gerard Beirne, thus four, amazingly, four real NC contributors sat at the same table. Next day I moved on to Halifax to stay with my son Jacob, another NC contributor. Jacob took me for steaks at the Henry House the first night after which considerable Ballantine’s Scotch was consumed with Jacob and his roommate Sebastian Ennis (who introduced me to the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy). I got obsessed with the Dingle Tower, a monument across the Northwest Arm from Jacob’s apartment and thus a salient feature in the landscape out my window. (Needless to say I am sparing you 99% of the photos I happened to take. I spent the driving time listening to Chekhov stories and lectures on the history of Ancient Greece and taking pictures through the car windows and the rearview mirror, a practice worse than operating a cell phone or texting while driving, I think.) One morning I had coffee with Ian Colford at the Dalhousie University Club — you will no doubt recall his contributions to the magazine. Last Monday morning I back-tracked to Sackville, New Brunswick, stayed two days and gave brilliant readings at Mount Allison University and the Université de Moncton. The U de Moncton English Department faculty took me out to dinner (Prince Edward Island scallops) at the Tide & Boar (a so-called gastropub; the name is a pun on the nearby Bay of Fundy’s famous tidal bore) on Main Street. My host in Sackville was Professor Christl Verduyn, a Canadianist of considerable scholarly accomplishment who has written some very intelligent essays about my work; had dinner with Christl and her husband, Mount Allison University President Robert Campbell, at Joey’s on York Street where the waitress announced to us that she was pregnant (this was a first for me, and, in case you want to know, her best friend is pregnant simultaneously). Then I rushed back to Hampton, New Hampshire, for Thanksgiving and more beach walks. Lucy blotted her copybook  by assaulting every dog she met. Apparently, she takes exception to New Hampshire dogs. This goes right up there with her insane hatred of small blond children under the age of four.

I tell you this in part so that you know real people write the things you read on these pages; one can occasionally even talk to them in person.

dg

 

Christ Church Cathedral, Fredericton, NB. Just a few doors down from Mark Anthony Jarman’s house and not to be confused with the Lunar Rogue Pub.

Mark Anthony Jarman taking a picture of dg reflected in the passenger window of the car, or what writers do when they have time on their hands. You can sense the shade of Benedict Arnold. Fredericton, NB

Jacob & Lucy at Lawrencetown Beach, NS

Same as above

Cranberry Lake from the Bluffs Wilderness Trail west of Halifax, NS

Dingle Tower across the Northwest Arm from Jacob’s apartment, Halifax, NS

North of Halifax, heading for the TransCanada Highway, fog and hoarfrost. This photo was taken one-handed while driving at 65 m.p.h. I don’t know if that counts as some kind of record. I might have had a cup of coffee in the other hand, and I know I was listening to a lecture on Archaic Greece.

Sackville Wildfowl Sanctuary, Sackville, NB

North Hampton Beach, NH

Jenness Beach, NH

North Hampton Beach, NH. I could tell you this is me surfing, but you wouldn’t believe me.

Consulting with my editor, Odirone Point, NH

Attack of the Copula Spiders Named One of the Top Non-Fiction Books of 2012 – The Globe and Mail

Nov 242012
 

“[By] by the time I reached the penultimate chapter, a brilliant examination of, among other things, the catastrophic meeting of the 15th-century book cultures of Europe and the oral cultures of the new world, I had decided that every literate person in the country should be reading Glover’s essays.” — Charles Wilkins

via 43 non-fiction books from this year that are worth a read (or two) – The Globe and Mail.

“Postcards” from “The Museum of Emotions” from Bill Hayward’s film “asphalt, muscle & bone” featured in “The Coffin Factory #4″

Nov 122012
 

Just a quick note as I am on the road, but here’s a chance to see more of Bill Hayward’s amazing film/photography work at The Coffin Factory. You can also see an excerpt from the film at his web site here.

dg

“Postcards” from “The Museum of Emotions” from my film “asphalt, muscle & bone” featured in “The Coffin Factory #4″ | bill hayward.

A Must-Read Interview With Hartmut Rosa on Social Speed, Technology & History @ Asia Times

Nov 022012
 

Hartmut Rosa: In fact, this question is not easy to answer. What is evident is the fact that in modernity, social acceleration has become a necessity. Modern societies can only reproduce, they can only maintain the status quo if they grow and innovate and accelerate. You can easily see this in the realm of the economy: if our modern, capitalist economies do not grow, the system is in crisis and decline. We lose jobs, companies close down, tax-revenues decline, welfare systems are strained and this puts pressure on the political system as well. Thus, acceleration and growth are necessities for modern societies, for they can only stabilize dynamically: no stability without acceleration.

But it has not always been this way. Most pre-modern societies followed a more static form of stabilization: they reproduced and maintained the status quo by keeping things as they are. This does not mean that they never accelerated or innovated, but they only did so accidentally or due to circumstantial pressures or changes. They did not have an inherent need for acceleration.

CG: We live in a speed society, everything is going faster leaving the individuals with a feeling to have to cope with completely inhuman rhythms. Is this acceleration in your opinion an inherent consequence of modern technik or the “philosophy” of technology is only one face of turbo-capitalism for which “time is money” as Benjamin Franklin put it?

HR: In my view, technology clearly is not the cause of social acceleration. Rather, it is the other way round: modern technology arose – it was invented – because of the time-famine of modernity. You can make this point historically as well as logically: most technologies help us to save time. More than this: it is the purpose of almost all modern technologies to save time. Thus, cars, hair-dryers, microwave-ovens or telephones are all machines built for the purpose of speeding-up “natural” processes.

Logically, this should create free time-resources for us. Take the email: to write and send an email only takes half the time of writing and sending a letter. Thus, if you have to write 10 messages and 10 letters take one hour, while 10 emails take half an hour, you gain 30 minutes. But where are they? Why is it that you have even less time now than before the email age?

The answer is easy: because you do not read and write 10 emails instead of 10 letters, but 20, 30 or 40. But this is not the fault of technology, it is not inherent in the logic of technology. Rather, it is the general logic of increase and growth that speeds up social life and creates the hunger for technological speed-up. This logic of increase itself is not driven by technology, but by social competition and economic capitalism.

via Asia Times Online : Read the rest of the interview here.

See also Social Acceleration.

Ian Colford’s New Novel The Crimes of Hector Tomas Just Published

Oct 302012
 

 

 

NC author Ian Colford has just published his new novel The Crimes of Hector Tomas. We were privileged to be able to publish an excerpt last year. Once  again, NC was ahead of the wave (or storm surge, as we say these days).

dg

 

Enrique Tomás lives a quiet life with a large, loving family in an unnamed South American country. But Enrique has secrets. When his second eldest son, Hector, and Hector’s beloved friend Nadia uncover one of Enrique’s secrets, the course of Hector’s life is irrevocably altered. Exiled by his parents to the isolated countryside, Hector is accused of terrorism—a crime for which he is innocent, yet ruthlessly punished. As he tries desperately to extricate himself from the violence perpetrated by a brutal political regime, he realizes that freedom can only come at a terrible price.

The Crimes of Hector Tomás is an epic novel about disappearance and deception, family and nation. Enrique, Hector, and Nadia become victims of their own choices as they helplessly make confessions, concessions, and commitments in pursuit of resolution—and, failing that, retaliation.

via Freehand Books » The_Crimes_of_Hector_Tomas.

Appropriate Response to Hurricane Sandy

Oct 292012
 

NC’s coverage of Hurricane Sandy continues — this person, BTW, is not a member of the magazine’s staff. Rumors to the effect that it is Rich Farrell are simply untrue.

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

How NOT to Put Together a Short Story Collection @ HTML Giant

Oct 292012
 

Amber Sparks tell us how NOT to put together a story collection over at HTML Giant.

DO NOT say to yourself, Well, I’ve got a lot of stories now, so I guess it’s time to shove them all into a manuscript and send it around.

DO NOT treat your story collection like a mix tape.

DO NOT save the best for last. Save the best for first. Put every single “best” story in the beginning. Frontload that motherfucker and then frontload it some more. Great story, great story, great story, great story – keep them hooked and don’t let them read anything less than your best until at least halfway through.

More here.

—Jason DeYoung

 

 

How to Write Literary Fiction @ The Millions

Oct 232012
 

In a recent profile of Justin Cronin in the New York Times Magazine, Colson Whitehead is quoted as saying he’d “rather shoot [him]self in the face” than have another discussion about literature genres. I don’t blame him. When people ask me what kind of fiction I write, I usually say, “It’s about people,” and leave it at that. But as I read Ringwald’s book, I found myself pondering literary fiction: as a genre, as a taxonomical category. When It Happens to You, you see, is a sterling example of literary fiction, if we were to consider literary fiction as a straightforward genre like romance or science fiction, with certain expected tropes and motifs.

What, you ask, are some attributes of this genre? Read on, my friend, read on.

via The Millions : Literary Fiction is a Genre: A List.

David Helwig Publishes Collection of Chekhov Translations: About Love

Oct 192012
 

 

Biblioasis has just published David Helwig‘s book of Chekhov translations About Love. Numéro Cinq was  privileged to publish the title story very early in its life as a magazine.

Here is a terrific CBC radio interview with David and Seth, the illustrator. It includes some very intelligent asides on the art of literary translation, Chekhov’s life, and a beautiful reading from the book. Many of you have been following David’s contributions to the magazine over the years; this is a great chance for you to hear him in person.

CBC Radio Interview with David Helwig on About Love.

 

dg

Leon Rooke: Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow

Oct 182012
 

 

Exile Editions in Toronto has just published Leon Rooke’s new story collection Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow. Numéro Cinq was lucky enough to publish one of the stories from the book earlier this year — “Heidegger, Floss, Elfride, and the Cat”. Here’s what I wrote about the story:

Leon Rooke is an old and dear friend. He was in my head long before I met him because of his books, Shakespeare’s Dog in particular in those days, a novel that has stuck with me as a license and an inspiration — William Shakespeare as observed by his dog (who is telling the story), a brilliant book, a tour de force of point of view construction, an example of how literature thrives by making things strange. I put Leon in Best Canadian Stories regularly (as often as Alice Munro) over the decade I edited that anthology. I’ve reviewed his books at least a half-dozen times. I wrote an essay about his (also brilliant, eerie, and wonderful) novel, A Good Baby, which you can find in my book of essays, Attack of the Copula Spiders. Rooke was born in North Carolina but lives in Toronto. He has an actor’s voice and presence and is an amazing performer of his own work. He’s also a painter — we have been lucky enough to publish images of four of his paintings on NC.

In “Heidegger, Floss, Elfride, and the Cat” Leon Rooke gives us Heidegger with his pants down (metaphorically), straining to compose the impenetrable prose of Being and Time while shuttling to and from his lover’s house and fending off the jealous and passive-aggressive intrusions of his long-suffering wife (I have inserted photographs of the real Heidegger and Elfride below).  All this is relayed through someone named Floss, another one of those odd point of view inventions Rooke is so good at. In this case, Floss might be a philosophy student reading Being and Time in a library or he might be Heidegger, or rather, I think, Heidegger’s Being (which we might have called his Soul in the old days). Heidegger, of course, can’t know Floss, but Floss knows everything about Heidegger. And when the story is done, Floss trundles home to his wife and kids (being Heidegger’s Being is like a job). And, of course, it’s very late and I might have got this wrong.

dg

DG on How Thomas Bernhard Works | Conversational Reading

Oct 162012
 

The Brooklyn Rail has a great essay by Douglas Glover about Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser (it is serialized from Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing, published by Biblioasis.

The essay makes a fine rundown of the various rhetorical devices that makes Bernhard Bernhard. So if you ever wonder how he manages to attain those typically Bernhardian effects, look here. For instance:

via How Thomas Bernhard Works | Conversational Reading.

Glover — New Epigram “On History Repeating” @ Global Brief

Oct 132012
 

Here’s a taste of my new epigram at Global Brief. See the whole series here.

dg

For hundreds of thousands of years of human history, we had no history. We call that part ‘pre-history’ – thus cagily rendering the deep past as a semantic extension of, well, history. It is often suggested that the study of history is useful preparation for the future. Edmund Burke said: “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” But Nietzsche, in his essay “On the Use and Abuse of History,” tells us that the weight of history saps the will; that is, in order to get on with life, we are better off forgetting history.

Philosophies of history are never in short supply, from Carlyle’s Great Man theory to Marx’s dialectical materialism, to Spengler’s rollercoaster rise and fall of civilizations, to Vico’s spirals, the endless cycles of the Mayan calendar, or the elegant gyres of W. B. Yeats.

via On History Repeating : Global Brief.

Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung” — How to Read It (with Diagrams)

Oct 092012
 

Here is my reading copy of Alice Munro’s short story “Meneseteung” with my original handwritten notes plus some additional annotations on the pdf itself. This is the copy I used to write my essay “The Mind of Alice Munro” which you can also find in Attack of the Copula Spiders. The two texts, my essay and this marked up version of her story, have a somewhat friendly relationship. And it might be helpful for people wanting to learn to read for shape and technique, or to learn how better to appreciate Munro’s genius, to see how the raw data of the story notes evolved into the essay. (Interesting also to note that Munro published at least one version of this story with a different ending.)

dg

Alice Munro — “Meneseteung” annotated

Douglas Glover: The Compassionate Writing Teacher — Jacquie Moore @The Calgary Herald

Oct 052012
 

Many of you know me as “the Shredder,” but there is another side of me as a teacher captured here by Calgary writer Jacquie Moore who was assigned to interview me in the run-up to my Wordfest class next week. 🙂

dg

Along with myriad writing tips, one of the best reasons to take Glover’s class is for this compassionate brand of pep talk for fearful writers. “I worry about a lot of these words like ‘procrastination’ and ‘writer’s block’ and all that crap. I’m very sympathetic to people who want to write something and are daunted by it,” he says. I tell him I’ve written approximately one paragraph of my novel in four years. He is unfazed. “That’s not a sign of weakness. There are all sorts of very good reasons for taking one’s time to get at it,” he says. “We should all give ourselves a break.”

This is the kind of gentle writing advice that has the potential to unclog my perpetual writer’s block—or rather, to get me thinking about it differently. In all seriousness, there are some pretty good reasons for why I haven’t gotten at it yet. For one thing, it’s painful to write about my own family—fictionalized or not. For another, I worry that my dad, who has generously answered all my probing questions about his life, might not be comfortable with me going public with the family history, albeit in lightly disguised form—an impulse Glover assures me is moral and admirable although here I go again envisioning myself with a bestseller rather than writing for writing’s sake. He encourages me to let go of my paralyzingly big idea and submit a vignette-sized piece to his excellent online magazine Numéro Cinq, comfortingly described as “a warm place on a cruel web.”

via The Calgary Herald, The Book in the Basement.

The Enemies of the Novel: DG Interview With John Hawkes

Oct 032012
 

This was before the last Ice Age, before the Flood, before the Great Extinctions of the Triassic: I had a weekly radio show for a couple of years, interviewing authors. Rummaging around in my boxes the other day, I happened upon the tapes, or at least some of the tapes. And then I figured out how to get the tapes onto my computer (I used an ancient Aiwa walkman player and a connecting cable that once belonged to talking Christmas tree we had around the place to terrify the dog — don’t ask). The result of all this techno-wizardry is the following two-part interview with the great American experimentalist John Hawkes upon the publication of his novel The Frog (about a boy who accidentally swallows a frog that takes up residence in his stomach and both blesses and bedevils him thereafter — for example, with the frog’s long sticky tongue, he is a great hit at the neighborhood brothel). Hawkes is famous for having once said that plot, character, setting and theme are the enemies of the novel. This conversation took place in 1996. One curious thing is the way my voice changes in the course of the interview.

—Douglas Glover

John Hawkes & The Frog Part 1

[podloveaudio src=”http://numerocinqmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Hawkes-Part-1.mp3″]

John Hawkes & The Frog Part 2

[podloveaudio src=”http://numerocinqmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Hawkes-Part-2.mp3″]

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