Utne Reader, The Best of the Alternative Press, just reprinted Sion Dayson’s excellent essay “Life Lessons in Père Lachaise Cemetery” in its July/August issue. “Life Lessons” was originally published in Numéro Cinq‘s January 2, 2012 issue. This is terrific recognition for Sion’s work and for the magazine. Congratulations all around. Raise a glass of Talisker, everyone.
See all of Sion’s work on NC here.
dg
Sydney Lea and John B. Lee, two poets brought together via/by/through their appearances on the pages of Numéro Cinq are going to fight it out (I guess) together in Ottawa June 19 at the American Embassy as THE DUELING POETS. Sydney Lea is the Poet Laureate of Vermont (not Vermonth as it is spelled on the U.S. Embassy website — http://canada.usembassy.gov/
dg
“…a master of narrative structure” (Wall Street Journal)
“…every literate person in the country should be reading Glover’s essays.” (Globe and Mail)
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Brendan Riley review in Review of Contemporary Fiction:
This is not literary craft reduced to statistical formulae and write-by-the-numbers word-bytes. Glover’s admirable ability and patient willingness to cast a careful—not cold—eye on what makes sentences hum and flow is fueled by a vital, infectious fascination with words, enabling him to reveal the inspired, alchemical, verbal concatenation at work in the most alluring and memorable fiction writing.
Read the whole review here.
3 Canadian Writers with Buzz @ The Reader
A Canadian author’s book on writing went viral on social media recently, leading to thousands of would-be fiction writers searching their manuscripts for “Copula Spiders.”
Douglas Glover’s book Attack of the Copula Spiders (Biblioasis) coins the term to refer to the multi-appendaged mess created by circling and linking all of the variations of the verb “to be” in a paragraph. (Copula is a term for the link between subject and predicate of a verb.) Excessive use of sentence constructions like “he was happy” or “the building was unassuming” lead to “flaccid and uninteresting prose,” he writes.
Joe Ponepinto, book review editor of the Los Angeles Review, brought Glover’s ideas to the literary world in a much-circulated blog post subtitled “Why I’ll never write (or read) the same way again.”
via Cameron Dueck’s arts column – Winnipeg Free Press.
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from Joe Ponepinto @ The Saturday Morning Post
I reviewed a book a while back that has stayed with me for many months and has affected the way I write and read, and it’s opened my eyes to a weakness in much creative writing, even in published books. Douglas Glover’s Attack of the Copula Spiders (Biblioasis, 2012) criticizes many aspects of fiction, but saves its most withering scorn for the rampant and indiscriminate use of copulas.
I hear you asking, “What’s a copula? I admit I had to look it up. Webster’s definition says: “the connecting link between subject and predicate of a proposition.” In most cases, this refers to a form of the word “be.” But what does that mean to us everyday writers? It means banal, didactic, often passive sentences, almost completely lacking in action or depth.
As Glover says: “A copula spider occurs when a student uses the verb ‘to be’ so many times on a page that I can circle all the instances, connect them with lines, and draw a spider diagram. Now there is nothing grammatically wrong with the verb ‘to be,’ but if you use it over and over again your prose is likely to be flaccid and uninteresting.”
From Chapman/Chapman’s Favorite Longreads of 2012.
“‘A Scrupulous Fidelity: on Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser’ by Douglas Glover, The Brooklyn Rail
Close reading doesn’t get much better than this. Glover expertly unpacks the logorrheic hilarity of Bernhard’s text without ruining any of the fun.”
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Attack of the Copula Spiders named one of the top non-fiction books of 2012 by The Globe and Mail.
“[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 Non-fiction books from this year that are worth a read (or two) – The Globe and Mail.
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Governor-General Podcast Interview with Sky Hornig in Calgary during Wordfest in mid-October.
[podloveaudio src=”http://numerocinqmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/The-GG-Podcast-–-Douglas-Glover.mp3″]
The Governor-General Podcast Interview – Douglas Glover
via Douglas Glover – CJSW – Calgary’s Independent Radio 90.9 FM.
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A few months ago I read a book by Douglas Glover titled Attack of the Copula Spiders. At the time, I didn’t even know what a copula was. Once I understood, I spent days fixing copula-laden writing, and sweated over every sentence I wrote to make sure I was using more active verbs. In time, though, those fixations fade into the subconscious, which is where they belong. The key to good writing, I believe, is not to ignore rules and not to obsess over them. It’s to incorporate the ones you believe are true into your writing psyche so that you are aware of them without thinking about them. — Joe Ponepinto, Book Review Editor at LA Review. Writer, editor, teacher. Occasional curmudgeon. Dad to henry, the coffee-drinkin’ dog
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If I had to guess what events will sell out first, my money would be on the Douglas Glover Master Class. He’s a spectacular Canadian writer who has kindly agreed to do a three hour class on the mechanics of good creative writing for WordFest patrons. The best part about it? It’s only 30 bucks per person. What are you waiting for? Follow this link and buy tickets now!
via Post-Launch Blog: A Response | WordFest Blog.
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Shelagh Shapiro interviews dg on his new book Attack of the Copula Spiders at Write the Book, Shelagh’s long-running radio show, which, by the way, is fast becoming an institution in its own right, a vast trove of writerly advice and experience. Listen to the interview on Shelagh’s site or download the podcast — it’s also available at iTunes.
Award-winning Canadian author Douglas Glover, on his latest book: a collection of essays on writing, Attack of the Copula Spiders, published by Biblioasis.
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Douglas Glover and How to Write a Novel
by Jane Eaton Hamilton
I’m reading “Attack of the Copula Spiders” by Douglas Glover. i remember him trying to drill the matters in his first piece, “How to Write a Novel,” through my thick brain back in Saratoga Springs in the early 90s. It was the best advice I had ever gotten on making a novel. Really, it still is, and I’m glad to see it again in other than my own scrambled notes.
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Vivian Dorsel interviews Douglas Glover in upstreet 8.
Dorsel: What do you emphasize in your teaching of writing?
Glover: Reading. The first thing I give students is a reading rubric and an analytical check-list to begin to reform their reading skills. As I say in Attack of the Copula Spiders, we live in a post-literate age. On a certain level that book is about the act of reading. I am pushing a critical aesthetic that is a bit like New Criticism and a bit like Russian Formalism; but, to my mind, as a writer, it just seems reasonable and immeasurably expands comprehension. You read a story and pay some attention to how it’s put together and, beyond the illusion of fictional narrative, you suddenly engage with the text on a whole other, rather exciting, level of grammar, rhythm and meaning. You begin to see connections that hitherto you vaguely passed over supplying your own dreamy connotations (as you’re taught to do in high school). We’re at a moment in our culture when differences in the ability to read and comprehend a text are critical.
I can’t remember the moment when I actually invented the phrase “copula spiders,” I only foggily recall circling over and over again all the “to be” verbs and then noticing that I could make a diagram on the page and that the diagram resembled a spider (with far more legs than it should have). The real issue, the shocking point, is that when you teach writing you are basically teaching the same student over and over again. It doesn’t matter whether the student is writing nonfiction or fiction or that the student thinks the burning piece of paper in his hand is the next War and Peace because he has put his heart into it and it comes out of his own original personal thoughts and is different (he believes) from anything ever written before (or in the future). The shocking thing is the uniformity of mediocrity. The shocking thing is that intelligent adults can’t think of another verb to use (actually most students jog along with a verb repertoire of about five: to be, to look, to sit, to stand, to see—absolutely the most popular verb choices).
The crucial connector here is to realize that part of the reason proto-writers don’t notice they are doing this is because they don’t know how to read. Eighty percent of what I do every semester is teach students how to read like writers, that is, with attention to structure and the felicities of well-written prose. So the two aspects of my book are necessarily joined: you can’t teach people to write simply by telling them what they are doing wrong; you have to show them where it is done right, that is, you have to show them how to read.
Once you learn to read you can teach yourself how to write. Literature is an encyclopedia of technique.
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“The best essays in this collection come further in as Glover, like a physicist dissecting atoms, breaks down the prose of several great writers of the past few decades. A successful fiction writer in his own right, he wants not only to identify the techniques of stylists such as Alice Munro, Mark Anthony Jarman, and Thomas Bernhard, but to understand the grand logic behind the structures, the God-like plans that such geniuses hatch to produce their greatest works. Although this is not specifically a “how-to” book, Glover’s analyses in Copula Spiders prove far more insightful than traditional criticism, and by extension far more helpful to writers who are serious about approaching perfection in their craft.” — Joe Ponepinto @ The Los Angeles Review
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It’s a great book. Look for my review in the next issue of Broken Pencil. — Nico Mara-McKay @ nicomaramckay.com
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The first bad review; always a landmark. DG taken to the barn and whipped with limp squibs by Daniel Evans Pritchard at The Critical Flame, a young man apparently lacking a sense of humor and a delusional optimist who seems to think all those e-books coming out are worth reading. Without a trace of irony, he quotes, um, a Gallup poll to tell us the state of literary culture in America. At least he spelled my name right (although he didn’t manage to copy Mark Anthony Jarman’s name with the same accuracy — Mark suddenly becoming French in the translation — Marc Anthony Jarman). Tiresome as it is, I herewith issue my usual challenge to a duel.
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Such was the pace of my conversion, that 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 and was fixing to present them to my eldest daughter, who is about to begin literary studies at UBC.
Glover is at times rather detached in his assessment of the value of storytelling. And yet there is a subtext to his work, a sense that if a story is to have life beyond the intrinsics of its existence, it must, sooner or later, ease up to the imponderables at the heart of what it is to be human. As Joni Mitchell said of songwriting, if at some point a song’s lyrics don’t extend themselves into a larger orbit, “it’s all just complaining.” Charles Wilkins, The Globe and Mail
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His sortie on the verb “to be” in “Attack of the Copula Spiders” is particularly brilliant. Mark Sampson at Free Range Reading
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Attack of the Copula Spiders is a practical guide for anyone interested in writing. Glover’s first chapter, “How To Write A Novel,” alone is worth the price of the book. Telegraph Journal SalonBooks
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Caroline Adderson, author of A History of Forgetting: “Just ordered it. The essay on “Meneseteung” alone is worth the price.”
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“These essays are not just for writing students, however. Whatever heightens student awareness of craft also sharpens the awareness of the general reader who has no desire to try his or her hand at writing but would like better to understand literature. Glover has an essay on Alice Munro that is of value to any short story writer but also should be required reading for anyone interested in Canadian fiction.” Philip Marchand in the National Post
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“You should have a look at Douglas Glover on what may be the Mexican classic, Pedro Paramo, which was once described to me as “Mexico’s Joyce.” (The essay appears in Glover’s recent Attack of the Copula Spiders, which looks to be a great book of literary essays.)” — Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading
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“Thoughtful and erudite books such as Attack of the Copula Spiders are always useful as roadmaps for developing better readers and writers. Now if we could only get the world to read them carefully.” George Fetherling review in Quill and Quire
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“I’m a few chapters into reading it a second time. All of it is wise and clear and exciting. The book is chock-full of good stuff, but the first and third chapters are especially brilliant. And the first paragraph of your essay on the Rooke novel is itself worth the price of the book. ” — Jack Hodgins, Governor General’s Award winning author of The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne and The Invention of the World
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March 25
Douglas Glover interview re Attack of the Copula Spiders on The Danforth Review.
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Douglas Glover’s Craftwork talk on the novel at the Center for Fiction — based on “How To Write A Novel,” one of the essays in Attack of the Copula Spiders
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UipTqY_HdQ[/youtube]
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March 14
Craftwork: Douglas Glover — Wednesday, March 14, 2012, 7:00 pm, at
The Center for Fiction
17 E. 47th Street
(between Fifth and Madison)
New York, NY 10017
(212) 755-6710
info@centerforfiction.org
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March 15
Douglas Glover Read at Celebration of The Literarian
The Center for Fiction
17 E. 47th Street
(between Fifth and Madison)
New York, NY 10017
(212) 755-6710
info@centerforfiction.org
Thurs
day March 15, 2012
07:00 pm
Come join us for drinks and micro-readings in celebration of our online magazine, The Literarian, featuring contribs Alan Cheuse, Anne Landsman, Barbara O’Dair, Carmela Ciuraru, Christine Schutt, Diane DeSanders, Douglas Glover, Elissa Schappell, Jane Ciabattari, Kim Chinquee, Leigh Newman, Leopoldine Core, Terese Svoboda, Tracy O’Neill, and Victoria Redel.
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February 9
The Thomas Bernhard essay in Attack of the Copula Spiders quoted in The New Yorker online Book Bench.
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February 5
UK Guardian reviewer and columnist and editor of the magazine 3 a.m. Andrew Gallix quotes from Attack of the Copula Spiders.
(This is in his Phantom Book category, related to language theory and a modernist aesthetic. dg is up there with Walter Benjamin, George Steiner and Herman Melville.)
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February 1
Essay excerpted from Attack of the Copula Spiders in The Brooklyn Rail
“…excellent essay” — @ Who Killed Lemmy Caution?
“…excellent essay” — @ Three Minutes’ Chewing
“…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.” Scott Esposito @ Conversational Reading
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Attack of the Copula Spiders Book Signing at Vermont College of Fine Arts booth, AWP Chicago — Thursday, March 1, 2-3:30pm. Books available. Bring cash or checks.
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Attack of the Copula Spiders Party at AWP Chicago — Friday, March 2, 7-8:15pm, Hilton Chicago Hotel Dining Room 4. Invitation below.
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Buy books here and a percentage comes back to NC for the upkeep of the magazine.
The best novels are like dreams. They come out of the silence of the page like a dream. They structure themselves like dreams, that is, there are clear ways in which the structure of dreams parallels the structure of novels. Like dreams, novels use image patterning as a device for suggesting meaning: image repetition, association, juxtaposition, and splintering (Viktor Shklovsky’s term for the branching pattern created by a repeating image and its associated or split-off elements which also repeat). Like dreams, novels are available to interpretation; the best novels have a central luminous mystery at their core which tempts generations upon generations of critics and readers to find new structures and meanings beyond the surface of the words. And like dreams, novels are built around (and this is explicable in only the vaguest of terms) the recurrence or insistence of desire which, in order to generate plot, must be resisted; the locus or arena of desire and resistance appears again and again with obsessive regularity in novels, an obsessive regularity which, in real life, would seem eccentric if not pathological. In novels, character is perversion, and the novel returns again and again to the animating desire which it must resist to the bitter end or even beyond the end of the words on the page.
—from “Novels and Dreams,” an essay by Douglas Glover in Attack of the Copula Spiders
The Greeks called their novels tales of suffering for love. If they weren’t about suffering for love, they wouldn’t be tales. A story consists of someone wanting something and having trouble getting it. There are no stories about people who start out happy and contented, remain happy and contented throughout, and end up happy and contented. Imagine the phrase “tales of not-suffering for love” or “tales of having fun for love” or “tales of finding pleasure for love.” The difference between pornography and literature is that in pornography everyone has orgasms all the time. There is no gap between desire and consummation. In literature there is always an element of frustration, displacement, delay and incompleteness (even if someone does eventually manage to have an orgasm). Don Quixote is the quintessential novel because it’s about a man in love with a woman who doesn’t exist. At the outset, Cervantes invents the limiting case.
—from The Enamoured Knight
Repetition, as I have said, is also a pattern. But it is a pattern of a different order, perhaps the pattern of patterns. To me, it is the heart of the mystery of art, of novel-writing. Without it, the novel becomes a strung-out plot summary. I have tried to think out why repetition is appealing, why it is aesthetically pleasing as a pure thing. I think there are two reasons, or sorts of reasons. The first is essentially conservative–repetition is allied to memory, to coherence and verisimilitude. The second is biological or procreative or sexual. Repetition creates rhythm which on a biological level is pleasurable in itself, the beating of our hearts, the combers rolling up on a beach, the motion of love. This is the sort of thing Lyotard is talking about when he writes about “intensities” or patterns of intensities in his book Économie Libidinal, or what the Spaniard Madariaga meant when he talked about the “waves of energy” in Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador de Seville.
—from “The Novel as a Poem” in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son
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Here is the performance version of “How to Write a Novel,” the first essay in my new book Attack of the Copula Spiders. I place it here for instructional purposes, also so that I can include it in our growing trove of craft and structure advice The Numéro Cinq Literary Craft Book, which you all should consult from time to time. I gave this talk as part of the Craftwork series at The Center for Fiction in New York, March 14, 2o12.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UipTqY_HdQ[/youtube]
It’s important to note that “How to Write a Novel” is a fairly stripped down version of the years of thought I have given to writing novels (and stories and essays and, yes, even poems). If you want to get the whole picture to this point, you should read also “The Novel as a Poem” in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son. That book also contains essays on novels by Leonard Cohen, Christa Wolf, Hubert Aquin, and Margaret Atwood, plus an essay on point of view and my pride and joy “Gertrude, or the Postmodern Novel.”
Then you would need to read my book on Cervantes The Enamoured Knight. The first section of the book, “Recovering the Text: Technical and Analytical,” provides a re-reading of Don Quixote and preps you for the sections to follow. The second section, “Don Quixote and Novel Form,” gives a history of the development of novel form, sorts out the rather confusing array of definitions offered by theorists, and then discusses a set of primary structures: plot, subplot, character grouping and gradation, and novel memory devices (which I have not really touched on elsewhere). The third section, “Night Thoughts of an Insomniac Reader, or Thematic Meditations,” demonstrates how the form itself predisposes the novel to a thematic “basket” of ubiquitous themes which appear in writers as diverse as Joseph Conrad, Cervantes, Jane Austen, and Alice Munro (to name four that come into the discussion).
Finally, in Attack of the Copula Spiders you’ll find not only “How to Write a Novel” (the complete text with sundry examples) but also analyses of novels by Juan Rulfo, Thomas Bernhard, Leon Rooke, and Cees Nooteboom as well as an essay on endings and a meditation on novels and history.
Unfortunately, foresight has been lacking. I haven’t managed to collect all of this material in one place (and that’s mostly because I have been sorting out these ideas for years, decades, often previewing them as lectures at Vermont College of Fine Arts where I teach in the low-residency MFA in Writing program). But here now you have a basic sense of where to find it all.
dg
For you delectation and inspiration, here are the opening paragraphs of my essay “Pedro the Uncanny: A Note on Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo” excerpted from my new book Attack of the Copula Spiders on the Biblioasis International Translation Series. Pedro Parámo is an amazing novel, written about dead people from the point of view of a dead man. Rulfo based the structure on the idea of a cemetery in which the various grave occupants spend their time whispering to one another, an eerie and startling conception. Critics often all this book the first instance of Latin American Magic Realism. It’s a Mexican classic. Click on the link above to go to the Biblioasis site and read the rest of the essay.
dg
Here’s the video of the tiny 5-minute reading I gave March 15 at the Celebration for the Literarian at the Center for Fiction in New York. Four little pieces, including three complete short stories (do not even THINK flash fiction).
dg
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtCR0osIREk[/youtube]
Here is a taste of the latest of my epigrams at Global Brief just published.
dg
Cooperation is local, competition is pandemic. It has always been this way. We live in a churning cauldron of competitive vectors, of drags and accelerants. We compete for money, jobs, love, space and power. We compete, and we are competed for (for our votes, for our consumer dollars, for our admiration – desire desires desire). What goes for thinking these days is mostly competition; what goes for information is mostly shill and exhortation. The media world is a vast infomercial – competing for the mind of the reader, the e-reader or the (TV) e-watcher.
Conversation is a competition to have one’s voice heard; to have one’s ideas prevail. Languages compete and extend their reach or disappear. The world is a chessboard of international gamesmanship. In space, we are all competing for the higher ground. And, willy-nilly, the whirling, pulsing interactions of competition seem only to grow faster and denser as the world goes digital, and as connectivity multiplies arenas of contention. The individual human being wins and loses a thousand times a day – mostly without even knowing it, as the virtual and invisible electronic tickers mark the rise and fall of prices, currency and interest rates. Being alive, we compete.
Here’s a teaser from a new essay of mine, just published at The Brooklyn Rail. This essay is from Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing
dg
The Man and his Books
Thomas Bernhard is dead. He had a terrible life, at least the early part. He was born in Holland where his Austrian mother had fled to escape the shame of her unwanted pregnancy. He never knew his father who died far away and in obscurity (and obscure circumstances). His mother mistreated him because of the shame he represented. Back in Austria he wanted to be an opera singer and studied music but caught a cold working at a menial job to make ends meet; the cold turned into tuberculosis. He was hospitalized repeatedly, his treatment was bungled, he was given up for dead, and survived just to prove how stupid his doctors were. Since opera-singing was out, he became a writer. He became a famous writer of deadpan, mordant, hilarious, difficult (modernist) novels and plays that often portray depressed characters with lung diseases.
Another common theme is Bernhard’s disgust with his native Austria which he continually berated for its Nazi past, its stupidity, sentimentality, and philistinism. In his will he stipulated that none of his works could ever be published in Austria. Paradoxically he rarely left Austria and lived quietly in a country retreat outside of Vienna (many of his characters live in country retreats outside of Vienna).
Despite the fact that he seemed to put himself in every one of his novels, little is known about his intimate life. He wrote a five-volume memoir, Gathering Evidence, which is quite beautiful but, as all memoirs are, unrevealing. His first biographer somehow managed to discover that he liked to masturbate while watching himself in the mirror. This is both comic and significant; over and over Bernhard presents his narrators as characters watching themselves think about themselves. In fact, his narrators seem more interested in watching themselves think about themselves than in telling the story which often seems, upon analysis, more of an occasion for baroque invention than an end in itself. Reading Bernhard one is often reminded of the American experimentalist John Hawkes who once famously said:
My novels are not highly plotted, but certainly they’re elaborately structured. I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme…structure—verbal and psychological coherence—is still my largest concern as a writer. Related or corresponding event, recurring image and recurring action, these constitute the essential substance or meaningful density of my writing. (Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 1965)
Adam Regn Arvidson has completed his epic (nearly a year) exploration of nature writing in America, including essays on Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, Edward Hoagland, Joseph Wood Krutch and Loren Eiseley plus a special craft essay/digression on imagery and invective (in the work of Edward Hoagland). Adam also explores the profound political and cultural effect this particular kind of nonfiction prose has had—these nature writers have altered the way with think about the land we live in (we are talking about the invention of Green). In the last year, Adam also had a new son and completed a nonfiction book on landscaping and the environment that will be published by W. W. Norton this fall. —dg
Adam Regn Arvidson
is a landscape architect and writer in Minneapolis. He has published numerous articles on design, planning, and landscape in a variety of magazines, including Landscape Architecture, Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, Planning, and Metropolis. He is founder of Treeline, a design/writing consultancy that assists public and private clients in telling the story of their land through landscape architecture and writing deeply rooted in place. In 2009 Adam won the Bradford Williams Medal, the nation’s highest award for landscape architectural writing, and he has a book forthcoming on environmental practices in the nursery and landscaping industry (W.W. Norton, 2012). This fall, Adam will be inducted as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. He is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Here are the opening paragraphs of a new story just published at The Literarian, the magazine at the Center for Fiction in New York. The story invented itself late last fall when I happened to stop at a Barnes and Noble in Colonie and discovered huge walls of books categorized as PARANORMAL ROMANCE (see photo above taken by NC Contributor Cheryl Cowdy). This was a completely new literary genre to me—you can tell I don’t get out much. But it seemed very popular. I thought, I can write one of those. So I did.
Read the rest of the story at The Literarian, link below.
Also, if you’re in New York on March 14, come to my craft talk at the Center for Fiction (see the link at the bottom of the story).
dg
Everything Starts at a Bookstore
I was supposed to meet Zoe for lunch at a chic Parisian restaurant she had discovered on the Internet, a crucial rendezvous during which I intended to propose marriage, but I was running late. A fierce, cold rain lashed down suddenly as I bounded up the Metro steps, rain as I had never experienced before. It drove me back into the underground, where dozens of African Parisians discussed the weather in languages other than French. I glanced at my watch and leaped up the stairs again, blinded by the torrents of rain.
Wind whipped the leafless plane trees along the avenue. I spotted a flower shop and ducked in, thinking to buy a bouquet for my love. But I must have slipped through the wrong door, for I found myself in a neat, closet-like secondhand bookstore with dark oak shelves marching back toward an ancient desk fortified with parapets of leather-bound tomes. I hovered, dripping in the doorway, loathe to enter and perhaps spatter some valuable books with water but also reluctant to dive back into the deluge. I wiped rainwater off my watch face, frantic with vexation and indecision. I naturally blamed all my troubles on the Parisians, their precious City of Light, and Zoe’s love of travel, which I did not share.
Please join Biblioasis and the Governor-General’s Award-winning novelist Douglas Glover for a reception in honour of his new book, Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing.
| Location: | Hilton Chicago Hotel (AWP), Private Dining Room 4 |
| Hours: | 7:00 PM |
| Web: | www.awpwriter.org/conference/2012schedFri.php |
CBC Canada Writes producer Sarah Gilbert asked dg to name a “writer to watch” when she commissioned his short story “Snow Days” for the Winter Tales series. He picked NC Contributing Editor R. W. Gray (who writes NC at the Movies for the magazine). DG discovered Rob Gray when he was reading books for the annual Danuta Gleed Literary Award. See Rob’s story “Crisp” published earlier on these pages and his lovely screenplay for the movie Alice & Huck.
And then read his essay on the Canada Writes website (link below.)
dg
DG’s dog Lucy, aka the NC Blue Dog
DG will read his new story “Snow Days” on The Sunday Edition, CBC Radio One, this Sunday (December 4). That’s a three-hour morning show; the story airs in the third hour (dg thinks). It’s also broadcast on Sirius–check the CBC website for details on that.
This story was commissioned by CBC producer Sarah Gilbert for a series called Winter Tales (um, winter had to be mentioned), all the stories written by former winners of the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction.
After the broadcast, the text of the story and a podcast will be up on the CBC Canada Writes Winter Tales website.
The idea also was to pair each GG winner with an up-and-coming writer of his or her choice—dg picked NC Contributing Editor R. W. Gray as a Writer to Watch. So please read his contribution, too, when you go to the site.
dg
Here is another dg epigram at the international affairs magazine Global Brief. Global Brief is an amazing and ambitious magazine, the inspiration of the editor Irvin Studin, who finds his writers all over the world (the online part of the magazine features blogs in several languages). The current issue features an interview with Steven Pinker, an essay on three tragedies of humanitarian intervention, a piece on international criminal justice and a prophetic text on the complex future of Israel—to name a few.
dg
Magnanimity heals the rift; ruthlessness seeks to erase the opponent. Both are tools of what we nowadays call conflict resolution. Yet history abounds with cautionary tales. In 1836, Santa Anna was ruthless at the Alamo and Goliad, raising the red flag signifying No Quarter, only to inspire the rag-tag Texians at San Jacinto. After the Second Punic War, Scipio Africanus was surprisingly magnanimous toward the defeated Carthaginians, which only led to the Third Punic War (after which the Romans ruthlessly sowed the ruins of Carthage with salt, and resolved that conflict for good).
Ruthlessness means without pity – without those second thoughts about the feelings of others that plague the well-brought-up human. Mexican drug lords popping victims into oil drums filled with acid are ruthless. Pol Pot was ruthless, as were Hitler and Vlad the Impaler. Andrew Jackson sending the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears was ruthless. Harry Truman bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was ruthless. But Gandhi was ruthless, too, in his own way, and maybe even Martin Luther King Jr. (a case could be made).
Read the rest at On Magnanimity and Ruthlessness : Global Brief.
To write false novels
Whoever you may be, if the spirit moves you burn a few laurel leaves and, without wishing to tend this meager fire, you will begin to write a novel. Surrealism will allow you to: all you have to do is set the needle marked “fair” at “action,” and the rest will follow naturally. Here are some characters rather different in appearance; their names in your handwriting are a question of capital letters, and they will conduct themselves with the same ease with respect to active verbs as does the impersonal pronoun “it” with respect to words such as “is raining,” “is,” “must,” etc. They will command them, so to speak, and wherever observation, reflection, and the faculty of generalization prove to be of no help to you, you may rest assured that they will credit you with a thousand intentions you never had. Thus endowed with a tiny number of physical and moral characteristics, these beings who in truth owe you so little will thereafter deviate not one iota from a certain line of conduct about which you need not concern yourself any further. Out of this will result a plot more or less clever in appearance, justifying point by point this moving or comforting denouement about which you couldn’t care less. Your false novel will simulate to a marvelous degree a real novel; you will be rich, and everyone will agree that “you’ve really got a lot of guts,” since it’s also in this region that this something is located.
Of course, by an analogous method, and provided you ignore what you are reviewing, you can successfully devote yourself to false literary criticism.
Here’s an essay on hauntology (word derived from one of Jacques Derrida’s puns). I place it here as a addendum to my essay on the history of philosophy just published. Haunting, hauntology, the ghostly feeling of immateriality–new metaphors for the way we feel today, what is also called nostalgia, or nostalgia for being. Philosophers are really poets of Being. They are always thinking up new metaphors for the relationship between Self and Other. Today it is haunting. We are haunted by Being. In this case, the idea is not so new, as the author points out. This essay is by Andrew Gallix and it first appeared in the UK Guardian.
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Today, hauntology inspires many fields of investigation, from the visual arts to philosophy through electronic music, politics, fiction and literary criticism. At its most basic level, it ties in with the popularity of faux-vintage photography, abandoned spaces and TV series like Life on Mars. Mark Fisher — whose forthcoming Ghosts of My Life (Zer0 Books) focuses primarily on hauntology as the manifestation of a specific “cultural moment” — acknowledges that “There’s a hauntological dimension to many different aspects of culture; in fact, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud practically argues that society as such is founded on a hauntological basis: the voice of the dead father”. When you come to think of it, all forms of representation are ghostly. Works of art are haunted, not only by the ideal forms of which they are imperfect instantiations, but also by what escapes representation. See, for instance, Borges‘s longing to capture in verse the “other tiger, that which is not in verse”.
via ANDREW GALLIX.
Herewith a link to dg’s distillation of 30,000 years (give or take) of Western philosophy. The idea for this essay came from reading Witold Gombrowicz’s wonderful little book A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes. DG thought six hours seemed a little long and tedious and that he could condense all the important points into about fifty minutes. This essay is a version of the lecture dg gave at Vermont College of Fine Arts last January (in the event, he was not able to get ALL of philosophy into the time slot), including his own incredibly helpful diagrams and sidebar comments which clear up the complicated points.
dg
Plato was right when he said that we can only know what we know already, that knowledge works by identity. What we cannot know, cannot access, we also cannot experience, and yet this unknowable is all around us, lies inscrutable and threatening behind everything we do know, crouches even within our hearts in a place Freud called the Unconscious. Mostly we cannot escape the feeling that it is watching us, waiting to trip us up, or sometimes bless us. At the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein threw up his hands and wrote that we must remain silent about the things whereof we cannot speak, by which he meant a long list of absolutes including God, the Good, Beauty, etc. But that sort of realism has never stopped humans whose imagination is prolific in inventing dream meetings with the Other. The history of our philosophies has been a history of such dreams.
via Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought – The Brooklyn Rail.
As a riposte to the doom and gloom about writing these days, the End of Times sentiment let loose by the marketing people of the world who sense, yes, alas, that the current spasmodic writhings of capitalism bode ill for the bottom line, here’s an interview with Tom McCarthy in the magazine The Days of Yore. McCarthy is ever cheerful, smart, well-read and positive–for someone who makes a living dwelling on failure. You might say he has made a success of failure–read the McCarthy interview in the context this Zadie Smith essay in The New York Review of Books in which she contrasts the “successful” well-made middle-brow novel with McCarthy’s novel Remainder, which, as Smith says, rather “gleefully” tears apart everything we’ve come to expect from a good novel.
These aren’t particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked. For Netherland, our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done—in a sense that’s the problem. It’s so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait.
via Two Paths for the Novel by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books.
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That’s some good advice. Any other advice for young writers?
I remember seeing an interview where William Burroughs was asked this question and he said, “Learn to type.” Anything I could say would be totally bland. Read a lot. See? That’s totally bland. But that would be the best.
Go smoke hashish on a bed?
[Laughs.] Go smoke hashish on a bed in Paris! No, I don’t know. Read. Read, read, read. That would be the thing. Because, ultimately, it’s not about having something to say. It’s what Kafka said, “I write in order to affirm and re-affirm that I have nothing to say.” Writing is not about having something to say. It’s about an intense relationship with the symbolic. Which means being completely immersed in literature, which means in other literature, but also in the world and all its mediations. So, maybe that would be the advice: Go and get immersed.
Everyone is grumbling about the end of the book. What do you have to say about that?
People who proclaim the end of the book just haven’t read their literary history. I mean, the first novel, Don Quixote, is about the end of the book. That is the premise of literature.
Here’s a deeply alarming story from BBC News: Algorithms are taking over our thought processes! Run for your lives.
Actually, this is funny, even hilarious. Journalists, always on the lookout for a new cultural catastrophes, have lately latched onto the word “algorithm” to symbolize machine (computer) control of the human environment. “Algorithm” sounds mysterious, technological, inhuman. Algorithms are going to think for themselves, take over the world, and eventually push humans and human thought out. Does this sound familiar? “Algorithm” and the fear thereof is just another moment in the long fantasy of automatons turning into humans, of machines learning to think and feel, or, in reverse, humans becoming machines (de la Mettrie and Deleuze have two ends of this stick).
The flaw in this terrifying scenario is that algorithms are nothing more than sets or sequences of procedures (rules, logical functions) WRITTEN BY HUMAN BEINGS. For example, Amazon.com might have an algorithm that says something like: if dg buys a book by Leo Tolstoy, then our computer will offer him a list of five other Leo Tolstoy titles. That’s a marketing algorithm. It’s not mysterious or weird or even complex–and it’s not a mathematical enigma. And the actual programming (which must be pretty dull) is done by a human. Except on some very simple-minded level, algorithms can’t write themselves. So the idea that algorithms control humans is idiotic.
Google uses algorithms to place those little ads you get next to your emails. But even here they can’t be astonishingly complex. If I right the phrase “Jonah’s erector set” in an email, I will find ads for Viagra and erectile dysfunction next to my email thread. Of course, this gets tricky when, say, Google Search tries to use algorithms (which, as per the examples above, are often pretty simple-minded) to predict the sort of answers I might want in my searches. I might get, to my mind, distorted search results. But that would end up making Google a less and less helpful service and I would go elsewhere. Same goes for that deeply comic little algorithm Google uses to auto-complete search terms (I turn off this function and the Google search history function).
The fear of algorithms reflects an oddly human suspicion of science (and, basically, fear of science these days means fear of the unknown as fewer and fewer people find themselves educated enough to keep up with scientific discovery–um, yes, think: intelligent design). Actually, people should be wary of other people first.
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If you were expecting some kind warning when computers finally get smarter than us, then think again.
There will be no soothing HAL 9000-type voice informing us that our human services are now surplus to requirements.
In reality, our electronic overlords are already taking control, and they are doing it in a far more subtle way than science fiction would have us believe.
Their weapon of choice – the algorithm.
Behind every smart web service is some even smarter web code. From the web retailers – calculating what books and films we might be interested in, to Facebook’s friend finding and image tagging services, to the search engines that guide us around the net.
It is these invisible computations that increasingly control how we interact with our electronic world.
At last month’s TEDGlobal conference, algorithm expert Kevin Slavin delivered one of the tech show’s most “sit up and take notice” speeches where he warned that the “maths that computers use to decide stuff” was infiltrating every aspect of our lives.
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Apparel chain Old Navy is reprinting thousands of college T-shirts to correct an embarrassing error.
The shirts debuted this month, featuring the names and mascots of dozens of schools including USC and UCLA. Printed at the top of each shirt are the words “Lets Go!!”
The problem is that “lets” is missing its apostrophe, which is necessary to create the intended contraction of “Let us go.” Without the apostrophe, “lets go” means to release something.
via Old Navy reprinting erroneous school T-shirts – latimes.com
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The ascendant, cheerful, dapper Canadian leftist politician Jack Layton died at 61 Monday morning. He died just months after taking his party, the New Democratic Party of Canada, to amazing heights in the last federal election. The New Democrats—always the bridesmaid, never the bride—thrashed the separatist Parti Quebecois in Quebec, left the once powerful Liberal Party a rump in the rest of the country, and earned the right to form what we call the Official Opposition to Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. Now he is being eulogized (mostly) in the press, a state funeral is in order, and, in many ways, his memory is already being co-opted by people who once dismissed him, derided him or even hated him.
Here’s a link to a smart little essay by Noah Gataveckas (published in the online magazine The Mass Ornament) that seeks to insert some logic and realism into the tangle of emotion and pop journalistic burbling and political re-remembering that is, yes, not just a characteristic of Canadian politics.
dg
It is important to remember the past, compare today to yesterday, if one wishes to gain an understanding into any (historical-material) situation. This holds true for the Canadian political landscape.
Various newspapers and ideologues are now posthumously celebrating noble Jack Layton as a hero of humanity, who “More than anything else, stood for Canada”. Yesterday, these same papers otherwise portrayed him as a socialist traitor who had “an almost pathological hostility to the corporate sector [that] would quickly turn Canada into a North American Zimbabwe”. Or: a “champion of elite privilege”. Or: a “Shameless Socialist Opportunist”.
Now that his legacy is up for grabs, Layton is being spun into some kind of watered-down New Liberal. While in the past he was portrayed as the Leftist Enemy (under the spooky banner of ‘socialism’), now he is being sold as a ‘good guy’ with “always a twinkle in his eyes”. The message here is: forget about who he was, what he did, and his politics, celebrate the mere ‘person’ of Jack once he has been abstracted from all the (real, living) political content that made him who he actually was (i.e. what he fought for, what “he gave his life for”). In other words, we are encouraged to celebrate a fiction of Jack Layton instead of his truth.
This is the copyediting desk (the rim) at the Montreal Star in 1976, probably just before 8 a.m., the paper has been put to bed and we’re just hanging around. I am across the desk on the left. Peter Leney with the long hair is next to me, The gray-haired gent is Walter Christopherson, the copy boss. Barry Johnson would normally be seated on my right, but most of the sub-editors appear to have momentarily disappeared.
I just discovered this obituary from the Vancouver Province. I worked as a copyeditor (we called them sub-editors) at the Montreal Star in 1975 and 1976. We worked the graveyard shift, midnight to 8 a.m., putting the paper to bed around 6 or so, then often adjourning to a bar across the street for a morning drink. Barry Johnson, a handsome, florid-faced old-hand, usually sat to my right on the rim, no doubt placed there to keep the new boy out of trouble. He had been trained as an air force pilot, but he knew his grammar and punctuation inside out and could amalgamate a dozen wire-service reports into a gorgeous 10-para story with nothing but a steel ruler, a ballpoint pen and a gluepot (these were the old days, let me tell you). He had stories to tell: how he got his nickname Precious, his career as a foreign correspondent, his sideline in the movies (spaghetti Westerns in Italy, a part in a TV mini-series on Casanova in France), his rather hasty escape from Greece in obscure and unseemly circumstances. Barry was a legend, a man bigger than life, but his star was falling, age was creeping on him. Sitting next to him as the newspaper technology changed around us (we were dinosaurs of several varieties), I was always in a spin, in awe and yet aware of the ache of loss, time moving on. I soaked up his stories, while at the same time incubating an idea for my first (published) novel Precious.
Years later, the Star shut down and Barry went through a bad patch. He ended up in Toronto, unemployed, scrambling. My book was out. I didn’t know if Barry knew how much he had influenced me. An old friend from my newspaper days (we worked at the Peterborough Examiner and the Montreal Star together), Mal Aird, arranged for us to meet at the Spadina Tavern. It was a stirring thing, handing Barry a copy of the book. It meant a lot to me; clearly it meant a lot to him. Now both he and Mal are dead. Time eats her children.
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Former Province reporter and copy editor Barry Johnson died peacefully in hospital after a long illness Saturday night, with his wife and sister at his side.
He was 74.
Johnson, who was known as “Precious” to his many friends, had a long career in Canadian newspapers, with stops at the Montreal Gazette, Montreal Star, Globe and Mail and Calgary Herald.
The former jet pilot jumped into journalism in the 1950s after a stint with the Royal Canadian Air Force. His writing career also took him to London, Greece and Rome.
“He’s been everywhere,” his sister Patricia Holland recalled Sunday.
Regarded by many as a lovable scoundrel, Johnson inspired Douglas Glover’s 1984 murder mystery Precious, the tale of “a boozy, burned-out reporter with an embarrassing nickname and a penchant for getting into trouble,” according to Glover’s website.
via Barry Johnson: A precious one gone.
But see also Barry Johnson obituary with more life details here.
From Precious:
I stayed where I was a few minutes longer to see the hands lock down the last plates, hear the warning bells, and watch the freshly folded newspapers flooding off the line. Twenty years had fled. I hadn’t listened to Uncle Dorsey. When I got out of the air force, I had my wings and a ticket to a gold mine. In the early sixties airlines were offering a million bucks, fifty grand a year, to ex-servicemen who wanted to fly passenger jets. But the thought of turning into a glorified bus driver at the age of twenty-five chilled me. And somehow I thought the money would always be there.
On a whim I took a job covering the police beat for a small city daily not unlike the Star-Leader. Inside of a month I was hooked on the steady rhythmic surge of the deadline, dropping Dexedrine tablets and working eighty-hour weeks, drifting through my free Sundays in the company of chain-smoking, liverish veterans, their hoarse endless talk echoing in my ears and dreams. I got married; I got divorced. The years accumulated like spent butts in an ashtray. When I finally pulled my nose out of the rat race long enough to grasp the situation, when I finally realized Dorsey had been right all along, it was too late to change and too late to kick.
Twenty years.
But, as the French say, even the most beautiful woman cannot give more than she has.
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One of the great pleasures of my childhood was reading Classics Comics versions of great books. The proper name is Classics Illustrated. I once had a collection, gone to dust. But I just found this site, Tom’s Place, which has some of the issues online, a treasure trove. Going through the complete list, I am not surprised to think how my reading of certain books is completely coloured by these comic illustrations: The Last of the Mohicans, With Fire and Sword (my favourite), Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, The Time Machine.
dg
Here’s Jean Glover, dg’s mother, reciting Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Breathes there the man with soul so dead…,” actually an excerpt from “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.” This is unrehearsed and you can hear the refrigerator whirring in the background as well as assorted whining dogs who, apparently, cannot abide the poem (everybody’s a critic). We were sitting in her kitchen, on the family farm in Ontario. She rides a stationary bike most days over the winter and memorizes poems while she’s riding. Scott is a favourite because her great-grandfather (or is it great-great…?) was raised by Scott who, seeing the boy playing in the street one day, discovered his widowed mother and offered to pay for the boy’s education. The family story is that Scott was writing his novel Rob Roy at the time. The boy and his brother were in and out of the Scott house as they grew and later Scott paid for them to go on the Grand Tour (somewhere there is a diary of this). The boy eventually succeeded to some family money and owned slaves and a plantation on the island of Cariacou. As soon as the British government offered to buy the slaves and free them, he sold up and moved to Canada. His daughter Anne married Daniel Abiel McCall. And their daughter Sarah married John Brock. And their daughter Kathleen was Jean’s mother. I give you the stripped down version of the story—we are a family that carries some history in its genes. And thus Scott comes easily to her mind. There is some Scott silver somewhere in the house, passed down through the family. In the video, Jean is just shy of her 90th birthday.
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Here’s the poem:
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonored , and unsung.
—Sir Walter Scott
Here’s another new story by dg, just out in the Summer Fiction Issue of The Fiddlehead, the venerable Canadian literary magazine now edited by Mark Anthony Jarman. It’s an amazing issue that includes, besides dg’s “The Lost Language of Ng,” new stories by Clark Blaise, Elisabeth Harvor, Leon Rooke, Bill Gaston and Katherine Govier (Jarman, Rooke, Gaston and Blaise have all been published at NC—see the fiction contents page at right).
This year’s Summer Fiction Issue makes me feel guilty; it may be our best ever, our most vigourous, yet the issue came together so easily, all these fine stories seemed to gather, like a party of friends or family that happens without effort on the part of any organizer. So I have an uneasy feeling that I’m forgetting something or someone or that the egg salad will poison the kingdom; surely creation should be more difficult than this. —Mark Anthony Jarman
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According to the Maya, their grandfathers, the Ng, refused to assimilate with later civilizations but rather retreated, after a period of decadence and decline, into the southern jungles whence they had emerged. They are rumoured to be living there still, a hermetic and retired existence, keeping the Secret Names in their hearts, playing their sacred ball game, and copulating with their women to inflate the world skin bladder and supply the cosmos with ambient energy, the source of all life.
The last known speaker of the language of the ancient race of Ng passed quietly in his bed at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles where he had been flown the week before for emergency surgery. The cause of death was listed as “massive organ failure.” He was ninety-two years old, according to estimates, though he himself claimed to be 148. He went by the name of Trqba, though he insisted this wasn’t his real name; it was “my name for the outlanders.” His real name, Trqba told researchers, was a secret, a secret so mysterious and terrible that were he to utter the name the world would end the instant his breath stopped on the last vowel of the last syllable.
The Ng are believed to have been a proto-Mayan people who emerged, somewhat mysteriously, from the jungles south of the Yucatan 1,000 years before the birth of Christ and established regional hegemony over the inhabitants of the dry central plains, impoverished tribes who lived by eating insects and grubbing for roots, given to war and venery but incompetent at both, according to Trqba (see C. V. Panofsky: “An Account of the Ng Creation Epic” Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1932). A carved stele excavated at the ancient Ng capital, long concealed beneath temple ruins, depicts the dramatic emergence of the Ng people, their great tattooed war god ______ stepping naked from behind a tree, brandishing a cucumber (or boomerang; listed as “unidentifiable” elsewhere) in his hand, his erect penis dripping blood (according to Trqba; however, according to Giambattista et al., 1953, possibly water, sweat, urine, semen, or “unidentified fluid”) on a row of diminutive, dolorous, and emaciated natives who are about to have their limbs severed (see Rich Farrell: “Ng Stele Recounts Imperial Conquest” National Geographic, 1951). The name of the Ng war god is lost because to utter even one of the 18 divine dipthongs would have meant the sudden and cataclysmic end of life on earth. But Trqba (see Trilby Hawthorn: “New Light on the Ng, a Jungle Romance” People, 2009) said that the Ng referred to him in conversation using conventional epithets such as Snake or My Girl’s Delight.
Soon after migrating out of the jungle, the Ng invented canals, roads, terraced agriculture, pyramids (prototypes of the stepped Mayan E type, aligned with the solstice and equinox), cannibalism, and the mass sacrifice of captured enemy maidens (also, poss. the wheel, the automobile, and an early computer-like device; see Von Daniken, 1964; Von Daniken believed the Ng were extra-terrestrials from the planet Cephhebox). They built immense cities with central plazas surrounded by the usual towering stone temples and played a peculiar version of the Meso-American ball game at the end of which the winners would be bludgeoned with gorgeously carved obsidian death mauls–the losers would become kings and nobles. Since no one wanted to win (especially in the Age of Decadence when the Ng empire went into precipitate decline–between the years 7 Narthex and 27 Px on the Ng calendar), in practice the Ng ball game went on forever. Players would grow feeble, die and be replaced by younger men who, in turn, would be replaced, and so on. (See Proctor: “The Final 16, Ritual Roots of American College Basketball” Harper’s, 2001.)
According to Trqba, the ancient Ng came to believe that the sacred ball game generated a spiritual current or life force (analogous to the Chinese concept of Li; see R.V. Hemlock: “The Ng Generator, Prehistoric Experiments in Conductivity” Popular Mechanics, 1955) which kept the world dome inflated (like a skin bladder or inflatable beach ball, a curiously foundational concept in the Ng metaphysics) and animated all living things. If the Ng heroes–oiled, naked, emaciated, arthritic, toothless, and decrepit–ever ceased their listless ebb and flow upon the court, the world would end catastrophically. (For the ancient Ng, it seems, time was equivalent to constant motion with no linear progression, something like treading water or jogging on the spot; see Larios: Changeless Change, The Ng Enigma of Time, Oxford University Press, 1999.) Though he claimed to be the last of the Ng, Trqba paradoxically seemed to believe that somewhere, deep in the jungle, on a rocky, weed-strewn court hidden by the over-arching green canopy, men and boys, lost tribal remnants or even spectral reanimates, still played the ancient game, the score forever tied at 0-0.
Just published: Another of dg’s worldly epigrams at the international affairs magazine Global Brief. Here are the opening paragraphs. Click on the link or buy the magazine to read the rest.
The great 18th century French diplomat Talleyrand once said that speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts – a counterintuitive claim that explodes many sentimental myths about both communication and diplomacy. People never say what they mean: communication is not exchange, but aggression – and secrecy is at the heart of diplomacy. That is why we have reached the end of the age of diplomacy.
With unseemly haste, the new digital era has ushered in the end of individual privacy, just as it has ushered in the end of official secrets. Any whistle-blowing idealist or malcontent can download a thousand state secrets in seconds, just as credit card companies, phone companies, Internet sites and security cameras daily harvest data about our lives – some, if not all, of that information sold or shared for commercial purposes. Every day, diplomats blush to have their unedited, private remarks and reports published to the world.
Diplomats are the mouthpieces of governments, which also like to keep secrets – doubly secretive as such, for diplomats renounce the expression of personal views, just as they tend to keep their country’s true intentions tight in their hearts. Thus, diplomats always bear the mark of Cain – the sign of untruthfulness; an unsavouriness, as it were, for their professional hypocrisy.
Years ago when I had my radio show (The Book Show at WAMC, the public radio station in Albany, NY,–the show still persists under different management) I interviewed William Gass about his amazing novel The Tunnel. Usually I interviewed authors by phone, but Gass was in town for a reading and so we met in the studio. I had always admired Gass, who seemed to have learned his moves at the feet of Gertrude Stein but then vaulted himself into a whole other planetary system. His essay “On Being Blue” is a classic, the place I learned about image patterning and thematic forcing (that essay and Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye). But I brought a baseball bat and placed it on the console between us and started the interview by suggesting he would probably want to hit me with it after I asked him a few questions. Critics were up and down about The Tunnel. Some, whom I would now describe as Tea Party Lit Crits, even went so far as to claim it wasn’t a novel at all. These were the kind of critics who only allow novels firmly in the tradition of the bourgeois epic starting with Defoe. (Sadly this is also the tradition out of which most creative writing students think they descend.) But there is a Bigger World out there, and this is a lovely reminder of the shapeliness of complexity (complexity being a whole other value system lost on conservatives of all kinds). Read this piece and think about structure, form, elaboration and the spirit of play—what should be at the heart of all great writing. Needless to say that bat was handy as a talking point, and Gass and I had a great conversation (which you can no longer hear because of copyright squabbles–although I have a tape). You can, however, read an interview with Gass at The Believer and at the Paris Review. Or read Gass’s introduction the Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy–for what he says about Burton’s sentences.
Thanks to Brad Green for sending me this link.
dg
How to Design a Lump of Darkness
William H. Gass has long been interested in design, particularly in the marriage of language and art. In his experimental 1968 novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, Gass used images and an array of fonts, colors, and symbols to suggest a text as female body below its male reader, the language the love being made. The author has admitted that some of these visual efforts were more conceptually interesting than successful, and at least one of his reasons why—”I was trying to find a spatial coordinate to go with the music”—is tellingly unhelpful. Gass’s interest in the visual arts would continue for decades, through his own photography, the Dual Muse exhibition and conference his International Writers Center put on in 1997 (painters writing; writers painting), and projects relating to what he calls “the architecture of the sentence.”
Thus it’s clear, reading this previously unpublished “Designing The Tunnel” document, that we’re hearing from a writer who cares deeply about the look of a book. “I regard these instructions and the general layout of the text only as indications of my intentions,” Gass began, welcoming the suggestions of a “sympathetic designer” who might take him closer to his goal. That said, he doesn’t sound like an author uncertain of what he wants. Having requested that the book be bound in rough black cloth, with a spine like Viking Press’s edition of Finnegans Wake, Gass stated that the reader “should be holding a heavy[,] really richly textured lump of darkness.” The cover should not have the author’s name. “Why not put the author’s name on the book? Because it is Kohler’s book. Because, in a sense, it is not a book.” Gass sounds like an art-class enthusiast describing his hopes for typography—”I would love it if every line looked like a length of barbed wire”—as well as the treatment of Kohler’s doodles, which might, if successful, bring to mind Hitler’s architectural sketches of camps. “I want something at once naive,” Gass instructed, “a little charming, and a lot unsettling.”
via Basking in Hell: Returning to William H. Gass’s The Tunnel | Quarterly Conversation.
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Here’s the opening of a new Douglas Glover short story, just published in Descant’s amazing 40th anniversary issue entitled Possible Worlds. It’s a fabulous issue, contains work by Steven Heighton (well known to NC readers), Nancy Huston, Josef Skvorecky, Alberto Manguel and Susan Swan among many other notables. Like all dg’s stories this one is autobiographical, nearly a memoir, exposes sidelights of his family life hitherto unrevealed to the reading public. Buy the magazine and read the tawdry remainder.
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The photo was taken just before all hell broke loose. Uncle Boris, always the clown, perches on a tree branch above the family group, making a mockery of the occasion. Jannik, the wastrel, smiles inscrutably. Bjorn, the straight arrow, looks like a man with all the troubles of the world on his shoulders, but he works in a bank in town and can afford a gold watch and fob. His eyes are closed. Gurn, the insane one, his mouth twisted from a horse kick, seems merely confused, innocent, and anxious. And Lisel, the compulsive smoker and Bible reader, has momentarily suppressed her persistent and fatal cough. The three young ones huddle with Ma and Pa: Trig, later executed for murder, only six in the photo and dressed like a girl; Grete who became a great lover; and little Nikolai, the math genius, eight months old. Bjorn’s wife Olga, plain as a pine plank but seething with desire, leans against the tree trunk next to Jannik. Aunt Doreen, flighty, excitable, and dim, stares at the camera warily. Daphne, the family slut, has her hands in her skirt pockets and her head tilted to one side.
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Here is Court Merrigan channeling Ecclesiastes on the subject of books and our common Fate, a stern reminder.
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When I moved my family back to the US from Thailand in 2009, I left two bookcases worth of books stranded in the tropics. Last month we went back. The two years have not been kind.
Here is a six-year-old copy of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men:
This paperback is being eaten alive by some orange tropical mold.
In my twenties (in the Precambrian era, sometime in the last century), Hemingway was one of my idols. In 1968 I spent the summer in Freiburg in the Black Forest training with the great German running coach Waldemar Gerschler. I ran three times a day beginning with a morning amble along the Driesam which flowed in front of the sports guest house where I lived. Between workouts I’d go to the American Library in town and read, mostly Hemingway. One day I stayed in my room and wrote a story called “Hail” about a storm that had destroyed the entire crop of tobacco on our southern Ontario farm. I was 19. Five years later I found that story and typed it up and sent it to the venerable Canadian literary magazine The Tamarack Review and got it published (this writing thing was easy, I thought). The next story I published was also a Hemingway pastiche, consciously begun with “Three Day Blow” in mind. In my story “The Mad River” I crafted the grammar of my action sequences on Hemingway’s participial phrases in “Downhill Snow.” Now I can barely read his stories; they seem mannered, sentimental and precious. But it was a great friendship while it lasted.
This article in The Independent is a fair rehearsal of the two-Hemingway theory and the multiply-determined (over-determined) suicide. But it leaves out one piece of the puzzle. Hemingway was being treated from time to time at the Mayo Clinic, and the story is that he was being given new drugs for depression, the sort that, as an unintentional side-effect (these were the early days of such medications) sometimes caused people to get even more depressed and kill themselves. I think I have seen this written about, but I heard it first hand from a girlfriend whose father had been a doctor at the Mayo Clinic at the time. She even remembered looking out her window and seeing Hemingway who took walks by their house for exercise. Of course, the drugs would not have caused his suicide, which was, as I say, already over-determined. But it’s an interesting sidelight.
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Fifty years ago, in the early hours of Sunday 2 July, 1961, Ernest Hemingway, America’s most celebrated writer and a titan of 20th-century letters, awoke in his house in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, rose from his bed, taking care not to wake his wife Mary, unlocked the door of the storage room where he kept his firearms, and selected a double-barrelled shotgun with which he liked to shoot pigeons. He took it to the front of the house and, in the foyer, put the twin barrels against his forehead, reached down, pushed his thumb against the trigger and blew his brains out.