‘Detect-Identify-Engage-Disengage-Destroy’ (DIED2), or What I am Reading this Morning

Sep 292010
 

Air combat is a complex mix of art, science and engineering. Aircraft performance, weapons performance, networked sensors and pilot skill all contribute to the final Loss Exchange Ratio (LER). The only simplification is that aircraft approach, engage in combat and the survivors depart. This activity can be examined in a ‘kill-chain’ with the following stages: ‘Detect-Identify-Engage-Disengage-Destroy’ (DIED2).

via How? The Deadly Question for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Some possible new sentences:

“After each date, Norbert rushed to his computer to calculate his Loss Exchange Ratio (LER).”

“Life is one long kill-chain, Norbert thought.”

“Polyamorous Norbert approached love like a heat-seeking missile. For each new woman, his only thought was: Detect-Identify-Engage-Disengage-Destroy.”

dg

From Julius Caesar’s The Gallic Wars—translated by Jacob Glover

Sep 282010
 

Here is Jacob’s translation of a passage from Caesar’s The Gallic Wars. Caesar is exposed as possibly a competent general and politician but a total loss in the area of animal identification. I missed this passage when we were reading Latin in high school (and it didn’t make it into the much more interesting Classic Comics version either).

dg




From Julius Caesar’s The Gallic Wars

Translated by Jacob Glover

 

Sunt item quae apellantur alces. Harum est consimilis capris figura et varietas pellium, sed magnitudine paulo antecedent mutilaeque sunt cornibus et crura sine nodis articulisque habent; neque quietis causa procumbunt neque, si quo afflictae casu conciderunt, erigere sese aut sublevare possunt. His sunt arbores pro cubilibus ; ad eas se applicant atque ita paulum modo reclinate quietem capiunt. Quarum ex vestigiis cum est animadversum a venatoribus quo se recipere consuerint, omnes eo loco aut a radicibus subruunt aut accidunt arbores, tantum ut summa species earum stantium reliquantur. Huc cum se consuetudine reclinaverunt, infirmas arbores pondere affligunt atque una ipsae concidunt.

—Excerpta e Commentariis C. Iulii Caesaris de Bello Gallico (VI.25-28)

There are also those which are called elk, the shape of which resembles a goat and whose coat varies in color. Their size somewhat surpasses [the animals mentioned earlier on in the passage], their horns are chopped off, and they have legs without joints–so neither can they lie down for the sake of a rest, and if, by unfortunate happenstance, they are caused to fall over, the poor jointless elk are unable to stand up. The trees are their beds, onto which they lean themselves, and in this reclining position they seek quiescence. When a hunter comes upon the trail of these creatures, he makes it a practice to take all of the trees in the area and either uproot them or cut them just enough so that they are left standing. When the elk lean, out of habit, against the unstable trees, the weight of the elk knocks over the tree which, in due course, kills the elk.

—Excerpt from Julius Caesar’s Commentary on The Gallic Wars, translated by Jacob Glover

Packet Fever

Sep 242010
 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMy3AbpkYvw]

I lock the doors–turn out the lights–set the dog on the FedEx man–the mail spills out of the box unopened–still and relentlessly the packets arrive–I dream of escape (motorcycles, the road)–I kick the dog–I kick Jonah–I watch endless episodes of House–I think I’m ill–I go to Best Buy and look at large screen TVs–I eat ice cream–I start drinking at 10 a.m.–

A monk once said to Abba Philemon:
I am very conscious of how my mind
constantly wanders all over the place,
drifting after things that are no good for it.
What can I do, father, to be delivered?
Abba Philemon hesitated and then replied:
This is a remnant of the obsessions your external life inflicts on you.
It still troubles you because you have not yet
reached the heights of perfect longing for God.
The longing for the experience of God
has not yet fallen on you like fire.

—Abba Philemon. The Discourse. from Philokalia (adapted from the John Anthony McGuckin translation)

Half A Life by Former dg Student Darin Strauss, Interview – The Daily Beast

Sep 202010
 

A former student of mine (from the days when I used to race home from the Vermont College summer residency and teach novel-writing for a month at the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute at Skidmore College), Darin Strauss, has a new and rather startling memoir just coming out.

Half A Life by Darin Strauss, Interview – The Daily Beast.

I have linked elsewhere to his little essay on my novel structure class.

dg

“…novels that feature a woman having sex with a bear…”

Sep 162010
 

bear

DG is being talked about again! This time for his apparent predilection for writing about weird sex (a Canadian thing, according to the author, Jeet Heer, who is, by the way, an otherwise estimable journalist), especially with large, hairy omnivores. DG has gone from being famous for being unknown to transforming bestiality into art. He thinks: Has anyone actually read the book? No one has sex with an animal in his novel! The heroine turns into a bear and grows extra sets of nipples, but she only has sex with humans. (Of course, this will no doubt disappoint many NC readers, a rowdy crowd, usually up for that sort of thing.)

As Katherine Monk points out in her book Weird Sex & Snowshoes, Canadian filmmakers are notable for their interest in outré forms of passion. Think of the acrobatic sexual positions displayed in the movies of Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, and Denys Arcand.

I’m wondering whether a similar fixation on erotic outrageousness isn’t also a running theme in Canadian literature: after all, the Governor General’s Award has twice been given to novels that feature a woman having sex with a bear (Marian Engel’s Bear and Douglas Glover’s Elle). [My emphasis.]

In many ways, bears make a natural sex symbol. With their hairiness, burliness, and wary aggression, bears embody a certain ideal of rugged Northern masculinity (notably among a subset of husky gay men). The image of ursine/human mating is redolent of both folklore (Beauty and the Beast) and mythology (the many occasions when Zeus took an animal guise in order to seduce a nubile maiden).

via “Sex, Prose, and the Veggie Aisle” by Jeet Heer | The Walrus Blog.

Okay, the last paragraph is interesting. Suddenly, bears come into focus for dg as attractive, sexual beings. He can see a canoe trip novel, something in Algonquin Park, a hunky male human of uncertain sexual orientation falls for a gay bear. All sorts of hanky panky ensues, while canoe-loads of campers look on in amazement.

Joking aside, you really ought to look at Marian Engel’s novel Bear, possibly the best book ever written about a woman having an affair with a bear.

dg

“Hasbrouck and the Rose,” a Poem to Meditate Upon

Sep 162010
 

Hasbrouck and the Rose

Hasbrouck was there and so were Bill
And Smollet Smith the poet, and Ames was there.
After his thirteenth drink, the burning Smith,
Raising his fourteenth trembling in the air,
Said, ‘Drink with me, Bill, drink up to the Rose.’
But Hasbrouck laughed like old men in a myth,
Inquiring, ‘Smollet, are you drunk? What rose?’
And Smollet said, ‘I drunk? It may be so;
Which comes from brooding on the flower, the flower
I mean toward which mad hour by hour
I travel brokenly; and I shall know,
With Hermes and the alchemists—but, hell,
What use is it talking that way to you?
Hard-boiled, unbroken egg, what can you care
For the enfolded passion of the Rose?’
Then Hasbrouck’s voice rang like an icy bell:
‘Arcane romantic flower, meaning what?
Do you know what it meant? Do I?
We do not know.
Unfolding pungent Rose, the glowing bath
Of ecstasy and clear forgetfulness;
Closing and secret bud one might achieve
By long debauchery—
Except that I have eaten it, and so
There is no call for further lunacy.
In Springfield, Massachusetts, I devoured
The mystic, the improbable, the Rose.
For two nights and a day, rose and rosette
And petal after petal and the heart,
I had my banquet by the beams
Of four electric stars which shone
Weakly into my room, for there,
Drowning their light and gleaming at my side,
Was the incarnate star
Whose body bore the stigma of the Rose.
And that is all I know about the flower;
I have eaten it—it has disappeared.
There is no Rose.’

Young Smollet Smith let fall his glass; he said,
‘O Jesus, Hasbrouck, am I drunk or dead?’

By Phelps Putnam, from The Oxford Book of American Verse, Oxford University Press, New York (third printing, 1952).

DG found this poem, one of his favourites, at a lovely blog site called Recently Banned Literature by William Michaelian.

Cavalier Literary Couture | Online | Haikus

Sep 152010
 

FYI here are those Christopher Willard bawdy haikus Julie Marden mentioned in her introduction to her co-author in the Novel-in-a-Box contest. (Weirdly enough, I tried to post this link on the NC Facebook page and it was rejected or turned down or whatever because some Facebook users had reported it as offensive–to me that sounds like a recommendation. Okay, a third attempt proved successful. Must have been a glitch and not evidence of narrow mindedness. Ah, the life of an NC editor.)

dg

Cavalier Literary Couture | Online | Haikus.

Some advice

Sep 092010
 

If you find your intellect wanders,
then reading, night-time vigils, and prayer will bring it to stillness.
Fasting, hard manual work, and quiet solitude calm the fires of desire.
To calm your restlessness, sit and recite the book of psalms,
and have pity and compassion on all those around you.
If you do excessive and inappropriate exercises
it will all come to grief very quickly,
and this will cause you more harm than good.


— Evagrios of Pontus, Texts on Watchfulness, found in The Book of Mystical Chapters, translated & introduced by John Anthony McGuckin



Or think about this: Lukacs on form and soul

Sep 072010
 

Man’s form, whether as individual or as species, is the tragic defiance of which he is author and victim. Lucifer, Prometheus, Faust, the main heroes.

This is a quote from Elfie Raymond’s essay on Georg Lukacs.

See also this:

And why form at all? Why order over anarchy? Because without his soul man is not man; and the soul is but the power which must realize itself in one’s lifetime to create forms from and for life. What else does it mean when Aristotle says that the soul is man’s formal cause but that we must give form to ourselves, individually and collectively? And form is achieved when the flux is arrested, and experience is distilled into its lasting significance.

dg

Then think about this: Keats on Negative Capability

Sep 072010
 

This is an excerpt from Keats’ letter (Dec 21, 1817) to his brothers:

I spent Friday evening with Wells, and went next morning to see Death on the Pale Horse. It is a wonderful picture, when West’s age is considered; But there is nothing to be intense upon; no woman one feels mad to kiss, no face swelling into reality-The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth. Examine ‘King Lear’, and you will find this exemplified throughout; but in this picture we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness-The picture is larger than ‘Christ rejected’.

I dined with Haydon the Sunday after you left, and bad a very pleasant day, I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith, and met his two Brothers, with Hill and King ston, and one Du Bois. They only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment-These men say things which make one start, without making one feel; they are all alike; their manners are alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their eating and drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter-They talked of Kean and his low company -Would I were with that Company instead of yours, said I to mvself! I know such like acquaintance will never do for me and yet I am going to Reynolds on Wednesday. Brown and Dilke walked with me and back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition, with Dilke on various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

dg

Think about this: The Not-Not Manifesto

Sep 072010
 

Some years ago I noticed, in a New York Times review of Jonathan D. Spence’s book  The Search for Modern China, a reference to the Not-Not Manifesto published in Chengdu, Sichuan, on May 4, 1986.

Here is a quotation Spence uses in his book.

Not-Not:  a blanket term covering the object, form, contents, methodology, process, way and result of the principles of Pre-Cultural Thought. It is also the description of the primordial mien of the universe. Not-Not is not “no.” After deconstructing the relationship between man and objects to their precultural state, there is nothing in this universe that is not Not-Not. Not-Not is not the negation of anything. It is only an expression of itself. Not-Not is aware that liberation exists in the indefinite.

And here is a portion of the original manifesto translated by Michael M. Day in his book China’s Second World of Poetry.

On the ruins of ancient Rome, those big, lofty stone pillars: they have always been alive, they have always been thinking – this is told us by our entirely wide open intuition – only if we are incapable of entirely benumbing ourselves, we then have no way of not deeply believing: they really are alive, without doubt they have continuously been thinking, always thinking. Up to this day, the sole difficulty has been that we have been unable to find any form of cultural artifice to “prove” whether they ultimately live in the fashion of an “animal,” or in that of a “plant.” Our present culture has been incapable of embracing them, this wondrous phenomenon of life. We also have no ready way of saying what manner of thought they ultimately follow, and what they ultimately are thinking.

So — Today we declare:

First, they live in a not-not fashion;

Second, they are not-not life;

Third, they make us feel not-not;

Fourth, they make us become not-not;

Fifth, we are not-not.

dg

From Primitive Parts, A Highly Evolved Human Brain : NPR

Aug 312010
 

I can’t resist another article on brain development complete with multi-colour 3D MRI illustrations and a diagram with pointers to things like “The Mouse Brain” and “The Reptile Brain.”

From Primitive Parts, A Highly Evolved Human Brain : NPR.

(DG is drawn to research like this because it helps him understand himself. For so long, so much of what he thought of as thought was really just an argument between his reptile brain and his mouse brain. This also helps explain his growing tendency to speak of himself in both the third and first person.)

This connects with my earlier post on brain evolution and rats and human nature.

dg

Show Me The Money: What Writers Earn

Aug 252010
 

My Future Employer?

Philip Graham sent a link to this today.  I know that DG has almost cracked the top 10 writers’ list, but for those of us still hoping to earn a living, here are some sobering numbers.  This link gets very specific about how much authors can expect to make.  I’d be curious if the more seasoned NC contributors and guests find this accurate.

That being said, Talisker is looking for a new U.S. importer.  Apparently they’ve had an up-tick in anticipated sales.

-Richard Farrell

In the suburbs of oblivion

Aug 252010
 

DG enjoys the way other people like to make up sound-bite narratives about his life and then publish them in large newspapers. This particular angle is poignant. The lonely hero, finding his path solo, forgotten, unnoticed, friendless, a man without a country, stranger, outsider, off the grid (completely–he doesn’t even know what the grid is), a craggy, moss-eaten hermit dwelling in the barren lands, the old bull moose with spider webs in his antlers, the Fisher King, etc. But, you know, you read this stuff (and when Elle came out what a terrific writer I am, etc. etc.) and it bears so little on your real life that you have the distinct impression that there is another DG, a double, call him DG2, out there, a composite of readers’ and reviewers’ imagined DGs, just as Don Quixote was haunted by a second fictional Don Quixote who was wandering around Spain telling everyone he was the real Don Quixote. Luckily, I kind of like DG2. We met once in Montreal at the Old Bagel Factory and walked down the Main to The Shed and had a drink and talked about old times (his old times were much more scandalous than mine, of course–once in a while we happened upon a memory we had in common, not too often, and, yes, he is better looking than I am, and maybe 10 years younger). Then we parted company and I drove back to Oblivion where the blue dog and Hobbes had completely forgotten me, so I felt at home.

Flying Under the Radar: 10 Underrated Canadian Authors | Afterword | National Post.

Memo from the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion

Aug 252010
 

Shelf Monkey: Monkey droppings – Precious by Douglas Glover – “I was left hanging, a dumb guy in the snow…mouth open and a one-way ticket to Nowhere.”.

dg

p.s. Why “monkey droppings?” I don’t know! Something Freudian–Freud has that idea of the mystic writing pad where, I guess, the mind writes and erases, leaving traces, which, sort of, are like droppings. Writing=droppings. The writer, Corey Redekop, is a shrewd judge of literature though, and also an estimable prize-winning novelist. Shelf Monkey is the title of his first novel.

Literary Silences

Aug 242010
 

But Bolaño was deeply interested in writers who chose not to produce or publish, as well as writers who were prematurely silenced. In an interview from 2005 in the Spanish literary journal Turia, Bolaño declared that “There are literary silences.” And he connected a number of his favorite authors to this notion.

Read the rest in MobyLives

What Bolaño Read: The literature of silence

By Tom McCartan

dg

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