The Remix the Novel Has Been Crying Out For

Aug 242010
 

from Robert Collins, “The Novel: Rewound and Remixed,” The Sunday Times 4 July 2010

Less than a century ago, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf took the 19th-century realist novel and forged it into the blinding experimental thunderbolt of high modernism. Ninety years later, with more novels being published than ever, and most of them uniformly aiming for the same realist goal, it’s as if Ulysses, Finnegans Wake and Mrs Dalloway had never happened. Where did the zeal for unfettered innovation go? Even in the brilliantly able hands of David Mitchell, Zadie Smith or Ian McEwan, the novel has regressed almost completely to its realist origins. With commercial expectations in publishing more desperate and unforgiving than ever, the room for experimentation has shrunk to virtually nil.

A recent book, Reality Hunger, by the American author David Shields, has generated febrile literary chatter about the novel’s future. Shields argues that the form, tied to phoney invention and creaky artifice, is no longer a viable medium for the tastes of the hyperconnected age, with its urge towards hybridisation and cross-pollination. Nonfiction — memoir, the lyric essay, rap, all freed from fiction’s dusty strictures — is where it’s at.

Read the rest at Surplus Matter here.

dg

News from the Dark Side, the Editor’s Perspective

Aug 212010
 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6sj89xgnl4&feature=related]

Okay, this topic evolves out of the comments attached to the “What I think” post below. Court and Gary and others are frustrated with the current literary scene, finding it difficult to get a toehold in terms of publication. The idea here is to try to establish a forum for NC readers and lurkers and the editors we have in the community. Vivian Dorsel is the publisher of upstreet. Robin Oliveira is the fiction editor (hopefully she can join in). I edited fiction at The Iowa Review during my stint at the Writers’ Workshop. I edited Best Canadian Stories for over a decade. I’ve judged innumerable contests. We can start here.

This is me talking from my experience as an editor, not as a writer or a teacher. Years ago, when I was at The Iowa Review, I easily received 50-70 stories a week, from writers like Joyce Carol Oates down to complete neophytes. The magazine then published four times a year, with 4-6 slots for short stories, at most 24 stories could find a place in a year (so, yes, obviously LENGTH makes a difference, a fact of life and economics). I suspect the odds are a lot worse now with the proliferation of writing programs. Typical for editors at this level, I was not paid well (the English Department gave me a research assistantship) and it was a part-time job. Most literary magazine editors and readers make nothing. With those kinds of odds you can afford to have a hair trigger rejection finger. You read so many awful or mediocre manuscripts (let’s be honest here) that it gets easy to say no to perhaps 80% of those 50 or more stories a week. Most of those stories you don’t even read past the second page. A cliché, a lame sentence, or a grammatical error automatically knocks them out. (Also sending clips and a c.v. along with that 3-page cover letter guarantees rejection—sure signs of an amateur.) It’s a simple as that. Ask yourselves a) How perfect is my first page? b) Is there enough panache and intelligence evidenced in my first two pages to make me stand out from the herd? After the first 80% of the stories (or essays or poems—it’s the same) get turned down, the work begins. The next 19% are the stories you come to loathe because they are often earnest and competent and second-rate to the core. These stories have plots that start up pretty decently and characters that move through their paces the way they should and they express the regular story-like emotions. But they are ordinary. They have no panache, no real surprises, no blazing excitement. Often you have to read right to the end of these stories because, you know, you’re rooting for the author, hoping against hope that he or she will pull off the terrific ending or suddenly bring a character to life. Sad truth is they never do. And the other sad truth is that there will be enough stories with panache, surprise, intelligence, and delightful linguistic turns, etc. that you can safely reject this 19% as well. The final, final sad truth is that even with that 1% of stories left to read, you know you’ll have a hard time filling the magazine slots with stories you really think are first class, superlative, all the way through—they are so rare.

There really is a perspective trick here. From the writer’s point of view, here is a story he has rewritten 20 times over three months, polished and perfected, and he looks out at the current scene and sees all the schlock that gets published here and there, and he thinks, My God, I am going to save the publishing world with this story! Editors are going to greet me as the saviour! And then that envelope or digital submission shows up at the editor’s desk along with 200 other equally earnest and brilliant (from their author’s perspective) submissions (and there will be MORE tomorrow!). Think of it. Two hundred Messiahs a day! But from the editor’s point of view it’s a triage situation, wave after wave of awful to pretty good stories, all looking about the same after a few months on the job, most of them DOA.

This shouldn’t discourage anyone, except those who want an excuse. I don’t think it’s ever been different. To stand out for an editor you have to be very, very good. And not just very good in spots—all the way through the text. That’s the key. Competent and nice aren’t enough. Tryers go to the end of the line. Stories need to ring with truth, linguistic pizzazz, mystery, life, passion and excitement from the first word. This isn’t to say that there aren’t bad editors, sycophants, people led by fads, provincials, people driven only by marketing models and bottom lines. And lots of schlock gets published—although that’s mainly because certain kinds of schlock actually sell well to an undereducated market that likes schlock (yes, honestly). And, yes, editors often lean toward established names, partly because those established names have figured out how to separate themselves from the herd (not just because names sell). And some magazines and editors have preferences in terms of style (e.g. avant garde or conventional realism)—we all have different tastes. But most editors are trying to fill their magazines with good exciting writing. It’s not a conspiracy.

But it is awfully hard to get published, to get started, and even to keep getting published over a lifetime. The art is difficult and long to learn, and the competition is brutal. And there certainly have been cases when editors have missed a work of genius (scary thought). And, yes, if your work is eccentric, or out of the mainstream in some way, editors will have an even harder time deciding if you are really good or not. And there certainly are cultural troughs and bents that militate against certain kinds of art (classicism yields to decadence and vice versa over time). All this comes and goes, lean times and fat (pretty lean right now). The main thing is to learn to write well and drive yourself with a realistic sense of how good your work has to be to attract an editor’s attention. The rest is in the hands of the gods.

dg

A Sentimental Education

Aug 202010
 

DG and the blue dog heading into the woods together

Strange the things that educate our emotional responses to life. I just finished a draft of the story called “Uncle Boris up in a Tree.” One of the characters, Bjorn, the straight arrow, buys a bright yellow Land Rover. The yellow Land Rover is, for me, a dream image, a symbol. But the “Land Rover” part doesn’t seem right. I think and think. I realize I meant it to be a yellow Rolls Royce. Rolls Royce seems right. And later I remember that when I was a kid I loved that movie The Yellow Rolls Royce, that for years I played the soundtrack over and over. The Yellow Rolls Royce is an unusual movie. It’s a triptych,  three different love stories connected only by the object, the image, the yellow Rolls Royce. I think the dramatist Terence Rattigan wrote the script. Very romantic, sentimental, sad. So then I realize that this movie, and the emotional education I derived from it, stands unconsciously behind the story. The yellow Land Rover is the clue. And I think there is a certain attitude to life and love that I try to get at in the story that comes from the feelings I got from that movie and the music, when I was a kid (and maybe I haven’t grown up so much).

Here are two of the songs from the soundtrack. “Forget Domani” and “Now and Then” (this one still shakes me). I think Riz Ortolani wrote the music. Katyna Ranieri sings.

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

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-7iGgDvj1E&feature=related]

dg

Library in a Canoe

Aug 182010
 

Jonah, The Scarlet Letter, notebook, and coffee inside the tent one morning

What we read on the EPE (Epic Canoe Event): Jacob reread Dante’s Inferno, Jonah read The Scarlet Letter, dg brought along Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary, Volume One. Jonah finished The Scarlet Letter early which was a problem (dg had, perhaps too hastily, ordered him to leave behind the Richard Dawkins hardcover he had wanted to bring). But then one lovely night dg got to listen to Jacob reading three cantos of The Inferno out loud by flashlight to his brother (with glosses and explanations). Throughout the trip there was much animated campfire discussion of The Scarlet Letter as Jonah waded through: the frequency of the word “bosom,” Hester’s personality, the demonic epithets applied to little Pearl, the peculiar role of Chillingworth (the “black” man, healer, and a man who consorted with Indians), and the nature of Dimmesdale’s wound.

dg

What I Think: A Credo

Aug 182010
 

In regard to various and sundry culture critiques animadverted within the NC garden walls (this little Eden, refuge from the bad world), it might be helpful to enunciate a positive credo.

A person writes because, through writing, he comes to know himself and the world better. A person may write for money or fame or to achieve social position by posing as a writer, but these are secondary and, to some extent, inauthentic motives that often result in inauthentic and second-rate writing. Inauthentic motives result in second-rate writing because they interpose someone else’s point of view between the writer and the work. The writer writes to an audience conceived loosely as a market. He writes to formula instead of form—and don’t be fooled: there are some very slick and intelligent-seeming formulas out there. Many people who want to be writers do not know themselves well enough to be able to sort out their motives. Again, don’t kid yourselves: most of what gets published is second-rate recyclable literature at best. (Why this would come as a surprise, or even be noteworthy to anyone in his right mind I have no idea.) If you write to know yourself and the world better, as a means of becoming a better version of yourself in your writing, then certain questions need to be answered in the writing. Who are you? What does it mean to be a person? How can a person relate to other persons? What is real and how do you know the thing you think is real is real? What do you want? How do you differentiate, evade, quell, and dismiss all the false demands of fad, formula, packaging, expectation, received opinion, ideology, and commerce to achieve your own unique answers? How do you translate the answers into words on the page? And, perhaps most importantly, how can you make this fun? If you use your writing as a mode of inquiry, if your plots are dramatic collisions between self and other or between self and the real (always with the preceding questions in mind), and if you are brutally honest with yourself and your characters, then you have a shot at writing well.

dg

The Possum: Essay — Douglas Glover @ The New Quarterly

Aug 162010
 

John Brock Here are the first few lines of a new essay “The Possum,” about dg’s great-grandfather, just published in The New Quarterly.

My great-grandfather John Brock killed himself with an overdose of laudanum in St. Williams on the North Shore of Lake Erie in March, 1914, the day before he was to appear in court to answer a charge of alienation of affection and criminal conversation. This was in an era when marital rights yet bore the flavour of property rights. Alienation of affection and criminal conversation referred to actions that deprived someone of his spousal relationship. In practice, the phrases meant anything from merely counseling a wife to leave her husband to seduction and adultery.

Today St. Williams is a sleepy hamlet on a sand and clay bluff overlooking the Inner Bay between Turkey Point to the east and Long Point to west, a beautiful and mysterious place, in summer especially when the lake surges languidly under the harsh sunlight and the trees on the point shimmer like a mirage along the horizon. In the early 1900s, lotus beds choked the shoreline and the bluffs were scrubby and bare except where the remains of the great timber flumes swooped down to the beach. For years, the McCalls (my mother’s family) had been engaged in lumbering, furniture making, boat building and general retail but mostly, as my mother’s father once observed, in shipping all the forest roundabout across the lake to Cleveland and Buffalo.

In 1914, the farms around St. Williams were turning to blow sand and dunes, and the McCalls turned necessity into virtue by lobbying the provincial government to buy their land and open a reforestry station to help put the trees back. The family businesses had been in gradual decline since the depression of 1873-78; we were the early victims of what is now called globalization, in this case the first wave of corporate bloat and centralization that coincided with the late Victorian era. When the railway finally extended a tentacle through St. Williams in the late 1880s, instead of inspiring a boom, it sucked all the money out of the village overnight. But in 1914 the family still thought a lot of itself, and those homes, with ivy crawling up their sweeping verandahs, stood with immaculate hauteur against the internal erosion of the economy and ecological ruin.

Buy the magazine and read the rest.

dg

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: Questions Game — Richard Hartshorn

Aug 052010
 

The following is a scene from Tom Stoppard’s film adaptation of his own play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.  The scene, which involves Gary Oldman (Rosencrantz) and Tim Roth (Guildenstern), illustrates some interesting things about language, specifically the game of Questions (has anyone ever played this?  I think it’s a good exercise for writers).  Note the specific “fouls” in the game and try to see if they apply to anything you’ve written lately.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maI53H4Zbrs&hl=en_US&fs=1]

Throughout the film, Rosencrantz is the man who sees everything and understands nothing. Making these “discoveries” in the game room, he believes he will simply be able to do it or make it work, as though he invented juggling and came up with the theory that two objects will fall at the same rate when dropped from the same height. But for anyone that has taken eighth grade science, we know that the feather is the one exception to the rule. Guildenstern, on the other hand, seems to be so wrapped up in his own ego that he thinks he understands everything.  (Just some observations.  I love this film.  The Questions game is what I really wanted to share).

RH

Adrift in the Interhuman

Jul 302010
 

I just had to write a tiny piece on what I am currently reading to go with a new essay of mine coming out in The New Quarterly. No reason not to share it here.

I’m reading Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary Volume One (1953-1956). Before that I read his memoir A Kind of Testament. Gombrowicz lived in Argentina starting just as the Second World War broke out, then eventually, in the 1960s, moved to France and married a French-Canadian woman and died soon after of asthma. In the diary, which isn’t really a diary–it was more like a blog, written regularly for publication in a Polish magazine, he’s funny, confessional, awkward, arrogant and amazingly smart. He compulsively turns and returns to various motifs: Poland and expatriates, Polish writers, the realm of the interhuman, and the deformation of form. The Polish material resonates in my mind because, of course, for various reasons having not much to do with choice–mostly circumstance–I live outside my country. Gombrowicz thinks this is okay. Being outside your country puts you at a distance from which you can see more clearly. Also, in the end, you realize your country is in you–this is where your art comes from. He’s also very good on the communal construction of the self in the interhuman. For centuries and right up to the Existentialists, we have too blithely taken the existence of an integral self for granted. But Existentialism is a reductio. At the moment of decision, self-creation, the self disappears (this is very clearly described in Camus’ novel The Stranger). Better, as Gombrowicz says, to accept that much of what we call a self is created through the desires of others and through communal forms and expectations. Only if we accept this do we have a chance to forge a new and firmer sense of self not based on blindness and denial. And finally Gombrowicz is a kind of formalist who makes himself as an artist (and a person–he liked to chase boys in Buenos Aires parks) by rejecting form (often in parody).

dg

Coming Soon: #4 of The Top 10 Things I Learned This Semester: (Invitation to a Re-shredding)

Jul 212010
 

“Go dig a hole, kids. Daddy needs a nap. I mean, to write. Daddy needs to write.”

I’m finding that being a “stay-at-home dad” considerably more difficult when my kids are actually at home.  Was this in the contract?  Did someone say something about kids?  Details, details.  I prefer the title, “Writer-in-Residence,” but my children don’t seem to grasp that this means I have to write in the residence.

“Daddy, why are you on the computer again?” they say.  I refer them to Numero Cinq, but for some odd reason, they prefer Nickjr.com.  Kids!

I’ve begun working on the next installment of my series (I use this term loosely), but at this pace, I will be lapped by the current students.  I’m sure the NC readership is waiting with bated breath for the next post.  Patience, I urge.  I’m also a bit worried that my generous NC grant will expire.  I wonder if the NC moderator would consider an extension of the monthly stipend (and, since we’re at it, an extension of the lease for the Benz…I swear the miles will come off if I drive it in reverse.)  More to follow…time to make oatmeal.

—Richard Farrell

A Canadian Moment

Jul 202010
 

Driving back and forth to Canada, knocking about the farm and Port Dover, listing to Fred Eaglesmith CDs—all this made me think of Stan Rogers who once wrote a song about the fish plant in Port Dover (now for sale again) called “Tiny Fish for Japan” and that reminded me of “Northwest Passage,” our favourite driving song for years. Even now the boys and I are apt to lapse into a chorus or two as the miles click by…

See also BBC piece on Sir John Franklin and the Northwest Passage here.

dg

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVY8LoM47xI]

Writers At Play — The Paris Review interview

Jul 142010
 

TPR: You’ve published many works of fiction and nonfiction. What we want to know is how a terrific writer like yourself spends his spare time. Reading great books? Memorizing hard words? At art museums? Playing chess?

DG: Jonah and I played nine holes of golf yesterday. We learned several important skill sets. 1) 4 balls are not enough. 2) Though I play hockey and baseball left-handed, I play golf right-handed. Thus we did not need 2 bags of clubs. 3) Do not play golf with the pencil stuck behind your ear. You will lose it and then you can only etch the score into the score card with the tip of a tee.

TPR: Fascinating. I imagine your golf skills are pretty high. What is your handicap?

DG: I have an artificial knee. (Next time we’re going to rent two of those golf cart thingies and race each other on the fairways.)

TPR: Ugh.

DG: Let me finish. Also I was handicapped by the large number of water hazards. I had to wade into one festering swamp up to my knees to retrieve a ball. Jonah thought this was funny. He took some very good video of one my best drives which ends with a large waterspout in the distance. Also, as mentioned above, we were handicapped by a shortage of balls. The last hole we started with only one ball between us which is pretty difficult. Jonah hit his tee shot and then ran over and marked his spot and threw the ball back to me and then I hit my tee shot and marked that and  threw the ball back to him. This makes golf an arduous and time-consuming sport.

TPR: Is there any similarity, in your mind, between golf and writing?

DG: Yes.

TPR: Could you expand on that?

DG: Yes.

TPR:  Now?

DG: In writing as in golf, I seem to hit my drives into the water traps or they end up on the wrong fairway or they get lost altogether. Also both writing and golf depress me.

TPR: We imagine that you thought about writing a lot as you played and that there was considerable intellectual byplay–witty remarks, etc.

DG: Jonah was very witty.  At one point, he observed that what consoled him through the ordeal was the thought that no matter how awful things got he’d still be able to beat Stephen Hawking.

TPR: Er, thank you. That will be quite enough.

DG: So when will this be published?

TPR: Never.

Shelagh Shapiro interviews dg

Jul 132010
 

VCFA graduate Shelagh Shapiro does a weekly radio literary interview show Write The Book in Burlington, VT. She interviewed dg during the residency and the podcast is available here. Check out her other podcasts as well.

I would write more about this, and will, but my current internet capabilities are very low.

dg

From The Robot Cafe

Jul 112010
 

The Robot Cafe, Port Dover, Ontario

DG writing from The Robot Cafe in Port Dover, Ontario, next door to the Hobo Java CD and guitar shop on Main Street. A live middleaged band playing mid-afternoon to an audience of three teenage girls (one dressed like a boy with a surfer haircut and a boy’s bathing suit, one pretty hefty in a zebra stripe dress) who between sets get up and sing “I’m A Little Teapot” into the microphone. Scifi movie posters on the walls. They Came from Outer Space. Tobor the Great. Girls in bikinis and tshirts walking in off the beach. This is Fred Eaglesmith‘s hometown. They are selling his CDs at the counter. Jonah is trying to repair a music website, but the wifi  is inadequate. We could have been watching the (yawn) World Cup. I imagine you can tell from this that dg won’t be posting much for a few days. Have fun on your own–don’t get into trouble without me. dg

Slovenia: East Montpelier? or What’s a 200M Sinkhole doing in Vermont?

Jul 082010
 

This isn’t Montpelier?

On Comings and Goings:

After 22 hours of flights from Trieste to Rome to Charlotte to San Diego, life has returned to some semblance of normal.   The Slovenian residency had much to offer: wine, travel, good food, wine, beautiful vistas across the Skocjan valley, trips to Italy, wine, Croatia,the amazing Soca valley in northern Slovenia, and more wine.  What the Slovenian residency lacked in intensity (Vermont has the lectures, readings, and workshops…we had those things, too, just not as many) it made up for in scenic and cultural beauty.  I returned energized and motivated to begin 4th semester.  Did I mention they had wine in Slovenia?

On Readings & Hooligans:

We had two student readings, the first at a restaurant in Betanjc, the little village just on the left side of the church in the above picture.  We read outside, in the dim light of dusk.  When it was my turn to read, a group of rowdy, drunken soccer fans descended on the table next to ours.  I read in darkness, holding a pen light over my story, and shouted for the entire 5 minute reading!   I think Uruguay won the match.  I also think no one heard my story, except for the word “blowjob”, which apparently was heard clearly across the entire restaurant.  I feel that such an experience can only help me for the upcoming graduation reading in Montpelier.

—Richard Farrell

The residency so far

Jul 042010
 

Memorial reading for Jack Myers last night. I spent 10 days with Jack, twice a year, for over a dozen years, but I didn’t know Jack as long as some faculty members (30-20 years), and Mark Cox was with him over the last days. It was lovely, sad, and poignant to be with his friends and hear his words and sit there leafing through my mind for my own memories. Among others: the Tang Night all-male faculty ritual Chinese buffet pig outs with Jack, Mark, Syd Lea, Walter Wetherell, Francois Camoin, and others; long evenings in Noble Hall dorm rooms with Jack and Mark sneaking cigars by the window and the vivid witty talk flowing; the night Jack talked about the Buddhist idea (I think I remember this right) of the little self that is the needy, compulsive, selfish side always tripping up the larger aspirations of the better self (I’ve thought about this a lot in life); the day he got me to start reading James Hillman, lending me his copy of one of the books; the crisp white shirts he often wore to readings; his scalpel like poems and pool-playing; and more. It was something, last night, hearing Jack’s poems and then Mark’s simple eloquent rehearsal of the last days of an old friend.

dg

Before/After History and the Novel: Essay — Douglas Glover

Jun 302010
 

Norfolk County Fair, 2008 (photo by dg)

Here’s the opening of a new essay on novels, history, historical novels, orality and literacy, truth, Dan Brown, and ghosts. It’s just been published Vivian Dorsel’s magazine upstreet #6.


dg

Before/After History and the Novel




1. Novels and History, an Exercise in Dialectics

The difference between written history and novels is contained in the difference between two theories of truth: truth in history is denotative or evidentiary while truth in novels is defined by coherence. It’s as simple as that. Yet they both rise from the same internal source in the mind, the story-making source, the imagination. This makes history and novels, at some level, teasingly similar. And then, of course, we do use that word “truth” in discussing novels in a loose and sloppy way that leads to all sorts of confusions. When we ask if a novel seems true, we often mean whether it sounds authentic, whether it’s plausible, whether the characters could have existed or events transpired. Sometimes “truth” in this context refers to emotional truth, an even more subjective truth than verisimilitude. As a novelist I have often found that what seems perfectly plausible to me in an emotional vein can be incredible to other people (readers).

But the fact remains, when you want to test the truth of an historical assertion, you have recourse ultimately to documentary or archaeological evidence, whereas, when you want to test the truth of a novelistic assertion you can only look at the text. It makes no sense to ask what Sancho Panza said or looked like outside Don Quixote, whereas you can test the claim that George Washington had false teeth or Sir John A Macdonald occasionally drank too much by examining documents from the period. This is the reason for a secondary difference between history and novels: historical explanations change when new evidence surfaces, whereas no fact in the world at large can force an author to rewrite a novel.

This is not to deny, of course, that there are sometimes criticisms of novels in terms of plausibility or truth, especially when it comes to historical novels. When you write an historical novel, you accept a certain contractual relationship with the reader in terms of verisimilitude, that quality of seeming to be real, which is one of the signal attributes of realistic fiction. But in fiction this contract can be fairly loose. When I wrote my novel Elle, it made sense to get the dates right and the proper sequences of events not to mention the correct king in France at the time. Readers accustomed to verisimilitude in novels are easily distracted by obvious mistakes of so-called historical fact. But a reader’s knowledge of any particular era is usually shallow, which leaves plenty of room for creative displacement without damaging superficial plausibility. For example, the relevant historical documents (themselves in doubt) say the woman I used as the basis for my protagonist in Elle remained on the island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence for two years and some months. But I ran out of dramatic possibilities for her after a year, so I sent her back to France early. Aesthetic considerations easily trumped historical accuracy, and no one noticed.

This is also not to say that occasionally these debates about the truth or historical accuracy of novels don’t sometimes erupt into frenzied public acrimony. These debates are irrelevant or relevant in a very interesting way. A case in point is the hysteria over Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. When the movie version of the novel was released, the Toronto Star ran a meta-commentary on the “flurry of analysis about the truth of the novel.” Among other debate armatures, the Star mentioned the Archbishop of Canterbury’s denunciation of the “lies” in the novel which might, he thought, lead Christians to doubt their faith.

One of the narrative premises on which the plot of The Da Vinci Code is based is the claim that Jesus was married and had a child and that child had descendants and so on and so on. This apparently contradicts the story in the Gospels which do not mention a wife or a child. We’re in Salman Rushdie territory here; The Da Vinci Code is a novelistic attack on the roots of Christianity. But no one in Europe or North America is going to issue a fatwa against Brown because, of course, we all know a novel is a novel and not a claim on truth. At bottom, we (except for fundamentalists and people who watch too much TV) all know that a novel is already a “lie” completely imagined for our entertainment.

Buy the magazine, and read the rest.

2010 © Douglas Glover

The residency so far

Jun 282010
 

The best thing that happened so far: 10 a.m. Faculty Meeting. Mary Ruefle sweeps up to me to say hello, sweeps me into a hug with one long arm and, with the other, presses a small book into my hand. She says, “I saw this at a tag sale and thought you should have it. It’s a little water stained. But I thought of you.” It’s a beautiful little soft cover booked printed in Mexico entitled The Wisdom of Don Quixote with lovely colour paintings scattered throughout and pages and pages of quotations from Cervantes. You can’t find it on the internet–at least I couldn’t. Selections by Ricardo Elizondo. Illustrations by Jack Unruh. Translation by Susan Moreira. Published by Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey. A splendid gift, terrific start to the residency.

dg

On love & books, a diary entry (undated, but long ago)

Jun 262010
 

Hermann Broch

We didn’t go hiking today. Weather too threatening. Try again tomorrow. I got my hair cut yesterday. Darcy, the woman who does it, just got engaged. She’s 31, Italian, big-hipped, kind of pretty face, likes to snowmobile, still lives with her parents. She got engaged to a 42-year-old builder in Ballston Spa. They’ve been going out for three years. They’re getting married May 11 next year. She said he asked her while they were on a bike ride and she cried all the way home and didn’t have tissues and got mascara all over her shirtsleeve. He said, “At least your nose doesn’t run when you cry.” I find all this strange and mysterious and fascinating. She seems so sensible and yet romantic and doomed. Last fall they went to San Francisco together for a vacation. At a restaurant, she got hit on by a woman. She got very flustered.

And I was thinking of the romantic intensity of that love Bronte was describing, where you sort of dissolve yourself in the desires of the other and she/he in you. Whatever that means. This is mixed up in my head with the Hermann Broch novel I’m reading [The Sleepwalkers]–the love in there is much more modern, strange–two unknowing and unknowable creatures thrashing together, drawn together, repelled, irritated, misunderstanding each other, thinking about killing one another and making love without words. Gorgeous and sad. And not at all like the perfect service of Rochester and Jane, though it’s interesting how Esch (one of the main characters) longs for that kind of love. When he offers it, his lover doesn’t understand what he’s saying and he gets angry and hits her, then they decide to get married. Jesus!

I went to Borders with the boys this afternoon after school because it was raining. And I got Jane Eyre and I guess from a quick glance that Rochester’s name is Edward. I was sitting there reading at the end of the book, the last couple of pages, where Edward goes blind and she has to read for him and tell him what everything looks like. “Never did I weary of reading to him; never did I weary of conducting him where he wished to go; of doing for him what he wished to be done. And there was pleasure in these services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad–because he claimed these services without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly that he knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance; he felt I loved him so fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes.” I had forgotten this, how strong it is.

Oddly, the very last paragraph of the book quotes the same lines from the Book of Revelations that I use in my story “Bad News of the Heart.”

—dg

Some suggested reading/watching

Jun 262010
 

“The Mind of Alice Munro,” excerpt from a new essay by dg

Jun 212010
 

This is the opening of an essay on Alice Munro just published in CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries 79, in a special Short Story Issue to coincide with the biennial convention of the Society for the Study of the Short Story in English, currently taking place in Toronto.

The Mind of Alice Munro

by Douglas Glover

 

Alice Munro’s constant concern is to correct the reader, to undercut and complicate her text until all easy answers are exhausted and an unnerving richness of life stands revealed in the particular, secret experiences of her characters. She does this in two ways. First, she has a sly capacity for filling her stories with sex, thwarted loves, betrayal and violence while self-presenting (somehow, in the prose) as a middle-aged Everywoman with only the faintest hint of a salacious gleam in her eye. And second, she deploys an amazing number of intricately interconnected literary devices that ironize and relativize meanings while conversely revealing (unveiling as in “apocalypse”) an underground current of life that seems all the more true because it is hidden, earthy, frank, and shocking. In her story “Meneseteung,” for example, the truth has something to do with menstruation, bloating, diarrhea and opium. That this truth is called into question at the story’s close is pure Alice Munro whose message may only be that life is never what you think it is.

“Meneseteung” advertises itself as faux amateur biography of a forgotten and forgettable local poet, a spinster named Almeda Joynt Roth, who lived at the end of the 19th century in a small Ontario village just inside the advancing frontier. In 1879, Meda is drifting toward middle age when a salt well entrepreneur named Jarvis Poulter moves into town and half-heartedly begins to court her. One night Meda hears a drunken commotion in the street outside her house. Ignoring the ruckus, she manages to fall back asleep, but in the morning she discovers a woman’s body in her backyard and runs to Jarvis’s house, two doors down the street, for help. Jarvis nudges the body with his toe, pronounces the woman drunk and wipes his hand off on a leaf after shaking her roughly by the hair. Then, apparently aroused by Meda’s nightgown (suddenly seeing her in a sexual light), he invites her to walk with him to church later in the morning (a decisive signal of interest in the world of the story). Meda is in a tizzy. She has taken a sleeping drug the evening before, her period is starting, she has diarrhea, she’s making grape jelly; now she doses herself with nerve medicine (probably laudanum). Just before Jarvis shows up she pins a note to her front door; Jarvis retreats in silence. Meda spends the rest of the day in a drug haze, imagining the townspeople as gravestones toddling down the street. Then life returns to normal; only Jarvis is no longer interested in paying court to Meda. In 1903, village louts chase the eccentric old biddy into a nearby swamp. She catches cold and dies, leaving behind a slim volume of poems entitled Offerings.

That’s the story action, the bare bones. But with Alice Munro the difference between the bare bones of the story and the way she organizes the bones and flesh of her text is…

 

2010 © Douglas Glover

World Cup

Jun 162010
 

The Guardian live play-by-play blog has some of the best humour I’ve seen/heard. Here are bits from the Spain-Switzerland match going on as I post this. If only more sports announcers would talk like this, I’d get cable again.

58 min “Hi Rob,” says Michael Minihan. “Just to point out, I made love to Mick McCarthy at a motel just outside Doncaster and I can confirm your suspicions about him being a tender lover. After the two of us had emptied the mini bar, he made off in the morning without paying though, typifying Premier League managers irresponsible attitude towards debt.”

48 min “That persistent drone is really annoying,” says Adam Forbes, lining up the inevitable gag. “Any news on the BBC offering games with Mick McCarthy filtered out?” HONK! I like McCarthy. He’s an underrated manager and, I imagine, a deceptively tender lover.

41 min Ramos passes the ball straight into touch. Spain are struggling to penetrate, against Switzerland. I can’t believe this is happening. I’ve lost faith in everything.

34 min Here’s the latest from Nightmare Corner, with Ross Kitson: “If I was playing against that Spanish attack I would be having nightmares for days – but appreciative nightmares, like the one where you are really thankful as you are being beaten about by a charming semi-clad Amazonian woman.”

Gens d’ici, gens de paroles

Jun 102010
 

02_Étendards Arts 2010

16_Stéphanie Roussy_Douglas Glover

Stéphanie Roussy who painted the text

I had a terrific surprise this morning when I opened an email from Katie Vibert, an artist and teacher at the CEGEP de Sept-Îles in Quebec, and discovered these photos of an exhibition of banners painted by students at the college. You can see dg in the middle of the photo above. The project is called GENS D’ICI, GENS DE PAROLES and is meant to celebrate authors, songwriters, explorers either from the Côte-Nord or having some passionate literary connection with the place. Art students did the portraits on one side of the banner, and literature students painted an apt quotation on the reverse. And then all the banners

Nadine Bouffard with her portraits

were displayed at the front of the college building. Some of the inspiration for the project came from Pierre Rouxel, founder of the North Shore literary journal Littoral (more on this another time). Of course, this is all because of my novel Elle which was translated into French as Le Pas de l’Ourse. Elle takes place on the Côte-Nord, though somewhat to the north and east of Sept-Îles. But the windswept islands off Sept-Îles in the Gulf of St. Lawrence inspired the island where she is marooned. And the last scene of the novel, the contemporary moment between the new young bear woman and her older lover, takes place on the beach at Sept-Îles. The Côte-Nord is part of the country of my imagination.

It’s difficult to explain how much this touches me. I love the quotation Stéphanie Roussy picked for the banner. It happens to be true and goes to the heart of things. I am an Anglo farm boy from southern Ontario, and now I live far away in a foreign country, and yet these students, artists, and writers have included me in their exhibition. My imagined Canada has become part of their imagined Canada. This is the miracle of books. It makes you want to be a writer.

SONY DSC

“Pointless, Incessant Barking in the Night,” another dg story excerpt

Jun 022010
 

dg tree climbing

This one was just published in Descant (148, Vol 41, No 1, Spring 2010)—“The Search for Happiness” issue—in Toronto. It was also published in Best Canadian Stories last fall. Here are the opening lines. I am pretty sure several of you have heard me read from this.

I went to the hospital to visit my neighbour Geills after her suicide attempt. She explained that she had used a generic brand of garbage bag which tore inconveniently along a seam and that she had been in love with me since we met in the alley behind our houses the night the dog barked. I remembered that night for its knot of misunderstandings and embarrassments. Susan, my wife, had been asleep in the bedroom. I was working late on my dissertation in the kitchen nook, still wearing my teaching uniform, tie and a cardigan with leather patches on the elbows, my glasses smeared with powdered sugar from the donuts I habitually ate when I was working. She misinterpreted the sugar traces as evidence of a drug habit which intrigued her. She also thought my late night tie-wearing was symptomatic of a deep fetish attachment, perhaps an interesting S&M thing, she said later. For my part, when I realized it was her dog we were searching for, I began to berate her for disturbing her neighbours in the middle of the night. She began to weep, twisting her chubby little hands in the lap of her t-shirt nightie, dragging it off her shoulder and revealing the butterfly tattoo which alarmed me with its suggestiveness. In the silence that followed, we both heard the dog again, now baying woefully a block or two away.

—Douglas Glover

Buy the magazine–read the rest.

Madame Jodjana

May 292010
 

In re the last post. Here is a site with a photo of Madame Jodjana and some text, English and, what?, Dutch?

I think there’s more material on the web if you track Raden Mas Jodjana who, I think, was her husband. Actually, I am just tracking this myself. Not sure who Raden Mas Jodjana is. But Madame Jodjana was actually Dutch.

More added May 31 in response to Natasha’s comment:

You know I am trying to piece this together. I think I recognize the guy sitting in the chair next to her in the photo. He was living in Paris with her, taking care of her, I think. She introduced him (I think) as the youngest son, an adopted son, she and her husband, she said, had adopted something like 50 children. I could be wrong. It’s been a while. (In fact, I probably am wrong. Memory doesn’t serve well at this distance.)

She told me she had been part of the Dutch colonial crowd living in Indonesia and had to leave when the Dutch pulled out. But she’d met this guy, a member of the Javanese royal family, and they got married and came to Europe. And she was living in Paris because the Dutch were peculiar about immigration. All this is from a vague memory of a conversation. She and her husband had made their living dancing and teaching. But he was much older. There were black and white pictures of them and their children and famous people all over the cluttered room in her house. She was a semi-invalid and never got out of her chair.

It’s funny how the blog brings all this up and then allows me to fill in blanks I didn’t even know were there.

Apparently, her husband was influenced by a Sufi teacher. Whatever it was she was teaching, it made an impression on me–oh, how impressionable I was in those days! Certain exercises I still teach to my boys.

Schizophrenia & Creativity

May 292010
 

Suddenly everything makes sense. Read this BBC piece on art and schizophrenia.

On an autobiographical note: In Paris, Christmas 1969, I saw Salvador Dali emerge from a limo with a lovely young woman in a leopard skin coat (leopard or ocelot–some patchy feral cat). Ask me what I was doing in Paris. Getting into trouble mostly. Also taking acting and movement lessons from an aged Javanese temple dancer named Madame Jodjana.

Ah, more information than you need.

dg

On Sex, Canadians, and What Paris Taught Me About Defeat

May 272010
 

In the dark days after the humiliating defeat of our villanelle, Paris and I have done some serious soul-searching.  The defeat weighs heavy on her (as it does on the author.)  She remains convinced that the Numero Cinq readership failed to identify the alternating motifs of pathos and love within the poem’s intricate structure.  But alas, as Paris tells me frequently, “Get over yourself.”  (Have truer words ever been spoken?)  We will be back, she vows.

So sex then.  An odd thing happened to me this semester:  almost all of my stories became highly sexualized.  I can’t blame my advisor for this, short of saying that he pressed me to build strong desire/resistance patterns in story structure.  He admonished me to make something happen in my stories, but didn’t say how.  As I reflected back on the stories I wrote this semester, I was surprised to see how I dealt with his guidance: I put a lot of sex in my stories.  This lead me to ponder, why?  I think the answer lies in a deeper, more complex relationship between the mind and the body, a relationship steeped in my culture and history as much as anything personal.

The Canadian poet, Steven Heighton, says that “violence is the sexuality of America.”  In his essay, “Body Found in Reservoir,” he explores how portrayals of violence in North American culture reflect a punishment of the body for its sexuality.  Another Canadian, songwriter Bruce Cockburn, put it this way in his song “Last Night of the World,”: “I learned as a child not to trust in my body//I’ve carried that burden through my life//But there’s a day when we all have to be pried loose.”  I didn’t consciously seek to ‘pry loose’ this mind-body contradiction in my stories this semester.  It arrived because I wanted to add a component of strong desire to my writing, but at what point does a torrid sex scene become, as my wife recently commented on one of my stories, gratuitous?   Heighton says this:

Violence is the sexuality of white North America because violence is all we have left.  The passions demand a physical outlet but in our bones we feel it’s somehow wrong to love the body.  So sex—no matter how aggressively marketed or universally portrayed, no matter how frankly and coolly discussed on talk shows or in the narcotic literature of self-help—remains fraught with an obscure gloom and guilt.”

Hollywood certainly offers up raw sexuality at every turn.  To return to my muse: Paris Hilton embodies this contradiction.   Her sexuality certainly calls attention to her body, but the mind seems a tad empty.  (Sorry P.)  Our culture in general offers the body willingly, with its ubiquitous promises of a perfect, unobtainable model (botox, liposuction, laser hair removal, Hair Club for Men, etc.)  Yet all these ‘cures’ seem to take us further away from the real body and into some hyped-up fantasy of perfection, which constantly implies that such perfection lies tantalizing close but always a hair-breadth out of reach.  Steven Heighton puts it more eloquently:

For the first few hundred years, it (the hiding of the body) worked.  Nowadays, if North Americans are still fundamentally puritanical, they show as much skin as anyone else—though in this seeming casualness there’s a strain of the frantic exhibitionism I mentioned before in regard to porn.  No group of people at peace with their bodies could muster such sad, huddled masses of anorexics and bulimics and the world’s highest per capita rate of abuse of steroids, sleeping pills, sedatives, and laxatives.

So back to my sexual drift this semester:  Did my use of sexuality in creating characters or situations reflect a healing of the mind-body?  Can I continue to write about sex without turning it into soft-porn?  The following sexual motifs appeared in my last four stories:  men masturbating each other in a foxhole, a threesome, oral sex in a parking lot, and S&M scenes between a husband and wife.  None of these stories was explicitly about sex, but these recurring situations gave me some pause.  Clearly a good sex scene ratchets ups the tension in a story, but writing about sex is certainly not daring anymore.  So what am I trying to accomplish with this?  A part of an answer might lie in Nancy Willard’s essay, “What We Write When We Write About Love.”  (Found in The Best Writing on Writing anthology edited by Jack Heffron.)  Willard describes a childhood scene where she is supposed to be watching a group of fraternity brothers serenading her sister as part of a courting ritual.  Instead of watching, she turns her binoculars onto a couple in the back seat of a car, doing what couples do in the backseat of cars.

Writing a love story is a little like finding yourself with a pair of binoculars in your hand, caught between passion and scruples, ceremony and sex.  If you err too far in either direction, you can end up on the side of pornography or romance.  The difference between a love story and a romance is one of intent.  When you write a romance, you carefully follow where many have trod, so that your readers can recognize the genre through its conventions.  But in a love story, you try to show love as if your characters had just invented it.  Follow your characters, and they will give you the story, but you can’t tell ahead of time where they’ll lead you.

What I draw from this is that sexuality becomes a matter of intent, not content.  It becomes a matter of healing, not manipulation.  It arcs toward love, toward the fusion of the mind-body gap.  It should celebrate, not denigrate.   Heighton says, “wherever the flesh is hated, or endangered, love is threatened as well.”

—Richard Farrell

Blood Sports & Near Death Experiences

May 272010
 

Ferocious, blood-thirsty, fearless, foolhardy--the walking definition

Dg’s cat Hobbes has slaughtered three chipmunks in the past two days. The last appeared at the back door this morning at about 8:30 a.m. Hobbes was still batting at the body, trying to get it to play. Then at about 9 a.m., dg was roused from a blissful nap (er, writing session, er, oh, right, I was doing packets) by Jacob’s shouts from the kitchen. Hobbes and a fox were crouched and staring at each other in the tall grass (lawn mower malfunction). The fox took off, and Hobbes shot into the house, looking twice his normal size, breathing hard. This has nothing to do with writing, I am aware of that, but dg thought you should all know what a War Zone he lives in with bodies piling up and blood everywhere.

dg

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