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Feb 252017
 

Ceramic box by Michel Pastore

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I’m calling this issue the Magic Box, Numéro Cinq‘s magic box issue, mostly because I am so taken by the image above, a ceramic box by the Swiss artist (and fashion designer) Michel Pastore. Pastore, together with his partner Evelyne Porret, are a truly remarkable duo. They live on an oasis outside of Cairo, where they operate their studio and a ceramics school and live in exotic splendor. We have a ton of images from their desert hideaway, stunning objets d’art that are both utilitarian and dreamy, fantastic shapes and colouring. All courtesy of Rikki Ducornet, who knows the couple well.

But to paraphrase the excerpt from Agustín Fernández Mallo’s poem below, inside a box there is always another box, and another, and another…

Even I am astonished and the depth and variety in this issue.

Ceramics artists Michel Pastore & Evelyne Porret

Pastore/Porret house and studio at Fayoum, outside of Cairo

Rikki Ducornet

And from Rikki herself, an essay on Gnosticism, a dramatized evocation of the beginning of everything and the light.

Attempt to imagine – and the task is futile – an absence, as when the night sky is empty of her moon, of moonshine, of stars, of starlight. Imagine a void in which you are without purchase (there is no place to stand); a night as unfathomable as a pool of ink (there is no pool, no ink) in which the vast firmament has dissolved. There is nothing but absence. (And you, the one who attempts this imagining, are nowhere to be seen.) —Rikki Ducornet

Kelly Cherry

Kelly Cherry sent us a story with a promising title — “Burning the Baby” — of course, we’re publishing it. And more.

The constant sun enervates. Yes, night still arrives, but one’s skin is burnt so bad that sores appear on arms, legs, and bald heads. People give up on clothes, abandon their garments, for it is too painful to wear them. Everyone gives up. —Kelly Cherry

Carlos Fonseca

And something truly special, writer/translator Jessica Sequeira interviews Costa Rican/Puerto Rican novelist Carlos Fonseca on his brilliant novel Colonel Lágrimas.

Then again, you can never escape your obsessions. So the novel ended up addressing some of the ideas that intrigued me at the time: the idea of a history as a giant museum, the inability to pass from thought to action, the Borgesian notion of history being reduced to a giant encyclopedia or archive. And then, there is also the story of how – as an adolescent – I wanted to be a mathematician. Perhaps, now that I think about it, the novel was a way of rethinking my past. —Carlos Fonseca

Jessica Sequeira

Ben Slotky

Also inside the box this month, we have new fiction from Ben Slotsky, recommended to us by no less than Curtis White.

Flow, content wording, prioritize critical information, establish a model and keep it. These are precepts, they are tenets. Processes, forms. You are not paying attention. It doesn’t matter. There is too much, a wave, a wash, and it is over, over, and you are gone. —Ben Slotky

James Joyce & Sean Preston

From East London, we have a short story by Sean Preston, ex-pro-wrestler (among other things).

She had her habits. One of them was buying cheap furniture from places that were so fucking far away, by the time you paid for travel to the ungodly zones of south-west London, you hadn’t really saved much money at all. —Sean Preston

Maura Stanton

And we have poems — and then MORE poems — wonderful poetry by Maura Stanton, Susan Elmslie, Fleda Brown (who has a new collection just out), and, from Spain, the legendary Agustín Fernández Mallo translated by Zachary Rockwell Ludington.

Trust me. I’m one who loves all fogs—
misty, yellow, blue, rolling or grey—
I’ll walk your fog down busy thoroughfares
at any hour, clean up its wet messes,
pull it away from streetlamps and hydrants
but let it sniff around in the shrubbery
or blow its light breath against a window.

……………………………………….—Maura Stanton

Agustín Fernández Mallo

Underneath this skin is another skin,
and under that another, and another, and another,
and thus, as many layers as you like, until n∊N→∞
antecenter of the center which is finite.
That center is the mask.

……………………………………….—Agustín Fernández Mallo

Susan ElmslieSusan Elmslie

After the chaos there is silence,
a failure of words but not of sound,
which we know travels in waves,
and the speed of which is still the distance
travelled per unit of time.

…………………………………….—Susan Elmslie

Fleda BrownFleda Brown

Good, the blatant coffin, the procession,
the undertaker, the taking under.
To turn a body to ash—I can see how
it flies in the face of full-on facing
how slow the earth means to be.

………………………..—Fleda Brown

J. M. Coetzee

Our Book Review Editor, the inimitable Jason DeYoung, reviews the latest from that other inimitable — J. M. Coetzee.

By the way, no one in this novel is clearly named or called Jesus. Only the title teases that one of the characters is—perhaps—the historical Jesus. Perhaps post crucifixion, perhaps not? Perhaps this isn’t the historical Jesus at all—perhaps Coetzee is  playing a game on us. Perhaps not. But the reader can’t help looking for parallels. —Jason DeYoung

Anne Hirondelle’s Aperture 14, 16″ x 16″

Anne Hirondelle returns to our pages with a mix of drawings and ceramics. Readers loved her work last time, and she has a new show just opened.

Anne Hirondelle working in studioAnne Hirondelle

Cynan Jones

Mark Sampson reviews Cynan Jones’ “otherwise dark, brooding, brutal and devastating” novella, in which ducks appear.

In The Long Dry, Jones writes very well about ducks, their sex lives, and their feces. In fact, if there were an International Literary Prize for Writing about Ducks, Their Sex Lives, and Their Feces, Jones would easily win it. These passages are moments of levity in an otherwise dark, brooding, brutal and devastating novel –Mark Sampson

Show Girl in Hollywood page

J P McEvoy still from Woman Accused 1933

Also we have from Steven Moore, a vastly detailed (lots of images) and fascinating essay on the protean, prolific and once famous “avant-pop” novelist-cartoonist-screenwriter J. P. McEvoy.

But literary historians have overlooked a novelist from the same decade who deployed these same formal innovations largely for comic rather than serious effect, adapting avant-garde techniques for mainstream readers instead of the literati. —Steven Moore

Steven Moore

Montaigne

Linda Chown is a new voice at the magazine. She’ll be back. But first this lively review of a new anthology of essays by Michel de Montaigne.

Repeatedly, Montaigne thinks of his efforts as flawed, monstrous or distorted. To become his reader, I have had to become a kind of ventriloquist engaged in an act of translation and projection, of time, genre, gender, language and many translations.  It was only when I found how uncertain, fearful and tentative he was that I could begin to write of him wholeheartedly. —Linda E. Chown

Linda E. Chown

Yannis Livadas

The Greek poet Yannis Livadas, whose poems have appeared on these pages in the past, returns with an essay on the theory and inspiration behind his experimental work.

What is born is condemned to death and to being absorbed by the newly born. The newly born is more specifically regulated by death. The newly born is the exchange value of death. Life, is the daemon – poetry, is the teaching of the absolute nullity. The irreversible perforation of what has been poetically affirmed by those who are still spendable. —Yannis Livadas

Amanda BellAmanda Bell

From Ireland this month, we have a beautiful and evocative Childhood memoir from Amanda Bell.

The boat bay was fringed with hazel scrub and thorn trees, and purple loosestrife and blue scabious grew in the coarse yellow sand. It was a very good place to catch grasshoppers and daddy-long-legs for dapping, and because I was small and moved quietly I was the champion hopper-catcher. —Amanda Bell

Timothy Ogene – photo by Claire MacKenzie

The Nigerian poet Timothy Ogene (whose poems have appeared here) has written an essay on the American poet Ruth Lepson (whose poems have appeared here).

In Lepson’s work, thought reveals itself in the choice and structural placement of words and, in other instances, a reluctance to carry an emotion to an expected end. The goal, it seems, is to create a binary that balances overt emotions with critical deliberations. —Timothy Ogene

Melissa Febos

And our own Carolyn Ogburn pens a rave review of Melissa Febos’ memoir Abandon Me.

I’m told if you score a bullet across its tip with a pocketknife, first lengthwise then across, your shot will penetrate its target cleanly, but ravage the organs inside. I thought of this when reading the blunt, clean prose of Melissa Febos in her new memoir, Abandon Me. —Carolyn Ogburn

But there is MORE!

Apr 032016
 

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The infinite suggestiveness of common things… —Patrick Madden

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Sublime Physick: Essays
Patrick Madden
University of Nebraska Press, 2016
244 pages, $24.95

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In the last sentence of his postscript to “Independent Redundancy,” the mammoth centerpiece essay of his new collection, Patrick Madden quotes Gide: “Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.” This might be just a bit too morose to serve as an unqualified summation of Madden’s essayistic perspective, but it’s pretty close. To read a Patrick Madden essay is to interface with the mind of an engaged, self-conscious thinker. Actually, that’s not quite right: It is to interface with Madden’s curation of the minds of many thinkers within the expanse of his own.

Madden is not a hoarder of his thoughts or his words, or the words of his many sources, and he frequently seems more interested in exploring mysteries than creating them. In his first collection Quotidiana (2010), Madden declared the essay “an open, leisurely form, somewhat allergic to sensationalism,” and the primary intention of the essayist to “make the mundane resplendent with their meditative thoughts.” In Sublime Physick, his second collection, he continues exploring “the infinite suggestiveness of common things”—spitting hockers, turning 35, being recognized in a public place, temporarily losing his children—while expanding upon a tendency he intimated in Quotidiana of blending his sources into his own thoughts and sentences to the extent that it’s sometimes difficult to tell where his own thoughts begin or end. This will probably be the most divisive element of Sublime Physick’s otherwise gentle, reflective style: Either you are carried away into the free-flowing stream of voices commingling under Madden’s umbrella, or you are confounded by his seeming unwillingness to settle on a central voice or thematic concern.

Madden does his part to prepare the reader in “Fisica Sublime,” the “introduction” which is also the second essay of the collection. After explaining his choice of placing the “introduction” second in the collection, Madden spends most of the essay giving the etymology, metaphorical significance, personal associations, multiple spellings, and binary structure of the essay’s and the book’s title(s), concluding:

Perhaps, I’m beginning to think, everything we think we know is a kind of sublime physic, an abstraction derived from concretion and a double-aspected entity that we think we know in two distinct forms, yet is really a unity: matter-energy, space-time, mind-body, emotion-intellect, self-others, inside-outside, nonfiction-fiction; you could go on and on listing apparently opposed binaries and find, again and again, that where they meet is beauty.

These beautiful binaries comprise the nucleus of the collection’s essays, whose ostensible subjects range from Madden’s travels with recently deceased Uruguayan poet/storyteller Eduardo Galeano, to the brief disappearances of two of his six children, to a midlife non-crisis, numerous meditations on time and its discontents, and the acquisition of a bass guitar.

And that’s just the first half of the book. Much of the second half is taken up with just two essays, the first of which, “Independent Redundancy,” can fairly be called the opus of the collection. In thirty-six sections that seem to be written from at least eighteen points of view, Madden explores the phenomenon of the title, a term Madden coins “to describe the phenomenon of two or more individuals coming up with the same idea without any cross-pollination or shared influence.” The essay trots out a set of cultural referents seemingly impossible for one head to hold, unified mostly by representing different cliques of the same school of thought. Following are some notable juxtapositions and conversations.

Madden opens the essay and comes back numerous times to the phenomenon in popular music of the independently redundant melody, like the one shared by George Harrison in “My Sweet Lord” and the Chiffons in “He’s So Fine,” and by Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” and Joe Satriani’s “If I Could Fly.” He even traces back the latter pair, in a connection one can guess only he has made, to the Argentine band Enanitos Verdes (Little Green Men). At least as interestingly, Madden also addresses the more obvious technique in modern hip-hop and mashup culture of sampling – direct “quotation” of previously recorded material, most times without citation, a technique, interestingly, that Madden consciously practices in his own essaying. As usual, most musical references somehow lead back to Montaigne or the band Rush.

He spends less space but as much energy on the nature of innovation and discovery in the sciences, positing most great advances as the cumulative work of many— “the result of convergences in ideas, materials, and possibilities”—rather than “the result of genius operating in isolation.” He points out that though the discovery of sunspots, the law of conservation of energy, and the invention of the airplane were all products of independent, synchronous work by numerous thinkers, “our mythologies tend to give full credit to a single inventor.” This leads Madden to ponder the place of free will in this process:

It occurs to me that the struggle between models of determinism…applies to invention as much as individual (or group) destiny, invention being a subset of destiny, and that all are opposed, in some way, to any real model of creativity. Rather, if we stipulatively determine (determine!) that invention means an unpredictable, unexpected, not inevitable creation and that discovery, as is binary, is that which—like a rock in the path of a tiller—will inevitably be turned up, then that is the same struggle. And this would mean that those who believe invention inevitable really really mean that there is only discovery, not invention…

Of course, Madden is not afraid to turn the scope inward. He peppers examinations of his own writing style throughout the essay, from examination of influences like Woolf, Borges, Lamb, and Hazlitt, to farcical interactions with various artificial intelligence devices, robots, and computer-generated feedback services, to his surprised reaction and subsequent self-analysis after a friend tells him he’s a postmodern writer. He decides he’s postmodern mostly in that “I am painfully metaliterary in my thinking.” Perhaps the most singular purpose to this self-analysis (or written-self-analysis) is, in his words, “to wave at the attentive reader, calling attention to the artifice, the fact that this is a creation made of language; it is not the thing it describes.”

Each of the 36 parts echoes independently and redundantly, while Madden stops for breath only occasionally to project himself on the reader:

What if we are our book but our book is not us? What if this independent redundancy spins out of control and the inadvertent plagiarism becomes complete? (184)

…whatever we may convince ourselves, we will never know it all, and no matter our cries of originality, we are ever repeating, singing back the melodies we heard somewhere before, whether we remember or not. (222-3)

As if to pull in the reins after the freewheeling “Independent Redundancy,” Madden finishes the collection by meditating in its final essay on fixity. As if in counterpoint to the multitude of voices, influences, and points of view in the previous essay, Madden situates “Fixity” firmly in his own, starting at a centuries-old grave in Greenwich, England and moving outward to the situation of Greenwich as earth’s prime meridian and finally addressing the gathered crowd with “how you necessarily apprehend my essay, dear reader: by depending on my observations as I in turn depend on the observations of others, near and far, here and long gone.”

Which is all fine and would be a fitting theoretical tie-in to, even justification for, the multitude of voices and echoes he invokes through the previous essay. But Madden goes deeper into himself, deeper into his own fixed point in the landscape, or rather a fixed point adjoining his. As he was traipsing through Greenwich, “111 degrees 52 minutes 24.1608 seconds west of me,” Madden’s wife felt the surging limbs of what would be their fifth child within her and remembered the ghost-child they lost a year and a half earlier, “realiz[ing] with a start that had this lost child come to term, there would have been no time for this new person inside her now, so strikingly active so near to advent; that the loss of one is the profit of another.”

And thus the essay and the book end with a beginning, a birth, that might have been a continuation had circumstances, fate, or whatever shrugged and begun a family a year and a half earlier. The forces that shaped Madden’s life and words would have had an entirely different prime meridian, his family started from a different point, the quotidian moments given substantially different context, all built upon “rigid foundations and relative freedom” from which “we flail against nothingness or take stock from temporary origins and movable objects.”

 

—John Proctor

NC

Proctor

John Proctor lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, two daughters, and Chihuahua. His publications include Atlas & Alice, The Weeklings, Essay Daily, The Normal School, The Austin Review, DIAGRAM, Superstition Review, and Underwater New York. His essay “The Question of Influence” was a recent Notable selection in The Best American Essays 2015, and his essay “The A-Rod of Ballhawking” was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart. He teaches academic writing, media studies, and communication theory at Manhattanville College. You can find him online at NotThatJohnProctor.com/.

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2011

 

Vol. II, No. 12, December 2011

Vol. II, No. 11, November 2011

Vol. II, No. 10, October 2011

Vol. II, No. 9. September 2011

Vol. II, No. 8, August 2011

Vol. II, No. 7, July 2011

Vol. II, No. 6, June 2011

Vol. II, No. 5, May 2011

Vol. II, No. 4, April 2011

Vol. II, No. 3, March 2011

Vol. II, No. 2, February 2011

Vol. II, No. 1, January 2011

Essay & Memoir

 

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Personal Essays, Aphorisms, Memoirs, Speeches, Diaries, Sermons, Science & Nature Writing, Travel Essays, Belles Lettres, Criticism, Philosophy, Craft Essays

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