Rusty Allegations

(- -)

2011-12-19T17:33:00.000-08:00

The church choir director. The way he heaves his virtuoso's girth to and fro like an obsequious anchor, it is clear the only divine presence he believes in is that of his own ego.

His fingers darting and spinning over the piano keys like some vain and improbable crab, he is intoxicated by the gleam of his own shell, a fibrous spell cast by mere dexterity.

His bald head offset by a muted brown blazer, a permanent eclipse playing itself out in some backwoods cathedral.

(-)

2011-12-16T15:26:00.000-08:00

The subterfuge of a seemingly transparent gesture, despite what behavioural psychologists would have us believe, continually eludes us.

We are betrayed by direct observation, led awry with hindsight.

Motion capsizes resolution.

New Review in the Antigonish Review

2011-11-24T21:37:00.000-08:00

Just a heads up that my review of Jason Price Everett's wildly ambitious, worthy, and mildly problematic no-novel Unfictions (2009) appears in the new issue of The Antigonish Review. For those who can't make it to the newsstand, (luckily?) it seems it has already been archived online. Anyone looking to have their literary feathers ruffled should really check out Jason's book - it's a scorcher.

New Poem Up At Encore

2011-11-18T22:53:00.000-08:00

A new poem of mine is up at Encore Lit. Thanks to Marko Sijan & Michael Carbert.

Also thanks to all those who showed up to the inaugural revivification of the Argo Open Mic for packing a full-house and making it a resounding success. Considering it took place on the same night as the Synapse Reading and it being our first event Meaghan, J.P. & I were deeply grateful and touched.

Marilyn Warring & the UNSNA

2011-10-30T22:15:00.000-07:00

Like so many galvanized by the sustained, and in my generation unprecedented, Global emergence of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, I have been trying to keep up not only with contemporary coverage of the issues, but have been searching out with a renewed vigour social commentators who with our present hindsight seemed to have a foretaste of what was coming.

One of the most pleasant discoveries so far has been the work of Marilyn Waring, to which I was introduced through the wonderful documentary Who's Counting? produced by the NFB and available streaming online for anyone interested.

For those unfamiliar with her work, Waring is just as vital as Chomsky or Galbraith in her quest to demystify economic and political jargon. She empowers laypersons with a course in economic self-defence, realizing that a gained familiarity with harmful policies is the most effective route to changing them, and hopefully eventually reclaiming lost sovereignty. Her clarity, colloquial language and affability also go a long way, and Waring effortlessly eschews the tag of either reactionary revolutionary or armchair activist.

The documentary traces Waring from her initial rise as the youngest and often only female member of the New Zealand Parliament, to her inspired and disturbing research on the fundamental environmental, racial, and sexual inequities imparted upon Global culture by contemporary economic practice. Waring shows how the economic "values" imparted by the United Nations System of Accounts and the GDP are in fact, in a tangible sense purely profit driven, and are, moreover, inherently sexist and ecologically destructive. She shows how the Capitalist apologists have no clothes. We learn how all nations wishing to be part of the UN must subscribe to the UNSA, regardless of the fact that it was a culturally and historically specific document devised in and pertaining to World War Two era England. We learn too that the GDP, far from measuring a nation's standard of living as it purports to, pays no attention to any environmental indicators and disregards the work, the value, and therefore the interests, of those who perform work which does not contribute directly to the fiscal economy. This includes (or rather, fails to place value and therefore excludes) the work of child rearing, caring for the elderly or infirm, housekeeping, and any aspect of unpaid work that provides the essential yet unacknowledged support for all market production activities. The term home economics is not only condescending but redundant: look at the etymology of the word.

Serious objection needs to be made to proponents of an economic world view that considers War and disaster situations desirable contributions to economic growth while holding in contempt fundamental biological processes and subsistence economies. That famous phrase of Orwell's comes to mind: "Political language ... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Economics today are only politics shrouded with an additional layer of mathematical obfuscation. The truth is that there is no debit side accounted for by modern economics: human cost and ecological cost are equally unimportant. In fact, environmental disaster is incredibly valuable in the eyes of economists: epidemics encourage more free market breakthroughs, more industry, more jobs, more capital circulation. According to the jargon of the GDP, the peddler of child pornography, as long as his profit is recirculated into the economy, is of more worth than the child prostitute he exploits. His time is in fact, by this logic, more valuable than that of the stay at home mother. To add insult to injury, the "stewards" are not only setting the house on fire, but are appropriating and gambling away your remaining assets, all the while assuming the guises of philanthropist and benevolent guide and appearing very clever indeed.

Perhaps it is cause for hope that some of Waring's almost two decade old suggestions, for instance that contemporary economic figures come to include such things as Environmental indicators and Household Time Use Surveys, are in some places beginning to be taken seriously. Not the former here at least, what with the current regime's ample disdain for superfluous appendages and knack for alchemically converting blight to gold. Surely, if economists figured out mathematical formulas to convince themselves that money is indeed real they could make steps to develop basic principles that take into account the public good? I know moral principles and spending aren't supposed to go together but let’s stop pretending that the current schematics have any real pretence towards impartiality, shall we? Even those who personally acquit themselves of moral blame and seek to redeem through private leisure need to understand something fundamental: with rules like these, there are no exceptions. Your leisure time is someone else's commodity, and whatever incorruptible sphere you imagine holds it fast, is shrinking.

Send in the Nouns

2011-10-18T10:11:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the folks at The Puritan for putting up my review of Jon Paul Fiorentino's Indexical Elegies as part of a supplement for the recent Summer Issue. Read it here.

What stronger perfume than a just cause?

2011-10-04T22:45:00.000-07:00

When I settled in London, in 1974, there were second-hand bookshops everywhere. One could walk from Earls Court to Notting Hill Gate, which is only a bit over a mile, and take in six or seven. They are all gone. One could step into even the smallest shop and there was always the sense of an inner sanctum to which only the elect had admittance. This is important to note. At that point, and it would still be the case later, a bookseller was deeply ensconced in a culture of secrecy. One simply did not speak of the inner workings of the trade. Now, of course, the guts are all over the place. One may poke through them at one's leisure. There are no more secrets: one speaks openly, shamelessly, of one's gains and one's losses. Anyway, to go back to those little bookshops and their secret zones, all the books one most desired were in those cubbyholes, just beyond one's reach, or so one imagined. Money was not the key to them nor could a smile move the misanthropic hearts of those crotchety old men in their small dark shops. (What man of feeling though, would not choose the misanthrope over the indiscriminate lover of his own species?) Selling a book was never uppermost in their thoughts, and indeed there was much pleasure to be had in not selling a book to someone thought undeserving of it. It was a great shame when booksellers began to have to sell books in order to survive. - from "A Factotum in the Book Trade" by Marius Kociejowski

I had the good fortune of being present at a poetry reading of rare calibre last night which featured, in addition to outlandishly priced drinks and a raucous house band with a thoroughly objectionable name, performances by three of Canada'a distinguished poetry elder statesmen, Norm Sibum, Marius Kociejowski, and Eric Ormsby.
The event took place at the CFC (formerly Zoobizarre) in the midst of the surreal St Hubert shopping district in the mile end, a sandwich board promising a free evening of live music and poetry oddly incandescent and alluring among the whirlwind of shoe polishes and esoteric tablecloths. The goods were sponsored by Encore Literary Magazine and presided over by its editor Michael Carbert, who read poems by the late Richard Outram between readers.

First up was Sibum, "the bard of Sherbrooke West," author of over fifteen books and an ongoing series of blog based missives of considerable lucidity and moxy, Ephemeris. With several books in arm he took to the stage and confessed that, contrary to usual, he had no idea what he was going to read. He began, quite arbitrarily, with a long, truly idiosyncratic poem rife with allusions and elusive particularities that I think the audience, myself included, was quite unprepared for. Upon completion Sibum confessed that the audience sounded "awful serious out there" and decided to read another lengthy musing with "funny stuff in it" this time. Perhaps it was due to the fact that the audience's occasional muted chuckles never coalesced into actual laughter, or his eagerness to have to his peers take the stand, but Sibum concluded somewhat prematurely, all but one of his books, and two of his poems, neglected. Sibum was in the difficult position of ice breaker this evening, and unfortunately, as he tested the waters, the audience somewhat failed him. Although I was unable to fully sink my teeth into much of Sibum's verse (I will have to read one of his books, 2002's A.M. Klein Award winning Girls and Handsome Dogs?, to savour and unpack some of its density), I was left with a strong impression of his commanding presence, his almost classical eloquence, and his begrudging, curmudgeonly tenderness and charm. My interest for more was piqued.

Second was Marius Kociejowski, author of the acclaimed travelogues The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool (2004) and The Pigeon Wars of Damascus (2010) whose recent reminiscences on a life well spent in the antiquarian book trade, published as "A Factotum in the Book Trade" in CNQ 82, I quote above. Kociejowski read two poems from his 2003 selected poems So Dance the Lords of Language, "Tiger Music" and "A Seventh Jew," as well as a more recent poem called "Sparrows". His reading was absolutely phenomenal. He was captivating, summoning a perfect timbre of restraint, patience, and theatricality. He knew how to hook a listener, as evidenced by his introduction to "Tiger Music": "I was informed by my friend Subhi in Damascus that in Arabic there are sixty-seven words for 'lion'; I assume, perhaps wrongly, that there must be almost as many for 'tiger'". That poem's exploration of "the many shades of tigerness between one which dozes / And another that lunges, / the different music they make" and "A country as bare of tigers as [a] soul of truth" was Conradian in its narrative pull, utterly convincing, with scores of dramatic levity in tow. In "A Seventh Jew" he gave us an imaginative portrait of an anonymous victim of the French Resistance in Lyon, arrested, imprisoned, executed and known to history only as "a Jew / with a fine voice" who sang an aria of Cavaradossi's before being taken to be shot. His closer, "Sparrows," pulled me in with its incendiary opening line "The bitch muse has gone, pulled another fast one" and sustained my interest in a usually hackneyed mode (the writer's block poem) with its stunning lines and images: "You should have known better than to bring her home. / You should never have tried to work miracles on a global scale. / There are, after all, limits to what a man on stilts can do." I never doubted Kociejowski's authenticity for a second, and where he displayed a romantic predisposition to dwell on the loftiest and most reiterative of poetic themes, he earned every moment of it.

Eric Ormsby closed off the evening nicely with a set of finely tuned poems from his most recent selected poems, 2011's The Baboons of Hada, to which the audience was very receptive. Ormsby displayed great range, alternately making the crowd laugh with "Mrs Lazarus," a comedic portrayal of the resurrected man's wife's chagrin at having to endure the rank odours and whims of her living dead husband, and edging them toward contemplative silence with his closer "Blood", a moving account of fatherhood and a tribute to Ormsby's two adopted sons, "Children not of my blood but of my love" of which "Consanguinity knows nothing of our fierce fragility": "Backward to Eden let our recognitions rhyme." I liked Ormsby's poems quite a bit, but found them a little too reminiscent of the perfect formally calibrated, conceit-driven English poetry of the mid twentieth Century, perhaps slightly out of step in their likeness to Larkin and Hughes. One requires a little slippage now and then. Don't get me wrong, I've no horror of form, nor even of rhyme, but I find the slavish adherence to conceit somewhat predictable: we all have the ability to remain topical, and we can all do the legwork, but there remains something ineffable, possibly dangerous, that makes a poem work for me - the kinds of wild eyed flashes and shadowy volleys that we catch if only in periphery - the kinds so amply displayed in Kociejowski's verse that night.

*****
I dunno, maybe my ample enthusiasm for the latter was bolstered by my previous reading of the article with which I began this post, and have mentioned earlier, "A Factotum in the Book Trade". Undoubtedly it coloured my reception of the poems and my endearment for their author. But I don't see how it could have been otherwise: Kociejowski's reflections on the vanishing sanctity of independent bookshops, his portraits of bygone eccentric, indeed, sometimes fanatical bookmen, and above all the fondness with which he speaks about "a world made for people fit for nothing else" were too honest and moving, and above all too timely, for me to leave them unheeded.

As some of you may know, I recently became involved with the Argo Bookshop, to the extent that come November, I and two others (my partner Meaghan and our friend J.P.) will be the new owners. No, it is not an antiquarian bookshop, but a retail one; in fact, the oldest independent Anglo retail shop in the city of Montreal, and a damn fine one at that. We've inherited quite a legacy. The original owner and operator of close to forty years, the infamous John George (who I never had the pleasure of meeting) is still renown as one of the greatest book eccentrics the city has ever seen, and is, in fact, a character worthy of Kociejowski's article. Regular customers have an almost rabid sense of ownership, and members of the "old guard" still frequent the store weekly, toting several hundred page typewritten bibliographies of recommendations for the humanities sections, or harbouring imminent divorce threats from their wives should they be caught buying another book, or else appropriating our new fall/winter catalogues without our prior consent. They are being driven out by an increasingly alliterate, digital culture, and the Argo has become a refuge of sorts - the last fort, all but slated for demolition. Dealing with these people has been a learning curve, the combination of their sense of entitlement and feelings of victimization sometimes utterly baffling, and we are slowly creeping towards a means to grasp, and cope.

The literary book selling landscape has changed considerably from the milieu Kociejowski describes in his article. Unfortunately I do have to worry about a sale, and though I try very hard to not be ingratiating, it does mean that I sometimes have to been beholden to absolute dipshits. No we do need carry How to Get Laid or Die Trying. But I'll order it for you if you really want it: after all, I'm no censor. People want to support an independent bookstore while acquiescing part-and-parcel to the dictates of of global consumer culture: if there's one important lesson I've learned already, it's that cognitive dissonance is the flavour of the day, and to not judge too harshly. After all, there is something of the deliberate anachronism (some would, and have indeed said, latent insanity) in our own choice to take over a bookstore that specializes in literature, philosophy, and religion, as if we want to be in the front row when the wave of extinction breaks over us.

And yet there is no sounder choice. In certain ways there was no choice. Or perhaps we were already resigned to it. You see, in case you haven't been following the headlines: the arts they are a' dying. Despite having drawn around 20-30 people last night, and having been published internationally in magazines as distinguished as The New Yorker and anthologies like the Norton, the authors from last night's reading would be lucky to collectively sell 50 books in independent shops in Canada this year. & even that might be considered a good number at this rate. Here is my first contribution to the pile of once surreptitious guts of the book trade Kociejowski referred to in his article. It is by all measures an ignominious decline.

& yet there is hope. The three new co-owners, all of us under 25, wouldn't have embarked on this endeavour if there wasn't. Ours may not be the popular position, but we are by no means lone wolves in the wilderness. There is, in a manner somewhat analogous to the resurgence of vinyl, a growing widespread movement of publishers and readers who have had it to the teeth with lesser digital approximations of the books they love: they are demanding, and starting to produce, thoughtfully designed, aesthetically distinguished books-cum-art-objects. To be sure, print has less multimedia potential than the digital, but it has the advantage of being a tactile medium, and there is a kind of reinvention of that medium afoot. Consider some of New Directions recent "book in a box" projects that, in addition to being simply beautiful, ask readers to question hegemonic givens of reading and to engage with text in novel and fascinating ways, such as Anne Carson's celebrated multidisciplinary elegy Nox or B.S. Johnston's The Unfortunates, whose unbound chapters can be arranged in accordance to the reader's preference. Or even closer to home, Bilbioasis's finely designed, often exquisitely embossed and printed catalogue of stellar National and International talents, or even fine press houses specializing in limited runs of contemporary Canadian talent such as Frog Hollow Press and JackPine Press. No, these presses will never become the mainstream, but they can at least become a self-sufficient and vibrant subculture if more people catch on and duly declare their allegiance. & there is of course, last but not least, the vigilant bookseller, an indispensable and often uncredited resource of the trade. These are the ones responsible for "selling the unsellable," the ones largely responsible (along with adept critics) for making the case for the overlooked and thus salvaging them in part, or at least introducing them to varying generations of readers. As far as I can see, there is a symbiotic relationship between booksellers, readers, and writers: all have a vested interest in the perpetuity of print, and all of us need to figure out ways to nurture mutually beneficial relationships - relationships often fragmented at the cusp of beyond repair, and preyed upon in the most insidious manner by vying corporate interest groups who cultivate our sense of wariness and alienation from one another. Let it be this simple: there are brilliant writers alive here and now who demand readers: support them. There are scores of other book lovers around who understand the inherent value of print: seek them out. There are booksellers who through whatever foolishness or insanity have decided to hang a bittersweet albatross around their head: support them. I would love for nothing more than the Argo to be a place that facilitates this kind of mobilization.

Last night's reading was amazing: the combination of Kociejowski's article and the three readers having strangely coalesced in my mind, and perhaps unexpectedly to the reader of this post. The reading was a powerful antidote to the mutual admiration societies and increasingly facetious meta-writing bullshit that all too easily fills up journals and readings these day. There are master craftsmen about and, it seems, at least a reprieve from the eternal apprenticeship I'm floundering in. We can renew our commitments and find other ways to deal with the apparent deficiency of our situation without being glib or dismissive. I think this is an important time for me to take a stand as a young writer and book lover both. How much richer and more memorable the exchanges between the few who bought books last night and expressed their appreciation and thanks with the poets than those who line up daily inside Dear Heather's to buy the most recent offering of Stephanie Meyer pap. As Kociejowski inscribed in fellow co-owner J.P Karvatski's copy of So Dance the Lords of Language, "What stronger perfume than a just cause?" Here's hoping the wind bears that perfume towards our book world a little longer before it stagnates with indifference and is replaced with the sewer that overtakes it.

Deadlock, A Poem

2011-09-23T16:21:00.000-07:00

Here is a newish poem of mine, freshly rejected from a somewhat distinguished poetry quarterly that shall not be named. Again. At least it didn't take nine months this time. It goes:

Deadlock

Rather than scour the shore for some faint

& final trace of formal coherence

let’s hotwire our tiny atlas to make way

for more tonic climate, hindsight itself being

only a tranquilized afterbirth of closure –;

Though this sluggish resurrection of the simultaneously

misconceived might seem like the deadliest inoculation

in years, it’s really just a minor hitch, a meagre snag in our stride

& that’s no reason to drive yourself swerving into

the ambivalent wayward forever –;

Pick up a stone: bother not with whether it’s smooth

or level: hurl it at the waves & wait for an incidental

ripple or two, since we’re none of us expert –;

It’s the way the current eddies your twirl

In all its dazzling makeshift proportion

that’ll decide the pave for the path we’ll know;

Only gravity can eschew the flight of desire

While accidence erodes the stone of intentions

"Posterity always has the advantage of enjoying the work of writers without having the bother of putting up with the writers themselves"

2011-09-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

A Review of Javier Marias' Written Lives (trans. Margaret Jull Costa)

New Directions, 2007, $20.00, 200 pages.

Among his many other distinctions, Spain’s leading writer and Nobel Prize candidate Javier Marias can certainly be credited for having written the National Enquirer of literary biographies. A hyperbolic and often hilarious gallery of brief literary portraits, all of which clock in at fewer than ten pages, Written Lives is an addictive blend of wicked criticism and juicy gossip covering the misadventures of an eclectic selection of twenty of world literature’s most famous authors.

Neither hagiography nor a museum piece of arid academic wankage, Marias’ book is that rare treat, an entertaining, casual read that doesn’t waste your time. “Treat[ing] these well-known literary figures as if they were fictional characters,” Marias peels back the mystifying solemnity of reverence and treats them “with a mixture of affection and humour,” unearthing the alternating ridiculousness, arrogance, helplessness and in the case of Malcolm Lowry, “calamit[y]” of their situations.

We become acquainted with William Faulkner and his scholarly impression of Freud: “I have never read him. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either,” as well as the absentminded Conrad whose twin habits of discarding lit cigarettes around the house and accidentally igniting volumes of literature by candlelight prove a serious hazard to his family’s well being. We are greeted with the nigh-mystical Isak Dinesen, who subsists on a diet of champagne, oysters and cigarettes, and become privy to the “linguistic punctiliousness” of Henry James who, in his unebbing “zeal for clarity” describes a dog to a servant as “something black, something canine.” There are reports of the then unknown Anaïs Nin and Carson McCullers desperate attempts to court the brilliant and enigmatic Djuna Barnes, who thought the former “a little girl lost and a sticky writer” and told the latter, after her continual unsolicited ringing upon the great author’s doorbell, to “please go the hell away.”

The bios are so quote worthy and anecdote ripe that it is impossible to enumerate anything but a remote portion here. One might anticipate that in the case of more infamously misanthropic or downright eccentric writers, such as Nabokov or Rimbaud or Wilde, Marias’ portraits might fall flat or be somewhat predictable. But Marias’ eye is always keen and he has a knack for modulating the outlandish and absurd with a pitch-perfect command of irony & understatement, as evidenced by this excerpt from “Arthur Rimbaud Against Art”: “He deeply offended a certain Lapelletier by calling him “un salueur de morts” (“a greeter of corpses”) when he spotted him accompanying a funeral cortege. This would not have been quite so wounding were it not for the fact that Lapelletier had just lost his mother.” Or witness his command in this excellent introductory line from “Oscar Wilde After Prison”: “According to all who met him, the hand that Oscar Wilde proffered by way of greeting was as soft as a cushion, or, rather, as flabby as old plasticine and somewhat greasy, and left one with the sense of having been sullied by shaking it.”

Of all the writers included, only three fail to gain Marias’ affection: James Joyce, Thomas Mann and Yukio Mishima. Intriguingly, in addition to their substantial narcissism and cruelty all three shared certain perverse fascinations with human digestion: Joyce was a coprophiliac, Mann left to posterity a series of inane diaries chronicling little other than his continual (and varying) intestinal difficulties, and Mishima had a certain theatrical flair for self-disembowelment. One can only guess that Marias felt the literary value of their works overshadowed by the shameless self-aggrandizing and unsavoury sexual tendencies of their creators; these portraits are somewhat scathing, and of a darker timbre.

Supplementing these twenty portraits are two “bonus” sections, “Fugitive Women” and “Perfect Artists.” The former consists of even briefer portraits (under five pages each) of six mostly Victorian and Edwardian female iconoclasts and is admittedly the weakest section of the book. It feels somewhat like an afterthought on the author’s part, a belated and rather half-hearted attempt to address the lack of gender parity of the bulk (17 males vs. 3 females). Worse, is that the portraits aren’t as interesting or lively as those that precede them: the delivery is somewhat flat, and the details not particularly memorable. This inconsistency is no doubt problematic, and will hopefully be rectified if there is an updated edition or sequel.

The book does, however, close on high note, with the essay “Perfect Artists” being perhaps the most engaging section of the whole. Consisting of Marias’ razor-sharp personal and psychological impressions of the gestures and faces of authors from his personal collection of portrait postcards (which are printed alongside), the essay showcases Marias’ at his best, with a precision and almost mathematical clarity comparable to Borges: “The only thing that leaps out at one is that all the subjects are writers and now, at last, when they are all dead, all of them are perfect artists.”

My admiration for Marias is great, for he is a dying breed of writer who can put erudition to engaging and novel use, the result being a work that affords generous pleasure for even the most general of readers. For all his lightness he is never glib, for all his approachability never dull, but always good-humoured and perceptive. These portraits are simultaneously moving, funny and endearing, their subjects fully-formed and intentional caricatures that are larger, but uncannily close to the bizarre flux of life.

Interview with Zachariah Wells

2011-09-01T09:34:00.000-07:00

I recently interviewed Halifax based poet and editor Zach Wells about his most recent book of poetry Track & Trace, and the excellent folks at The Puritan were kind enough to give it a home. This interview was a bit of a thrill for me since Zach is one one my favourite contemporary poets. Read the interview here.

Javier Marias on Rilke

2011-08-30T06:45:00.000-07:00

An amusing excerpt from Marias' gently subversive book of terse, hyperbolic literary portraits Written Lives:

"The fact that such a sensitive person, so much given to communing, should have turned out to be the greatest poet of the twentieth century (of this there is little doubt) has had disastrous consequences for most of the lyrical poets who have come after, those who continue communing indiscriminately with whatever comes their way, with, however, far less remarkable results and, it has to be said, to the serious detriment of their personalities."

"National imaginary gardens" with "genetically robust fake toads" in them

2011-08-24T07:19:00.000-07:00

Daryll Whetter on the Giller-bait phenomenon and 2010 scandal (no, not the "tragic unavailability" of the winner upon the unveiling, boohoo) in CNQ 82.

A particularly tasty excerpt:

"With nominees like Winter and winners like Skibsrud, CanLit has become so propagandistic we're stretched between unconscious self-parody and a tin-eared prose so nakedly value-driven it sounds like the lyrics of Soviet propaganda music. Honestly, how different is our national literature from East German or Soviet songs devoted to the party, ample harvests, and good factory production?"

-- from "Genetically Modified Toads, Factory Songs, and Fake Gardens: Mutations, Natural Selection and Gillermania"

On Starnino's Nichol, etc...

2011-08-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

A lauded poet and thoughtful critic sometimes lashed at for his potentially opportunist and/or straw-man attacks against purportedly "avant-garde" factions of this country's literature, Carmine Starnino delivers the goods in a captivating and nuanced account of bp Nichol's legacy in a recent article for Maissoneuve, Captain Poetry. He offers careful analysis of Book Thug's recently reissued, corrected and expanded edition of Nichol's lost gem The Captain Poetry Poems, and adeptly situates the work and Nichol's oeuvre within their cultural contexts while attempting to assess the extent of their contemporary relevance. I'm glad he did: he treats Nichol with neither the hagiography nor cool dismissal one might have expected and gives equal credence to both his enthusiasm and reservations about the work, dismissing the romantic notion of a ne'er-err Nichol:

"At their worst, though, Nichol’s visual poems are just the wish-fulfillment of a poet who liked the look of his own irreverence. They bespeak an exaggerated confrontation with convention. Nichol was interested in short-circuiting reading habits unchanged since the Gutenberg revolution, but too often, the results merely project his interest. This is why Nichol’s visual poems leave many readers cold. Staged cleanly in open space, they give him away not as a hot-blooded rebel but a Spock-like formalist. Calibrated to convey the sonic weight and density of language untamed by sentences, the poems are full of causeless, do-nothing effects."

Despite the controversy (and what rabid Nicholites might dub the contestabplity) of such instances as the preceeding, his portrait is an overwhelmingly sympathetic one marked by affection and sense of readerly indebtedness:

"For all his épater ethic, Nichol was too much fun to dislike. Making the individual uncomfortable—Nietzsche’s ambition—wasn’t Nichol’s thing. He was that rare bird: an avant-gardist without an axe to grind. He was seditious, anarchic, optimistic. You kind of miss the guy."

-------

On a different note, I just finished Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, which I find a thoroughly engrossing and exquisite novel. Less of a cultural zeitgeist than Gatsby, it is probably defter in terms of character psychology and overall emotional resonance, more intricate and resourceful in its craftsmanship and temporally inventive narrative structure. There is a quiet inevitability from the first, a ponderous melancholy and subtle dissipation which is probably truer to life than the explosive tragedy of Jay Gatz and Daisy Buchanan. Fitzgerald's is the chocolate cheesecake of prose, and to be again in the hands of his singularly rich lyricism is a rare pleasure:

"On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rosecolored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away.
The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one."

Ahh....

Poem: Lima by Michael Nelson

2011-08-11T14:51:00.000-07:00

Lima

The horse that savours arsenic rejects tortoise shell powder
- Lezama Lima

Inside the bottle...; the prison baroque
- Lezama Lima

Absolutely...; caves; furthermore: Inside a hollow indentation, there, in a

burlap cafe, occasionally eclipsed by buses, sitting at a wicker table in this beige

cafe, in a button-up shirt w/sweaty armpits, giving way to dangling, active hands–

cigar to mouth; grasping spoon , pen; pulling papers, books, near; pushing dishes

away; ashes drop, tumbling scree, into lap; stained napkin falls to floor – there sits,

clamorously quiet , rasping breath filing horse-shoes into a cabinet unheard, a

practitioner of the absurd, sewing together tin cans and springtime rain, a

draftsman of organic holographs, crude surrealist latherings, ornate baroque

creator of befuddled lucidity, arms now submerged under the table, plunged into

thought, 'with celestial disgust, ' there, sitting, a sweet husky gentleman of Cuba:

Jose Lezama Lima

Something from Tender is the Night

2011-08-09T05:31:00.000-07:00

"One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it."

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Poem: Hunting/Cabin by J.P. Karvatski

2011-08-01T07:36:00.000-07:00

Hunting/Cabin

Young and walking home

on its dirt road at night,

the neighbourhood was recluse.

At times in late fall,

the same garage was open,

spilling light, silhouettes and blood.

My neighbour inside would wave.

I didn't know him.

His boots sop with peat and wild rice,

dancing to the radio as he stripped

another dead moose

hanging from the rafters, so large

its neck bent against the cement.

Its blood draining away in ribbons,

its slack tongue pointing

to the rifle propped aside.

I’m thinking of this now

over the beer-brown water,

dragging a paddle, leaving brief eddies.

The shore gorges on my wake.

Landed. In my rented cabin,

the smell of burnt newsprint fills the air,

a glow of stirred ember. After chopping wood,

and stripping the outhouse’s webs,

I raise a bulrush blind.

I prop up a .22 rifle, bought for the occasion.

Clumsily, I aim at a mallard. The day cracks in two.

My boots rattle on the rotted bridge back,

heavy and unfit in the silence,

the gunshot still ringing in my ears.

The bird dangles from my hand

and holding up that reason I came

I pluck as I walk, a delicate trail,

and a feather’s broken rachis draws blood.

Soon the cabin breathes smoke again.

In its single lantern-lit room,

I lie the gun on the table and look again at it,

the small and limpid thing, just a carcass,

a mange of skin and down in my hands,

and toss it on the table. It flops.

The bullet hole stares:

How it withered in the sky when shot.

It was as beyond me then as it is now,

these scant gains of a stilted confrontation

I started, not even here but long before,

in some remote genetic recess

belonging to someone else, to whom

hunting was everything.

And reemerging from hunting that hunter

with only a mallard's corpse.

(J.P Karvatski lives in Montreal. His poems have appeared in a few University & small press publications including Inwords & Soliloquies.)

Oatmeal & Raisins

2011-07-27T19:27:00.000-07:00

Here is my most recent attempt.

Oatmeal & Raisins

like a gluttonous child

whose half-eaten biscuits

crumb behind her

in a surreptitious sprawl

adoring the path to bed,

we are all of us professional amateurs

poised before the moment

of irreversible defeat,

the door our embellished credentials

hinged against

swinging wide upon misdemeanours

& slander,

incipient Melvillian grandeur

wilting away

into the cold apotheosis

of a tenure spent frittering

over ample paltry excuses,

sated desire & its namesake

turning tricks

at the very frigid cusp

of indolent shame

Event Horizon (or; the future of Canadian literary periodicals)

2011-07-25T19:52:00.000-07:00

Back in March, National Post columnist Michael Lista posted a controversial column about the very real trials facing contemporary Can Lit periodicals. The creation of the new Canadian Periodical Fund has spelled impending disaster for the vast majority of literary journals, who, sporting a yearly circulation of less than 5,000 copies, are no longer eligible for funding. Only a handful of literary magazines meet that criteria, and that handful, consisting of The Literary Review of Canada, Broken Pencil, Matrix, Prairie Fire, The Queen’s Quarterly and SubTerrain, collectively received about 0.02% of the total sums allocated to Canadian magazines in 2011. Last year, under former regulations, four more literary mags received funding, and the total funding was just short of twice of what is on offer this year. That is by any count a rapid decline.

The added controversy is that Lista, faced with the threat of this potential literary Armageddon, argues that this apparent deficiency of funding could be counterintuitively turned into a beneficial grounds to 'weed out' inferior magazines in today's "supersaturated market". If need be, this could mean "eliminating redundancies" and forcing existing magazines to overhaul and reconsider their mandates and marketing strategies, as well as bring more attention and distinction to their sometimes shoddy & indistinguishable editorial and publishing processes. Better magazines would emerge, each with a distinctive flavour and unique foothold in the market, or so the argument goes. Quality over quantity; a kind of survival of the fittest. May the best mag win.

An excellent place to dive into the somewhat fevered & polarized discussion that ensued is Jacob McArthur Mooney's excellent blog, Vox Populism. Mooney agrees to a large extent with Lista, but makes clear that he "disagree[s] with the statement [...] that “we have more journals than we need.” That’s not really what’s happening here. I will say: we have more journals than we’re using." Though his 'tear off the cover & throw em in a bag to see if you can tell the difference between em' test doesn't bear close scrutiny, his invitation for readers to consider the precise aesthetic, political, & editorial differences between well-supported National magazines does elicit provocative questions. Are they redundant? Obsolete? To what extent can we quantify similarity, plurality? How do we judge a given journal's 'cultural contribution'? By the extent of its subscriber base? By the amount it pays contributors? By the dwindling governmental support it receives?

I would say that the conversation between concerned writers, readers & editors that follows in the comments section of the blog is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of literary magazines in Canada. Sure, much of it is reactionary, but its not hard to see why: almost everyone involved has a vested interest, being a fraction of the precise readers, writers, & editors who alternately contribute to, support, and generate the content that goes into the very mags endangered.

In particular, I would highlight Paul Vermeersch's point about the fluidity of seemingly 'fixed' or stagnant journals, which are often drastically overhauled and refocused by succeeding generations of committed and forward thinking editors, as in the case of Elizabeth Bachinsky and Event magazine. Dismissing a magazine as inferior and subsequently cutting its funding denies its potential to evolve and make a significant contribution: "jackpines are not static. They morph into bamboo and date palms and maple trees depending on the editor. Fewer magazines still adds up to less diversity, even if sometimes they seem alike, they all change and diverge and converge differently over time."

James Langer, poetry editor of The Fiddlehead, with perhaps more moxy & flavour than many of the others, dismisses the somewhat fallacious & arbitrary thinking behind Lista's original article:

"That essay is so far up the elephant’s ass it thinks ass tastes like ivory. It takes a clear-cut issue that should unite us, strains it through the anti-Canadian, zombie, capitalist logic of Darwinism (not to mention a pansy’s acceptance of “the hand we’ve been dealt”), and undermines our solidarity. The supply routes are cut-off, the rations are growing dear, so let’s randomly decide which of our brothers and sisters seem to be weakest and start frying them up with a side of stupidity. So here we are, promoting tribalism, sectarianism, laying out useless bent-over-the-barrel 7-point blog posts, insulting and defending The Fern, insulting one another, when we should be blasting a government that’s playing siege warfare with the literary community, the same government that’s willing to pay upwards of $16 billion to employ about 60 jet pilots, and the same government that’s up for re-election."

I can empathize with Mooney insofar as I too am sick of the redundancy of certain CanLit magazines. Sick of mags with art directors who seem to think that 3rd rate still life cover paintings of ponds reflect contemporary realities. Sick of derivative & formulaic narrative-knowledge poems that abide by same-voice-syndrome and substitute engaging subject matter and imagination wholesale for token revelation and sentimental moralizing. Sick of self-proclaimed blue collar free verse poets who pass off lack of attentiveness to both process & contemporary reality as their love of accessibility and penchant for universal truths. Sick of the politically correct domestic tripe that passes for national literature, and the notion that mere inclination towards the arts, regardless of ability, should instantly provoke a sense of public charity and institutional patronage.

We don't need less magazines, but we need writers and editors who give a fuck & are willing to suffer reverses in the hope of doing something authentic & worthwhile. The point is that, regardless of this funding issue, though it clearly exacerbates it, the medium clearly needs to reinvent itself. Online journals are proving a medium for both emerging & disenfranchised generations of writers to try something radical, sometimes antithetical to print culture, & some of the results are intriguing, to say the least. Attention needs to be paid to this shift, and not simply in the provincial manner of switching from print processes to cheaper and more convenient online equivalents, but at the level of radical self-assessment. In the absence of funding, it is also a mistake to glorify, like Lista, the supposed resilience of grassroots endeavours & to conflate a sense of distinctness with total abiding singularity; these are simply further roads to bankruptcy and stagnation. Regardless of the funds allocation, times are a changing: The Matrix, for instance, is no less safe in the long run for securing funding this year than lets say, The Malahat, for failing to do so. Lit magazines need to reexamine their editorial processes, their methods of distribution, their prospective readership, and above all their place in the cultural dialogue in which they are purporting to be such an integral aspect. Literary magazines shouldn't simply abide by the status quo, but be on the vanguard of reimaging it and ripping it apart; if we read literature to learn something new, to experience visceral aesthetic pleasure, to be privy to myriad emotional and intellectual situations and stations with which we were previously unfamiliar, then why do we content and acclimatize ourselves with safe & predictable commonplace fodder? We don't need more or less magazines, just magazines that make an effort to be worth our time.

Welcome

2011-07-19T06:30:00.000-07:00

I've decided to create this blog as a forum for posting ongoing writing projects, miscellaneous observations, reprints, and eventually exclusives, of various poems, stories, book reviews and interviews I've written/conducted. I will also post stories by talented friends and peers I admire. I have also recently begun selling reasonably priced used books online, so there will be a section/link with an updated list of titles as well. I am aiming to update Rusty Allegations on at least a weekly basis, so check back soon & often!

So in the spirit of beginnings, here are the first offerings: these two poems were recently published in the February 2011, final issue of the unfortunately now-defunct Maynard. Enjoy.

Tetanus Shot

Like a gutted fish
scales left fallow in the sun
silver fades to ashenly
your twined guts fetched overboard
to make for some unpardonable stew –

the fetid husk of you
is the rusty pucker in me

Converge (The Angel Fatima Sneezes)
– for dad

Your faith is a scantily clad rider
Poised before some golden prairie at dawn
Gripping a taut leather harness
Smoke blowing from failing embers in the distance
Waiting for you to summon her horse

http://themaynard.org/Vol4No1/contents.html