Zachariah Wells

I first heard from Zach Wells before I'd heard of him. I suppose that's now an unlikely sequence. His reputation precedes him.

It was 2002 and I was plugging away at The Danforth Review, the online magazine I started in 1999 and continue to tinker with. I published something that Wells took issue with and he let me know where he stood.

Subsequently he wrote book reviews for the magazine and I asked him to write a review essay on Carmine Starnino's A Lover's Quarrel. That review is included in a revised ("New and Improved!"?) form in Career Limiting Moves (Biblioasis, 2013), which Google for some reason categorizes as "humor" (see link on title).

Funnily enough, I saw Wells recently and I said humor was one of the reasons I was enjoying his book. "It's not what you're known for, though," I said. "Some people seem not to get it."

"I know some people don't get it," he replied.

Which brings us back to the reputation that now precedes him.

I have heard him called an asshole. I've heard him called right wing. I've heard him called a misogynist. In the book he notes he's been claimed and rejected by both the populists and the elites. In truth, he has always been what his letter to TDR in 2002 perhaps should have made clear: a jury of one. An iconoclast. One who rejects systems. One who seeks a genuine, unpredictable deep connection with the wildness that is existence and also, therefore, literature.

Which doesn't mean he isn't sometimes a literary bad boy. The conversation about Canadian poetry in the past decade has had multiple moments of overheated debate. Wells has often been in the middle of it or nearby. (Sometimes of his choosing; sometimes dragged in by others.) I'm not going to sift through any of that, except to say little of it made it in between the covers of this book. Readers expecting score-settling won't find it here.

I'm not going to attempt a Social History of Canadian Poetry in the Aughts and Beyond, because what I'd like to attempt here is a book review. I have read this tome, and I'd like to record a few thoughts about it. Is any of that extra-curricular stuff relevant? I have decided to mention it in passing because, let's be honest, the book exists in a context and the context is relevant, if sometimes wanton. Willfully spiteful, is what I'm saying, not promiscuous. And, yes, I know Wells has been accused of the same. (So have I, and sometimes I have even deserved it.)

But see how quickly we move away from the book? I will try to stay focused.

The book is subtitled "Interviews. Rejoinders. Essays. Reviews." It begins with "Rejoinders." which is the category most responsible for ZW's reputation. It's the category where the TDR letter would fit. It's not the category that, ahem, contains his best writing. While the writing here is playful, snarky, sharp-witted, intelligent, and polemical, his debate skills (formidable) leave his opponents flattened. The later essays, some of which are also put-downs, are more finely tuned; complex; subtle; and therefore interesting. Wells can be an excellent close reader. His intricacy of thought is not on best display when he's demolishing Dr. Zwicky, for example. (However entertaining the piece is. Too entertaining? No. We must save some room in our life of letters for some fun; at the same time, we must save our praise for that which is truly great. This ripost is fun, and needed, but not great.)

ZW's rhetorical approach is part of the package, however, so ...

"I'm with Angela Carter," Wells writes in his introduction, "a day without an argument is like an egg without salt."

Being Wells, he then adds: "(I prefer pepper myself.)" (So he's with Angela Carter ... but only up to a point.)

This is a small thing, but let's notice that the movement here is towards the specific and subjective. The general point is all he needs. He likes to argue. Okay, we get that. But he also likes things to be grounded in the concrete, the real, the authentic, which is also, therefore, personal and subjective. Is Wells the only poetry critic to include his Myers-Briggs score? Likely. This subjectivity contradicts his reputation. The imperialist doesn't tell you where she is coming from; she simply states what is.

But here's what I really want to say about this book. I acquired some learning that I hadn't expected. I encountered arguments from Wells that I hadn't expected.

Wells is a brilliant polemicist, but his reputation obscures and over-simplifies a more interesting (to me) critic, poet and thinker.

I'm going to focus on one element that emerged from multiple pieces within the book, a pattern that I wouldn't have grasped if I hadn't read each of these essays, reviews and interviews in sequence.

And that is the connection between language, wild nature, and the impenetrable unknown.

I'm not a close reader of Wells's poetry. I have dipped into it, but I claim no insight about what he's "up to." What's at the core of Career Limiting Moves, however, it seems to me, is a collection of interests that might even move toward claiming the label of mandate. (And it's a mandate far beyond the limited conversation about positioning for privilege of place within Canada's hyper-competitive hierarchy of career minded, um, how is this even possible?, poets.)

"If we persist in being so insecure and isolationist, we are doomed to remain infantile," Wells ended his TDR letter. And since 2002 he has been mapping out his vision of a poetry of maturity. What should be starkly obvious is that it is an individual's vision, not part of a collectivist campaign.

He slams poetry that tells us what we already know. He slams poetry that uses worn out language. He turns to the natural world for examples of "the real," and also for example of spontaneous creation. Not his words, but I sense he sees humanity as an animal within nature. We are not apart from it; we are part of it. And what is this thing that we are a part of? What can we know of it? How can what we can know of it tell us about ourselves? What is the limit of our knowledge? How can we break the barriers so that we can know more? He praises poems that press against the outer boundaries. He praises poems that pressure language until it reveals its limit. Then he asks it to go further.

He is claimed by People's Poetry because he writes of work. He is projected to be a member of the elite because he eschews informality and values received forms. Yet every collective who claims him (or he is pressed into), he rejects ... one must say, Dylan-like ("Don't follow leaders, watch pawkin meters"). At one point in my reading I made a note: "straddling the authentic." And here's where that "pepper" comment comes in again. Wells grounds his line, his polemics, his mandate, as it were, in the every day, but it is a deeply mysterious (subjective) kind of quotidian. He is highly alert that day follows night, and night follows day, and life is full of pattern and routine, as poetry has form, as nature has seasons, but also that none of this is simple or self-evident. Whatever intimacy the day-to-day holds is best revealed through interrogation. Not simply conversation, argument.

The wildness of language and the wildness of nature is where he finds value. (I might have anticipated the first, but the second caught me off guard.) Each is perpetually in motion and impossible to set down except in instants. And here I recollect that ZW's debut collection was called Unsettled. The void looms large over his work. An anxiety to sweep away the superficial and dedicate the best resources to the biggest reward. While time lasts. His patience is weak for those who contemplate lesser obstacles. I knew that about Wells over a decade ago when I received from him from that first email, which set me back a couple of steps. (Most don't bother to engage; those who do, often have nothing to say. Those who have something to say, one never forgets.)

In 2002 I wouldn't have called Canadian literature infantile, but today I'm happy to claim that ZW is helping it grow up.

*

As a laying of cards on the table seems appropriate, yes, I count Wells as a friend, though I have only met him a handful of times, and I have not met his family, and he has not met mine. About that latter I am sad. He and my late-wife would have got on like a house on fire, if you will pardon the cliche. She liked to argue, too, and she didn't like to lose. It is strange to me to be writing this review and referring to events that happened before I met Kate in 2006 and including events that happened after she died, but that is what we do. We knit our lives together out of what we have, and this is constructive grieving. Just telling the stories and expressing the emotions. I wish Zach and Kate had met. I'm sure that I would have enjoyed that, a lot.

The M Word

The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood
Edited by Kerry Clare
Goose Lane Editions, 2014

My step-daughter (10) saw me reading this.

"The M Word," she said. "Michael."

Last May, she gave me a Mother's Day gift. I can't be the only man who's ever received one, but none of the essays written in these "conversations" is written by a male.

A year before I got a Mother's Day gift, my wife mother died, following 21 months with breast cancer.

The temptation to write "following a 21 month battle ..." is immense, as you might understand.

The real battle, however, was in the final three or four months. The disease had gone to her liver and her bones, her T1 vertebrae specifically.

Breast cancer can put you in a wheelchair. I didn't know that until it happened. It also typically progresses, as it did for Kate: breast, liver, bone, brain. Once it leaves the breast, cure is impossible, and you get the special benefit of learning to live with the fact that your days are numbered.

But then they are for all of us, right? We just typically forget that part. We let other anxieties grip and define us.

Goose Lane sent me this book in the mail, a review copy for this site, even though I haven't reviewed anything here in six months. Turns out there's something worse than living with someone who's dying of cancer. It's living without the person who was dying of cancer.

Reviewing books used to give me pleasure; now I have a hard time thinking three sentences in a row.

Ah, but I exaggerate. Some of my Tigger bounce is returning.

I don't like "Conversations about Motherhood," the sub-title. What's wrong with calling essays essays?

A quibble.

Confession: I'm only halfway through this book, but I've been itching to capture my thoughts, so here goes.

Persistently these essays (the one's I've read) reinforce the idea that motherhood is a choice (even if the conception is accidental, because abortion an option and a second level of choice). Alternately, not becoming a mother is also a choice, except for those times when it isn't because conception (and carrying to term) is biologically impossible.

That is, there is anxiety about control. Control to make the choice, one way or the other, and the strong assertion that the choice is valid, whatever the choice is.

Now I support choice, and I accept the validity of any choice anyone makes. It's your body, it's your choice, this is all fine.

What I find oddly missing is, um, well ... awe. Mystery. The miraculous. What also might be called, fate. What will be will be. The revelation that comes with the encounter with the void, the other, the greater power that drives away all expectations and replaces it with that indescribable whatever that shakes you to the core and makes you realize that you've never been so alive. And so lost.

So changed.

I mean ...

In 2007, I became an instant part-time parent of a three-year-old and a seven-year-old. I chose to tie myself to this ship. I love being a parent almost more than I loved being married. I will be eternally grateful that Kate allowed me this experience. It caused rapid growth in my psyche and emotions that could not have happened any other way.


The best days of my life were spent talking to Kate about how we were going to grow these munchkins. The most important thing I've ever done is clean up puke at three o'clock in the morning, while Kate slept, undisturbed. (I know!) She didn't believe that it had happened, until I showed her the sheets in the washing machine. (But there were other times I let her do it. Fair is fair.)

Then in May 2012 I sat with Kate as she told the children that she was going to die, which she did eight days later, in the back room of our house, in front of them.

I wonder how the lost mother becomes part of this conversation.

Anyhoo ...

I'm enjoying reading this book. I enjoy the diversity of the stories, the variations of circumstance.

I wonder why, though, in 2014 we can't have a book about parenting. The P Word. How many generations until these marketing categories get broken down?

But it's not just that, I know. The entire parent council of the school across the street from my house is made up of women. Women are the do-ers, overwhelmingly. They make the household spending decisions, overwhelmingly. They organize the birthday parties, overwhelmingly. They care for the boo-boos and late night puking, overwhelmingly. They are the caregivers, emotionally and otherwise, overwhelmingly. And each new generation of young women is raised to be independent and self-actualized. Crash, boom, bang. The center cannot hold. Conflict is inevitable, and also interesting. The source of narrative.

I'm starting to get the "conversations" bit now. It's sort of like Sarah Polley's "Stories We Tell," each story strand is okay. It gives us a different angle on an impossibly angled object.

I should likely highlight some examples to give you some idea of the content of the book, and not just my own muddling meanderings. (I warned you, though; my mind is griefstriken.)

My heart went out to Heather Birrell. Her piece was super lovely.

Julie Booker's late-arriving twins sound like a handful, yet their arrival gave me sweet joy.

Diana Fitzgerald Bryden's story about her nephews and their dog was fantastic. Rich complex layers of super goodness.

Kerry Clare's tale of her abortion and subsequent pregnancy was well argued and poignant.

Myrl Coulter's reflections on giving up a baby for adoption show well-earned wisdom. Very effective integration of her own story with researched facts.

Christa Couture lost two small children. Separately. One after the other. Her essay is heartbreaking and, frankly, it contradicts my earlier claim above about the lack of fatalism in the collection. This is a brave and remarkable piece, one of the best here.

Nancy Jo Cullen sounds like a nifty drinking companion. She has two teenagers she will be happy to see out the door. She is a true den mother and zen mistress with a zingy comedic touch.

Marita Dachsel captures the anxiety of parenthood with gut stabbing precision.

Nicole Dixon doesn't have a kid and doesn't want one.

Ariel Gordon is a mother and a poet and she seems pretty good at balancing both roles.

Amy Lavender Harris reminds us that conception, even in modern advanced societies, is not a given. Her essay is another excellent example how effective it can be to mix the personal with well chosen researched facts. This is a very compelling piece that addresses how to become a mother in a lab. It looks at the personal pressures and costs, the social narratives that define and deny "naturalness", and the scientific details about how it all works, when it does.

Fiona Tinwei Lam is a third-generation single mother, and it seems to be working out well for her. As I step-parent, I appreciated her analysis of the changing social ideals of "attachment." Once unwed mothers were thought to be too unstable to care for their children (best for the children to go elsewhere); now the biological connection is privileged above nearly all else.

Deanna McFadden tells the ugly truth. Your children will make you angrier than you ever thought possible, and you will wonder why they aren't like other kids, specifically the quiet one that you saw on the way home on the subway.

And that's as far as I've gotten so far. I'm hoping that there's more craziness to come. Starker confrontations with the abyss. I want to hear from a mother who would be at home in a book like this. Or maybe from Jennifer Lawrence's character in "American Hustle." Or from an incarcerated mother. Or a drunk one. Or by a mother who spends her time looking after other people's kids so she can support her family in another country, typically the Philippines.

The narrative tension between the expectation and the real is okay, you know. It is what it is. It's motherhood in our current moment, though perhaps most prominently in an educated, middle-class type mode.

Motherhood is a role like every other role, in that it is complicated by a variety of pressures: race, class, family background, mental and physical health, level of education, geography, and pure random luck or lack thereof. (Wealth and power might be more common recent additions to this list. I imagine Allison Redford has an interesting tale to tell now. Kathleen Wynne, too.)

The truth is, that life is wild and unpredictable and out along the high wire we go. There is no net. No amount of desiring control and demanding validity is going to change that, though you may get strapped into a safety harness or two.

Yesterday I saw Michèle Taïna Audette speak. She is the president of the Canadian Native Women's Association, and she is currently leading the call for a national public inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women.

She started her talk saying she is a mother of five. And single.

One of the stories she told went like this. She was giving a talk in Sault Ste. Marie to about 300 people. There were about 30 Aboriginal people. She asked them to stand up and raise their hand if one of their direct relatives (grandmother, mother, sister, daughter, granddaughter) was counted among the missing and murdered. Twenty-nine raised their hand. Then she asked the 270 non-Aboriginal people to stand and answer the same question. One person put up their hand.

Someone asked her about the sex slave trade on the Great Lakes. Did she know about that?

Oh, yes.

Life is really a great disaster and the ability to bare and look after children a great gift. Unless you don't want to, then that's okay, too.

It would be a shame if conversations about motherhood skirted that chaos too tightly.

Melia McClure

My review of Melia McClure's The Delphi Room (CZP, 2013), from Quill & Quire. (See also me reading this thing on YouTube.)

*

When Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor Gregor, but not much.
After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or somewhere in between?
Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling intimacy.
Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely avoids simple solutions.
A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.
- See more at: http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8143#sthash.FJoDdt6p.dpuf

When Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor Gregor, but not much.

After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or somewhere in between?

Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling intimacy.

Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely avoids simple solutions.

A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.

When Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor Gregor, but not much.
After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or somewhere in between?
Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling intimacy.
Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely avoids simple solutions.
A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.
- See more at: http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8143#sthash.FJoDdt6p.dpuf

When Bob Dylan told us, “It’s doom alone that counts,” he might have been anticipating Melia McClure’s tragicomic debut novel. In the first sentence, the narrator, Velvet, hangs herself; all subsequent action is post-mortem. Like Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, which opens with the narrator waking up as a bug, the plot’s trajectory goes straight down. McClure’s protagonist has more self-determination than poor Gregor, but not much.
After hanging herself, Velvet wakes up naked in a room that is decorated like her childhood bedroom and resembles a jail cell. The closet contains a single set of clothes. Besides a bed, there is a mirror, a desk, and a pad of paper and a pen. Is this heaven, hell, or somewhere in between?
Soon she discovers she’s not alone. A neighbour, named Brinkley, is in the next cell, and they pass notes back and forth under the door. The mirrors in their rooms show scenes from each other’s lives. Velvet and Brinkley start off as strangers, but move toward something resembling intimacy.
Despite this growing relationship, Velvet is often alone with her thoughts, and we learn much about her sad, tragic life. She is an engaging narrator: cultured, self-aware, and often funny despite the disturbing circumstances. Existential and philosophical questions are inevitable in this context; McClure addresses them directly and wisely avoids simple solutions.
A clever novel with a unique approach, The Dephi Room both challenges and entertains. Though the story takes place after Velvet’s death, the characters are full of life, painted with emotional depth and affirming the wild complexity that is the human condition.
- See more at: http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8143#sthash.FJoDdt6p.dpuf

Maitland & da Costa

My review recently posted on The Winnipeg Review.

*

Being assigned two books to review at once, one cannot help but return to grade eleven English. The command echoes loud and clear: compare and contrast.

Paulo da Costa’s The Green and Purple Skin of the World (Freehand Books, 2013) and Collette Maitland’s Keeping the Peace (Biblioasis, 2013) are both short story collections. Even a cursory contemplation of their titles, however, would lead one to suspect that while they share a form, they are divergent in other significant aspects.

In his 1998 book Ripostes (Porcupine’s Quill), essayist Philip Marchand compares and contrasts the work of Terry Griggs with that of Barbara Gowdy and illuminates insights that are assistive to our consideration of the works under review here.

Griggs, says Marchand, is Catholic; Gowdy, Protestant. He considers their treatment of angels. In Griggs, they foretell miracles; in Gowdy, death. Marchand writes of Gowdy’s characters: “It is as if they have a genetic memory of salvation anxiety – an anxiety in striking contrast to the relatively relaxed approach to salvation characteristic of many Catholics, who know that if Jesus hasn’t entered their hearts, at least they can make a novena on nine first Fridays and feel fairly safe.”

Based on the titles, do you want to guess which of these writers I am about to suggest is the Catholic and which the Protestant: da Costa or Maitland?

Let’s get it over with. Maitland, Protestant; da Costa, Catholic.

Keeping the Peace contains nineteen stories in 238 pages. The stories are short, sharp, intense. They are often shocking. They contain domestic violence, mental illness, teenage sex. The stories often turn on moral failure. More specifically, they turn on the failure of an individual to live up to the standards of “the code,” which is often the unspoken social expectations of contemporary rural Orangetown — I mean, Ontario. You know what I mean. There is no salvation for those who don’t follow “the code,” and for those in danger of straying away from the code there is much anxiety, an emotion that swells to bursting in every story in this collection.

Compare and contrast this with the stories in The Green and Purple Skin of the World. The stories in this collection rollick in the foibles of their characters. Aren’t people strange and wonderful? Wow. Did you hear the one about the old widow with the gun who scared the crap out of her live-in caregiver? Did you hear the one about the kid with that disease and he went to the doctor, and he had an operation, and he was freaking cured? Can you believe that? A miracle!

The Green and Purple Skin of the World contains sixteen stories in 206 pages. Many of the stories are intimate family portraits. It would be a stretch to call them dramas. Some haven’t much drama at all, really, or to approach it another way, they haven’t much anxiety. Some of the stories are full of intimate moments, portrayed lovingly, lightly and suffused with fun. To use the word Marchand highlights, salvation is not at risk in these stories. The fate of the family, the fate of an individual is not at risk. These stories don’t sharpen a narrative edge; they expand with love of life and risk being boring.

Let me be clear, not all stories in The Green and Purple Skin of the World meet this description. One story about a combat pilot who watches his buddies blow up, for example, has plenty of anxiety and narrative edge. We might conclude, therefore, that da Costa’s stories showcase greater range that Maitland’s, but that would be a superficial conclusion. Maitland’s stories push harder against the edges of reality, focusing on the fraying edges of relationships. The title may be Keeping the Peace, but these stories more often articulate the point at which relationships fragment. There is much anxiety that the peace be kept, that the code be followed, but damnation is inevitable within this mythology. The centre cannot hold.

In the final story, for example, the wife of an elderly man with Alzheimer’s takes him for a walk in the park. It seems a nice day until the man pulls a kitchen knife from his pocket and attacks a concrete lion statue, scraping newly applied paint off the creature’s eyeballs. A mother with a young child passes by and then turns away. The old man’s wife watches the woman pull a cell phone from her pocket. She can only imagine that the woman is calling 911, and she notes as the story ends “she would have done the same.”

Oi vey. Really? The wife identifies with Nurse Ratched? Surely this is the point where Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters enter the picture, but, no, the book ends. It’s severe, man. Yikes.
The Green and Purple Skin of the World, on the other hand, offers frequent reconciliation. One story collects a family at Christmas for the traditional torture. The mother is desperate for a granddaughter. Is the daughter going to fulfil her mother’s wish? Why should she, since her parents kicked her out of the home many years earlier when she was a teenager and caught in bed with her boyfriend? The daughter went on to live years on the street. The boyfriend was sent off to posh schools. Years later, they married and now all is supposed to be forgiven and forgotten. The daughter swears, however, she will never have a child. Never inflict on another being the damage that was inflicted upon her. But the story doesn’t end on a note of negation; it ends with the mother sharing the daughter’s childhood bathing suit with her. Wouldn’t it look nice on a girl? Yes, the daughter agrees. It sure would.

Cue the strings. Full orchestra. Bleeding heart and tears. Oh, lovely. Yes. It is, though.

As we reach our own conclusion, let us settle on relativity. Different strokes for different folks. An engaged reading, however, demands what Leonard Cohen asked of us in 1956: Let us compare mythologies. Off you go, now. Get reading.

Peter Roman

Peter Roman's The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (CZP, 2013) is the first novel I've read that made me feel like I was playing a video game.

Maybe it was the protagonist, who kept dying and coming back to life, fighting assorted demons (and angels) and progressing to higher levels of complex game play.

But the protagonist isn't Super Mario; he's Jesus Christ. Or at least the soul who inherited Christ's body. Confused? So is he. His name is Cross, as in the Cross, but also angry.

Cross has the biggest case of amnesia in history and a unique problem. He can't die. He wakes up in a cave, rolls away enough of the rock to squeeze out. He has vague memories of being crucified. He remembers his enemy, Judas. No Prince of Peace, he's pissed off.

Over the next two thousand years, he drifts around the world indulging the body's cravings (often simply described as wine and women), fighting in the Roman Coliseum, with King Arthur's Knights, against assorted knaves, rogues and rascals. He has a burning hatred for Judas and a permanent existential crisis. He cannot erase himself (he dies repeatedly, only to dig himself out of various graves). He is propelled forward for a desire to know himself (though he's not much for philosophy) and a desire for revenge (he's convinced Judas is the cause of his fate). Judas, it must be explained, is a lot like Lucifer; he is no mortal; he morphs throughout history, often placing himself at the site of catastrophe and chaos (e.g., Hiroshima et al).

The background of the story is Christ withdrew to Heaven and God withdrew from the world. Judas, essentially, inherits the earth, except he hasn't achieved the complete Doom's Day he expected either. Angels remain, abandoned by God, awaiting his return. A host of other magical creatures also exist, each with different agendas.

Cross is like Moses in the desert, cast out, wandering. How can one not quote Bob Dylan? "Like a complete unknown/ Like a rolling stone." He hunts angels for grace. He kills them and sucks out their power, which restores him. If he died low on grace, he would still be restored, but it would take longer. Being stocked up on grace also allows him to perform magic of various sorts.

While the context-setting is complicated, the plot isn't. The story opens with an angel offering Cross a bargain: find the Mona Lisa (the real Mona Lisa, not the painting) and he will be given Judas. And since his search for Judas is one of the few things that have kept him going for the past two thousand years, of course he says yes. He would do anything for that. And what follows is a series of the odd and improbable. It's also a love story. And everything wraps up tightly, while also setting us up for the sequel.

Part hard-boiled detective novel, part magical realism, part mystic fantasy, part picaresque adventure, this genre bending novel may leave you seeking grace yourself. Though as Cross makes clear, eternal life has its down sides.

Leon Rooke

There's a video on YouTube about manuscript records of Barry Hannah's at the University of Mississippi, and they interview a professor who recounts first reading Hannah, oh so many years ago, and the prof talks about how he had to learn to read Hannah the way Hannah wanted to be read.

He summarizes this as: learning to read for "language," not just for "story."

Rooke is the same way.

Read for the stories, the "acts of kamikaze fiction" in Wide World in Celebration and Sorrow (Exile, 2012) are going to confound.

Read as wild arrays of language, these stories will amaze.

Rooke's fans already know this. Eager readers everywhere, all aboard!

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Here's my other post about the marvelous Mr. Rooke (from May 2010, written earlier), plus bonus interview!

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Here's the Barry Hannah video:



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Here's Leon reading poetry:

Donald Barthelme

We're due for a Donald Barthelme revival. Or at least I was, because of passages like this (from an interview with Charles Ruas and Judith Serman, 1975):

BARTHELME: [On teaching creative writing] About the only thing I give them [the students] in the way of general pronouncements is that I forbid them absolutely to use weather in any form. ... Weather, weather. Thunderstorms, rain. 

I say, "This is an entirely artificial prohibition and as soon as you leave my class you can use all of the weather you want. But for this space of time, weather is verboten." 

That immediately gets rid of a lot of really bad writing.

RUAS: Why, because --

BARTHELME: -- Because it's so easy to use weather as the equivalent of an emotion, and you know --

RUAS: -- And Shakespeare's already done it better than anyone else can.

BARTHELME: Yes, and one very good student, at the start of this semester, said, "What, no weather? What would Lear be without weather?"

And I said, "The exception to this rule is if you write Lear."

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My favorite quotations from Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews:

• “There’s nothing more rewarding than than a fresh set of problems.”
• “There’s nothing so beautiful as having a very difficult problem.”
• “Beckett’s work is an embarrassment to the Void.”
• “To quote Karl Kraus, ‘A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.’”
• “Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.”

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Most people probably encounter Barthelme in a classroom, which is unfortunate, especially if he is taught as part of the post-modern crowd, which of course he is (part of it, and taught that way). His fiction may be of the 1960s & 1970s, but his influence (and potential influences) span backwards and forwards in time.

Not-Knowing begins with two substantial essays, "After Joyce" and "Not-Knowing," which establish Bartheleme's bona fides as a Modernist and a Texan. His father was an architect and high on the intellectual curve for his time. Barthelme's interviews and essays show his deep immersion in aesthetic debates from visual art, to buildings, to books. While he may have picked up some avant garde tendencies from his father, his pater didn't appreciate Donald's sense of humour, or the advent of the "post-" prefix.

What one senses in all of this is the primal conflict, perhaps best illustrated by noting the title of what of Barthelme's novels, The Dead Father.

"Not enough emotion" and "too many jokes" were what Barthelme considered the weaknesses of his fiction. We might identify here instead an anxiety to simply be himself. But what was that?

Barthelme situates his work, like Joyce (and his other oft cited influence, Gertrude Stein) in the perpetual state of becoming. Or as he calls it, Not-Knowing: "The not-knowing is not simple, because it's hedged with prohibitions, roads that may not be taken. The more serious the artist, the more problems he takes into account and the more considerations limit his possible initiatives."

There is also the ongoing argument with those who don't "get it," those content to be hip to be square.

Barthelme quotes Kenneth Burke (from "The Calling of the Tune"):

For the greater the dissociation and discontinuity developed by the artist in an otherworldly art that leaves the things to Ceaser to take care of themselves, the greater becomes the artist's dependence upon some ruler who will accept the responsibility for doing the world's "dirty work."

Puzzle that one out for a moment, before reading Barthelme's response:

This description of the artist turning his back on the community to pursue his "otherworldly" projects (whereupon the community promptly falls apart) is a familiar one, accepted even by some artists. Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the other writers of the transition school (Burke mentions them specifically) are seen as deserters, creating their own worlds, which are thought to have nothing to do with the larger world. The picture is, I think, entirely incorrect. ...

Burke's strictures raise the sticky question of what art is "about" and the mysterious shift that takes place as son as one says that art is not about something but is something. In saying that the writer creates "dissociation and discontinuity" rather than merely describing a previously existing dissociation and discontinuity (the key word is "developed"), Burke notices that with Joyce and Stein the literary work becomes an object in the world rather than a text or a commentary upon the world -- a crucial change in status which was also taking place in painting. With Joyce, and to a lesser degree with Gertrude Stein, fiction altered its placement in the world in a movement so radical that its consequences have yet to be assimilated.

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Barthelme wrote that in 1964, just when the Sixties were becoming the Sixties. He then went on to become one of the leading literary innovators of his generation. His short stories and novels kept up the beat. The times were a-changing. At least, so it seemed for a while. They don't really change. They just modulate within a frequency. (What frequency, Kenneth?)

Check on the podcast by The New Yorker: Chris Adrian reads “The Indian Uprising,” by Donald Barthelme, and discusses it with fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

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As much as Barthelme was on his period, part of what we mean by literary influence is that the artist was ahead of her time. I think this is true of Barthelme. There is much (too much) "knowingness" in  the 21st century, despite all of the quakes, wars, economic and environmental meltdowns. And I don't just mean Dubya's "you're with us or agin us." So-called progressives can be just as closed-minded as the ultra-dumb, I mean, -right.

"Dissociation and discontinuity developed by the artist"? In the interviews Barthelme repeatedly asserts that he's a "realist." Amen to that. He's also a language-magician and an idea-jerking philosopher (joker, midnight toker).

BARTHELME: I say it's realism, bearing in mind Harold Rosenberg's wicked remark that realism is one of the fifty-seven varieties of decoration.

We're talking about art, people.

Repeat after me. Donald Barthelme revival. Donald Barthelme revival.