What's New In Books

An early mock-up cover for my hybrid memoir/poetry book, Playlist: a Profligacy of Your Least-Expected Poems, scheduled for release in Fall, 2024. Anvil Press is the publisher, Rayola the designer,

The Bitch (1979)

My advice to those interested in the writing life is now down to four words: read widely, write daily. An example of wide reading could include Elfriede Jelinek at one end of the shelf, Jackie Collins at the other. 

A couple weeks ago I picked up a never before cracked Jackie Collins paperback published in the relatively debauched year of 1979. The book is called The Bitch.

Collins is at her best with chapters that begin with the names of her characters. In The Bitch, it is not the bitch we first meet (Fontaine Khaled), but the "gentleman" (Nico Constantine) who uses her as a unwitting mule to smuggle a fabulously large and "borrowed" diamond ring into London to sell before his return to Las Vegas, where he can pay off his gambling debt.

I am only on Page 141 of this 253 page cartoon, so I don't know how it turns out. Not that it matters, for as I said, it's portraiture, not plot, that is Jackie Collins's strong suit. Which is not to say (so far) that the Bitch is well drawn, with complexities that lead us to sympathize with her, forgive her bitchiness as a symptom of some childhood injury, and thus love her for what she isn't. My problem is that the Bitch isn't bitchy enough.

Like Nico the Gentleman, Fontaine the Bitch goes through lovers -- young lovers -- like seltzer water. The difference is that Nico (a widower) sets a time limit of four weeks on his love affairs, after which he gives his exes a diamond trinket and a speech that makes it sound like it is the dumped lover who is breaking up with him. For Fontaine (the divorcee), a lover rarely lasts a week, and is assessed entirely on the size of his bank account (we're still in the era of the millionaire) and penis ("eight or nine inches").

Why Nico is considered a gentleman and Fontaine a bitch is the difference between the lies of a confidence man and the honesty of a woman who, though fickle, is at least up front about what she wants. Fontaine's bitch is a mere shadow when compared to the ferocious recklessness of today's bitch. As for Nico, his gentlemanly ways would only leave him vulnerable, serve as an admission of guilt, and he would, like Tennessee Williams's Sebastian Venable, be torn to pieces by an unforgiving mob.

Bedside Reading

"Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages," said Samuel Johnson in The Idler, in 1758. 

The war in question was the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), beginning first with England declaring war on France over Spanish colonies in North America, and soon enough Prussia taking up arms against Austria, France, Russia and Sweden -- what Winston Churchill referred to as "the first world war," because it spanned five continents. 

Although Johnson's proposition is a late-comer to a species that has known war since time immemorial, its utterance has allowed us to consider war's more abstracted consequences, not just fallen buildings and piled up bodies, but a change in how we relate to each other in that increasing utopian state known as peacetime.

Today, Truth is out the window. Too many of us no longer believe in what is shaped by reason and politics, but what is drawn and quartered by emotion and quantified "likes". Unless it serves our opinions, History is a stumbling block in need of removal. (A recent example came while reading pop cultural analyst Roxanne Gay's 2014 collection of essays Bad Feminist, where she has lots to say about feminism, despite admitting that "I am not being terribly well versed in feminist history" and "not as well read in key feminist texts as I would like to be."[xiii])  That we expect to have it both way is a further indication of our troubled times.

So what's next? What's next when everything thus far is History? The Future? (Gay has said little to prepare us for this Future, and that's why I have set aside her book for a second edition of Octavia Butler's 2005 speculative short fiction collection, Blood Child.) 

The Pact

I saw the story yesterday. A group of songwriters calling themselves The Pact are refusing to allow singers to receive as much as 30% of their writing credits when a singer has had no "meaningful" involvement in the writing of a song. This is not a new phenomenon. 

Apart from the song "amalgamations" of A. P. Carter, Colonel Tom Parker would insist that certain songs offered to his client Elvis Presley carry his name on the writing credits, while producers like Phil Spector hustled credits out of lesser known writers and musicians for prepositional changes to songs he had arranged and recorded. What is new is that there are less royalty monies available to musicians now that the era of ubiquitous radio play is dead; that digital downloads amount to little more than a tenth-of-a-penny for their Authors and Composers; and that touring during a global pandemic has been declared unsafe, if not illegal.

What is new is not to be confused with what has changed, and it is here that the list is longer, more complicated. One of the biggest changes concerns the way we have come to think about creation: not as a singular endeavour, but as a collaborative or relational activity. Not necessarily a bad thing. But when inclusion is manipulated by those seeking more of the pie than they already have, you have a problem.

Does a singer deserve a writing credit because their spectacular presence is such that the song they record would be nothing without their ability to take it beyond the kitchen table where it was written? Is melisma an essential part of a song's melody, or an example of its interpretation? This, like everything else right now, is a cultural issue. And no, The Pact is not all white guys.

Moments of Difference ("Against")

"The thin rain, falling past the square of my lighted window, looks like damp, finely-sifted flour, white against the black background of the road." -- Colette, Vagabond, 1910 (111)

"What does a victorious or defeated black woman's body in a historically white space look like? Serena and her big sister Venus Williams brought to mind Zora Neale Hurston's 'I feel most coloured when I am thrown against a sharp white background.' This appropriated line, stencilled in canvas by Glenn Ligon, who used plastic letter stencils, smudging oil sticks, and graphite to transform the words into abstractions, seemed to be ad copy for some aspect of life for all black bodies." -- Claudia Rankine, Citizen: an American Lyric, 2014 (25)

Suppose a Sentence (2020)

This brand new book by Brian Dillon is a thoughtful confection devoted to the pleasures of the sentence. Each of the book's 28 short essays begins with one, from Shakespeare to Anne Boyer. 

Shakespeare's sentence comes from the deathly Hamlet -- "O, o, o, o."   -- as in, "-- the rest is silence. O, o, o, o." Dillon does not mention T.S. Eliot's use of the unpunctuated, all caps string of Os in Line 128 of "The Waste Land" -- "O O O O that Shakespearean rag --/ It's so elegant/ So intelligent" -- but that's to be expected -- even Eliot questioned the staying power of his best known poem.

For my part I played off Eliot's "O O O O" in the second poem of my hole-y O poem sequence from my book 9x11 and other poems like Bird, Nine, x and Eleven (2018). "POtiOn" opens like this:

O O O O that Peruvian rag

the alpaca O O O who stOOd

fOr it O O beside O O the fire

(The attempt here was to do what poets Judith Copithorne and Steve McCaffery regretted of their early works, and that is mix concretist and expressive rhetorics -- the O an uncorked opening of the genie-releasing "Vial" in the previous poem, the first in my untitled sequence.)

Suppose a Sentence draws on a range of styles. Writers from all walks, including visual artists Robert Smithson and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (the cover is a montage by John Stezaker). Like the world's population, this book is comprised of slightly more women than men.

A Poem by Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)

blessing the boats

  (at St. Mary's)

may the tide 

that is entering even now

the lip of our understanding

carry you out

beyond the face of fear

may you kiss

the wind then turn from it

certain that it will

love your back     may you

open your eyes to water

water waving forever

and may you in your innocence

sail through this to that

Cartoon Roused By Its Live-Action Equivalent

Testing the New Pen

Bic 4-Colour Pen

I love this pen. Plus it was time for a new one.

Fifty years old next year!

I did not know that Bic (Société Bic) is a French company, and that my 4-Colour pen was made in France (Clichy). It says so on the white part, below and between the red and black selectors. You can barely see it, but it's there.

Portraiture

Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some extent, despite the village school: the characteristic intonation of that dialect for this district being the voicing approximately rendered by the syllable UR, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech. The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word.

-- Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (51-52) 

She mimics the speaking. That might resemble speech. (Anything at all.) Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words. Since she hesitates to measure the accuracy, she resorts to picking gestures with the mouth. The entire lower lip would let upwards, then back to its original place. She would then gather both lips and protrude them in a pout taking in the breath that might utter some thing. (One thing. Just one.) But the breath falls away. With a slight tilting of her head backwards, she would gather the strength in her shoulders and remain in this position.

-- Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (3)

Poem

before words

what feels you

to even think them

this is what

you are missing

The Writer As Gunner not Hunter?

Flipping through Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, Third Edition (Macmillan, 1979), the copy given to me 39 years ago by Susan Currie after I told her I would like to spend more time writing.

In the "Approach to Style" chapter there is an analogy that had me wondering why E.B. White likened the writer to "a gunner" when the context for gunning is hunting (why not a hunter?).

“The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, [s]he must cultivate patience; [s]he may have to work many covers to bring down one partridge." (69)

Poem

Strange Fruit

could it be that your foul nature has

as much to do with me as your own

self-loathing

or is this stab at humility shared with

the world what you call self-loathing

on Twitter

just another mad outfit you don when

performing in the closet of your phone

a tableau

like the I’m-calling-you-out tableau or

the schadenfreude tableau or the WTF

three-parter

the triptych template that combines

incredulity anger and an emoticon I

had not

seen before a figure that took a while

to figure out but once I had is that
a gallows?

Marguerite Duras

Early in Mark Polizzotti's translation of Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Marguerite Duras writes:

My room is not a bed, neither here nor in Paris nor in Trouville. It's a certain window, a certain table, habits of black ink, untraceable marks of black ink, a certain chair. And certain habits that I always maintain, wherever I go, wherever I am, even in places where I don't write, such as hotel rooms…

Readers of our national newspapers will have noticed two recent articles concerning the written sentence and the English language. On January 28 the National Post gave us Mike Doherty’s review of Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence, and How to Read One, while on February 18 The Globe and Mail did the same with Zsuzsi Gartner’s review of Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer.

While Doherty is quick to identify Fish as “a connoisseur, not a polemicist,” both could be said of Gartner, a sentencista who identifies as a “card-carrying cult member,” a phrase not unlike the one-too-many she packs into her fiction, teetering as they do in the middle of her long and thoroughly worried sentences, invariably falling off by the time I get to the period (gasping for air!). Malcolm Lowry, whose own sentences are often unwieldy and fragmentary, manages to create a different effect, where by the end of the paragraph they fall nicely into place, providing overtone, an experience I rarely have with Gartner.

Another bothersome aspect of Gartner’s review is related to something Doherty brought up, and that is context. Not once in Gartner’s article does she refer to the materiality of sentences in relation to content, an absence that seems in support of the romantic writer, one who develops their own style, their own voice, like those graduating from the "success-oriented" creative writing classes Gartner is also a card-carrying member of. Whatever happened to using style in relation to content, as content? Style and voice, like setting and character, are materials too. Must one always write the same way every time?