tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73531984146177768402024-03-05T05:02:14.928-05:00Tangerine Tree Press and The Tangerine Tree ReviewTangerine Tree Press is an independent literary press with international scope committed to fiction and serious non-fiction evincing a distinctive voice, a mastery of craft, and an obvious love of language. In 2011 we will introduce a line of rare late 18th and early 19th Century fiction of scholarly interest. The Tangerine Tree Review discusses fiction and poetry published by independent presses.Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.comBlogger68125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-86255568411244356362011-03-08T22:16:00.005-05:002011-03-09T21:09:06.247-05:00Review of 'Dodging Traffic' and Interview With Poet Jesse Bradley<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJqNelYcsdb9XxtLYikFW7a1jLwM-_FMys5S-BXPY4emBECAEI4cWIScaWLMB2lPpplTSvfrPyh_1RGn3IqLXQviLOeQJOWqYeBT2qbctp3KU6aZFSEemLcaXkCYhe2-IHMbygJRLgToOb/s1600/dodging-traffic.200%252520wide%255B1%255D.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 180px; height: 282px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJqNelYcsdb9XxtLYikFW7a1jLwM-_FMys5S-BXPY4emBECAEI4cWIScaWLMB2lPpplTSvfrPyh_1RGn3IqLXQviLOeQJOWqYeBT2qbctp3KU6aZFSEemLcaXkCYhe2-IHMbygJRLgToOb/s320/dodging-traffic.200%252520wide%255B1%255D.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5582267506772585666" /></a><br /><br />Jason Cook, at Ampersand Press, seems to like backing readers up against the walls of their own comfort zones and giving them a good solid push. I suspect he’s always curious about whether the wall or the reader will give way first. Dodging Traffic, by Jesse Bradley, is another of his offerings, and here I am, definitely in a space I wouldn’t have entered on my own. <br /><br />Dodging Traffic is a story of love turned ugly. It’s the bitter dregs of what might have been a sweet drink – you can taste bits of the sweetness in the sticky residue on the sides of the glass – imbibed in the sort of establishment you wouldn’t admit to frequenting. Lines like “Who made your hands stammer/ the first time they cradled a waist/ on the last day of summer?” give us glimpses into a past that has given way to sexual encounters made sordid by language and insults and pain. Many of the poems reek of disappointment and resentment – “You should know I kiss/like a fistful of mistakes” - and they don’t mince words. In “What Makes a Man a Man” he gives us a frank appraisal of his approach – <br /><br />Chasing butterflies<br />With automatic weapons.<br /><br />There are lighter pieces, even some whimsies – The Bride of Dracula’s Gynaecologist on Career Day – but Bradley’s main theme is bitter experience with the death of love. There are several poems in the collections that give (perhaps questionable) advice about love and sex to the young, often to the narrator’s son, but the poetry itself acknowledges the pointlessness of such advice. In ‘Another Poem About China’ he says;<br /><br />When I finally go to China<br />I will pollute the Yangtze<br />With the ghosts of my <br />unborn children.<br /><br />I hope a fish swallows<br />A daughter<br />So she can teach <br />all my sons<br /><br />how to commit<br />to something<br />other than suicide.<br /><br />The wisdom he passes on has the feel, at times, of religious instruction from a priest who’s lost his faith but can’t quite manage to give up hope, in the clear awareness that “the entity known as Hope/ feloniously spread[s] the infection/ known as optimism. It is his ambivalent relationship with hope, I suspect, that lies at the core of the collection. He addresses the problem directly.<br /><br />Dear Hope... <br />Thank you for showing<br />that sometimes you need a lie<br />to float above the truth.<br /><br />Love may be dead - “that’s why,” as he says in 'Why There are no more Unicorns, My Child,' “you can’t quite wipe out the aftertaste of extinction,” – but he lives, probably in spite of his better judgement, with a belief in its perpetual resurrection.<br /><br /><strong>An Interview With Jesse Bradley</strong><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3yizDNgKivxGH5UG7lnjwzSrtsBtwSuv1JynDtfu6hlnKXEWc24E-QZLRWswGPNWehZIMHu79L-5_cmBiDfXept6gkkFBoMyj7HShZEDI7vCf184BDd_Ps-gbHqJJiBgclm9bOMGeQMiB/s1600/100_0066.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3yizDNgKivxGH5UG7lnjwzSrtsBtwSuv1JynDtfu6hlnKXEWc24E-QZLRWswGPNWehZIMHu79L-5_cmBiDfXept6gkkFBoMyj7HShZEDI7vCf184BDd_Ps-gbHqJJiBgclm9bOMGeQMiB/s320/100_0066.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5582267251871327026" /></a><br /><br /><strong>T.T.</strong> The collection as a whole reads like the diary of a very intense relationship on the edge. One side of a love story. Dodging Traffic veers between tremendous physical/sexual/verbal tenderness and violence on all those levels, sometimes in the same poem. It operates outside my comfort zone, which I take to be the point of the exercise. It’s combative. It plays with the old trope ‘the battle of the sexes’ and pushes it in all directions. What do you feel is gained, poetically, by the pushing? Any comments on your philosophy of love? Any other comments?<br /><br /><strong>J.B.</strong> Congratulations, you are the first person who gets how I put together Dodging Traffic. It was a love story about my ex-wife and I, the dating and adventures I had before and then while with her. We had a very intense relationship and the poems show that. Now, it's a time capsule of my relationship with her.<br />The battle of the sexes is an old trope and with old tropes, the challenge is to address them differently. What is gained by pushing poetically is a new pair of eyes that lets you see everything, address everything, the good, the bad, and the ugly.<br />I love incredibly hard and I also let go incredibly hard, like cutting the limb off before the gangrene spreads. I just had my first amicable break up ever, and it was nice not to have to cut off my arm, for once.<br /><br /><strong>T.T.</strong> Many of the poems in Dodging Traffic present bits of a slagging match, perhaps like the African American “playing the dozens” or “signifying,” an artistic hurling of insults with the reader as audience. They share some of the formulaic patterns, the use of rhyme (often subtle in your case), and the shift in speech rhythms away from the natural, of that form. This sort of exchange – assuming it’s meant to be seen as part of an exchange and not just as an assault - is supposed to be a way of harnessing aggression with the constraints of form and language. How do you see your use of it? What is it doing, in the context of relationship story presented in the book?<br /><br /><strong>J.B.</strong> I'm not someone who is into saying 'fuck you' directly. There are better ways to say it and, when I want to write a punch, I write it to where you are misdirected and distracted enough until it is too late and you can't dodge the hand coming for your stomach. I only write these sort of poems when provoked. I'm not into starting but I will finish.<br /><br />In the context of the relationship story, they are kiss-offs to various lovers, people in my life, roadblocks on the way to the destination.<br /><br /><br /><strong>T.T.</strong> Simile is the rhetorical device of choice here, often used to add punch to an insult. You look worn, like a youth hostel mattress. Your face looks like a swine flu outbreak in a small town. Like a necrophile the day after Katrina hit New Orleans... He wore his skin like a strop... But they are almost always implicit, leaving the reader to worry about what, exactly, you intended. In a slagging match the poor sod on the receiving end of some of these lines would have to stop and figure out just how offended he/she ought to be. In other words, the poems feel immediate, but are not. They suggest something tossed off, but can’t be taken in as quickly as they’re thrown out, which is part of the point of the contests I mentioned earlier, but in the context of poetry they leave the reader a little unsure of his footing. Comment?<br /><br /><strong>J.B.</strong> They aren't all insults. They are different ways of saying things without being explicit because saying you want to ejaculate on someone's face is too obvious and dirty. The context of the poem determines whether the simile is insulting or jaw dropping in its own way. You have to read all of the poem to get the flavor.<br /><br /><strong>T.T.</strong> There’s a sub category of poems in Dodging traffic – a group of poems not called “Advice to the young on conducting themselves in life.” “Son, scrotal sweat makes a poor calendar...” “But honest to blog, you’re keeping the baby?” Poems as explicit as “Lesson Plan,” “One day, you will wear hickeys like a varsity jacket.” Obviously they’re all taking the mickey, but perhaps you could comment further.<br /><br /><strong>J.B.</strong> The "But honest to blog" line comes from "Juno MacGuff to Bristol Palin", where the main character from Juno addressed an at-the-time pregnant Bristol Palin. The two were very similar and it was appropriate at that time for Juno to address Bristol's pregnancy.<br />Other than that, there is an advice section and yes, these are things I wish I knew, that my mother and stepfather would have told me.<br /><br /><strong>T.T.</strong> You do a lot of performance work. How has that affected the way you write? And has it affected what you write about? The immediacy of your audience and critics must make a difference, the lack of barriers between the poem and the minds receiving it.<br /><br /><strong>J.B.</strong> Performance work helps give a better attention to how the poem or story sounds aloud. Originally, when I was neck deep in slam, it affected what I wrote about, trying to write what could win now and again. Now, I write what I want. My flash fiction chapbook The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Robot shows an evolution in my style. I think I'm only going to get more interesting.<br /><br /><strong>T.T.</strong> In Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of New York City Poetry Slam, by Cristen O’Keefe Aptowicz, poet John S. Hall comments on his first experience with slam poetry. “ ...I hated it. And it made me really uncomfortable and... it was very much like a sport, and I was interested in poetry in large part because it was like the antithesis of sports.... [I]t seemed to me like a very macho, masculine form of poetry and not at all what I was interested in.” There’s something in his observation that relates to the narrator’s attitude in Dodging Traffic. What do you think about what Hall is saying here?<br /><br /><strong>J.B.</strong> Slam is a gimmick that uses competition to get people to listen to poetry. It is a feast or famine sport and if you stick with it for awhile, you get better. It's not for everyone because of that and that's ok. I recommend to everyone to try slam a little. It will make you sharper, more human, more aware on how to interact with an audience. <br /><br /><strong>T.T.</strong> In her book Ms O’Keefe says of slam, “One of the more interesting end products (to me, at least) of this constant shifting is that poets in the slam always worry that something -- a style, a project, a poet -- will become so dominant that it will kill the scene, but it never does. Ranting hipsters, freestyle rappers, bohemian drifters, proto-comedians, mystical shamans and gothy punks have all had their time at the top of the slam food chain, but in the end, something different always comes along and challenges the poets to try something new.” Do you agree with her on the challenge aspect of slam, and maybe of writing poetry in general? Dodging Traffic is no longer a new book. What are you working on now? What directions have the challenges moved you in?<br /><br /><strong>J.B.</strong> Aptowicz is absolutely right. Slam is a constantly evolving game. I remember watching in 2007 a two time Individual National Poetry Slam champion sacrifice at a bout with a poem he used in his run to the championship. It got one of the lowest scores of the entire night.<br />I'm working on a lot. From a book perspective, I'm shopping around a flash fiction/poetry hybrid called We Will Live Like Our Ghosts Will Live, which is a sequel to Dodging Traffic. I'm also writing new stories for a chapbook called The Internet Is A Dangerous Place To Live, my second chapbook coming out through Safety Third Enterprises (http://safetythirdenterprises.com). I'm also working on my first short story collection called We Will Celebrate Our Failures, a linked short story collection about people who use Craigslist to break up their engagements, in a messed up pay-it-forward set up. From an events perspective, I have a new fiction reading series starting here in Orlando in May called There Will Be Words in conjunction with Burrow Press. This last year has pushed me into new and interesting directions that I will continue exploring.<br /><br /><strong>T.T.</strong> In Poem seeking Poem for NSA Encounter you wrote “I’ve been very bad and I need a poem that knows how to edit me?” Have you written one you feel manages it? <br /><br /><strong>J.B.</strong> Yes. Some of the work I've written post-divorce has made me pause and look deep at myself and it has changed the way I deal with relationships.<br />This poem was just featured in The Scrambler.<br /><br />The Astrology of Running Into Your Exes<br /><br />Cigarette ashes grow<br />from tongues, curl around<br />gums and gullets.<br />As the beer bottle empties,<br />it will remind you of her hand,<br />his stare.<br />When the beer bottle smacks<br />the wall adjacent to a trash can,<br />do not study the constellation<br />of brown glass, do not say<br />‘It sounds just like you.’<br /><br />Dodging Traffic by Jesse Bradley is available, with his novel The serial Rapist Sitting Behind You is a Rapist, from <a href="http://ampersand-books.com/the-serial-rapist-sitting-behind-you-is-dodging-traffic/<br />">Ampersand Press.</a>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-27342264444779628322011-02-18T00:56:00.005-05:002011-02-27T13:15:42.007-05:00Wordsmithonia Review of The Alchemy of Chance<span style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://wordsmithonia.blogspot.com/2011/02/alchemy-of-chance-by-peter-s-brooks.html">A lovely review</a> of The Alchemy of Chance.</span><br /><br />"I fell in love with them and by the end of the book as I was ecstatic for them and the future that awaited them..."<br /><br />"I felt as if I was partaking in every meal, exploring every vista and piece of scenery described, and getting to know every little hamlet that our sojourners visited. I rarely ever get lost in the "setting" of a book, but this is one time that I did..."Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-84933913772809847052011-02-01T20:00:00.014-05:002011-02-01T20:47:49.945-05:00Review of The French Exit, by Elisa Gabbert<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfguL8JCh5RxFL6SkvsdXdbWfvs6UQzW7IZgFf6YWcQcVWK8JNnkixgb8-7QeeknpUT6Etgts30hn3yzG4EGcRIEluKOuA1ZsrKyfHtj9HV_Q79vXBajCFU0hOen0osRyU5RlLbd5KlNUl/s1600/41KMMn8RCKL%255B1%255D.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 213px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfguL8JCh5RxFL6SkvsdXdbWfvs6UQzW7IZgFf6YWcQcVWK8JNnkixgb8-7QeeknpUT6Etgts30hn3yzG4EGcRIEluKOuA1ZsrKyfHtj9HV_Q79vXBajCFU0hOen0osRyU5RlLbd5KlNUl/s320/41KMMn8RCKL%255B1%255D.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568893697922793458" /></a><br /><br />Several times during her adventures in Wonderland, and through the looking glass, Alice is forced to deal with poetry. Once the question is as simple and as complex as “Do you like poetry,” but at least twice the treacherous question of meaning arises. Confronted with ‘Jabberwocky’ she says, “It seems very pretty, but it’s rather hard to understand... Somehow, it fills my head with ideas, only I don’t know what they are.” On hearing the verses read out by the White Rabbit in evidence against the Knave of Hearts, she announces she will give sixpence to any juror who can explain the poem and declares, “I don’t believe there’s an atom of meaning in it.” The King, reasonably enough, answers, “If theres’s no meaning in it, that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any.” All well and good, except that on examination, he decides: “I seem to see some meaning in them after all.”<br /><br />We must bear all of this in mind, as we begin our examination of Elisa Gabbert’s new poetry collection. <span style="font-style:italic;">The French Exi</span>t opens with a prelude of sorts called ‘Commisssioned,’ or, as Gabbert puts it, <br />“It starts here, where you begin<br />remembering. (How else could it begin?)”<br /><br />You – by which she means you, the reader – find a notebook with pages of your own writing. <br />“You must know what it says,<br />But in the dream you can’t read it.”<br />So the stage is set. You’re in a dream, and in the dream, you’re in a landscape “Supersaturated with meanings. With meaningness,” and because you’re dreaming, everything is at one remove.<br />You kick a car, and it crumples apart<br />like a death-hollowed tree.<br />“Pain” ripples out in a wave.<br />Pay attention to those quotation marks. Remember your situation.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The French Exit</span> is divided into three parts. Part one opens with a poem called ‘What Happened.’ No punctuation, so it’s unclear whether we’re being asked to assess the situation presented, or just being informed of the facts. That something happened is plain. It involved blood, concussion, “sleeves of glass.” It happened to someone who watches her body wake up, rise, stand ‘in her outline,’ look in a mirror to try and figure it out.<br />Nobody sees this.<br />She doesn’t know.<br />Broke. Or syncope.<br />Or glow.<br /><br />It’s a mystery, and the mystery, its dissociation, scars, closeness to death, informs all of part one. <br />‘Poem With A Threshold’ gives us a few more clues.<br /><br />In the grip of the NYC sublime<br />I fell in love out of boredom.<br /><br />I left the party, through the French exit<br />to the smaller one inside<br /><br />where the cake said<br />I HAVE NO CONCEPT OF TIME.<br /><br />Look into my image<br />distortion disorder and tell me<br /><br />what you really feel now<br />that you’re incomprehensible, Mr. – <br /><br />tell me “what for.” I love you<br />but my arms are full.<br /><br />I opened my face with the door.<br /><br /><br />Here we have the stories of two young females weaving in and out of each other, not randomly, but with the disorienting logic of a dream. I know, from a wonderful interview with Gabbert, by <a href="http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_06_016182.php">Elizabeth Hildred</a> on Bookslut, that the accident alluded to in some of these poems involved a moment of unconsciousness – the syncope, mentioned earlier - which resulted in a fall through a French door and a bad cut caused by the breaking glass, so it doesn’t seem a stretch to associate the narrator, on some level, with the poet. <br /><br />The facts presented in the poem – and I don’t think the reader would need advance knowledge to notice them – are that during a party in NYC the narrator, on passing through a French door, “opened her face” with it. Once inside, the world is a different place, a place with much in common with the world Alice finds when she falls into Wonderland. That Elisa is a near anagram for Alice, we probably have to put down to a parental whim, but it’s a nice connection anyway. <br /><br />Both young ladies begin in boredom - Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. – both have “not a moment to think about stopping” themselves before they find themselves falling, and both find themselves in a strange and incomprehensible place. Alice’s cake says,”Eat me,” and doing so makes her grow very tall – part of her serial distortion disorder. The narrator’s cake, however, seems to be stuck in the conversation between Alice and the Hatter, about Time, what he is like, and how little Alice knows of him, and the distortions she, the narrator, suffers from are as much of meaning and reality as of her physical self. <br /><br />“She’s under sentence of execution,” the rabbit tells Alice, speaking of the Duchess. “What for?” said Alice, but he never quite manages to tell her “what for,” just as the poem never quite manages to tell us. The next time she sees her, the Duchess tells Alice “O, ‘tis love, ‘tis love that makes the world go round.” And round and round till you’re so dizzy you fall in a faint and find yourself in an incomprehensible place. One of the most common occurrences of syncope is the coup de foudre, a violent falling in love. So the poem goes, weaving in and out of the rabbit hole, till we’re brought up short in the real world by the odd inversion of that violent final line, the opening of the narrator’s face by the door, instead of what we might have expected when someone falls face first into a hinged object.<br /><br />The Alice in Wonderland imagery reappears in several poems, both directly and indirectly. In ‘Camera Obscura’ we find the narrator confined in a “tiny room,” with just a “pinprick of light,” an image very like Tenniel’s drawing of Alice squashed into a tiny room with one window. In ‘Day Trip With Spires’ we find her inside a space so capacious all of her largest emotions are “made small,: and in ‘Must See Movie’ she is “tumbling up the rabbit hole.” <br /><br />The title of ‘I Even Feel Tired in my Dreams’ picks up the fatigue Alice suffers from throughout her long Wonderland dream, from the moment of sitting by her sister on the bank, through the physical fatigue of trying to reach the key to the garden and swimming in the pool of tears, and the emotional fatigue of being small and all alone. The first three lines - <br />I have to finish the tennis match but just want to sleep.<br />Small dogs leap up and latch onto my arms.<br />I want to lie down, let them have me.<br /> - seem to particularly refer to, and almost invert, the odd scene in which a very small Alice finds herself playing fetch with an enormous puppy, and worrying about whether or not it was likely to eat her up. <br /><br />We are diverted from the significance of these lines when the idea that the narrator can’t indulge her fatigue as her mother will never forgive her if she dies first, intrudes in the next line. A haunting possibility, every parent’s worst nightmare, and the annihilation of all the dreams that grow with and around a child. The narrator is distracted by the evidence of her heart pounding – presumably because of the tennis match – and by a series of stream of consciousness associations about dreaming and death by heart attack, triggered by the sight of her pulse. <br /><br />In a further association she notices the duplication of the phrase “right through,” - I can see my pulse pounding right through my skin” and “Can you have one (a heart attack) in your sleep and not die or even start? Just sleep right through.” That observation leads to the line –<br />Concordance: “right through.” As in trapdoor.<br /><br />I’m not as observant as the narrator is, and I confess I didn’t notice the repetition, so the phrase, a nice little puzzle, puzzled me. It didn’t stop me, which would have been counterproductive, but it made me go back and wonder, something that happens often in <span style="font-style:italic;">The French Exit</span>. What did she mean? One of the hazards of dealing with poems that play with meaning as effectively as Gabbert’s, is that you begin to see possibilities the writer probably never dreamed of, some legitimate, as cultural connections, and maybe even as subconscious connections, but not necessarily part of the poet's intention. I had all the meanings of concordance in my head; genetic, linguistic, etymological - it's such a great word, the way the meaning is shifted slightly in its various uses - but I wasn't getting a satisfactory result. So I cheated, and asked the poet. She said – “A concordance, in linguistics, can refer to a series of words that commonly appear together (especially in a certain text). in writing the poem, I noticed that I had used the phrase "right through" twice -- "right through the skin" and "sleep right through it" -- and instead of revising it out, I put it in again -- because "right through" then struck me as an important phrase. (now I'm picturing Alice falling right through the rabbit hole, since you've put me in mind of her!) and it's a French exit again! "Right through" sounds so casual, an easy slipping ...” <br /><br />We don’t all have the benefit of the poet’s elucidations when we come to a line we’re not sure of, so it’s a lucky thing that it doesn’t matter. The line works in its vagueness, in the way it suggests harmony and the concordance of genetic material and the passing on of disease, especially when the trapdoor – further echoes of the original falling into something unexpected, and of Alice’s fall – opens onto a return to her mother’s death.<br />My mom is going to die.<br /><br />Of course, all of our mothers are going to die, so we have that one heartbeat between the stress on “die” and the remainder of the line – the word lupus means “wolf.” – to form the comforting thought that it’s a general statement. “Lupus” flattens us immediately. We’re overhearing thoughts about an impending personal disaster, not a general statement about the human condition. The fact that the “wolf” tends to stalk victims in family clusters adds resonance to the earlier “concordance” line, and to the fatigue running through the work, whether the poet had that meaning in mind or not. You never know, when you write, what the reader will bring to the poem. The final line - “Most commonly named wish that is also a fear: to die in one’s sleep.” – turns the whole thing neatly back to the cause of the fall through the door.<br /><br />Catherine Clement, in her book <span style="font-style:italic;">The Philosophy of Rapture</span> says, “Syncope. Suddenly time falters. First, the head spins, overcome with a slight vertigo. It is nothing; but the spinning world goes wild, the ears start to ring, the earth gives way and disappears, one sinks back, goes away...Where does one go?<br />Syncope: an absence of self. A “cerebral eclipse,” so similar to death that it is also called “apparent death”; it resembles it model so closely that there is a risk of never recovering from it...When she comes to, her first words will be, :”Where am I?” and because she has come to, “come back,” no one thinks to ask where she has been. The real question would be, rather, “Where was I?” But no, when one returns from syncope it is the real world that suddenly looks strange.”<br /><br />It is this strangeness that informs <span style="font-style:italic;">The French Exit</span>. The strangeness, and to a certain extent, the connected idea of rapture – the state of being transported by emotion, or a transporting of a person from one place to another, especially (but not necessarily in this case) to heaven. Obsolete French, abduction, carrying off, from rapt, carried away, from Old French rat, from Latin raptus. Another French exit, in other words.<br /><br />Section two of the book presents a series of blogpoems, a term coined by Gabbert for a “tossed off” poem, one written “quickly, with minimal revision, in a burst of energy, and ...appropriate to the blog format/setting -- pretty short, and relatively light and digestible.” (For more on her use of the word see her interview, below.) There is much wit, and a chattiness to the tone of many of these pieces, a lightness, as she says, but it often masks, or sugar coats serious material. The title of one of the poems is ‘Blogpoems Are Ideas,’ and that’s as good a definition as “tossed off.” The two are probably related. The poems are ideas - explorations of, play with, but not necessarily the final word on. <br />In ‘Blogpoem After Walter Benjamin’ the speaker addresses someone (you) about the reproduction of works of art.<br />Every time you reproduce a piece of art<br />you remove some of its aura and that’s why<br />your mix tape didn’t impress me much,<br />it was so fucking aura-less<br />but in the film<br />version of the novelization of this poem<br />I play myself but have fantastic breasts<br />and there are probably some blood baths<br /><br />and also when my fangy tooth catches <br />on my lip men everywhere crumple<br />w/ the ecstasy and agony of it and really<br /><br />who need aura in your movie when<br />you’re so hot it breaks people’s knees.<br /><br />Benjamin takes the distinctive, invisible, intangible emanation or radiation around a thing or person we ordinarily think of as ‘aura’ and uses it as a way of seeing he calls the ‘auratic gaze,’ “a mystical interplay of closeness and distance, contemplation and identification” which articulates “forgotten bonds between the realms of civilisation and nature, between the unanimated and the animated. Grounded in circular rather than chronological time, auratic gazes remind us of the human in nature and the natural in humanity.” Reading even that much of Benjamin’s idea of aura makes the connection between his thinking and Gabbert’s poetry plain, and provides enough background to appreciate the verbal and imaginative fireworks going off here. Specifically, Gabbert is flirting with Benjamin’s ideas about mechanical reproduction: “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.” That she does so with such flippancy and humour is impressive. <br /><br /><br />The humour in The French Exit is pervasive, but not always obvious. In the Benjamin blogpoem it comes from a deliberate flouting of expectation, the dry statement opening what seems to be a discussion of aesthetics, giving way, first to a mix tape, and then degenerating, very suddenly, into that lovely fricative F word. Not ‘film,’ The one before that. After which it moves into a fairly juvenile fantasy about the film based on the novelisation of the poem, that returns to the idea of ‘art’ with a brief and backwards allusion to Michelangelo via a film made of the novelisation of the great artist’s conflict with Pope Julius II over the painting of the Sistine Chapel. I’ve never seen ‘The Agony and the Ecstacy’ but based on the stills I’d venture to say there’ isn’t anyone in it “so hot it breaks people’s knees,” a line I found particularly funny. But maybe that’s just me.<br /><br />Often the element of surprise is compounded, one following another so closely the reader has no time to regain his footing in between. In ‘Blogpoems are Ideas’ for instance, the portentous “And yet, as far as we’ve come, technology still lags behind our desires,” is followed by the unexpected “for instance, science hasn’t solved the problem of weather.” You could make the adjustment, given a moment to consider the number of ruined outings and spoiled vacations you’d had because of the weather, failures of the world to fall in with your desires, but you’re confronted too quickly with the end of the thought: “how much of it there is, and how it is literally everywhere.”<br /><br />Here’s a problem for the Humour Theorists. Aristotle claimed humour was the result of surprise. Peter Marteinson says it’s “a reaction to a cognitive impasse, a momentary epistemological difficulty.” He goes on to say other things, probably irrelevant and possibly wrong, but that little bit seems like a fine starting point, and in agreement, more or less, with Aristotle. Consider ‘Ornithological Blogpoem,’ in which Gabbert gives us a short prose passage about, obviously, birds. “You will be woken by the chirping of the birds, which is the sound of their egos escaping from their bodies in loud and irregular streams... The birds have PhDs. They chirp out chapters from their dissertations. The birds do not agree that irony is dead...The birds are control freaks...One of the birds has assumed a leadership role. Another bird is plotting to assassinate it...If you are lucky one morning the birds may chirp selections from your favourite opera. The birds are especially fond of Wagner. What would you like to hear? They have a very long waiting list and are nepotistic. Do not be afraid of angering the birds. What angers the birds is fear.” That’s just part of it. The humour works on many levels, on the absurdity of the personification, on the details chosen, on the mental images of the sorts of people described and the bird caricatures that best capture them, and so on. However, if the reader is observant, he will have noticed the book was published by Birds LLC, giving the humour a new dimension. He will know, at that point, just what sort of people the poem is having fun with, and will bring his own ideas of publishers to the page. Some of his less friendly suspicions will be confirmed, and some of the pain caused by their rejection eased. Cathartic humour. The poor reader has no way of knowing the poem was written some years before the poet ever heard of Birds LLC, and indeed, before such an organisation existed. A cognitive impasse, for us, the informed few, a momentary epistemological difficulty. Which should certainly make us laugh. Where it leaves the poor bloke who doesn’t know any better I haven’t figured out.<br /><br />There are puns – the ability to “defenestrate anything except for the window” - sexual innuendos, ambiguous little throwaways– “I’m this close to deforestation porn – the trees aground, all around my hole self”, for instance, with a French wax and a couple of French exits in the same poem, word plays, visual jokes. I won’t go on. It’s all in the mind of the beholder. You have to read it to get it.<br /><br />To return to Alice for a moment, I’m afraid the Duchess would have made a poor poet. At one point she says, “take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves,” advice Gabbert has plainly disregarded. However clever and multifarious her meanings, however quick, or sly or surprising her humour, the sound of the poems has never been overlooked. Her control over the aural experience provided by her poetry is impressive.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">The French Exit</span> closes with a poem called “The Word Fuseki,” a piece that drives home the incredible range of emotion in the collection. It’s a poignant, heartbreaking poem, and it manages to be that without ever letting the reader know exactly what’s going on, either in the narrator’s mind or in the situation. <br /> In that I think of my brother, <br />his serious face while gaming – <br /><br />the serious frown, crook between<br />his caterpillar eyebrows – <br /><br />and then Allen, the counterintuitive<br />move – “It’s not ‘interesting’!” – <br /><br />getting up to fuck around <br />on the marimba,<br /><br />Charlie Brown and Debussy.<br />I now hate the word <span style="font-style:italic;">interesting</span>.<br /><br />The structure of the poem is complex and interesting. We’re presented with a series of open ended premises, in the form of “in that” statements, in some cases with a group of observations that may or may not offer support for a conclusion the poem may or may not deliver. <br />In that I once tied my brother at chess; <br />In that it’s not called a tie. The word<br /><br />Endgame. In that I almost won <br />at ping pong, then Robinson asked him<br /><br />why he was playing left handed.<br />The word cannot, in that my brother,<br /><br />Asked to use the word <span style="font-style:italic;">cannot</span> in a sentence,<br />Wrote; “I don’t like cannots.’<br /><br />The form is familiar enough. There’s an example of it nagging around the edges of my brain that I can’t put my finger on, but the ones that come to mind will do. The writer of the book of Ezekiel uses it, sometimes inverting statement and conclusion. I’ve changed the order of clauses, to make the parallel clear.<br /><br />Ezekiel 39 – 28 In that I caused them to go into captivity among the nations, and have gathered them unto their own land; and I will leave none of them any more there; they shall know that I am Jehovah their God.<br /><br />Thomas Watson uses it to wonderful effect in part of The Ekatompathia.<br />In that I thirst for such a Goddesse grace <br />As wantes remorse, like Tantalus I die...<br />In that I ryse through hope, and fall againe <br />By feare, like Sisyphus I labour still.<br /><br />It is perhaps helpful to think of the statements in terms of inductive reasoning. The premises suggest the truth but do not ensure it. <br /><br />Also involved in the structure are three games. The word “fuseki,” refers to the whole board opening or pattern of play in the Chinese game called “Go.” We also have the calculations and strategies of chess, specifically the closing moves, or the endgame, and a reference to a tied result. Around these careful manoeuvres we have the radical element of the ping pong ball, bouncing off this and that at angles difficult to calculate or control. The mind of the narrator as she moves around thoughts of her brother is at least attempting to be rational, but something, perhaps her emotional state, insists on throwing up more difficult material. The final lines, another open “in that” statement, include a bracketed observation that changes our experience and understanding of everything that has come before.<br /> In that<br />I always say <span style="font-style:italic;">my brother.</span><br /><br />(If he’s mine,<br />Why can’t I keep him?)<br /><br />‘The Word Fuseki’ could easily stand in for <span style="font-style:italic;">The French Exit</span> as a whole. Between the statement and the conclusion, the world throws up any number of free radicals. It is the syncope we began with – an eclipse, interval, absence, followed by a new departure.<br /><br /><br />The French Exit is available from <a href="http://www.birdsllc.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=77&Itemid=18">Birds, LLC</a>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-10172449253230876042011-01-30T13:17:00.007-05:002011-01-30T13:42:55.459-05:00The Alchemy of Chance, - Review by John Hayes at Robert Frost's BanjoA short quote from a really wonderful review of The Alchemy of Chance, over at <a href="http://robertfrostsbanjo.blogspot.com/2011/01/alchemy-of-chance.html">Robert Frost's Banjo.</a> John Hayes is a formidable poet and a musician and does the sensuality of Peter's book justice. Do your winter reading list a favour and check it out.<br /><br />"Aurélie stood up and stepped forward, discarding the bow, which she thrust down her waistband, and the dark glasses, which she stuffed down her white Indian shirt inside her bra. Her legs slightly apart, her knees slightly bent, a towering six-footer on the edge of the stage in a flowing white gypsy skirt, plucking a four-foot bright white cello strapped around her neck like a guitar, she led the band into a spine-tingling intermediate cadence, minor to major….She moved her left foot forward to tease up the pedals and slowed her playing right down, this time bending the notes like a jazz sax-player. Long and high, they soared across the room above the audience’s heads, echoed round ceiling corners and wall joints, returning to pierce the backs of their necks and shiver their spines. Then she made a quarter-turn in the direction of the bass-player, with a silent invitation to fill some empty spaces."<br /><br />I quoted this at length not only because I believe it’s a fine example of Mr Brooks’ descriptive abilities, but also because it shows his belief in the power of transformation; not only does Aurélie’s improvisation transform the audience, it transforms her & the very space they all inhabit. But—& this is a crucial point in the novel—this transformation isn’t effected by Aurélie alone, but by her working in concert with the other band members. In the same way, the disparate lives come together in the narrative as a whole with transformative power.<br /><br />John Hayes <a href="http://robertfrostsbanjo.blogspot.com/2011/01/alchemy-of-chance.html">Robert Frost's Banjo.</a>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-69770978901129659152011-01-27T17:52:00.005-05:002011-01-27T18:17:38.577-05:00Happy Birthday Lewis Carroll - Lines from Elisa Gabbert's Poem With A Theshold<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkI0RYepG-Zs__Vmal1VBhCnppq9aSIz4APaxNnCliVWiiybtS7dYONkPmPjrW0TO0y6UAWvQMvIn-D_WVc-4V61qUStQGqCmj0mjO8wgnn1ME63YJt7sKPoEJaxRXGDQmawJTSO_5shTM/s1600/ryanlerch_Alice_%255B1%255D.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 223px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkI0RYepG-Zs__Vmal1VBhCnppq9aSIz4APaxNnCliVWiiybtS7dYONkPmPjrW0TO0y6UAWvQMvIn-D_WVc-4V61qUStQGqCmj0mjO8wgnn1ME63YJt7sKPoEJaxRXGDQmawJTSO_5shTM/s320/ryanlerch_Alice_%255B1%255D.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5567008814987372434" /></a><br /><br />In honour of Lewis Carroll's birthday - January 27th, 1832 - and in anticipation of my upcoming review of Elisa Gabbert's 'The French Exit' - a few lines playing with Alice in Wonderland, from her "Poem With A Threshold."<br /><br />I left the party through the French exit<br />to the smaller one inside<br /><br />where the cake said<br />I HAVE NO CONCEPT OF TIME.<br /><br />Look into my image<br />distortion disorder and tell me<br /><br />what you really feel...<br /><br />I'll be thinking aloud about Elisa's poems in a few days, and will even provide the rest of the words to this one. In the meantime, check out the interview below, for some insight into the way she thinks about her work.Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-57833290711026497662011-01-26T23:05:00.010-05:002011-01-27T10:34:54.867-05:00The French Exit - An Interview with Elisa Gabbert<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWu02n5XhEGiH8_BN0r_uC-bL0gk8wGqbpgXJAD_7eb2Y6Zt4zI67UOAoes825Vx2LUOW5uySgaxGBCMSTv9GmwnlonzZVt7_461f-8EaNQhR3mUQlq2pyT5SDtWodjsLA6y8pblv5uCno/s1600/man%2527s%252520shirt%255B1%255D.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWu02n5XhEGiH8_BN0r_uC-bL0gk8wGqbpgXJAD_7eb2Y6Zt4zI67UOAoes825Vx2LUOW5uySgaxGBCMSTv9GmwnlonzZVt7_461f-8EaNQhR3mUQlq2pyT5SDtWodjsLA6y8pblv5uCno/s320/man%2527s%252520shirt%255B1%255D.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5566889594937831394" /></a><br /><br /><strong>TT</strong> - The editing process at Birds sounds really interesting. Can you talk a little about the practicalities of it, as far as French Exit was concerned?<br /> <br /><strong>E.G.</strong> - Birds assigns a lead editor to each book they accept for publication. My editor was Sampson Starkweather. We've been friends and mutual fans for a long time, and he always had lots of free-floating ideas about my poetry and nothing to do with them. This was a chance for us to funnel those ideas into something, namely, making my book better. I was having a really hard time editing the manuscript on my own – I didn't know how to order it, I didn't know which poems to take out and which to put in. I desperately wanted someone who knew my work to step in and tell me what to do. Sam was that person! It was a great working relationship because I trusted his judgment completely, but he always made it clear that every decision was ultimately up to me. I took almost all of his suggestions. We had long phone calls every few weeks over the course of several months, during which time we finalized cuts and settled on the sections. I also did major revisions of a few key poems. All the editors had good suggestions for the manuscript, but they were mostly filtered through Sam so I never felt too overwhelmed. We were all pretty invested in it, since it's my first book and one of their first books too.<br /><br /><strong>TT </strong>- Many of the pieces in the book are called “blogpoems,” a new word to me. Can you give us a definition?<br /><br /><strong>E.G</strong> - The "blogpoem" concept grew out of NaPoWriMo, which is the poetry version of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month); my friend Maureen Thorson is generally credited with "inventing" NaPoWriMo. This was back around 2006; I knew a number of poets who were writing a poem a day that April and posting the drafts to their blogs. At the time, I didn't have a blog, but my good friend Chris Tonelli did. I semi-joked that I should send him tossed off, throwaway poems to post on his blog, and he challenged me to do it. The first one I wrote was "Blogpoem for April" – like I said, it was originally kind of a joke; I was making fun of the idea that you would write a poem so quickly. The trouble was, it turned out to be a good poem! So then I decided to take the project seriously – I wrote each poem quickly, with minimal revision, in a burst of energy, and I tried to make them all appropriate to the blog format/setting – pretty short, and relatively light and digestible. Suitable for Internet reading. It turned to be a lot of fun, and because I had to write one every day, they are often built out of trivial or inane ideas, because you can't write about something profound every single day. Turning those little thoughts and lines into decent poems was part of the challenge.<br /> <br /><strong>TT</strong> - Many of your poems are funny, on one or several levels. Aristotle claimed humour was a matter of surprise, and that’s often the case here, although which bit of which poem will surprise any given reader may be a surprise in itself. How do you think of humour in relation to your poetry? What is its place? What are you using it for? <br /><br /><strong>E.G.</strong> - Humor is so important to me – my conversational style revolves around banter and jokes, and I gravitate toward people who are always joking, to the point that it's kind of hard for me to connect with people who aren't that way. That filter of wit, sarcasm, levity, it just colors my whole worldview. Similarly I gravitate toward poetry with a sense of humor, though I'm not really satisfied with poems that are content to be simply funny. My favorite poems (songs, people) are usually wry, funny-sad, funny but vulnerable. I like a kind of intelligence that knows the world is tawdry but carries on anyway, making the most of it. That's how I want humor to function in my poems, as comedy brushing against tragedy. And that may be where the surprise comes from – not expecting the two to bump up together.<br /><br /><strong>TT </strong>- These are poems of ideas, and you play with various philosophical positions in the texts. Which philosophers have been an influence? Any ideas that have had more impact than others?<br /><br /><strong>E.G</strong>. - Great question. The philosopher with the most influence has probably been Daniel Dennett (who, like Benjamin, gets his own blogpoem). I'm drawn to a kind of bullet-biting, hyperrational philosophy of mind/science (Eliezer Yudkowsky would be another example of this): no souls, no free will, no one, coherent world – that kind of thing. The trick is to accept this lack of magic or "spirituality" in the world and still find room for happiness, which is entirely possible. I don't cotton at all to the theory that if you have no sense of God or some great unknowable unknown, there's no reason to live. A lot of what I'm doing in my poetry, I think, is playing with that space where we forget we have no control over anything and that nothing ultimately matters – that's where we live our lives, in that forgetting. However smart or rational we are, it's our nature to forget it.<br /><br /><strong>TT</strong> - In my review, I’ve written about “Blogpoem After Walter Benjamin.” In that poem you mention aura – and allude to Benjamin’s belief that the acceleration of life in the modern city is responsible for its disintegration. You also play with the problem of mechanical reproductions and the way they cut our connection to the uniqueness of reality. The blogpoem is a clever, compressed discussion of auratic perception. Do you believe modern urban life has fundamentally changed the way we see reality? If yes – and the answer, based on your poems, seems to be yes – in what way? What does the change mean to art, which, if nothing else, is bound up in “aural perception’s” interplay of closeness and distance and in the uniqueness of existence.<br /><br /><strong>E.G.</strong> - I think yes, our perception of reality is fundamentally different, though it's been different my whole life, so it's hard for me to compare my perception to that of a frontier woman or a caveman. In regards to art, I was thinking specifically of this tendency for things not to feel "special" – which says nothing about how good or bad they are as art. When we read a book of poems, what we appreciate is the information, not the actual instance of the book. (OK, design wonks go on and on about the physical object of a book, but that's really beside the point to the poetry. It's a copy. The book is not THE BOOK, the pure idea. If all extant copies were burned, we could print more books, etc.) And this is kind of the norm now, what with everything being digitized, to receive things as information, wherein the form/format is pretty incidental. The medium is not the message. Because people want to be able to choose their own medium (like, hey, from now on I will receive all messages via my iPhone; you, as the messenger, can no longer control the medium).<br /><br />This is not to say that I think everything was better in the past, or anything like that. Though I do wish Hollywood would stop with the remakes already.<br /> <br /><strong>TT </strong>- Walter Benjamin plays with time, Lewis Carroll plays with time in Alice in Wonderland, syncopes play with time, you play with the way they play with time, and you play with time on your own terms. What’s going on with that?<br /><br /><strong>E.G.</strong> - Time is the great enemy. On the micro scale it moves too slowly, on the macro scale it moves too fast. Days are long, years are short. I don't see how anyone can be alive and aware and not obsess about time, all the time. Who said all poems are about death? All poems are also about time, since death is ultimately about time. <br /> <br /><strong>TT </strong>- Syncope is a fascinating and frightening thing/concept/occurrence, in all its various meanings and permutations. I talk about some of them and the way you use them as a connecting metaphor, in my review, but I wonder if you have anything you’d like to say about your use of it.<br /><br /><strong>E.G.</strong> - I'm not sure I could add anything to your present understanding of it. I think you see how it's working in the book at least as well as I do! Certainly I was exploring the scariness of a brush with death as a reminder that anyone could die at any time. In a way I think it's weird that we fear our own deaths. So what if I die – I won't be around to miss me. What's really scary is the thought of everyone else dying. <br /> <br /><strong>TT</strong> - The French Exit – It’s a syncope, it’s a party left without notice, it’s a French window, it’s coitus interruptus, happiness, interest, brothers, lovers gone awol, life ended abruptly and without warning. How did you arrive at such a wide ranging metaphor?<br /><br /><strong>E.G.</strong> - You've nailed it, it's all those things. It wasn't at first; first it was just a phrase I liked, which I learned from a guy I had a crush on, who was particularly adept at it. So I put it in a poem. Later on, unrelatedly, I had a syncopal episode and fell into a French door. The "French exit" ended up in another poem. The phrase just bloomed for me somehow; I realized slowly how it was functioning on all these different levels in my poems, and it ended up governing the structure of the book. The phrase has taken on new weight and I can't just use it in casual conversation anymore. It feels almost mystical now, like some portal to another dimension. <br /> <br /><strong>TT </strong>- “The Word Fuseki” is a terribly poignant, painful poem. I talk about it at some length in my review but I wonder if you would address the two lines in brackets halfway through – (I wanted to keep that. Why did I give it away?) There’s always a giving away in poetry, and it’s often a giving away of something the poet might have preferred to keep. What can you tell us about that tendency/necessity/compulsion/gift?<br /><br /><strong>E.G.</strong> - I think every writer has things they need to write about – and they're the very subjects we tend to avoid, because people tell us to, because it's so hard to get it right. I tried to write that particular poem several times over the course of a couple of years. I couldn't get it right. Even a successful poem is a failure in some way – you feel you've spent that subject, that's it, you'll never write another good poem again. But again, we have to. For me, the poetry that really tears me up and stays with me has to take that huge risk of showing the reader its weakness. It has to play its hand. <br /><br /><br />The French Exit is available from <a href="http://www.birdsllc.com/">BirdsLLC</a>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-14641989918695152152011-01-20T18:11:00.004-05:002011-01-20T18:20:18.339-05:00On Choosing Poetry - Birds LLCA very interesting interview with the editors of Birds LLC on their unconventional but obviously effective editorial process. How do you put a poetry collection together? What about unity and/or diverity in the aesthetics of the editors? One voice or many? It's all <a href="http://htmlgiant.com/feature/an-interview-with-birds-llc/">here.</a>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-13049596887317231912011-01-16T20:39:00.004-05:002011-01-19T20:35:19.605-05:00Winter Poem with Tangerines<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZSwLSf01F9Bu7VTT-E3h6kGirLvZFl6KNaC4sPEoQzI_RyvzS3AA5lpt-OweZGUiWKPujEL86-FCUpqyY2dHce989yfCH4xNe1fS0Tmn5-MnAbsu1B-t1Nav39vViYksKV_V-Z-CwKUjY/s1600/DSC02835.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 246px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZSwLSf01F9Bu7VTT-E3h6kGirLvZFl6KNaC4sPEoQzI_RyvzS3AA5lpt-OweZGUiWKPujEL86-FCUpqyY2dHce989yfCH4xNe1fS0Tmn5-MnAbsu1B-t1Nav39vViYksKV_V-Z-CwKUjY/s320/DSC02835.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5562964934807495170" /></a><br /><br />With all this snow everywhere, two feet deep on either side of the pavement and plowed up in nine foot heaps on the street, I thought we might need a tangerine poem to keep things in perspective. I'm quite sure that when Mr. MacNeice sectioned his tangerine he noticed the little white tree spreading its bare branches up the centre.<br /><br />Louis MacNeice - Snow<br />The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was<br />Spawning snow and pink roses against it<br />Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:<br />World is suddener than we fancy it.<br /><br />World is crazier and more of it than we think,<br />Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion<br />A tangerine and spit the pips and feel<br />The drunkenness of things being various.<br /><br />And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world<br />Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -<br />On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -<br />There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-66002696473143696452011-01-15T16:36:00.001-05:002011-01-15T16:38:41.790-05:00On Cooking With Your Dead Grandmother<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpmU8xXtnTloX7R7zh6fHU3bpdPpjlXLe1ZqQ3wN3-5C0KBMHiIh2tHqrFkQBAXMglqglQMCceDjhYe12PItfmvJebx84e2ip31QOcrTchgLIn6Yc_xVv957bmDE3m0_Ml_BZHSJrAVnUx/s1600/DSC04365.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 190px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpmU8xXtnTloX7R7zh6fHU3bpdPpjlXLe1ZqQ3wN3-5C0KBMHiIh2tHqrFkQBAXMglqglQMCceDjhYe12PItfmvJebx84e2ip31QOcrTchgLIn6Yc_xVv957bmDE3m0_Ml_BZHSJrAVnUx/s320/DSC04365.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5562530276584577650" /></a><br /><br />Within minutes, Rosa had two pans going. One contained roundels of already-cooked potato stolen from the next day’s roast, which were stewing slowly in olive oil. The other was sizzling sliced onions, on a much higher heat. She beat half a dozen eggs and slid the bowl to one side. She’d have tortilla in fifteen minutes. <br />More onions, finely chopped this time, went into a big pan and as soon as they were soft she covered them with ladlefuls of Doris’s chicken stock. As she started to portion the chickens, she paused. Something else was needed here. She pictured her grandmother Mercedes in their kitchen back home and spoke out loud:<br /> ‘Abuelita. I’m stuck in this terrible English kitchen with no chorizo, no tocino, no judias blancas, no garbanzos, no… garbanzos… garbanzos…’ She’d seen a few tins of chick-peas somewhere that Gladys occasionally used to make her own hummus.. ‘OK, that’s one. I need more ideas. Come on Abuelita. Help me!’ <br />‘Stop thinking about what you want, girl. See what you’ve got. And then use that.’ <br /> Rosa rushed into the walk-in fridge and lunged around, looking for ingredients and inspiration at the same time. Nothing resonated with her culinary experience, until she landed on the trays of tourist fare. Of course. She grabbed some plaice fillets and two slices of the gammon bacon. Back at the chopping board, she skinned the fishes, trimmed and diced the bacon. She’d make them as sweet as merluza and chorizo. She even remembered to throw the pieces of bacon-rind into her stew. <br /> By the time Doris returned, Rosa was flying, although she was still talking to herself intermittently. Doris found this disconcerting, until it was explained to her, whereupon she offered to stand in for Mercedes, for the sake of both their sanities. She put her pinnie on and offered to help.<br /> Rosa piled garlic into the simmering stew-pot and thrust a couple of red peppers on to an open flame to burn off the skins. In went the saffron, bay leaves and paprika, and finally the chicken portions. Lid on, she left it to simmer away gently.<br />The stewed potatoes and brown onions were amalgamated in one pan and on went the eggs, to bubble and colour. As soon as the egg mixture pulled away from the sides of the pan, she rammed it under the grill to brown the top, and then turned it over on to a plate. Doris sliced it up and out went the first dish with a basket of crusty bread.<br />Rosa flash-fried the pieces of plaice and bacon with fresh red chilli and garlic. Placing them on some lettuce leaves, she dressed them with olive oil and lemon and a sprinkling of parsley, while Doris set about heating up the chick-peas. <br />“What are we doing with these?” <br />“Warm salad. Erm… fresh tomatoes, chopped, garlic, parsley and spring onion, French-style dressing with mustard… There’s still something missing… I know…”<br /> She opened a jar of German Bockwurst, split the chubby sausages in two lengthways, and made a few slashes across the tops. Into one of the vacant frying pans and they were done in a few minutes. Village sausage, she called it, topping off the chick-pea salad. Out went the next two dishes. Rosa cleaned up her peppers and put them in the stew with the spinach and pine-nuts. Doris took the whole pot out and placed it centre-table with a ladle, before they’d even started on the middle course.Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-83413288820657777342011-01-14T17:42:00.003-05:002011-01-14T17:46:59.098-05:00Glenn Haybittle - Letter To My EditorCheck out Glenn Haybittle's "Letter To My Editor" post at <a href="http://glennhaybittle.blogspot.com/">Errands Into The Maze</a> Yes, that's me he's talking to. No, we don't have a difference of opinion. It's always interesting when you can provoke a clear statement of intent, which this certainly is.Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-44631069646929409592011-01-11T23:46:00.001-05:002011-01-11T23:47:54.771-05:00Review Comment - The Alchemy of ChanceThe Alchemy of Chance is a foodie’s dream. I loved the descriptions of the meals and wanted the food right out of Antoinette's kitchen - soft eggs in cream, simply grilled fillet of sole with lemon, and roast leg of lamb - so I cooked everything in the book, using local, seasonal ingredients, just as Peter's characters did. Fabulous. A great read. <br /><br />Janet Beck, Victoria, B.C. CanadaSheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-71658533607970558792011-01-04T21:08:00.006-05:002011-01-04T21:50:24.546-05:00Reading Glenn Haybittle's - That Time Is Past<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXDPWYLO3avkniA3MoCAWnspIM2if5gaxkXdX0721SeV00IAtSjkr7pNSKqXTjIGigIKu32aRDOfEvH35cNpunKLjtsuvbi8J-GtqUrMYU675PjZ7mH-wMAHauv1nk6i5MGpzoFStgKhLo/s1600/Cenci%255B1%255D.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 243px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXDPWYLO3avkniA3MoCAWnspIM2if5gaxkXdX0721SeV00IAtSjkr7pNSKqXTjIGigIKu32aRDOfEvH35cNpunKLjtsuvbi8J-GtqUrMYU675PjZ7mH-wMAHauv1nk6i5MGpzoFStgKhLo/s320/Cenci%255B1%255D.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5558527609230214754" /></a><br /><br />I'm reading Glenn Haybittle's revisons of That Time is Past. Ivan, who has abandoned his wife and children to write a biography of Shelley and live in Italy with the appropriate Romantic intensity, is taking the beautiful, if distant, Isabella on a tour through the Villa Cenci, the centre of a lurid family tragedy involving incest and murder in 16th century Rome, that inspired Shelley to write a verse drama. Instead of imaginatively entering the passion and atmosphere of the place in search of what Shelley saw or thought, he's analysing his non-relationship with Isabella.<br /><br />"He thought of something Shelley had written in relation to Epipsychidion: “I think one is always in love with something or the other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is eternal.” <br /><br />The quote holds a core truth of the novel. Almost everyone in the book is avoiding anything like a meaninful relationship while busy imposing some ideal of their own on someone else, and finding they fall short, and the revisions are strengthening that point.<br /><br />The Romantics touted strong emotion as the 'real' source of aesthetic experience, but these neo Romantics, who, as Lady Lydia points out, seem to be "at rather a loss," make a career out of completely avoiding anything that smacks of actual emotional involvement. There is much here on the modern engagement/disengagement question but it's well coated with wit and fun and a good helping of Italian light.Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-89362647320391365852011-01-02T15:35:00.003-05:002011-01-02T15:44:58.969-05:00Review - The Alchemy of Chance<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnMmjmVvDFmLp7aGUWQ-b0gzFuoMEsPp2GOd9z9ONoz9NEn4Vmuhayljco97abBW28yvyDf6On99hV3it9Uw8lUXEtBVS2aEdDz2itgDe58mFI3EqpMEQta9kiqpon0g6OhHaER-w-CMaF/s1600/russellflint-carlottaontheloire%255B1%255D.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 179px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnMmjmVvDFmLp7aGUWQ-b0gzFuoMEsPp2GOd9z9ONoz9NEn4Vmuhayljco97abBW28yvyDf6On99hV3it9Uw8lUXEtBVS2aEdDz2itgDe58mFI3EqpMEQta9kiqpon0g6OhHaER-w-CMaF/s320/russellflint-carlottaontheloire%255B1%255D.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5557692035577405730" /></a><br /><br />“I don’t read much Francophile literature - soft-focused Frenchness makes me mutter - but Peter Brooks writes a France that I recognize. His Paris is noisily Parisian. His Brittany is blown through with sharp, salty air and the smells of seafood. His Loire is all liquid light and the still, strange atmosphere of that river.... 'Alchemy' is full of light, life and heart. There’s also a small sprinkling of magic in there. It's one of those novels that leave me smiling at the world a little more. <br /><br />Caroline Scott, Lot, France<br /><br />Image - Detail of "Carlotta on the Loire" by Sir William Russell FlintSheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-2032822339343035342010-12-29T00:13:00.007-05:002010-12-31T19:58:24.674-05:00Review - Etienne's Alphabet by James King<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYI-QC-IjhncU0_X1ZK4DDWl8-s1rWoa7Des-dUC0ekGSirCJLzaw6E3siHx-TJOBHFgdKsvTtStGBgW3L8MXIEWQmk-9r31hev8VMdNSqWuul3H_0yfTZhwYGOOQcrv-5v-21UVG4wwzM/s1600/EtiennesAlphabet_10-04-10.pdf+-+Adobe+Reader+1162010+82913+PM%255B1%255D.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 210px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYI-QC-IjhncU0_X1ZK4DDWl8-s1rWoa7Des-dUC0ekGSirCJLzaw6E3siHx-TJOBHFgdKsvTtStGBgW3L8MXIEWQmk-9r31hev8VMdNSqWuul3H_0yfTZhwYGOOQcrv-5v-21UVG4wwzM/s320/EtiennesAlphabet_10-04-10.pdf+-+Adobe+Reader+1162010+82913+PM%255B1%255D.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5555969840594096066" /></a><br /><br />The phrase “two solitudes,” referring to the perceived lack of communication between English and French speakers in Canada, and also to the lack of interest in redressing the situation, is well known in Canadian political discourse. The term was popularised by Hugh MacLennan’s novel <em>Two Solitudes</em>, but probably originated in a 1904 letter written by Rilke to a friend, about the changing nature of love between men and women, love born out of their individual solitudes. “This advance ... will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another... And this more human love... will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: the two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.” <br /><br />Rilke’s optimistic view seldom crosses over to the political use of the term, but in <em>Etienne’s Alphabet</em>, by James King, both meanings come into play. <br /><br />Etienne is half Anglo, half Francophone, and a complicated character. He objects with good reason, to the labels his doctor’s pin on him – OCD and schizoid – as the truth is much less tidy. He makes lists of the physical characteristics of the people he meets and would otherwise fail to recognise them, suggesting he suffers from face blindness. Letters speak to him, have colours and personalities– c and s are arrogant, d has humility, e attracts the colour green, F is the Hamlet of the alphabet, very indecisive, G is a fretful letter, h is a wallflower, I the letter of loneliness - words form pictures of their meaning, he can see smells, all of which suggests a complex synaesthesia at work. He has no interpersonal skills, makes no emotional connections to other people. Another character points out “you understand numbers but have not the slightest idea about people.” He is reticent, detached, brash, melancholic. He talks like a robot and never fits in with his confreres. He seems to be a high functioning autistic and is the embodiment of the two solitudes. Etienne’s Alphabet is his story, told through a series of dictionary entries that make his identification with the schism in the Canadian identity plain, at the same time as they reveal something of his extraordinary view of the world around him. <br /><br />In an entry on Kaspar Hauser Etienne says “I am a riddle to myself. I have never been subjected to the inhumane regime inflicted upon Hauser. But like him, I do not know how I became the person I am. What is the mystery ailment in my soul that keeps me so desperately apart from others? His notes on Jean-Paul Riopelle point out that the artist wrote to Premier Duplessis in 1948”telling him that both Canada and Quebec were too isolated from the rest of the world. ‘You must open up,’ he had demanded. Of course, his plea was ignored.” The advice Riopelle gives Duplessis is the same advice Etienne’s colleagues and superiors at the bank give him, and it has the same result. <br /><br />Etienne seldom speaks directly about his feelings, except when he finds himself in a rant about English Canada’s prejudices against French Canadians, We are left to infer, to piece together his life from what he chooses to tell us about what he chooses to talk about.<br /><br />Aardvark: Charming looking little creatures with built-in suits of armour...<br /><br />Alphabet: Letters obviously hold the entire world together. Otherwise, there is no order, no language, no significance...<br /><br />Appearances: They are not really deceiving...<br /><br />Weasel: Weasels are synonymous with deceit, trickery and false promises. When I began my drawings ten years ago, I promised myself no portraits of any kind because the genre is subject to those awful vices.... People are vainglorious, unduly complicated and, ultimately, beyond understanding. Why should I subject myself to such a dubious enterprise as putting them on paper?<br /><br />Zigag: Life is a series of abrupt right and left turns. There is no clear path, as Dante informs us...<br /><br />After his death, Etienne’s landlady, who has taken care of him all his adult life, finds boxes of brightly coloured drawings in his rooms, a remarkable body of work as refractive, brilliant, suggestive and teasing as his autobiographical notes.<br /><br />The oddly chosen entries in his idiosyncratic dictionary reveal a fascinating mind grappling with an often incomprehensible world, and eventually imposing, as all artists do, some sort of order on it. His story is carefully, hopefully, tenderly presented. An opaque character grows translucent, we begin to understand a little of what makes someone very unlike ourselves tick, and by the time Zodiac – a complete circuit, the compass of eternity – comes round we face Etienne in the way Rilke dreamed we would, as two solitudes greeting each other.<br /><br /><br />Published by Cormorant Books - ISBN 9781897151877 | 5.5" x 8.5" | TPB with French Flaps | $21 Cdn.<br /><br />You can read a preview or download an exerpt of <em>Etienne's Alphabet</em> at <a href="http://www.cormorantbooks.com/">Cormorant Books</a>Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-22843440746184927062010-12-26T21:50:00.004-05:002010-12-28T13:48:43.196-05:00The Alchemy of Chance Recipes - Potato Gratin<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3htllb9Hj1V1epHeCHgdXjzVQjdQd57Aqh0VM5vsID2FiOwpk8Y01gyZgTtINmV2Tp_XkdsAE7AqumpivMeCGtVj9AR5YmFBY-ym73SsCVpPHyhlWCMKW5_jLBGoJENpQiFMrygEqQOgg/s1600/securedownload%255B1%255D.png"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 229px; height: 229px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3htllb9Hj1V1epHeCHgdXjzVQjdQd57Aqh0VM5vsID2FiOwpk8Y01gyZgTtINmV2Tp_XkdsAE7AqumpivMeCGtVj9AR5YmFBY-ym73SsCVpPHyhlWCMKW5_jLBGoJENpQiFMrygEqQOgg/s320/securedownload%255B1%255D.png" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5555806935698449186" /></a><br /><br />There is something wonderfully simple about potatoes. It takes almost nothing to take them from everyday to extraordinary with only basic ingredients. When Didier and Maria started their meal with a potato gratin I could almost imagine the incredible smell that permeated the kitchen. The best part is it comes together so quickly that there is time to relax with that glass of wine Marie was pouring. I make potato gratin often, sometimes in a large dish that is placed on the table for everybody to pass carefully around or when I want something a bit more formal I make individual dishes, which I turn out on the plate. As with everything in Pete's book the recipe is pretty simple and you just adjust amounts to fit the size of the dish you need. I have used ramekins as small as a 3 1/2"creme brulee dish to a 4 1/2" ramekins for individual servings; it all depends on what else is for dinner. The important thing when make small servings is to line the dish with parchment paper on the bottom and the sides. It is a bit of work but it makes the end results much better as the potatoes slide easily from the dish to the plate; I have also lined a large casserole dish for serving 10 to 12 people; I still like to use parchment on the bottom of the dish because the potatoes take on a beautiful golden colour. I have even turned the large dish out on a serving tray and arranged other roasted vegetables around it.<br /> <br />The important thing to remember is that the first row of potatoes will become the top of your dish, if you are turning it out, so take the time to make it look good. I generally place a couple of small sprigs of thyme on the bottom and then start to place the potatoes in concentric circles around the dish overlapping just a bit. The great thing about cooking like this is that you can adjust the dish as you like, sometimes I alternate layers with sauteed mushrooms or with other root vegetables such as turnips, sweet potatoes or parsnips; no matter what else I put in it I always use onions. I tried a recipe in a magazine recently where you alternated layers of potatoes with oven dried yellow and red tomatoes;it was delicious and gorgeous on the plate.<br /> <br />Potato Gratin<br /> <br />2 cups whipping cream<br />3 pounds potatoes, Yukon Gold work well but you can use any good potato. Try to get them roughly the same size.<br />1 small onion<br />1 1/2 teaspoons salt<br />1 teaspoon black pepper<br />1 1/2 teaspoons dried thyme<br />enough soft butter to coat the dish<br /> <br />Thinly slice potatoes and onion using either a mandolin or a good sharp knife. If you are making individual servings line the bottom and sides of your dish with parchment paper and butter the paper; or, alternatively, butter the bottom and sides of a 9" x 13" casserole dish. Arrange three layers of potatoes around the bottom of the dish, overlapping each potato slightly then add a small layer of onion. Top the third layer with onions and some of the salt, pepper and thyme. Continue layering potatoes and onion, sprinkling the onion layer with salt, pepper and thyme until complete. <br /> <br />Place dish on a cookie sheet, to catch any of the liquid that may boil over. Gently add the cream, pushing down on the potatoes to almost cover them. Bake in a preheated 400 degree oven for 30 minutes then reduce temperature to 350 degrees and continue to bake until potatoes are tender. If you are using individual ramekins reduce temperature after 20 minutes and continue to cook until potatoes are tender, about 25 minutes more. The cream will be almost completely absorbed. Let the gratin rest for 15 minutes before serving.<br /> <br />This dish can be made ahead of time and reheated in a 350 degree oven until heated through, making it a great dish for taking to friends or to get a head start for a dinner party. Enjoy<br />Janet BeckSheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-17946016002429520742010-12-24T16:51:00.002-05:002010-12-24T16:52:29.205-05:00Alchemy of Chance - Facebook PageYou can now become a fan of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Alchemy of Chance</span> on Facebook! So you should all head over <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Alchemy-of-Chance/170098753025863">there</a> and hit the 'Like' button. Thanks!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-9684431348508163892010-12-24T01:43:00.004-05:002010-12-24T01:54:29.859-05:00That Time Is Past - Snakey Sex, Take One - Glenn Haybittle<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6yXJES_XZxfX9KpcIHwEmi0ljRj3FmH4TQ17mgYv6rwjHYS807NKgQSaLNO2o_KQIA9vA3aWyrZjGfffVyeI7v27pAAAWdtvfHgLsAPozQ8TI-X08jaIdX-5sjp3FCk4Y0Ged9bYbnh24/s1600/Mating%255B1%255D.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 261px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6yXJES_XZxfX9KpcIHwEmi0ljRj3FmH4TQ17mgYv6rwjHYS807NKgQSaLNO2o_KQIA9vA3aWyrZjGfffVyeI7v27pAAAWdtvfHgLsAPozQ8TI-X08jaIdX-5sjp3FCk4Y0Ged9bYbnh24/s320/Mating%255B1%255D.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5554138321179344642" /></a><br /><br />The girl entering the olive grove had a shaved head and was dressed in a ragged red ball gown from another century. She carried very attentively a woollen bag of bright colour, swollen with coins that made a heavy fidgeting noise. She stopped suddenly on noting a flicker of movement in the parched grass up ahead. There was a black snake that seemed to be having an epileptic fit. On closer inspection she realised it was two black snakes, entwined, and moving slowly, sometimes in unison, sometimes in conflict, undulating together with sudden whiplash jerkings and leaps off the ground. She saw the open fangs of the snake that seemed to be the aggressor; it made several attempts to bite into its adversary’s sleek black skin just beneath the head. Then she understood that they weren’t fighting; they were copulating. She watched spellbound, following them at a distance as, coiled and lashing together in a fluid double helix, they slithered and gyrated over the bracken and crisp dry grass. There were quiet moments when they were aligned into an almost inseparable writhing unity of wave motion, as if swimming together with their tails gently touching. Then there would be another a sudden thrashing of violent outcry when an electrical charge seemed to bolt through the length of them and toss them up into air, like a rope trick. The girl in the frock spent ten minutes watching them. <br /><br />Image - snakes mating - www.riverdalefarm.com/<br />Copyright 1997, COBB PublishingSheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-28674116649592335742010-12-22T15:07:00.003-05:002010-12-22T15:10:40.801-05:00Glenn Haybittle's Review of The Alchemy of Chance<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvsH8-_iPv4U9FSKvg2vKTn-cXQZOCO6ui_7f0OU3rsrZ5-DIK-gFrwbaUFMbX_XjoJFJS6IbS2VnmcgHR80orP8n5GXnuqfipElUbtYugZTF31Moj-x8IV1E9j5liEl8ppXNfcbiHeYYA/s1600/AT%2526T+Yahoo%2521+Image+Detail+for+httpwww.westernfrancetouristboard.com2004imagesbritmap2.gif+-+Internet+Explorer+provided+by+D+12222010+30124+PM.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 160px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvsH8-_iPv4U9FSKvg2vKTn-cXQZOCO6ui_7f0OU3rsrZ5-DIK-gFrwbaUFMbX_XjoJFJS6IbS2VnmcgHR80orP8n5GXnuqfipElUbtYugZTF31Moj-x8IV1E9j5liEl8ppXNfcbiHeYYA/s320/AT%2526T+Yahoo%2521+Image+Detail+for+httpwww.westernfrancetouristboard.com2004imagesbritmap2.gif+-+Internet+Explorer+provided+by+D+12222010+30124+PM.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5553601256567385170" /></a><br />The Alchemy of Chance is about maps, the guides we use to make headway in life. These maps aren’t always visible configurations of roads and rivers: often they consist of tides, star pulses behind the appearance of things, magnetic forces that are not available to the human eye. The heart too is a map; and perhaps the most fateful map of all.<br /> <br />When Aurelie Pêguissoux loses her sight in a car accident she has to map out a new set of coordinates for herself. She sets out on a journey of rediscovery. Meanwhile, in Wales, Dafydd Williams is given a mission by his father – to find his missing brother. The only clues to his whereabouts are a sequence of postcards all sent from various parts of France.<br /> <br />The Alchemy of Chance impresses with the creativity and lively courageous intelligence that has gone into its design. The prose is consistently as crisp and confident as the footprints of a fox in virgin snow. This novel, about map making, is also a map in itself, a complex intricately drawn map. That chance has a design to it is of course the premise of pretty much every novel ever written: we make order from shavings and rinds, from stains and litter, from what is strewn and overlooked as much as from what is photographed and cherished, Peter Brooks though is drawing up a map of the map so to speak which is a fascinating and exciting idea. Once we have this idea of the map every detail has the eye-catching pull of a landmark, a pathway, a clue. We see what he describes in a conventional context but we also see it shifted into a poetic realm where its significance, its consequence is still buried, is accumulating meaning and force before it’s eventually unearthed and integrated into the overall pattern, becomes another part of the map. We participate in the drawing up of this map with the excitement of an archaeologist taking off the top soil of an ancient burial mound. We know this is a treasure map. <br /> <br />The Alchemy of Chance is a life-affirming romantic adventure into a world where the secret poetry of synchronicity is a constant guide and companion.<br /><br />Glenn Haybittle, Florence, ItalySheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-5476321870384470402010-12-18T00:14:00.005-05:002010-12-18T00:24:45.584-05:00The Alchemy of Chance - Author Interview<strong>An Interview with Peter S. Brooks, by Dan Holloway</strong><br /><br /><strong>DH</strong>: Can you explain what synchronicity means to you? The word makes me think of the hippy teacher in ‘Heathers’. And the introduction to the film ‘Magnolia’. <br /> <br /><strong>PB</strong>: I haven’t seen ‘Heathers’ but yes, I suppose ‘Magnolia’ is dealing in that currency, though in a very particular Hollywood style. The opening of the film has a lot in common with one of those bathroom booklets, which I’m not averse to reading now and then. Lots of little anecdotes founded on a single notion: ‘… at the precise moment that…’ One of my favourites is the true story about the guy whose life was a bit of a mess and he threw himself off the roof of the Empire State Building shortly after it opened. He hadn’t gone far when some kind of updraught sucked him through an open window on the RCA Radio floor while a live news programme was going out. So the newsreader stuck a mike in his face. You can imagine it: ‘Tell me, what’s it like…’ <br /><br />I simply take synchronicity at its root, ‘same time’, and apply it to the broader weave of my storytelling. Most would agree it’s an inherently compelling topic and capable of being treated in many different ways. My own version in The Alchemy of Chance is built on the thesis that apparently random cosmic urges do in fact have a pulse, although I consider it my job merely to try and describe them, no more. I make a point of resisting any sense of predetermination, or a label. I mean fate, or destiny or god forbid, God. As Aurélie says: ‘Things just are.’ <br /><br /><strong>DH</strong>: It's a fascinating concept. But as an author how did you avoid falling into contrivance? Were you conscious of this as a potential danger?<br /><br /><strong>PB</strong>: In one sense, all plot-design is contrivance, but I guess you’re refering to that moment when it creeps up to the edge of artifice. I was aware of the dangers and I became pretty obsessed with avoiding implausibility. In order to do that, I had to distinguish between the implausible and the unlikely. Unless you’re writing sci-fi or fantasy, where perhaps anything goes, it’s an incredibly important aspect of our craft, even down to small matters of ‘staging’, narrating a character’s progress from A to B without unwittingly breaking a limb of theirs in the process. You don’t want an expert witness coming at you post-print with: ‘That simply could not have happened.’ <br /><br />On another level, I wanted to make sure that each encounter, each coincidence in time and space generated an echo of collective experience, an affirmative connection. ‘Yes. That’s just what happened to me.’ Or my cousin. Whoever. On their own, these kinds of coincidence are of limited utility, a part of the stock of material that we refer to for our stories. But I am drawn to the more complex notion of massed synchronicity and this is what the book is about. In my preface, I take a pretty serious mathematical stance on this and use the example of roulette. Forgetting the House, first time, there’s a 50:50 chance of throwing a red. Second time, there’s a 50:50 chance of throwing another red. And another, ad infinitum. All that we can say about the chances of throwing ten reds in a row is that it’s 50:50 each time (which is an axiom) and highly unlikely (which is an anecdote, though equally true). I happen to believe the universe works in the same way. I even thought about calling the book ‘Ten Consecutive Reds’.<br /> <br /><strong>DH</strong>: Does having a large ensemble cast make writing harder (keeping tabs of narrative arcs and the like) or easier (because you have to give up on graphs and trajectories and just get on with It)? To be filmic again, I can't help thinking of Robert Altman's The Player.<br /><strong><br />PB:</strong> That’s interesting. I loved ‘The Player’, but the film that influenced me the most as I was coughing up this tale, was ‘Short Cuts’, where Altman uses originally unconnected Carver short stories as a springboard for a number of overlapping vignettes which all share a dénouement, a minor earthquake in Southern California.<br /><br />As for the design, I thoroughly enjoyed that part of the process; so I guess it was easy. But I certainly couldn’t abandon ‘narrative arcs … graphs and trajectories’, as you put it. It’s essential to keep a handle on both the separate and the interlinked elements or else you never gain full control. Film-makers use storyboards of course, but this is writing as choreography, moving your main players around in relation to each other and to the broader scene. My way was to get myself a poster-sized artists’ sketchpad and a few pencils, and plot everything with boxes and bubbles, lines and arrows, dots and dashes. The result – to anyone else – was a mess, but I had to do that before I typed a word. Even then, I also had to set up a timeline spreadsheet, covering the main characters over the six months of the story, to the day, even down to the (real for that year) phases of the moon. Again, it’s down to plausibility. Perhaps I’m unnecessarily obsessed with it, but if I’m going to enter the world of Aurélie’s lunar cycles, for example, then I really should get it right. I can’t have her ovulating when she should be menstruating.<br /> <br /><strong>DH</strong>: How easy was it to write a blind character? Did you find yourself editing as you went, did you get into character before you started then stay there? Or did you let yourself get it all out and then edit for consistency? Did you find yourself "looking" at the world in different ways?<br /><br /><strong>PN:</strong> Well I had to do some homework, that’s for sure. I interviewed a few blind people (though very informally, I must add), just to get a take on their take on their world. That was fascinating and instructive, but once I started, I was navigating by my own imagination, with the odd tip and anecdote thrown in subliminally.<br /><br />One of the great things about writing a non-linear narrative with a multi-character cast is that when you’ve finished writing you can shift your chapters around with ease. I wrote all the Aurélie chapters in one sequence; so yes, I got fired up in character and let it all flow. Editing came later, when I’d completed the whole work. However, like many a writer before me, I allowed myself to get smitten by one of my characters. I think it shows; many have commented on it anyway. Aurélie would come to me, often in the car, usually late at night, and I’d look across at the empty seat and she’d be there with me as I drove through France. Many scenes came out of those moments, especially the ones where she sets off with Dafydd. It’s a form of madness, of course, but at least it’s only temporary. <br /><br />Writing from the PoV of a blind person, with only non-visual predicates to hand, was a joy. It really stretched me and my outlook too. I found myself totally immersed in the senses for a while. And I’ll never go back. Whatever my next work is about – and it almost certainly won’t feature a blind person – I’ll be giving the non-visual senses much more say in the narration. I’m sure it was responsible for reinvigorating my lifelong love of food. And, looking back now, it corresponded to a point in my life when I took on new interests in horticulture and floriculture. I’d still hate to be blind though, that much I know. The other transformational thing for me was a reaffirmation of my attraction to people with handicaps. So often, their combination of vulnerability and openness seems to sum up the best of the human spirit. <br /><br /><strong>DH</strong>: For someone of, er, my age, the 70s is a fascinating time, right at the edge of what I can remember. Do you see any aspects of historical fiction in the book, or is it just literary fiction set in the past?<br /><br />Absolutely not. Rightly or wrongly, for me the term ‘historical fiction’ me doesn’t kick in until, say, World War 2. I regard the 70s as a while ago. I decided to set the book in that decade for two reasons: firstly, it was a time of great change for me, the arrival of adulthood I suppose. Above all, I was happy. I first went to France when I was 14 and I wanted to capture that intensely aromatic moment of being in another quite alien land. I decided to situate my wide-eyed innocence in the character of Hannah. I found I was able to plunder my memory bank with ease.<br /><br />The second reason is to do with the modernisation of France. By setting this piece in the 70s, I found I’d created something of a requiem for a fast-dying culture, one whose time-distance co-ordinates would soon be ripped apart by TGVs, miles more autoroutes and cheap flights; whose metropolitan drains would finally be fixed, and – above all – whose momentary personal isolations would be removed, almost at a stroke, by the advent of the mobile phone and the internet. None of these stories could be the same today. Imagine Aurélie standing alone on that station platform. She’d have her mobie out like a shot<br /><br /><strong>DH</strong>: Having grown up near the Mapa Mundi, mapmaking has always fascinated me, but did you ever feel you were treading a fine line between a great central metaphor for a "web of synchronicity" and hitting the reader over the head with the authorial preachy stick?<br /><br /><strong>PB</strong>: When I started out on this, Aurélie came to me almost all in one go. She was blind of course, slightly eccentric and adventurous, a crazy astrologer with an odd byline in twinning. But the mapmaking came later. It just slipped in through the back door. And I think that’s because it’s one of my own ‘trainspotting’ quirks, which I’m a little hesitant to admit to. By including it as Aurélie’s original trade, her reason for getting up in the morning, it struck me as yet another loss from which I could have her recover. <br /><br />There’s a clue in the story, when she’s playing tactile Scrabble with Dafydd, and she refers to the ancient power of graphic representation and analogues. I love them! They’re so quintessentially human. No animal could invent the clock or make a map. <br /><br />Although, as I have said, the structure of the piece was carefully plotted, any idea of mapmaking as ‘a great central metaphor’ must have been subconcious. I simply didn’t plan it that way. It’s interesting that you posit this, because shortly after arriving on Authonomy, Radek – one of the finest reviewers up there – said about Alchemy:<br /><br />‘This novel, about map making, is also a map in itself, a complex intricately drawn map. That chance has a design to it is of course the premise of pretty much every novel ever written.You though are drawing up a map of the map so to speak which is a fascinating and exciting idea.’ <br /><br />So it’s a meta-map. Which I like. But I honestly didn’t realise until it was pointed out. <br /><br />Dan Holloway is author of Songs from the Other Side of the Wall; a spoken word performer, a founder member of Year Zero Writers; and curator of eight cuts gallery. <br />http://danholloway.wordpress.com/work-in-progress/songs-from-the-other-side-of-the-wall/<br />http://yearzerowriters.wordpress.com <br />http://eightcuts.wordpress.comSheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-46505954524113606802010-12-16T22:16:00.007-05:002010-12-16T22:36:16.539-05:00Lost - The Alchemy of Chance with Technology<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcbcoifCU1hl5n3G1VX28tTJ-IF7JOmHixsml56FKTiOYZs7H3VW2tyXuVukBDpye8JbH8C5iUDlZmrQ2a74By3wgqhq7ecdcsCmlImQO4TRL0wi6a4sOt-xzAYYFWy-UKAdBB-Tu0FJmb/s1600/308567808_cf29e2240a%255B1%255D.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 155px; height: 198px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcbcoifCU1hl5n3G1VX28tTJ-IF7JOmHixsml56FKTiOYZs7H3VW2tyXuVukBDpye8JbH8C5iUDlZmrQ2a74By3wgqhq7ecdcsCmlImQO4TRL0wi6a4sOt-xzAYYFWy-UKAdBB-Tu0FJmb/s320/308567808_cf29e2240a%255B1%255D.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5551488666604347874" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidxgwgwc1zh6rk89fwB9J_IgmujLoickQIjoNB5obZdfDVEZXtfLhYhS23psL-h8pM58LkGXHHkV7EOEQ0nWFJ9nwySa3ePazDEPkIXwF_9BpQGHLR7vjKdF-jMo1LphVrlBUz5EA4DUw8/s1600/jeanne+darc.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 203px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidxgwgwc1zh6rk89fwB9J_IgmujLoickQIjoNB5obZdfDVEZXtfLhYhS23psL-h8pM58LkGXHHkV7EOEQ0nWFJ9nwySa3ePazDEPkIXwF_9BpQGHLR7vjKdF-jMo1LphVrlBUz5EA4DUw8/s320/jeanne+darc.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5551488537409981378" /></a><br /><br /><strong>Lost</strong><br /><br />You put my postcode <br />Into your Sat Nav<br />So you can find me.<br /><br />But how we get <br />From where we are now <br />To where we want to be<br />Is a mystery. <br /><br /><br />Lost was written by Libby, at <a href="http://poems4people-libby.blogspot.com/2010/11/lost.html">Poems4people</a> and has been quoted with permission.Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-58902629541466824782010-12-13T19:05:00.002-05:002010-12-13T19:10:33.409-05:00The Alchemy of Chance - UK LaunchThe Alchemy of Chance was launched in the UK on Saturday with a party in Cardiff. My spies tell me it was a good time and ended with the author dancing in the kitchen. I'll have an official report in a few days, hopefully with photographs and details of the dance step involved. I'm hoping for a tango, and a picture of Peter with a rose between his teeth, but I deal with disappointment fairly well.Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-27173911378283156382010-12-09T15:43:00.008-05:002010-12-31T20:02:31.203-05:00Sunshine Girl and the space time story fracture.<strong>“So, sunshine girl, what's your name?” I asked. <br /><br />She was sunshine girl because it was pouring cats and dogs and she was smiling and the metaphor was apt. Her smile is like that. It just floods you with warmth and light. <br /><br />“Abigail,” sunshine girl said. “And you're...” she frowned, “Andy?” <br /><br />“Andalucia,” I told her. “Not Andy in a very long time. Luce usually, or Luci.” <br /><br />“Andalucia,” she repeated. <br /><br />“It's a place in Spain. My parents fucked there. I was conceived.” <br /><br />She frowned for a moment. <br /><br />“Oh,” she said, “I just am. I sprang, fully formed from the earth. In my nice shoes.” <br /><br />I sort of believed her, too.</strong><br /><br />I’m reading an extraordinary manuscript, involving, among many others, a child called “sunshine girl.” In her world things don’t behave as you expect. Narrative time isn’t linear, but it isn’t a series of nice comfortable flashbacks or a “wibbly-wobbly ball of timey-wimey... stuff,” either. Nothing you could conveniently traverse in a blue police call box. <br /><br />It’s more like a hall of funfair mirrors – fractured, fragmented, reflecting, refracting, folding in on itself. Splintered time. Origami time. The world is warped in ways that haven’t been explained. It’s a trial by immersion, like baptism in a very quickly moving river, when you can’t trust the person holding you, and also like the way one celestial body obscures another, then reveals it again. It’s a place full of love and death and sex and recreational pain and absolute moral judgements, full of beautiful, slightly unreal characters who have done a lot of damage to themselves and each other. There’s a luminous white haired girl who keeps head severing throwing stars in her leather corset, a rhino guy with infinite eyes, a monk with no eyes at all, a perfectly ordinary absent minded professor with half eaten biscuits on his desk. There are monsters, and not just under sunshine girl’s bed. In some of her strange moments of clarity she’s become aware of them. They’re getting to Luci. They sit on her eyelids, and cast shadows under her eyes. <br /><br />Not really my cup of tea, except there’s tea everywhere. It’s the number one drink of choice, which makes it all seem so civilised, in spite of the blood and single malt running neck to neck for second place. According to sunshine girl there are also teacups that feel neglected if they aren’t used in their proper turn, which I can definitely identify with. All in all, there are story worlds you might be wise to avoid, but somehow find yourself inextricably involved in. One thing there doesn’t seem to be is a title. I’ll have to get back to you with that.Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-88203779848943096012010-11-29T19:44:00.005-05:002010-11-29T20:04:44.039-05:00The Alchemy of Chance - Proof Copy<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh98zUtGijQR-hMCt-B_B1XJMlyQv41bewFqYxcO9irjl7t00_QMKh9ThguJerxo2InmsR72sYcbu6DlwIjMiuH2zTzcGuDgoh5Lq-k7Q1NBtdnXaDowf9JN4E9-deXu9gPwcXBxlNNRH-c/s1600/DSC04362.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh98zUtGijQR-hMCt-B_B1XJMlyQv41bewFqYxcO9irjl7t00_QMKh9ThguJerxo2InmsR72sYcbu6DlwIjMiuH2zTzcGuDgoh5Lq-k7Q1NBtdnXaDowf9JN4E9-deXu9gPwcXBxlNNRH-c/s320/DSC04362.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545142390442564690" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqdarMS57inuJzoRl0jR6OcN4Rn1JQ_XouWcWQrV6fDfovnuZZQDElwdPGgAllyg0Cqdgk2Wyzz5GlZEQsyJdvM4gwNgCJbp_ON4rvjTIw2_nyhBiawPBofXv9ubvFni6_8RjFPGdx9hD2/s1600/DSC04363.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqdarMS57inuJzoRl0jR6OcN4Rn1JQ_XouWcWQrV6fDfovnuZZQDElwdPGgAllyg0Cqdgk2Wyzz5GlZEQsyJdvM4gwNgCJbp_ON4rvjTIw2_nyhBiawPBofXv9ubvFni6_8RjFPGdx9hD2/s320/DSC04363.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545141860397908338" /></a><br /><br />In the really exciting news department, the proof copy of The Alchemy of Chance arrived today, with Marianne Pfeiffer's glorious enamel zodiac signs glowing on the front cover, and Peter's story just waiting for the turn of a page. Our first real, actual book. It will go into production later this week. I apologise for the terrible pictures. The only available light was a stark overhead.Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-17754371081898701192010-11-24T12:17:00.002-05:002010-11-24T12:25:16.296-05:00Cosmic Love and The Alchemy of Chance<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJFy1Jz7zp6yxpw2ZZtRSmTuw7hYmWlXCbQJ3hu00wOZZ-1TTGLjlNP90dOYp9XXACspp9_RhcXXPWghGHiuun96zbnjBQKopueDCasA_iMQY5zcvw4oXY8I2Rs8674eGmdrzOXGZSAaYg/s1600/DSC04240.JPG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 272px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJFy1Jz7zp6yxpw2ZZtRSmTuw7hYmWlXCbQJ3hu00wOZZ-1TTGLjlNP90dOYp9XXACspp9_RhcXXPWghGHiuun96zbnjBQKopueDCasA_iMQY5zcvw4oXY8I2Rs8674eGmdrzOXGZSAaYg/s320/DSC04240.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5543167591759491650" /></a><br /><br />Cosmic Love<br /><br />I took the stars from my eyes, and then I made a map<br />And knew that somehow I could find my way back<br />Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too<br />So I stayed in the darkness with you**<br /><br /><br />My daughter and my husband are very keen on a song called Cosmic Love, by Florence and the Machine. It’s on both their ipods so I hear it in the kitchen while my husband is cooking, and in the car. In the song the narrator has been blinded by a star falling from an un-named someone’s heart, and left in the dark, so he or she makes a map, all of which reminds me, on more than one level, of The Alchemy of Chance. Aurelie, who is actually blind, meets Dafydd, who is symbolically blind, at least where love is concerned. You might think I’d be comparing Aurelie to the narrator of Cosmic Love, but Dafydd is a closer match. When he meets Aurelie he’s immediately struck by her and the book is much more about his long journey, sharing her darkness, than it is about any issues she has with finding her way around. She was once a mapmaker but blindness has reduced her, bizarrely enough, to the position of navigator, and it’s Dafyyd who makes the literal maps of their journey. <br /><br /><em>... she needed the whole picture, and preferably one with a frame. She needed relief and spatial accuracy, signs and symbols that spoke to her of landscapes natural and man-made, rivers hills and towns, the odd church and burial mound, the relationship of one place to another, accurate to the kilometre… well maybe ten, at this scale… <br />“You understand, don’t you?”<br />“Of course.”<br />“You’ll need another Michelin, a piece of board, some fuse-wires, drawing pins…”<br />“I’ll make you a map, OK.”</em><br /><br />Early in the book Aurelie’s father, Didier sticks pins into a map of the London Underground, so she can visualise the route through it, and then makes her a map of sorts, of the stars - a book of blank astrological charts with each segment lined with fuse wire. “Some jewellery-maker friends fashioned a brooch for each of the star signs. He made a tactile protractor himself. A small toolbox housed more lengths of fuse wire, locating-pins and lumps of plasticine to help keep the delicate operations stable.” All of this made it possible for Aurelie to find her way amongst the stars, and to do astrological readings. But Didier too is caught in the darkness, in “a sombre dusk” that “fell on his soul” after the death of his wife and Aurelie’s loss of sight.<br /><br /><em>His eye was taken by a box of pins, the kind with multi-coloured plastic heads like little chess pieces, and he suddenly saw them, these commonplace trivia, in a different light. He bought a few boxes and, while Aurélie was out, dashed up to her old apartment for the London Undergound Map they’d left behind. He re-mounted it on corkboard, hung it in the hallway and stuck a pin in every station. On her return, he took her arm and led the middle finger of her left hand to the Western edge.<br /> “I’ve brought your map back. Here.”<br /> She boarded at Uxbridge on the Metropolitan Line, appearing perplexed at first. But she soon got the hang of it. She headed for Hillingdon. Bump… Ickenham. Ruislip. Bump… Bump… “Faster!” Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump. By the time she hit the Circle Line, she was whizzing along. She went all the way round and then again. Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump. Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack… Then she shot off up the Central Line... Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack… and alighted at Epping. </em><br /><br />The plot of The Alchemy of Chance is structured around Aurelie’s and Dafydd’s search for Dafydd’s brother, Sean, who has been out of touch for years, and the search itself follows a cryptic set of directions Sean wrote on the backs of a few postcards. More maps, of sorts. Sean is another man wandering in darkness. When Aurelie reads his star charts she discovers he’s prone to “moments of darkness, where he is best left alone,” but those moments seem to have spread to cover too much territory. <br /><br />So The Alchemy of Chance is a book about, among other things, the literally blind attempting to lead the figuratively blind out of the darkness, and one of the questions it raises is whether this is a possibility. Florence’s narrator, when he discovers that the mysterious someone who blinded him is also trapped in darkness, decides to stay there and keep her company. That’s one option.<br /><br />**Cosmic Love, by Florence and the Machine<br />The London Tube in Darkness is by S. Mairi Graham-ShawSheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7353198414617776840.post-38762009053013383682010-11-20T22:20:00.002-05:002010-11-21T02:13:26.818-05:00The Mountie at Niagara Falls by Salvatore DifalcoAnvil Press is pleased to announce the release of:<br /><br />The Mountie at Niagara Falls and other brief stories<br />by<br />Salvatore Difalco<br /><br />The Mountie at Niagara Falls is an astonishingly absurd and humorous collection of brief stories from Toronto author Salvatore Difalco. Ranging in length from fifty to seven hundred words, these vital and sudden fictional forays transport the reader to worlds both big and small: a land where green goats roam, voodoo dolls inflict crushing migraine headaches, a typographer from South Porcupine kills a potential love affair with a discussion of sans serif type, a benevolent judge imparts clemency on an admittedly violent man, and the road of experience turns this way and that for a truffle-snuffing boar and a talking cat.<br /><br />These brief tales are alternately fantastic, humorous, menacing, contemplative, absurd, hallucinatory, violent, confessional, and always provocative.<br /><br />SALVATORE DIFALCO currently resides in Toronto. He is the author of Black Rabbit & Other Stories (Anvil). His short stories, essays, book reviews, and poker columns have appeared in publications across Canada and the USA.<br /><br />ILLUSTRATED BY FRANCESCO GALLÉ. Gallé is an established painter in Toronto and Italy. He was born in southern Italy in 1966 and like many Italians made his way over the ocean with his family in 1972 at the age of six. His work has been featured internationally from New York to Germany and Italy. He created several wine labels for Viticcio, Greppi and Fattoria La Loggia Wineries in the Chianti Region of Tuscany. He is represented in private collections throughout Canada, Italy, Germany and England.Sheilahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08789453390762057934noreply@blogger.com0