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George Elliot Clarke

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Janey’s Arcadia
By Rachel Zolf
Toronto, ON: Coach House, 2014
136 pp, $16.51

The Seasons
by Bruce Meyer
Erin, ON: Porcupine’s quill, 2014
128 pp, $19.00

Rachel Zolf’s fifth book of poetry, Janey’s Arcadia, is an insurgent read and an insular—involuted—read. Born in hell-raising Manitoba (site of Marxist mayors, the Winnipeg General Strike, and a Riel Rebellion), Zolf knows Prairie Canucks are a product of Canada’s Department of Immigration and Colonization, which sought to replace Natives with European peasants, granting them “free land.”

To entice colonists, the federal government employed propaganda. So, Zolf’s cover reproduces a bureaucracy-approved, fascistic image of a rosy-cheeked mom, a chubby blond babe in her left arm, her right raised in a pseudo-Nazi salute. The background is Janey’s Arcadia—her Promised Land (seized from Natives)—of wheat bales, fatted calves, foraging chickens, plus a tidy farmhouse, outfitted with a barn, garage, and shed.

This image is important because Zolf seeks to rip away the pastoral, family-values façade and reveal the real (and continuing) violence of colonization, including the practice of cultural oppression against Indigenous Canadians, but also of actual, race-inflected misogyny amounting to the serial killing (or time-lapse mass murder) of Native women.

Zolf illustrates the violence of the settler regime in two ways. First, she uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to reprint “old, acid-worn” texts; the result is “hauntological error”: Words end up deformed, interpolated with non-alphabetical, typographical ornaments and symbols. So, for instance, the lines, “The advancement of Goad’s Kink / is intrinsically tied / to how full we are of Jes$s,” can be read as a sly comment on sexual abuse of Native children by Christian missionaries. “God’s Kirk”—church—becomes, instead, a reference to “kink” and a sex-toy; “Jes$s” suggests that the churches are fleecing their flocks….

Elsewhere, “The Indians have never been troublesome” becomes “The Indigns have never been trouhlcsonie”: The spelling change suggests that “Indians” are “Indignant,” while the next odd word suggests holes (French: trou). Zolf’s second technique is to engage a multilingual diction. Her access to Greek, Cyrillic, Cree syllables, Cherokee, the International Phonetic Alphabet, plus Yiddish, English, and French permits her to mash up terms and collide cultures.

The poetry echoes reality: On Winnipeg streets, “people smile at you in English, but speak in Russian,” or are “stiff-tongued Germans, ginger-headed Icelanders, Galicians, Norwegians, Poles and Frenchmen….” Between the challenging poems and the deliberately distorted prose, there is relief: Pages of handwritten women’s names, so easy to skim. But, no! There’s no relief from politics. When “Helen Betty Osborne” appears (128), we must guess that the names we are reading are those of murdered and/or missing Indigenous women….

Janey’s Arcadia is a daunting read; plough it twice to find its riches. Oh, if only prize-winning Zolf had placed her explanatory back pages up front. To know that “Janey” is a mash-up of “Janey Canuck” (a white Anglo heroine) and Kathy Acker’s “Janey Smith” (a punk character) eases the strangeness of the text. But, Zolf is following experimental, Canuck poet M. N. Philip, so she must want us to feel disoriented (hear the pun on “orient”)—just like “Indians,” misnamed by genocidal, homicidal Occidentals….

 

Bruce Meyer deserves more space than I’m allotting. The Poet Laureate of Barrie (Ontario) has written, following the 1959 example of Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda, 100 love sonnets—whispers of love—for his wife, Kerry. The Seasons is Meyer’s umpteenth verse collection. He is a poet of grand thought, not grandiloquent expression, so his verse flies under the radar, so to speak, but is no less dangerous—like a stealth bomber. Quartered like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, each sonnet sequence connects nature, season, love, and family. “Flannel” exemplifies Meyer’s approach: “The wind … / claws at the house and whines to come in. // It merely wants to be warm at last— / To slip its hand inside your button front…”

The Seasons is a book to curl up with—in a Friendly Giant armchair—with one’s sworn spouse. His poetry is cuddly and comfy…

Thrilling Cities
by Ian Fleming
USA: Thomas & Mercer/Amazon, 2013
250 pp, $15.00

Sex and Horror: The Art of Emanuele Taglietti
by Emanuele Taglietti
London, UK: Korero, 2016
160 pp, $36.00

Fictional spy James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming (1908-64), was first a newspaperman before he was a novelist, but was always a traveller, and, unable to feel quite at home in England after World War II, settled in Jamaica. Fleming is a British novelist, but he was really, by inclination, a West Indian thriller writer. In any event, his success with the Bond novels brought him a commission from the Sunday Times, in 1959-60, to visit glamorous cities, infamous for schmoozing and boozing and/or gambling and/or gangsters, and scout out the most notorious dens of iniquity and moral hazard and write them up as alternative tourism sites.

The Eiffel Tower is all very well and good, but Fleming knows that many discerning folks would prefer Paris’ down-to-earth entertainments, such as the burlesque and risqué attractions of Pigalle. Such is the point of the newspaper columns collected in Thrilling Cities ($15, Thomas & Mercer): To guide voyeurs, tired of Picassos, to the women mud-wrestlers of Hamburg, the poetically named masseuses of Hong Kong, and the cheap, large-pour martini bars of New York.

Reprinted in 2013, the columns still seem fresh, the cities and travel experiences still pretty much as they are now (though with no “urban renewal”—mass demolition of downtowns—and no glowering airport security types). The secret behind this “in-the-know” feel is Fleming’s savvy use of slang (much of which holds up: helicopters are still “choppers”), but more to the point is his understanding that most human beings are not saints and might seek pleasure as much as—ahem—enlightenment when on a jaunt or a tear. So, Fleming’s HK is massage parlours and naughty cinemas “(with colour and sound!)” and ads for women such as “Miss Emerald Parsley” and “Miss Ten Thousand Fun and Safety.” In the column-closing section, “Incidental Intelligence,” Fleming alerts us that the Peninsula Hotel, in Kowloon, is “the Number 1 hotel for visitors to the [British] colony” (which HK was, up to 1997).A night at the hotel, 56 years ago, went for HK$70 (single) or just CDN$12. Today, the cost ranges between CDN$800-$1000.

From Asia, Fleming jetted to America the Efficient (his highest praise for the superpower), where Honolulu offered (around about the time President Obama was conceived) “men either bulging or scrawny [and] women unshapely, blue-rinsed, rimless-glassed, and all with those tight, rather petulant mouths of the pensioned American.” Yes, Fleming is sexist, classist, and blithely racist: Blacks are hapless “negros”; Jews gave pre-Hitler Vienna “an atmosphere in which the intellect appears to flourish astonishingly,” but are still smeared as having been “poor” citizens, though this insult receives—and can have—no justification. But this is Fleming’s garish, Space Age, and nasty Cold War world, where trade is smuggling, investment is gambling, “love” is trysting, and reportage means dressing up sleaze with glitz.

It’s a world where (white) might makes right and so-called family values have no reality outside Walt Disney’s fabrications.Maybe that’s the best way to view Fleming’s Bond—as the antidote to the smarmy, smiley-face satisfactions of Disney.

 

Emanuele Taglietti (1943-) would be the perfect artist for illustrating Bond novel covers or movie posters. Sex and Horror: The Art of Emanuele Taglietti is a lush presentation of the Italian artists’ luscious canvases for movie posters and “pulp” comic books. Given that his grandmother was aunt to the fine Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni, it’s likely genetic fate that Taglietti has become famed for his own visual art, though it is deliberately—deliciously—lurid. A typical image is a buxom beauty, supremely scantily clad, presented as the prey of an ogre, a fiend, a gangster, or a swashbuckling swordsman or a pirate.

Occasionally, the villain is female; occasionally, the damsel is the heroine. Nevertheless, the devilishness or derring-do is accomplished in a state of partial undress or déshabillé (what it means to be disheveled). True: One could dismiss this art as being of a piece with much adolescent (heterosexual) male fantasy, or as simply being Kitsch. Okay: But it’s still ‘watchable’—not as eye-candy, but as eye-tonic averting the catatonic….

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