Monster<\/strong> Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero\u2019s Visions of Hell on Earth<\/strong> It was in 1985 that I first saw a zombie film that bothered me. It was likely an Italian picture, and I only remember that ranks of \u2018the walking dead\u2019 were successfully mutilating and gobbling down scared-to-death but insufficiently resourceful humans. It was in 1992 that I viewed the film that started the contemporary craze for \u2013 or interest in \u2013 the zombie as the most frightening monster of our time. I refer to Italian-American director George A. Romero\u2019s Night of the Living Dead (1968). Indeed, zombies resemble, says the author, Dante\u2019s description of the damned as \u201cthe suffering race of souls who lost the good of intellect.\u201d In other words, these ghouls are idiotic gluttons; they are examples of human beings who are slaves to appetites, unguided by reason or intelligence. To put it another way, those who only care about stuffing their guts or satisfying other physical needs, even when they are not hungry, thirsty, weary, sex-starved, et cetera, act just like zombies. Worse, zombies are unproductive parasites, consuming other beings, even when their cannibalism has no purpose. Zombies eat people, but are never satisfied by what they consume. They are emblems of greed\u2014and types of the filthy rich who just want more, more, more, and don\u2019t care what dirt they must do to achieve it. Clink\u2019s Monster is a horse of a different colour of fish. The mixed metaphor is deliberate, for the Toronto poet is interested in \u201cshapeshifters,\u201d including \u201cone \/ who became an amusement park\u2026 \/ his mouth a Ferris wheel, his arms the midway\u2026.\u201d As much as Clink reworks myths and legends, he is also keenly aware of how \u2018monstrous\u2019 our natural desires and processes are: \u201cSaltwater on skin: \/ we can taste its bitterness, even as we explore \/ each other, these two new worlds we inhabit, \/ as we lick each other clean with our craving.\u201d Echoes of Africa: An Historical Novel in Two Parts<\/strong> Dr. Bridglal \u2013 \u201cBridge\u201d \u2013 Pachai, C.M., Ph.D., D.C.L., is one of those eminences who seems to have done just about everything.\u00a0 Born in the village of Umbulwana, in Ladysmith, Natal, South Africa, he was a factory worker and a teacher before becoming a history professor. Dissatisfied with life in a then-white-supremacist nation, and wishing for true equality of opportunity, the South Asian-African left his homeland to teach elsewhere, including in Ghana and Malawi.\u00a0 In 1975, he emigrated to Canada, and settled in Halifax, N.S., where he is now professor emeritus of Saint Mary\u2019s University. Book I reads like a blend of Motorcycle Diaries (without the motorcycle) and Alan Paton\u2019s classic novel of apartheid South Africa, Cry, The Beloved Country (1948). We see young men finding themselves, while \u2018on the road,\u2019 but also witnessing \u2013 or hearing of \u2013 bloody, native insurrections against European imperialism, but also discovering the ideas of international black solidarity and the passive resistance politics of a certain Indian lawyer surnamed Gandhi. Eventually, Khonje and Kaluwa find themselves in the United States, where they graduate from high school and university, and become writers and orators. (Mataka Phiri remains in Africa, but is a Christian minister with an Afrocentric focus.) The Man with the Golden Touch: How the Bond Films Conquered the World<\/strong> For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming + James Bond<\/strong> The fictitious super spy James Bond escapes all, but we cannot escape him. Blame that fact on his creator, Ian Fleming, who, if he had not died in 1962, would now be 103. Two recent books pay homage to Fleming; or, rather, one celebrates the author, and the other analyzes the success of the EON Productions films, which are, for the most part, merely \u2018based on\u2019 Fleming\u2019s prose and plots. Ben MacIntyre\u2019s For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming + James Bond is a photo-packed examination of the parallels between author Fleming and character Bond, produced to accompany an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum that was staged in honour of Fleming\u2019s 2008 centenary. MacIntyre shifts easily and irreverently among examinations of Fleming\u2019s biography, Bond\u2019s novelistic life, and the related but different Bond who occupies the cinema. Lost Gospels<\/strong> Letter Out: Letter In<\/strong> Lost Gospels is Lorri Neilsen Glenn\u2019s fourth collection of poetry. An award-winning ethnographer and essayist, the Prairie-raised, Halifax-based writer was Poet Laureate for Halifax, N.S., 2005-09.<\/p>\n The new work spelunks into memory \u2013 childhood and genealogy, as well as into the wider caverns of history and biography, especially in lyrics wherein Glenn addresses the spirit of the Jewish-French philosopher Simone Weil, whose Christianity mixed Plato with Marx \u2013 and a healthy lashing of paganism too. (Given that the late Halifax, N.S-based, Christian philosopher George Grant adored Weil, she should be viewed as the patron saint of Haligonian intellectuals. A once-and-future Haligonian, I confess that I also like her.) Salimah Valiani\u2019s second collection of poetry, Letter Out: Letter In, also worries the personal and the political.\u00a0 Born in Calgary, Alberta, and now based in Toronto, the poet has Tanzanian heritage. So her verse addresses the politics of race in a context of official non-racism, as in South Africa (where she has visited), yes, but also in Canada. That was then, but even now, \u201cWhen you hear of strife \/ In Sierra Leone today \/ It is in part conflict \/ Dating back to late 18th century Halifax.\u201d Valiani\u2019s muse is editorial and didactic, but her sentiments stab and jab. She is Emily Dickinson with a razor at the ready, but she also recalls Maxine Tynes. Valiani does address love, but its sensuality is not divorced from global issues: \u201cgreen leaves \/ almost yellow \/ from sun \/\/ body \/ moist \/ with grassy heat \/\/ ant-kissed skin. \/\/ De-toxing \/ in climate change rays.\u201d Letter Out: Letter In is also a red-letter book.<\/p>\n The Scare in the Crow<\/strong> The Glassblowers<\/strong> Tammy Armstrong was nominated for a Governor-General\u2019s Award for her first collection, Bogman\u2019s Music, and the promise established in that debut is sustained in The Scare in the Crow, her fourth book of verse. George Sipos\u2019s second collection, The Glassblowers (Goose Lane, $18), follows the success of his debut, Anything but the Moon, which was shortlisted for British Columbia\u2019s Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.Armstrong is a generation younger than Sipos, and so she tends to look more outward than inward, while the opposite is true for him. Sipos is Executive Director of ArtSpring, a visual and performing arts centre on B.C.\u2019s Salt Spring Island. Now 62, he authors poetry that shows a lifetime of careful thought. Like Armstrong, he has a gift for turning precise images: \u201cMoths circle the lamp, \/ beat their heads against glass, \/ make the same points again and again \/ with the vehemence of old arguments.\u201d They \u201crepeat \/ the little melodramas of bodies \/ flung against an indifferent current.\u201d That zinger \u2013 \u201cmelodramas\u201d \u2013 makes one pay attention. But the close of the poem is also fine: \u201ctheir stubborn \/ trajectories refuse to concede to the night, \/ till one, gone astray, \/ collides with my chest. \/ I feel it pause, \/ bewildered in the dark, \/ its unseen wings \/ caught between faith and doubt.\u201d Like Armstrong, Sipos also sneaks \u201cMidden\u201d (a dung heap or shell pile) into a poem, perhaps because the two share Ross Leckie as an editor. But I do like how the poem ends (in an allusion to Ezra Pound\u2019s Cantos): \u201cBeautiful, perhaps, \/ all these fragments; everything \/ we could possibly love \/ scattered here.\u201d Not every poem works. \u201cLilacs\u201d begins better than it ends; ditto for \u201cPro-Life at the Ex.\u201d But these are considered, sensible, and pleasing lyrics, whose subtleties may dispense with passion. One must applaud a poet who can write of \u201copen water \/ untenanted by anything conscious \/ except these two swans.\u201d The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time<\/strong> Objects for Study \u00a0<\/strong> David L. Ulin’s The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time is a topical essay, one of those current-issue books that the U.S. book market generates regularly for cognoscenti to debate and for travellers, impatient with fiction, to ponder. Of course, the topic should interest writers, publishers, educators, librarians, journalists, and anyone who has ever delighted in holding a book, turning back its pages, and entering into a realm of thought, dream, and argument different from those that one normally invents, remembers, or knows. In Objects for Study, Forrestall reproduces 38 black & white illustrations and photos, plus 10 colour plates of his paintings, all reflecting his study of artifacts found in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford) and the British Museum (London).\u00a0 Forrestall considers these items as subjects for still life rendering. For me, the most poignant paintings are “Three that are Broken,” “Easter II,” and “Three Flowers and the Offerings of Time.” The Misfits<\/strong> Sunday, the locusts<\/strong> Published in hardcover in 2000, The Misfits, is now out in paperback. It is a stunning photo essay about the 1960 making of the last great film by Hollywood legends Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, and Montgomery Clift. Sunday, the locusts is a poem composed of snippets of events, quotations, and images; it is a literary collage. But it also features many apt illustrations that are, themselves, visual collages. Authored by Jim Johnstone, a \u201cdoctoral candidate\u201d at the University of Toronto, and illustrated by Julienne Lottering, an art history student also at the U of T, their book is dedicated to the same institution, which may explain its arch, intellectual pitch, as does the fact that the editor is Ray Hsu, a poet brilliantly studied in the academic orientation of Anglo-Canuck verse. Poetry, Fiction and Sundry Reviews George Elliott Clarke Monster by David Clink Toronto, ON: Tightrope Books, 2010 71 pp., $15.95 Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero\u2019s Visions of Hell on Earth by Kim Paffenroth Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006 195 pp., $30 It was in 1985 that I first saw a zombie film […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"parent":77,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-106","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":725,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/106\/revisions\/725"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/77"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue10\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nby David Clink
\nToronto, ON: Tightrope Books, 2010
\n71 pp., $15.95<\/p>\n
\nby Kim Paffenroth
\nWaco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006
\n195 pp., $30<\/p>\n
\nThe flick is terrifying in its black-and-white simplicity: Zombies will attack, implacably, even those they knew and loved in life, and reduce them to meat, unless they are pitilessly and fatally lobotomized, i.e., in effect, decapitated. Before looking at Monster, David Clink\u2019s sophomore collection of poetry, I want to eye Kim Paffenroth\u2019s Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero\u2019s Visions of Hell on Earth.
\nPublished in 2006, Paffenroth\u2019s academic study of Romero\u2019s zombie flicks is disconcerting in its own right, for it is an unexpectedly \u2013 if only subtly \u2013 Christian reading of the films. Ironically, however, as the author notes in his Introduction, Romero\u2019s \u201cDawn of the Dead (2004) was the first movie to edge Mel Gibson\u2019s The Passion of the Christ (2004) \u2013 another low-budget movie with plenty of gore and no big stars \u2013 out of the number one place in box-office sales.\u201d For Paffenroth, Romero is an American Gothic filmmaker whose vision is indebted to the Renaissance Italian poet Dante Alighieri\u2019s epic, The Divine Comedy.<\/p>\n
\nFor Paffenroth, Romero dissects human nature, sin, and hell, showing us that hell is really a place where the sinful continue to sin, but without any rationale or pleasure. After analyzing Romero\u2019s zombie flicks up to Land of the Dead (2005), Paffenroth concludes, \u201cZombies will always be the nightmare we love to hate, and the painful wake-up call from our sinful reveries, one that we dread as much as we need.\u201d (Paffenroth refers frequently in his notes to the great, Halifax, N.S.-based, literary critic, John Fraser, who has written brilliantly about violence and horror in art.)<\/p>\n
\nSome environmentalists argue that humans are rogue creatures, savage parasites, wantonly wasting habitat and destroying other animals, to satisfy unnatural and unsustainable needs. There\u2019s a trace of this argument in Clink, but also outrage at our vain pretense to immortality. \u201cPutrefy. No one can recognize you now\u2026. \/\/ Fester for awhile\u2014perish at the thought \/ everyone alive will outlive you. \/\/ Somewhere there are people baking, \/ transforming ingredients, \/ combining \/ eggs, flour, and assorted fruit into flaky pastries. \/\/ Rot is the furthest thing from their minds.\u201d
\nMonster is a scintillating, \u2018dark\u2019 collection, and its vivid poignancy is related to its precision in diction and form. \u201cCome closer \/ and accept the blackness\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nby Dr. Bridglal Pachai
\nPachai Consultancy, 2010
\n$18.50<\/p>\n
\nPachai is a historian of a humanist and humanitarian bent, a point verified in his twenty works on African and African-Nova Scotian (\u201cAfricadian\u201d\u2014my word) history and in his two memoirs, but also in his extracurricular labours, so to speak, heading up the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission and also the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia. He has also returned to Africa, twice, to teach in Nigeria and in The Gambia. Given his lustrous biography, it is natural that his first novel, Echoes of Africa: An Historical Novel in Two Parts, dwells on the history that has shaped\u2014and is shaping\u2014the continent of his birth and, specifically, South Africa itself.
\nHowever, this book is not one novel, but two, and their main connection is the fact that they are by the same hand and contained within the same covers (prepared by Dan O\u2019Brien, of Design North, Halifax, N.S.). Book I, titled \u201cSmall Steps to Somewhere,\u201d seems rooted in autobiography. It tells of three Africans, Kaluwa, Khonje, and Mataka Phiri, who, during the German-British strife of World War I-era Africa, leave \u201cthe parched and pokey ground\u201d of villages to find work, aided by Christians, in larger towns and cities.<\/p>\n
\nBook I is well written, but, except for the discussion of the rebellion, there is little action or plot. The story is almost a biblical tract, where we learn that education and good will (plus help from charitable others) can put bright, young men on the path to self-improvement and social activism. But Pachai does provide a scathing portrait of imperialism and racism. Mataka himself states, of the Europeans, \u201cThey overstayed, took over, pushed the natives away, became masters and rulers and devils.\u201d Although Christians aid Khonje and Kaluwa in their travels, missionary Christianity is rebuked as a matter of \u201ccut-throat competition to win over African souls to pay homage to western civilization.\u201d It may sound cynical, but it is Political Science 101.
\nBook II, titled \u201cThat Paradise for a Few,\u201d is a more satisfying novel, because it has rounded characters and an engaging plot. At the dawn of the apartheid era (late 1940s), a white farmer chooses to use a policy of racial division as a means to advance his own political fortunes. But the policy is based on hypocrisy: He and other white farmers and businessmen have no qualms about keeping black and brown mistresses and even fathering \u2018Coloured\u2019 children.
\nHowever, they believe that apartheid is a price worth paying to achieve a white \u201cparadise.\u201d These machinations result in family splits, cold-blooded murders, a race riot, and the necessity to erect a police state.\u00a0 Here Pachai refers to, not only Paton\u2019s novel, but also Shakespeare\u2019s Julius Caesar. If Book I is sentimental (save for political insights), Book II is tragic, spicy, and a damn, fine read. It is contradictions in characters \u2013 what makes them human \u2013 that make us care about their fates.<\/p>\n
\nby Sinclair McKay
\nNew York, NY: Overlook, 2011
\n400 pp., $33<\/p>\n
\nby Ben MacIntyre
\nLondon, UK: Bloomsbury, 2008
\n224 pp., 20\u00a3<\/p>\n
\nIn The Man with the Golden Touch: How the Bond Films Conquered the World, British writer Sinclair McKay considers each of the 22 films that he terms the \u201cJames Bond epic,\u201d from Dr. No (1962) to Quantum of Solace (2008), to decide how well each flick succeeds as entertainment (or art), and also explain why the series has lasted nigh 50 years. McKay is a fan. Yes, some Bond films and actors are better than others, but he finds something positive about each one, and he defends each Bond actor for his strengths.
\nBut he also scorns bad acting, fake action scenes, silly seductions, and opaque plots. Too, some of the flicks can be accused of racism, and all are guilty of sexism. What makes this collection of, really, extended and recherch\u00e9 film reviews so much fun, is McKay\u2019s ready wit and refusal to be circumspect, plus his obvious pleasure in this caper genre. For McKay, the Bond series is \u201ca big-budget Bayeux Tapestry that encapsulates everything from fashion to geopolitics.\u201d It is \u201cthe purest expression of the entertainment possibilities of the big screen.\u201d It is \u201cbangs and flashes and sex and kinetic energy.\u201d\u00a0 It is \u201cbright colour and arresting images thrown up by intriguing locations.\u201d
\nThe films could also be classed as \u201ccult\u201d flicks, \u201cnot only in the sense of appealing to fannish enthusiasts, but also in the sense that they are built up of single [distinct] elements that are just as important as the prevailing narrative.\u201d Those elements include the score and title song, which are often masterpieces, from Shirley Bassey\u2019s rendition of \u201cGoldfinger\u201d to Louis Armstrong\u2019s \u201cWe Have All the Time in the World\u201d (On Her Majesty\u2019s Secret Service); and there are the villains, often sporting some outrageous, physical marker, from the steel teeth of Jaws (The Spy Who Loved Me) to the blood-weeping Le Chiffre (Casino Royale).
\nAnd what about the girls, the gadgets, the gunplay? As McKay says, with flagrant enthusiasm, after seeing a Bond extravaganza, \u201cNo one feels cheated, no one feels left out, everyone leaves the cinema with a smile on their face, feeling that they have had a terrific night out.\u201d McKay is a smart read of social contexts, and his insights are as accurate as they are often acerbic or just comic. True: the critically applauded French film, Last Year at Marienbad (1961), \u201cmight not have seemed so lengthy if it had featured psychopathic lesbians and garotting wires concealed in wristwatches.\u201d
\nYes, Sean Connery exudes \u201cinsouciance\u201d; but Roger Moore\u2019s \u201cgreat talent for light comedy\u201d makes him just as watchable. In the end, the Bond series is about style given a memorable unveiling before it is put away to make room for the next \u2018new\u2019 thing. These films are, to refer to Ezra Pound, The Cantos of the cinema. Watching them, we are always watching EON Productions \u201cMake it new.\u201d Indeed, the Bond films are showy; they are huge adventures that yield belly laughs as well as unforgettable, vivid bloodshed.<\/p>\n
\nWe learn, among other things, that Fleming was a womanizer, but his novel Bond is serially monogamous, while the cinema Bond is a definite playboy. Here\u2019s one case where the movies are closer to the author\u2019s life than they are to that of his invention. MacIntyre is pithy and witty: \u201cFleming understood the extraordinary attraction of \u2018things\u2019. Not just material things \u2026, but things that did things\u2026.\u201d If gaudy spectacle and a deathless spy interest you, these books are must-reads. Shaken, not stirred.<\/p>\n
\nby Lorri Neilsen Glenn
\nLondon, ON: Brick, 2010
\n112 pp., $19<\/p>\n
\nby Salimah Valiani
\nInnana, 2009
\n$19<\/p>\n
\nThe title poem\u2019s two-line stanzas remind one of ghazals, but are actually narratives about alternative scriptures, such as \u201cthe one about Mahalia, rebuked and scorned, or a man named Willie Johnson \/ blinded at seven, and they sang, oh yes, they raised light from dark water\u2026.\u201d Biblical is every instance of love, striving, and death: \u201cPinned carefully \u2026 under the blade of the wiper \/\/ against the glass are two brown speckled wings. You see under the feathers \/ the shield is cracked\u2026.\u201d
\nThis first section of Lost Gospels, moving between private memory and political critique, recalls, in style and imagery, the work of Dionne Brand. But the terminal haikus attain the power of aphorism: \u201cWhen you avoid dark, \/ you miss the beauty \/ of chiaroscuro.\u201d The second section, Verge, seems to owe its structure to a sequence in M. NourbeSe Philip\u2019s 1989 collection, She Tries Her Tongue, the Silence Softly Breaks.
\nPerhaps Glenn\u2019s seeming response to African-Canadian women poets is for her an acknowledgement of the \u2018African\u2019 foremother of us all, namely, Lucy, who is the subject of the poem that opens the book\u2019s third section.\u00a0 A strong lyric here is also simple. \u201cWhen they are old\u201d: \u201cdays weigh like dust \/ thick on the leaves \/\/of a roadside bloom. \/ Then: her fingertips, \/\/ his skin, the rain\u2019s \/ soft and trusting tongue.\u201d
\nThe \u201cSongs for Simone\u201d sequence is good. Yet, the choice to address Weil mainly through prose poetry is questionable. True: This approach shows off Weil\u2019s quoted lyricism, but it dulls Glenn\u2019s lyricism in comparison. Arguably, the fourth and fifth sections of Lost Gospels are the finest.
\nA prime lyric is \u201cWinter Kill\u201d: \u201cThe snow sharpens its cold notes on their needles. \/ To love is to pity: this is the beginning \/ and the end of all there is \/\/ to know. The field is scalloped in drifts, and the deer taken \/ down by their throats; their ribs, cleaned by claw \/ and tooth, curve around the weight \/\/ of absence. Here is where we teach the spirit \/ to move into sorrow\u2026.\u201d Here is also where Glenn is most beatific, most spiritual, and most scriptural.\u00a0 Here is the heart of Lost Gospels, which is art that borders on the sacred.<\/p>\n
\nThus, a meal in an upscale, Cape Town restaurant occasions this reflection: \u201cThe wine is fine \/ The pizza: gorgonzola in Africa \/ But I can\u2019t understand why there isn\u2019t barbed wire \/ Around the table where I\u2019m sitting\u2026.\u201d Closer to home, the poem, \u201cBlack History Tour of Halifax, 2008,\u201d points out that \u201cSaint George\u2019s Round Church\u2026 \/ Included a special gallery for the slaves \/ Complete with shackles to secure them \/ during the service.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nby Tammy Armstrong
\nFredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 2010
\n112 pp., $18<\/p>\n
\nby George Sipos
\nFrederiction, NB: Goose Lane, 2010
\n104 pp., $18<\/p>\n
\nRaised in St. Stephen, New Brunswick, next door to the U.S., Armstrong has also lived on the West Coast. Though she is definitely \u2013 defiantly \u2013 an East Coast poet and novelist (now resident in Fredericton), she is resolutely not provincial, even if her poetry is eyeing the local, giving it scrutiny \u2013 in the manner of Elizabeth Bishop (whose centenary we celebrate this year). One can glimpse the Bishop style in \u201cBelow Estey\u2019s Bridge,\u201d a poem that meditates on old tombstones scattered over a riverbank: \u201cFrom the bridge\u2019s spandrel \/ and banks of pigweed, \/ headstones with sandblasted errata spilled \/ over into the river scuff\u2026.\u201d It\u2019s the appearance of the exact, unexpected word (\u201cspandrel,\u201d \u201cscuff\u201d), but also irony: \u201cAlong the banks, I have scanned \/ these headstones for my own \u2026 \/\/ name \u2026 \/\/ and my surprise when the dates hinge and recede\u2026.\u201d
\nMaybe there\u2019s a touch of Ted Hughes in the nature studies. European starlings are \u201cdelinquent tax evaders \/ searching for cavities to nest\u201d; numbering only 60 at first, they \u201cstand now at two million, \/ speak in something \/ black-gated, less bardic. \/ These vagrant drill-soldiers \/ \/ smear the sky with labour song.\u201d See also Armstrong\u2019s poem on the \u201cfiberglass geese\u201d hung aloft in Toronto\u2019s Eaton Centre; they are a \u201cperegrination\u201d that has found \u201canchorage in the pleasure dome\u2019s \/ ceiling beams, a hovering in the light\u2019s unmooring\u2026.\u201d Her eye is excellent; her ear is sharp; but poems can end flatly, as is the case with the poems on the starlings and the geese. Similarly, \u201cGirls with Sharp Scalpels\u201d offers terrific images (\u201cPerched on silver stools, \/ we pried the organs free \/ until the glut of formaldehyde \/ fogged the room in tension headaches\u201d), but the end is uninspired: \u201cThey\u2019ve spent centuries amidst the basement midden, \/ waiting for home renovations, \/ waiting for us to find them [frogs] warted in regalia.\u201d But one must set aside quibbles and recognize the stellar quality of what Armstrong gives us \u2013 an always stimulating and always vivid set of insights.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cOn s\u2019est perdus de vue\u201d is another nice poem, drawing a connection between the screening of a film and the end of life: \u201c \u2018Cut, cut!\u2019 I\u2019ll hear you say. \/ \u2018It\u2019s ended.\u2019 \/\/ Yes, I know, I\u2019ll say\u2014 \/ but look, \/ here we are in the credits.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nP.S. Goose Lane Editions has published my poetry.<\/p>\n
\nBy David L. Ulin
\nSeattle, WA: Sasquatch Books, 2010
\n160 pp., $13<\/p>\n
\nby William Forrestall
\nFrederiction, NB: Broken Jaw Press, 2011
\n147 pp., $36<\/p>\n
\nIndeed, Ulin’s title is even a tad alarmist:\u00a0 To suggest that reading is a lost art is to suggest that seeing itself, or thinking, or breathing, are also imperilled. But maybe such bleak prophecy is only bad news for those who do not think of reading materials as fuel for bonfires, but as intellectual treasures. Certainly, Ulin is preaching to the converted: who else but readers would buy his book? Then again, some forms of reading, of intellectual interaction with printed text (not electronic bits and bytes), are likely in decline, due to competition from screens (computer, TV, pads, pods, and phones), not to mention the e-book. The digital revolution makes more information and entertainment available to more people in more places faster; and looking-and-listening (absorbing) is less challenging brainwork than is reading. The result is the old (moral) divide: gratification now (watching) versus deferred pleasure (reading).\u00a0 So why read\u2014printed books?
\nFor Ulin, the question is occasioned by his teenage son, who prefers the excitement of video games and the bling and blip of electronic communication to the seemingly more sedate \u2013 staid \u2013 pleasures of reading literature, such as The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ulin experiences a crisis of confidence in the (old-fashioned) book. How can it compete with the bells and whistles of the new gadgetry? Well, the answer is conservative.\u00a0 Trashy pleasures and propaganda (lies) are eventually deleted or pulped.
\nAt it’s best, says Ulin, \u201cliterature … offers … a slicing through of all the noise and ephemera, a cutting to the chase.\u201d Recalling the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign, Ulin suggests that Barack Obama was the candidate of the literate, while Sarah Palin was not only a proud yahoo, she seemed functionally illiterate.
\nTo go further, Ulin says that \u201creading is a revolutionary art.\u201d\u00a0 To engage with a text that challenges one’s morals, one’s beliefs, or to enter into the world, imagined or recollected, of an alien consciousness (and everyone’s mind is alien to everyone else’s), is to be forced to think or to dream anew.\u00a0 Such lucubration must frighten thought-police \u2013 the guardians of the status-quo \u2013 everywhere.
\nIn the end, Ulin makes peace with the wired world, discovering that “reading can exist in a variety of different forms.”\u00a0 He’s right about that.\u00a0 The book may become electronic \u2013 read and deleted to make way for the new upload\/download. But there’s much to be said for brick-and-mortar libraries as there is to be said for gold deposits in brick-and-mortar banks: Both make deception more difficult, and both hold real value.\u00a0 Ulin\u2019s screed is readable.\u00a0 But the best defense of the library is George Orwell’s 1984; and the best defense of the book is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Read them and weep.\u00a0 From The Lost Art of Reading, we go to New Brunswick artist William Forrestall’s drawings and paintings of the excavated \u201clost art\u201d of ancient Egyptian clay objects, left in graves, apparently for use in the afterlife.<\/p>\n
\nBrief essays by R.M. Vaughan, Virgil Hammock, Leopoldo C.J. Kowolik, and Forrestall himself serve to introduce the art.\u00a0 For Vaughan, drawing is an act of love; Hammock says it is the “handwriting of the artist”; Kowolik sees still life as a contradiction of the vanity of existence. Forrestall understands his “objects for study” as still life pieces come literally \u2013 powerfully \u2013 from the grave itself.
\nIt is wonderful that Broken Jaw Press has given Forrestall such a loving presentation.\u00a0 It is especially grievous, then, that Forrestall’s fine essay is injured, on p. 32, by either editorial inattention or a botched printing job.<\/p>\n
\nby Serge Toubiana
\nLondon, UK: Phaidon, 2000
\n191 pp., $28<\/p>\n
\nby Jim Johnstone
\nToronto, ON: Tightrope Books, 2011
\n86 pp., $19<\/p>\n
\nIt opens with an interview between Misfits (1961) screenwriter Arthur Miller (famed for his plays and his marriage to M.M.) and Serge Toubiana.\u00a0 Next, Toubiana reviews the tortures of filming in the Nevada desert, in summer, with the shaky Monroe, the agitated Miller, the director\u2014and inefficient perfectionist\u2014John Huston, the morbid drunk Clift and the sickly Gable. The last section mines the archives of nine Magnum photographers, permitted to roam the set and shoot at will.\u00a0 The black and white snaps are excellent (perhaps better than the flick), and they gain poignancy thanks to the context that Miller and Toubiana provide.
\nIf the movie is an elegy for wild horses (that become dog food) and the cowboy (reduced now to being just another worker in blue jeans), it is also Gable\u2019s testament to his gifts as an actor, just as it is a revelation of Monroe\u2019s skills as a serious \u2013 not just comedic \u2013 artist.
\nThe film shoot itself was a version of hell. The Monroe-Miller marriage was dead; Miller loathed Monroe\u2019s tutor Paula Strasberg; Monroe was often late for her turns; the heat was deadly; Huston kept re-shooting scenes. The movie\u2019s theme is alienation (Miller views the actors as \u201cseveral planets revolving around one another\u201d), but that feeling itself soon infected cast and crew.
\nOne ingenious \u2013 accidental \u2013 photo shows Monroe and Miller in a hotel room; her back is turned to him as she looks out a window, but he regards her, wistfully, tenderly. Toubiana\u2019s essay is a meticulous consideration of the dreams and difficulties involved in making The Misfits. It is fine prose. Photographs appear throughout the book, but the final catalogue of shots is superb. Monroe is, well, Monroe. Other stars there have been; but none has been as luminous; none has the lens loved as much. Whatever she does, doffs, or dons, she is the light that the camera celebrates.
\nGable incarnates weathered individualism; Clift looks sensitive, i.e., appropriately weak; Eli Wallach resembles a rough romantic; not a prizefighter, but a brawler. Huston seems thoughtful, if distracted (except when gambling); Miller seems distracted, if thoughtful (a bluesy intellectual). The shots of the desert, the horses, and the crew are just as desolate, just as splendid. Misfits is a must-read; must-see.<\/p>\n
\nJohnstone summons Plato to suggest that folks are (or descend from) locusts, especially as Battle of the Atlantic sailors, (U of T) students, and urbanites (Torontonians). But a real locust infestation, of Toronto, in 1915, is also conjured. The poem\u2019s thought is Plato, plus Darwin, plus biblical (apocalyptic) and literary allusions.
\nLuckily, to serve comprehension and explication, we have pages of notes. Still, a background in biology and post-modern literature \u2013 or access to Wikipedia \u2013 must be prerequisites for grappling with this self-conscious experiment. Despite his educated difficulty (cf. T.S. Eliot), Johnstone produces some effective images: \u201cBefore \/ flight, we were certain of a window\u2019s strength. \/ Now your fist shivers through glass, wrist locked \/ in knots of blood, insects crowding excavation.\u201d
\nIt\u2019s good, but the allusion to the Michael Ondaatje image collection alerts us to Johnstone\u2019s debt to Coach House Press, circa 1975-85, and its publication of similar combos of word \u201carrangements\u201d and Late-Late-Cubist art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"