Traveling and Writing

Good News!

Next spring (2010), Jan Wellington (English) and I will offer a class on Traveling and Writing. Jan told me about an online journal called the Literary Traveler that had published a fine piece of hers about Oscar Wilde traveling in the Wild West. I sent them something I had written about following a Peter Handke character into Slovenia, and today they published it as their feature article.

See it HERE.

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Photo and Stories

For provocative, funny, and disturbing examples of interdisciplinary collaboration between a photographer (John Sellekaers) and a writer (Brian Evenson), take a look at Wag's Review HERE.

Paragon and Paradox: Brian Evenson's "Last Days"

Brian Evenson writes with a scalpel, paints with a fine camel-hair brush, composes novels like haikus. 

Brian's words and sentences and images and plots are paragons -- Greek parakonan, to sharpen -- of the writer's craft, so precisely honed that his readers put their fingers at risk.

Like his earlier work, Brian's new novel Last Days (Underland Press, February 2009), has a dangerous edge; and here too the danger is oddly comforting, the sharpness as welcome as the rasp of the Scotch brought to protagonist Kline by multiple-amputee Gous: "Kline screwed the cap off the bottle and drank. It was good Scotch, or at least good enough. He took another mouthful then pushed the bottle over to Gous, who, using his forearms like chopsticks, managed to get it to his mouth." 

Kline wakes up from the whiskey to a horrific revelation, but like all detectives who populate stories of this sort, he doggedly follows clues and combats evil until he solves (or kills or burns down) the crime.

So, if the crime is solved, the prose perfect, the Brotherhood of Mutilation cut off, where's the paradox?

It's on page 46.

There, after Kline is ushered ritualistically ("What is wanted? . . . Having been faithful in all things, we come to see he who is even more faithful than we") into the presence of Borchert, whose multiple amputations qualify him as second in the brotherhood's hierarchy: "He was missing an arm and a leg, his robe cut away and left open at shoulder and hip to reveal the planed surfaces, hardly stumps at all. The other arm and leg were intact, though the hand was missing all but two of its fingers, the foot all but the big toe. Both ears, too, had been cut off, leaving only a hole and a shiny patch of flesh on either side of the head. One eyelid was open, revealing a piercing eye, the other closed but deflated, the eye under it clearly absent," Borchert wants to see Kline's amputation, the hand severed and "self-cauterized" before Kline shot the "gentleman with the cleaver" through the eye. 

And here the paradox: "Kline went closer. He held his missing hand out; Borchert took it deftly between his remaining fingers and thumb and pulled it forward until it was only inches from his face, his eyes dilating."

His eyes?

Is Brian human after all? He wouldn't be the first writer to lose control. Tolstoy famously has the sun rise twice on the same day in War and Peace. And Peter Handke, describing Van Morrison's song "Coney Island" 

(. . . Heading towards coney island/I look at the side of your face)

in his "Essay on the Successful Day," transposes Coney Island from Ireland to Brooklyn. It happens.

Brian's one-eyed man's eyes dilate. It's a mistake. Or perhaps it's a mistake Brian meant to make. Not a mistake at all. If it's the latter, then what is meant? Are there indications it might be meant?

The conversation continues until Borchert, who threatens to have Kline killed "for the good of the faith" unless Kline does what he asks, requires him to amputate one of his fingers with a cleaver, after which Borchert presses his new fingertip down onto a hot burner: "The flesh hissed, the blood hissing too, the air quickly filling with a smell that seemed to Kline like the smell of his own burning flesh. Now, he thought, it is time for Borchert to pick up the gun and shoot me through the eye. When Borchert took his finger away, Kline could still hear it hissing a little. And then Borchert turned to face him, his face wreathed in ecstasy, his eyes dilated wide."

Again, both of the one-eyed man's eyes dilate. This time it's in the context of Kline's ongoing identification with the person whose eye is exacted for an offense, as the biblical injunction that acts as the book's epigraph requires. When he kills, he kills himself. When he burns, he himself catches fire: "His shoes and legs and shirt were aflame. He tried to beat himself out. . . ."

He tried to beat himself out. He cut off Borchert's finger and became the man he shot. The detective who solves the crime becomes the crime.

Eyes?

Yes.

You can trust this writer, especially when he makes mistakes.

Cloud, mountain, moon

This blague

This blague is a French/English joke.

barbed wire borders

Lyn and I are teaching a course on borderlands, using the US/Mexico borderlands as our primary example. Last week we read Gloria Anzaldua's book "Borderlands/La Frontera," and came across this poem (just a part reproduced here):

I press my hand to the steel curtain--

chainlink fence crowned with rolled barbed wire--

rippling from the sea where Tijuana touches San Diego 

unrolling over mountains 

and plains 

and deserts, 

this "Tortilla Curtain" turning into el rio Grande 

flowing down to the flatlands 

of the Magic Valley of South Texas 

its mouth emptying into the Gulf. 

1,950 mile-long open wound 

dividing a pueblo, a culture, 

running down the length of my body, 

staking fence rods in my flesh, 

splits me splits me 

me raja me raja 

This is my home 

this thin edge of 

barbwire. 

We're all split, separated, divided, defined, limited, ordered by the boundaries we live on, by the borders that run, barbed and dangerous, through our psyches and our physical circumstances.

Anzaldua gets here at something Lyn and I are trying to think through for a paper we'll deliver at the next meeting of the Western Historical Society. A couple of paragraphs from our proposal:

Amy Irvine, in her memoire Trespass (North Point Press, 2008), tells of coming on a shocking scene in southern Utah: “Strung across the fence is a dead coyote. Blood drips from a fresh wound, blooms like a red Oriental poppy in the snow. . . . We climb over the fence and then lift the coyote off the barbed wire.”

Near the end of her 1998 story “Brokeback Mountain,” Annie Proulx writes: “In the end the stud duck refused to let Jack’s ashes go. ‘Tell you what, we got a family plot and he’s goin in it. . . .’ Bumping down the washboard road Ennis passed the country cemetery fenced with sagging sheep wire, a tiny fenced square on the welling prairie. . . .”

And finally, also in 1998, Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was beaten, tied to a rail fence, and left to die outside Laramie. Laramie residents denied that their town is a homophobic place. We live and let live here, they kept saying, a western mantra that rings true until you bring homosexuals into the equation.

Barbed wire is a sometimes vicious alternative to the open range Proulx and Irvine offer in contrast. Our paper will explore the living and letting live, the fencing in and the fencing out, the practice of stringing up trophies as threats, and the depictions of such practices that can either reinforce them or unmask them. 

[photo of a pronghorn leg caught in barbed wire by Ben Abbott]

East and West of Depression