Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book Notes: Gay Fiction Roundup


As promised, our Pride Month series this year includes reviews of the best GLBT-themed books that have come to the attention of Reiter’s Block. These short fiction anthologies stood out for their fine writing, diverse perspectives, and emotionally compelling characters.

*Steve Berman, ed., Best Gay Stories 2008 (Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2008).

This anthology boasts an appealing mix of genres including fantasy, horror, and crime fiction, along with more traditional literary fiction. The economic and racial diversity of the characters also held my interest. As a woman writing about gay men, I appreciated the inclusion of two female authors here. Favorite tales: Raymond Luczak, “Interpretations,” the story of a sign-language interpreter working with deaf gay men at the beginning of the AIDS crisis; Holly Black, “The Coat of Stars,” a magical-realist love story about a Hispanic tailor who must win his childhood sweetheart away from the fairy queen; and Jeff Mann, “Taming the Trees,” which combines the rural, S&M, and “bear” subcultures in the unlikely persona of a middle-aged professor missing the one man he truly loved.

*Richard Canning, ed., Between Men (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007).

This is a fine collection of contemporary literary fiction, enhanced by Canning’s introduction, which highlights important themes in the stories and places them in their cultural context. Some novel excerpts work better than others as stand-alone reads, but all authors are high-quality. Overall, the book’s flavor is subtle and melancholy. Favorite tales: Kevin Killian, “Greensleeves,” a disturbing account of a power game between a wife, a husband, and his gay lovers, whose motives are left to the reader’s imagination; John Weir, “Neorealism at the Infiniplex,” in which anger, grief, and comedy collide at the funeral of a friend who died of AIDS; David McConnell, “Rivals,” the unforgettable story of a female teacher who seduces an eleven-year-old boy (an excerpt from his forthcoming novel The Beads); and Tennessee Jones, “Pennsylvania Story,” the dark romance of two abused men reenacting their past.

*Donald Weise, ed., Fresh Men 2: New Voices in Gay Fiction (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005).

This anthology series showcases emerging gay male authors of literary fiction. Not surprisingly, casual sex and unfulfilled longing are common themes, though handled in a variety of ways. In my opinion, the most original and substantial tales in this book are clustered toward the end: Rakesh Satyal, “Difference,” an unbearably tender and sad story of a young man who can’t get over a breakup; Ted Gideonse, “The Lost Coast,” in which a vacationing male couple’s relationship is tested when tragedy strikes their fellow campers; and James Grissom, “A Bright and Shining Place,” which addresses homophobia in the black church and how it strains one interracial couple.

*Richard Canning, ed., Vital Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007).

Canning once again works overtime as editor to provide a masterful survey of AIDS literature from the pre-1996 period, before the new drug therapies offered HIV+ people a chance at a normal lifespan. All the stories are powerful and well-written, but I was particularly affected by the following: Edmund White, “An Oracle,” in which a young hustler on a Greek island helps a man grieve for his dead lover; the late Allen Barnett, “Philostorgy, Now Obscure,” about a terminally ill man gently closing the book on his complicated friendship with two women; Thomas Glave, “The Final Inning,” about the suffering of closeted gay men in the black community; and Dale Peck, “Thirteen Ecstasies of the Soul,” a lyrical tribute to two dead friends, told as a series of prose-poems.     
  

     

Book Notes: Nobody’s Mother


Northampton poet laureate Lesléa Newman is the author of more than 50 books of poetry and prose for children and adults, including the poetry collections Still Life with Buddy and Signs of Love. She was one of the first authors to write children’s books for gay and lesbian families, the best known of which is Heather Has Two Mommies.

Her latest poetry collection for adults, Nobody’s Mother (Port Orchard, Wash.: Orchard House Press, 2009), is an autobiography in verse, narrated in a likeable voice that will resonate with a wide audience. Its themes include feminism, aging, the complexity of mother-daughter relationships, and nostalgia for Jewish culture along with a critique of its patriarchal and warlike aspects. Along the way, Newman offers such delights as an ode to Manhattan’s now-shuttered Second Avenue Deli, and a playfully erotic exploration of middle-aged love.

Newman is closely attuned to the duality of our core experiences–our love-hate relationships with God, tradition, family, and our own bodies, to name a few. In the first section, “Nobody’s Mother”, she portrays her own mother’s emotional unavailability and resentment of her children, with a sharp eye and a wounded heart. At the same time, the author demonstrates compassion for her mother, seeing her from a feminist perspective as one of many women forced to choose between parenthood and personhood.

Other poems in this section reveal that Newman made the opposite choice. Her pride in her independence mingles with tender sadness for the daughter she will never have. “The Bad Mother” could be about either the narrator or her mother, depending on how it’s read:

…The bad mother never
thought she had
what it takes
to be
a good mother

The bad mother never
let her daughter
out of her womb
to prove
that she was wrong

The book’s second section, “A Real Princess”, sketches the characters of her Jewish family: the beloved dog, the aunts playing mah-jongg (“Company”), the distant father whose one effort at family closeness (“How to Make Matzoh Brei”) is treasured more than the mother’s daily unsung labors. However, amid these cozy scenes, the girl-child is also learning to associate her body with shame and danger. While the aunts gossip and laugh downstairs, the narrator is listening with dread for the sound of her older brother’s knock on her bedroom door:

…”Want company?” he asked
and though I never answered
he came in anyway
and did what older brothers often do

to younger sisters too ugly to date
while their father sleeps
and their mother laughs
and the telephone doesn’t ring

In the third section, “Classy Dame”, Newman engages in feminist midrash, fighting to inscribe her experience in the Jewish texts and traditions that are an inescapable part of her identity. The poem “Minyan” conveys how her grief at her grandmother’s death was compounded by the rule that women do not count towards the quorum of ten mourners required for the Kaddish.

…Dear God,

if a woman sobs
at her grandmother’s grave

and there’s no one there
to hear

has a sound
really been made?

In “What the Angel Really Said”, Newman turns the binding of Isaac into a classic Jewish comedy routine with an edge, using humor to puncture the patriarchal arrogance that sacrifices human beings to abstractions:

…Abraham, I’m warning you
unless you loosen the ties that bind
right this very minute
I’m going to have to declare you
an unfit parent. I’m going to have to
call the authorities who are going to have
to call the Department of Social Services
who are going to have to place the boy
in foster care and then may God
have mercy on his soul.
Already he’s going to spend
the next two hundred years
in therapy kvetching about his father
the meshugeneh who tried to kill him
because he loved some God
he had never seen
more than he loved his own flesh and blood.

Newman here creates an alternate mythology of original sin, suggesting that the root of our present evils is not disobedience to an arbitrary command but rather the opposite, the failure to recognize that human love is the truest expression of what God wants. Though her lesbianism plays a surprisingly small role in this book, this way of reading the Bible seems informed by our contemporary struggles over sex and gender in our religious institutions.

The last section, “Age Before Beauty”, includes often-whimsical homages to role models who have helped Newman love herself as a middle-aged woman. These range from literary icons Grace Paley and Virginia Woolf to a majestic, weathered old tortoise that she once saw crossing the road. It’s a hopeful ending to a collection that bravely explored some dark places.

Below, reprinted with permission, is “The Woodgatherer Speaks”, one of the book’s strongest poems about the intersection of faith and power. I love how it connects scapegoating to the reminder that there’s always so much we don’t know about a person, or a text, or (especially) God. Mob violence is the opposite of the humility that allows a multiplicity of voices.

The Woodgatherer Speaks


Once when the Israelites were in the wilderness, they came upon a man gathering wood on the
sabbath day. Those who found him as he was gathering wood brought him before Moses, Aaron
and the whole community. He was placed in custody, for it had not been specified what should
be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses, “The man shall be put to death: the whole community
shall pelt him with stones outside the camp.” So the whole community took him outside the camp
and stoned him to death—as the Lord had commanded Moses. (Numbers 15:32-15:36)

It was a sunny day
It was a cloudy day

It was early morning
It was late afternoon

I was gathering wood to build a fire
to warm myself

I was gathering wood to build a fire
to cook myself a meal

I was gathering wood to build a fire
that was never lit
yet burns for all time

I still tasted the bitterness of slavery
and did not care about keeping the Sabbath

I cared about keeping the Sabbath so much
I sacrificed my life so others would remember

I was selfish
I was self-less

Some say my name is Tzelofechad
and my five brave daughters
Machlah, No’ah, Choglah, Milkah and Tirtzah
are my legacy

Others insist I am a nameless man
known only for the worst thing I did
on the worst day of my life

Here is the truth:

I was gathering wood on the Sabbath Day
I was warned three times to stop

I was gathering wood on the Sabbath Day
no one said a word

I was brought before Moses and Aaron
They put me in custody
Then Moses spoke with God

God said to Moses, Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy
God said to Moses Thou shalt not kill
God said to Moses Take this man outside the camp
Have the whole community stone him to death

Moses said to God
Pardon the iniquity of this man
according to Your great kindness
as You have forgiven the people Israel
ever since Egypt

Moses said: nothing

When I heard my fate
I stood still as a stone

I was struck first
by a rock
the size of the apple
Eve shared with Adam

I was struck first
by a small pebble
that was later placed
on my grave

The first stone
was thrown
by the hand of a stranger

The first stone
was thrown
by the hand of a friend

The first stone
was thrown
by the hand of my daughter

The first stone
was thrown
b’ yad Moshe

The stones came hard and fast as rain
The stones came slowly, a lifetime apart

I stood upright
I fell to the ground

I cursed God
whom I did not believe in
I prayed to God
whom I loved with all my heart

As I lie on the earth
bruised and broken
a grasshopper leapt near my face
looked into my eyes
and sang a song so sweet
it broke my heart
and healed it

The grasshopper died beside me
The grasshopper hopped away

My life ended thousands of years ago
I am alive today

I gather wood on the scrolls of your Torah
I dance on the fringes of your tzitzit
I wander through the corners of your mind
as you sit in shul on Shabbat
and contemplate
the meaning of your life
the meaning of mine

Poetry Roundup: Koeneke, Minnis


How much is too much? I recently read two poetry books, Chelsey Minnis’ Bad Bad (Fence Books) and Rodney Koeneke’s Rouge State (Pavement Saw Press), that were enjoyable and frustrating for similar reasons. Both started with a clever and unique style, and both had that essential ingredient of self-mockery that keeps experimental poetry from becoming a new pretentious orthodoxy. Both books also luxuriated in excesses of language and imagery: Koeneke marrying the Orientalist fantasies of sheiks and odalisques to the trappings of suburban consumerism, Minnis describing poetry as “lickable mink” and a “doorknob covered with honey”. Yet there were places in both books where I felt fatigued, because every poem seemed to be in the same tone of voice and be funny/experimental/surreal in exactly the same way.

The cover of Bad Bad is striped Barbie-pink and white with red gothic-type letters, as if to code it “girly product, not to be taken seriously”. Of course, placing these graphics on the august cover of A Poetry Book invites us to rethink the seriousness of both girls and poetry.

Adopting the persona of a naughty little girl, the speaker of this book deflects criticism by flaunting her frivolity, yet at the same time secretly hopes to impress everyone with her cleverness. This is especially evident in Bad Bad‘s 68 “Prefaces”, my favorite section. Here’s a taste:

Preface 13

When I write a poem it’s like looking through a knothole into a velvet fuckpad…

And it is like buttery sweetbreads spilled down the front of your dress…

It is like a gun held to the head of a poodle…

If I want to write any poems I will write them!

A poem that doesn’t have any intellectual filler in it…

Like two blondes fighting on a roof…

****

Preface 20

I am a poet so I can say things…

And not so that I can have any notion of a literary lifestyle…

I don’t like to be a poet but how else can I be so fitful?

When I say “I am a poet” I expect I am saying something that is neutral of all self-congratulations…

I am saying, “I have a special quality that is like swan shit on marble…”

****

Preface 36

“Poetry writing” is a hardship

Like crying because you don’t like the wallpaper…

It is like bleeding from your anus in the snow…

But I don’t like it…

In the “Prefaces”, Minnis
tries having it both ways: she flaunts her vain and sensual motives for writing poetry, but equally flaunts her self-knowledge, as if to convince us that ironic frivolousness is not really frivolous. That coy refusal to resolve the paradox provides a great part of the pleasure of reading Bad Bad. Minnis’ surprising use of language is the other thing I most enjoyed about the book. Even when I became impatient with its limited range of themes and emotions, I kept laughing at passages that deftly spun from melodrama to true remorse to ridiculousness and back again, such as these lines from “Double Black Tulip”:

………….I write this poem like a girl in a black wig……
…………
…………………………………………………………………………
…………but my heart is the heart of a true skunk…………
…………………………………………………………….
……………………………………………..
…………..this is bad fluffy thoughts.
.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .
……………………………..like the hurtfulness of chartreuse
…………………………………………………………..carpet………
……………………….I must try not to feel a fake kindness….

Though I am a fashion junkie, I got bogged down in the 16-page poem “Foxina”, which is basically a list of sensual, outrageous, fetishistic clothing that “the women in the viewing boxes” are wearing. In my opinion, this poem shows up the limitations of a book that is composed of clever fragments. Not every poetry collection needs a traditional narrative arc, but if I’m reading from cover to cover, I like to feel some movement, some development of consciousness, such that the poems at the end of the book could only belong at the end and are informed by the journey that preceded it.

Which brings me to another question: Is a structured poetry book “better” than an unstructured one? Should I be blaming a box of chocolates for not being a three-course meal? I’ve enjoyed a number of collections where the individual poems were not dazzling, but the overall effect was powerful, because the pieces informed one another; like chapters of a novel, they might not all stand alone, but they belonged together. If Bad Bad is a box of chocolates, to be dipped into rather than consumed in one sitting, it’s like the chili-powder-and-Pop-Rocks truffles that my husband bought me for Valentine’s Day. Pacing is everything once the novelty wears off, but what a novelty it is.

The above comments would also apply to Koeneke’s Rouge State, another book whose abundance of surface variation was not always enough to compensate for the poems’ underlying sameness. Rouge State won the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Award, and the post-9/11 date gives us a key to the poems’ political context, providing a backdrop of passion and fear that is rarely invoked directly by Koeneke’s pleasantly aimless language. The raw material of Koeneke’s poems is Western colonialist fantasies and how they might be processed by people with no cultural literacy–people whose minds are full of catchy phrases and bits of information, but without the attention span or historical awareness to put them together properly. Rouge State is like “The Waste Land” written by a likeable, confused, somewhat ADD-afflicted American teenager deployed to Iraq.

           from #38

…Tonight’s ceremony will require your bride’s
virginity. Spread nard over the bedclothes
and charge it up to the hotel. The poppies mean
we’re leaving. It was a once-in-a-lifetime
sort of thing–the seeds were used for visions
and the husks served as clothes.
On the airport concourse you’ll notice a series
of fluorescent yellow cannisters: please put them down
at once. The people were so sorry when
we told them you were leaving–
that’s why I think they’re doing
that funny little dance.

Such naivete should be dangerous, but a sense of menace is mostly lacking from Rouge State, which relies perhaps too much on its readers’ knowledge of extra-textual facts to give the book its urgency. As with Bad Bad, Koeneke’s poems can be enjoyed for the reckless abundance of their vocabulary and imagery. Some of the poems could be said to have a meaning or a narrative thread, while others are more cryptic. Untitled, they are numbered from 1-50, and I couldn’t say that I discerned a reason behind the order of poems: the speaker doesn’t seem to have reached any insight by #50 that he didn’t have halfway through. In fact, quite the opposite:

#50

Summer acrostic hotshot,
Urgent as a somnambulist.
Create in me a clean heart, Zardoz–
Krazy-glue gentile moils upon me.

Orangutans, start your gonads:
Not one of you gets out of Zaire alive.

The thing I learned at scribe camp:
Hermes is vowels. Graminivores
In igloos eat more teeth.
So much for that Hummer the

Orotund senator sent round–
She got spotted on the parkway, imploring
Apaches to land.
“My, what cheesy palms you have, Sir Swithin.”
All I ever wanted was free beer.

I have come late to the appreciation of this nonlinear type of poetry, so other readers might be more patient about pushing through its difficulties. For me, an author needs a good reason to depart from recognizable modes of communication. I’m less interested in technique for its own sake. For example, in The Cow, Ariana Reines uses fragmentary and bizarre language because the passion of a speaker fighting her way back from madness to sanity bursts the bonds of ordinary rational thought.

The rationale for enigmatic speech in Rouge State might be to show that Americans have lost the ability to think clearly about the political power we wield. However, this seems like more of a conceptual point than an emotional necessity, and once made, perhaps does not need to be repeated so often. Does nonsense-humor trivialize this type of subject, whereas satire might have provided some reparative insight?

I did enjoy Rouge State, on the whole, because I read it over several weeks and could slow down to appreciate the experience of each poem, notwithstanding how familiar that experience sometimes was, underneath the inspired nuttiness of the vocabulary. And there were some brilliant passages, my favorite being this one from #39:

Ego is an autopsy
at which you’re a guest but also its theater,
a space in which no detail is too small to be applauded, but only once
the scalpels go to town.

With more such moments of profound analysis thrown in among the non sequiturs, Rouge State could have been an even more satisfying book. I have confidence in Koeneke’s imaginative powers and will be interested to see the direction of his subsequent work.

Book Notes: The Glass Violin


Australian poet P.S. Cottier truly does see the universe in a grain of sand–as well as in a tram ticket, a Caesarian scar, the names of Australian military operations, a shabby bear in the Soviet zoo, a wren visiting a dead friend’s garden, and myriad other small details of modern life that she turns into windows on the human condition, in verses both whimsical and profound. Her new collection The Glass Violin (Ginninderra Press, 2008) contains all this and more.

One of the pleasures of reading poetry is finding that someone else has experienced and expressed a precise emotion that you thought was peculiar to you. When Cottier writes, in a poem titled “Forlorn”, “The abandonment of teabags is absolute,” I feel less silly about my pangs of guilt for turning those neat, dry, nearly immortal little packets into wet lumps of trash. Elsewhere, in “Cutting on Laminex”, she reflects on how the scratches on a cutting board outlast the meals prepared there, which segues into awareness of the marks that time has left on her: “I can’t recall the accidents, the sharp slice/which scarified, but skin scratches speak/of that open cut, some day, grave of mine.” She has kindly given me permission to reprint a poem from this book below.

Rock

I didn’t want this, not at all.
The rock rolled back,
groaning, rasping,
birthing brightness.
It was meant to
make them free.
But a single breath,
in and out,
a teasing pause,
then they crucified others;
those who walked outside
their straitened view of me.
Labyrinthine irony,
to fill the sarcophagus
in my name.
Those chaotic echoes
darkening on deafness,
I hear them still.
I’d asked them to put down stones
and not to pound down sinners.
To understand, or at least,
not to irrevocably judge.
But when they built their church
on rock, of rock,
flesh was pushed aside,
Golgotha glorified.
A mortar and pestle,
hope ground against granite.
Sometimes when I watch, I wish
that boulder had not budged.
When my flesh was tortured
and my mother’s tears fell,
I believed
it would erode
the rocks in human minds.
But I hadn’t counted on their
thoughts like drowning pebbles,
sinking in a hard skull cave
just beneath the skin.
Love sealed within forever,
not knowing light.
The third day never comes.

Some Readings for All Saints’ Day


Today, Nov. 1, is All Saints’ Day in the church calendar, otherwise known as the day after Halloween (All Hallows’ Eve). We saw only a handful of trick-or-treaters last night, but this morning the large container of leftover Mounds and Milky Way minis on our porch had been completely emptied by hungry teenagers or very neat raccoons. If you’d stopped by, you would have seen my husband eating a nutritious dinner of microwave popcorn and bananas while I read to him from Ariana Reines’ new poetry book, Coeur de Lion. (“But the planet, what is it/That assholes speak of saving it/Like they speak of saving Africa/By shopping. Saved./Saved. An agate marble/At the bottom of a toilet.”)

Coeur de Lion is mainly about Ariana’s short-lived affair with a rather banal person named Jake. She is aware that neither the animal heat and messiness of their sex, nor the desperate pretensions of their literary exchanges, really elevate this affair to a grand passion, yet she feels awful nonetheless. She writes candidly about the slippage between the actual and the literary self, using humor as a means to sincerity rather than an evasion of it. However, sometimes the flatness of her mock-Internet-speak grows tiresome, creating an immature voice that doesn’t do justice to the brilliance of her thoughts.

Reines’ first book, The Cow, is so stupefyingly wonderful that I have not yet been able to blog about it. To say that Coeur de Lion is not as good as The Cow is like saying that it is not as good as Shakespeare. Well, of course not.

The Cow restored my sanity last January, or rather gave me permission to go beyond reason, to give unselfconsious voice to what made me insane. Reines bursts out of linear thought patterns and explicable metaphors because she is saying the unsayable, not in the usual anguished self-referential modernist way, but in full surrender of the self, surrender to its incarnate, permeable, consumable and consumed condition. “Alimenting the world perpetuates it. Duh. Plus ‘the world’ itself is a food. We go outside we stay in. I am going to try to be a girl. Try to transcribe bare sustenance.”

The best part of Coeur de Lion was the section about her mentally ill mother, which recaptures some of The Cow‘s urgency and unique associative leaps:

Her mind dips into the agar-agar
The air feels like, her mind dips into
It and sticks. The city’s so general
How can she possibly specifically be.
These people who are going to have a good time
Are everywhere; up
To date. Day of wrath, burn
Me. Burn me. Hildegard,
Make the voices of the women
Soar up so high. I am listening.
The voices carry
Me. The stony heights
Echo the voices, the air
Is being caressed by them.
Something burns in this sound,
The fire’s soft and even
Like the oblong flame of my mommy’s orange wig.
…

…The recorded sound
Of the psalterion
The women singing enormous vowels
I want to feel them sweep over me
And all of this particularity
Fall away. I think it is possible
To be impersonal without being so general
You’re dead. I do not want
To optimize. I want to kiss you and feel
Sorry and kiss you again while the mommy
Slowly loses her reality, an
Abrasion in the heavy ledgers kept by statisticians
And demographers, a wound that will not
Heal.  They are not ledgers. They are
Databases. This is my poem. I wish I wasn’t so
Lonely in this capability of being devastated by
Her. I wish I wasn’t alone in this
Awe of her long errand, even now as it starts
To get dumb, and how unloved
She is, and how broke, opening onto an expanse
Of losses so diverse and endlessly amplifiable
That all narration just congeals. I’m broke
Too. Brokenness is not exactly honesty
But sometimes it gets close.
Somebody stole her computer; when she
Had one dollar she bought with it
An adjustable ring. She is a prizewinning
Medical doctor. The facts suffer,
They suffer and die.
…

Reines probably doesn’t think of herself as a Christian poet, yet she “gets” the moral and aesthetic implications of incarnation better than a thousand inspirational lyrics about birds and sunshine. “Even I can figure that a body is in a way ultimately an INCENSE.” She is willing to smell and taste the despised flesh of the world–the female genitals, the cow’s carcass–and find holiness in the act of not recoiling, in the act of seeing what is true. From The Cow:

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Time is somewhere else.

Don’t they call a body the wound with nine holes. Why cannot a body itself be testimony. Why cannot the fact that the witness is bear the witness. Testimony’s gesture of veracity used to be the laying of a hand upon the genitals. Why cannot being itself bear anything without a proof. FLESH MADE WORD

Constant presence of everything BE MY FRIEND longing.

You have got to goad yourself toward a becoming that is in accordance with what you are innate. You have got to sometimes become the medicine you want to take. You have got to, you have absolutely got to put your face into the gash and sniff and lick. You have got to learn to get sick. You have got to reestablish the integrity of your emotions so that their violence can become a health and so that you can keep on becoming. There is no sacrifice. You have got to want to live. You have got to force yourself to want to.
…

On a related note, this is the story of my personal favorite saint, St. Dymphna, the patron saint of mental and nervous disorders. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:


The earliest historical account of the veneration of St. Dymphna dates from the middle of the thirteenth century. Under Bishop Guy I of Cambrai (1238-47), Pierre, a canon of the church of Saint Aubert at Cambrai, wrote a “Vita” of the saint, from which we learn that she had been venerated for many years in a church at Gheel (province of Antwerp, Belgium), which was devoted to her. The author expressly states that he has drawn his biography from oral tradition.

According to the narrative, Dymphna — the daughter of a pagan king of Ireland — became a Christian and was secretly baptized. After the death of her mother, who was of extraordinary beauty, her father desired to marry his own daughter, who was just as beautiful, but she fled with the priest Gerebernus and landed at Antwerp. Thence they went to the village of Gheel, where there was a chapel of St. Martin, beside which they took up their abode. The messengers of her father however, discovered their whereabouts; the father betook himself thither and renewed his offer. Seeing that all was in vain, he commanded his servants to slay the priest, while he himself struck off the head of his daughter. The corpses were put in sarcophagi and entombed in a cave where they were found later. The body of St. Dymphna was buried in the church of Gheel, and the bones of St. Gerebernus were transferred to Kanten.

The Encyclopedia adds that this story is “without any historical foundation”, but apparently that hasn’t stopped the miracles from occurring.

As Ariana Reines says, “If the style is too much of an achievement then the edifice becomes what it is, alone, marooned inside of the real. You have to fuck with everything.”

Who Cares for the Reader’s Soul?


Among the many reasons I have found to avoid writing, or at least to avoid writing with any conviction, is the fear that my work would lead the reader astray. All truth comes from God, it is said, and therefore if I tell the truth as I see it, the end product will lead back to Him, without my needing to impose a Christian allegorical framework or engage my characters in theological conflicts.

The killer words there are as I see it. My vision is clouded by sin, so it is possible that if I write from the heart, what I’m really offering my readers is a glimpse into how far I am from God–or worse, persuading them to adopt my own faithless worldview.

It is no wonder that so much evangelical art is banal, since the stronger one’s belief in total depravity, the greater the resistance to departing from tried-and-true Biblical imagery. Of course, Catholics are no strangers to kitsch, but it’s always seemed to me that they had more of a campy sense of humor about it, connected to their refusal to let the sentimental entirely eclipse the grotesque.

Speaking of Catholics…I would like to believe what Flannery O’Connor says in this passage from “The Church and the Fiction Writer”, in Mystery and Manners, but I’m not sure if I should let myself off the hook that easily. On the other hand, what’s the alternative? I’m sure most people would rather read a good story than another hand-wringing post about why I don’t deserve to write one.

In this essay, O’Connor is disputing the conventional wisdom that religious truth and imaginative freedom are at odds. This view is shared by secular intellectuals and, ironically, by their Christian antagonists, who demand sanitized language and subject matter in their fiction. Both parties, she says, misunderstand the writer’s responsibility. Truth is embedded in the fallen reality of this world, not floating above it. The writer’s job is to describe this world, not to direct her readers’ spiritual lives.

Interestingly, O’Connor does not base this assurance on the “all truths lead to God” concept, which she might consider too akin to liberal optimism about personal authenticity and perspective-free knowledge. She would be more likely to cite St. Paul’s “many members, one body”: God wants us to know our role and develop the excellences appropriate to it, neither lording it over others nor taking on responsibilities outside our competence.  O’Connor writes:


When fiction is made according to its nature, it should reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in concrete, observable reality. If the writer uses his eyes in the real security of his Faith, he will be obliged to use them honestly, and his sense of mystery, and acceptance of it, will be increased. To look at the worst will be for him no more than an act of trust in God; but what is one thing for the writer may be another for the reader. What leads the writer to his salvation may lead the reader into sin, and the Catholic writer who looks at this possibility directly looks the Medusa in the face and is turned to stone.

By now, anyone who has had the problem is equipped with Mauriac’s advice: “Purify the source.” And, along with it, he has become aware that while he is attempting to do that, he has to keep on writing. He becomes aware too of sources that, relatively speaking, seem amply pure, but from which come works that scandalize. He may feel that it is as sinful to scandalize the learned as the ignorant. In the end, he will either have to stop writing or limit himself to the concerns proper to what he is creating. It is the person who can follow neither of these courses who becomes the victim, not of the Church, but of a false conception of her demands.

The business of protecting souls from dangerous literature belongs properly to the Church. All fiction, even when it satisfies the requirements of art, will not turn out to be suitable for everyone’s consumption, and if in some instance the Church sees fit to forbid the faithful to read a work without permission, the author, if he is a Catholic, will be thankful that the Church is willing to perform this service for him. It means that he can limit himself to the demands of art.

The fact would seem to be that for many writers it is easier to assume a universal responsibility for souls than it is to produce a work of art…. (pp.148-49)

Ouch. That hits me right in my codependent little tush.

The fact is, dear readers, I don’t actually care about your souls as much as we all thought I did. What I really care about is not letting you see what a bad person I am, which might happen if I wrote honestly. Not even bad so much as foolish, self-indulgent, affected, unlikeable and gloomy. Honest badness has an artistic purity to it that is lacking in your garden-variety schmuck.

What O’Connor says about the reader’s soul is even more true about the writer’s. The battle is fought elsewhere. I have the authority to offer my personal vision of the world only because I personally am saved by grace–not because it’s necessarily accurate or because it will motivate you to get baptized. I can offer it but I can’t impose it. God has given me the right to show up. You, too.

Flannery O’Connor Appreciation Week (Part 3)


“Last spring I talked at [this school], and one of the girls asked me, ‘Miss O’Connor, why do you write?’ and I said, ‘Because I’m good at it,’ and at once I felt a considerable disapproval in the atmosphere. I felt that this was not thought by the majority to be a high-minded answer; but it was the only answer I could give. I had not been asked why I write the way I do, but why I write at all; and to that question there is only one legitimate answer.

“There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.

“A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and wholly undeserved, something whose real uses will probably always be hidden from us. Usually the artist has to suffer certain deprivations in order to use his gift with integrity. Art is a virtue of the practical intellect, and the practice of any virtue demands a certain asceticism and a very definite leaving-behind of the niggardly part of the ego. The writer has to judge himself with a stranger’s eye and a stranger’s severity. The prophet in him has to see the freak. No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made….

“St. Thomas [Aquinas] called art ‘reason in making.’ This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, it is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth….


“One thing that is always with the writer–no matter how long he has written or how good he is–is the continuing process of learning to write. As soon as the writer ‘learns to write,’ as soon as he knows what he is going to find, and discovers a way to say what he knew all along, or worse still, a way to say nothing, he is finished. If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.”

 
       –“The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), pp. 81-83.

Flannery O’Connor Appreciation Week (Part 2)


“People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable. The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels. Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won’t survive the ordeal.

“People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.”

        –“The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), pp. 77-78.

Flannery O’Connor Appreciation Week (Part I)

“In the greatest fiction, the writer’s moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgment is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery….

“It may well be asked, however, why so much of our literature is apparently lacking in a sense of spiritual purpose and in the joy of life, and if stories lacking such are actually credible. The only conscience I have to examine in this matter is my own, and when I look at stories I have written I find that they are, for the most part, about people who are poor, who are afflicted in both mind and body, who have little–or at best a distorted–sense of spiritual purpose, and whose actions do not apparently give the reader a great assurance of the joy of life.

“Yet how is this? For I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose and no vague believer. I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that. I don’t think that this is a position that can be taken halfway or one that is particularly easy in these times to make transparent in fiction….

“My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable. In some cases, these writers may be unconsciously infected with the Manichean spirit of the times and suffer the much-discussed disjunction between sensibility and belief, but I think that more often the reason for this attention to the perverse is the difference between their beliefs and the beliefs of their audience. Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.

“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock–to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

        –“The Fiction Writer and His Country,” in Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), pp. 30-34.

John Amen: “Reconciling with Stillness” and “In Praise of Us”


The poems below are reprinted by permission from John Amen’s poetry collection Christening the Dancer (Uccelli Press, 2003). John is the editor of The Pedestal Magazine, a notable online journal of poetry, short prose, and book reviews.

Reconciling with Stillness

It is not enough
to follow a map to familiar temples,

I need
bulldozers in my stomach,
my spine bent to its breaking point,
secrets ripped from my groin
like sequoias uprooted in a hurricane.

I am filling holes, but also
crawling into them,
refusing to suck distraction’s oozing nipple,
even when my nerves
vibrate like a cheap doorstopper,

I feel loose dirt piling over me,
thirteen gravediggers burying me alive.

****

In Praise of Us

We are the winners, you and I,
traveling dirt roads that lead to junkyards,
hurling the thermometer into the crocodile’s mouth.

Always, their voices have been behind and before us,
that we have not walked by the tape measure
or turned our songs to science.

They gave us maps and exiled us,
laughed when we arrived at dry waterholes,
shook their heads as we ran with cheetahs.

But you and I,
we live in the center of the web,
feasting on our heartaches,
turning stone to water, icicles to lava,
using crosses as kindling.

We stand in the fusillade,
refusing to camouflage ourselves.
Every bullet swallowed turns to gold in our bowels.