FORGET-ME-NOTS

For you, I have
dug and tend

this garden,

but I am

the sort of gardener
who looks with smug

accomplishment
upon the heap

of weeds just pulled,
only to realise

they are
the forget-me-nots

you'd asked for.

THE AUTHOR IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE AUTHOR! PATTERNICITY, THEORY OF MIND AND HUMAN ERROR IN IAN McEWAN'S SATURDAY

[Several things I've read recently, and a few conversations pursuant thereto, have put me in mind of a talk I gave for a graduate seminar course in contemporary British fiction at UNB a couple of years ago. Perhaps you'll enjoy reading it, though you'll definitely get more out of it if you've read McEwan's Saturday, which was not a novel I much enjoyed, as a work of art, but is nevertheless intellectually impressive.]

Given Ian McEwan's avid interest in science and this book's particular focus on the functions and pathologies of the human brain, I thought it would be fitting to examine it through the lens of a couple of key scientific concepts.

The first of these is “patternicity,” a term coined by psychologist Michael Shermer.

1. PATTERNICITY

Basically, this is the innate human tendency to, as Shermer puts it, “find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.” According to Shermer, “our brains are belief engines: evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature.” We do this because it has survival value; when things are in fact connected, we gain crucial knowledge of our environment.

The downside is that our instincts for pattern-recognition often lead us to forge erroneous links between things that are best left unconnected. Shermer provides a few examples of false patterns: “UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration.” He encapsulates all this with a nifty aphorism: “people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things.” If the distal cause of these misconceptions is embedded in our DNA, the proximal causes, or “priming effects” in Shermer's terminology, are rooted in the specific cultural milieu of the individual.

So, if you're doing your duty as a pattern-perceiving hominid, you've likely guessed that I'm next going to talk about Henry Perowne's early-hours plane-spotting episode, which begins on page 13. Strikingly, Henry “doesn't immediately understand what he sees, though he thinks he does.” First, he mistakes the streaking flame for a meteor. Then, realizing the trajectory's all wrong, he corrects this misreading with another one: it's a comet. Then, with the help of a bit of auditory stimulus, he realizes that it is, in fact, a plane.

This bird-plane-superman process happens very rapidly; on page 14, the narrator says “Only three or four seconds have passed since he saw this fire in the sky and changed his mind about it twice.” Once he knows what it is, his imagination is “set free” and patternicity kicks into overdrive. On Page 16, Henry imagines “The fight to the death in the cockpit, a posse of brave passengers assembling before a last-hope charge against the fanatics.” Etc. He sees a pattern because it's human nature to see one. He sees the particular pattern he sees because of the priming effect of 9/11. Henry clearly isn't a marginal conspiracy theory wackjob in thinking this way, as the media, throughout the day that follows, repeatedly report things that accord more with what one expects or wants to be found, than with the actual facts of the case: fundamentalist Islamic pilots, Koran in the flight deck, etc.

2. THEORY OF MIND

Before I say anything further about how patternicity relates to Saturday, I'd like to briefly explain a related concept: Theory of Mind. This sounds pretty highfalutin, but psychologist Martin Doherty explains that it is, essentially, the practice of making “inferences about the psychological states of others.” This is something that virtually all (neurotypical) humans do as a matter of course.

In How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker situates Theory of Mind within what he calls the practice of “intuitive psychology” and, like Doherty, says it's something everyone does instinctively:

“We mortals can't read other people's minds directly. But we make good guesses from what they say, what we read between the lines, what they show in their face and eyes, and what best explains their behavior. It is our species' most remarkable talent.”

And it is a talent that becomes manifest in human beings, typically, by the age of four, regardless of what culture they come from, as research conducted by Doherty and others has shown.

Saturday is rife with examples of Perowne practising Theory of Mind in trying to anticipate, interpret and understand the words and deeds of other people. The two Baxter episodes are the most obvious—and the most fraught, because Baxter, whose “face is never still” (222) is far from neurotypical—but think also of the brief moment, which you can find on page 141, when Henry, stuck in traffic, looks over at a TV screen in a storefront, where he sees a close-up of Tony Blair's face and tries to determine, by reading Blair's features, if he's being honest.

Here, the narrator comments on Theory of Mind explicitly:

“For all the difficulties, the instinctive countermeasures, we go on watching closely, trying to read a face, trying to measure intentions. Friend or foe? It's an ancient preoccupation. And even if, down through the generations, we are only right slightly more than half the time, it's still worth doing.”

Which is a neat recapitulation of Shermer's argument for the evolutionary benefit of patternicity.

When I started thinking about how to approach this presentation, I had the idea of using McEwan's interest in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology as a foil to Barthes' “Death of the Author.” I was motivated in part, I have to admit, by my disagreement with Barthes' thesis and my distaste for the dogmatism with which he propounds it. The reading experience has long been for me, fundamentally, a matter of communication between the person who wrote the text and the person who's reading it, an extension and refinement of the face-to-face storytelling that is such a big part of daily life.

Far from limiting the possibilities of the text, as Barthes says, this conception of writer-reader intimacy enriches it for me. If anything, Barthes' view seems to me mistily naive, a kind of nostalgia for the innocence of the child's reading experience, uncluttered by awareness of the publishing industry, book prizes, celebrity gossip, etc. It seems to me exactly the sort of theory that might be espoused by a writer who lived with his mother most of his life...

I came to see McEwan, particularly in Saturday, as an ally. The more I read about him and his book, the more I saw a rejection of critical theories such as Barthes'. Not only does McEwan favour peer-reviewed science over abstract theory and intuition, but he falls very much on the side of the things against which Barthes rails in the conclusion of “The Death of the Author”: i.e., “reason, science, law.” As opposed to the surrealism and automatic writing championed by Barthes, McEwan favours prose and plot that are the quintessence of tidy, disciplined, sequential order.

Moreover, in Henry Perowne McEwan has created a protagonist who, we learn through various profiles and interviews, lives in McEwan's house, plays McEwan's squash game and prepares the same fish stew served to Dr. Neil Kitchen in Mr. Ian McEwan's dining room. Henry also has a mother, Lily, who, like McEwan's mother, Rose, has vascular dementia. McEwan has gone so far as to say that “Henry is probably closer to me than any of my (characters).”

We sometimes catch McEwan using Henry as a mouthpiece for his creator's views. Henry, for instance, has no truck with fairy tales and magic realism. At the bottom of page 67, McEwan/Perowne opines that “the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible.”

In the New Yorker profile by Daniel Zalewski, McEwan says, in what seems like a broadside against one of the other books on our reading list [Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus]: “It's enough to try and make some plausible version of what we've got, rather than have characters sprout wings and fly out the window.”

McEwan's use of free indirect discourse in the narration of Saturday further blurs the line between himself and Perowne.

So, armed with all of this good, hard evidence, it isn't so great a leap to say, if not Henry Perowne = Ian McEwan, then at least that the author is alive and well in Saturday. It's certainly a leap that John Banville was willing to make. His review of Saturday, in the New York Review of Books, is literary criticism as Patternicity and Theory of Mind par excellence. Consider some of the things Banvillle says:

“ Few passages catch the flavor of this extraordinary book as well as the one in which, apparently without a trace of authorial irony, Perowne is made to recall an epiphanic moment on a fishing trip when his eye lit on his beloved car”

“The hard-fought match between Perowne and his American-born rival is meant, we assume, to illustrate the competitive, indeed warlike, nature of the human male, and to show us that McEwan is not entirely Mr. Nice Guy.”

“This fight seems meant to be a further display of McEwan's tough-mindedness, but is merely as tedious as any other overheard squabble between youth and age.”

“The awful possibility arises that Perowne's ignorance may be intended as a running gag; if so, it is the only instance of humor in the book, if humor is the word.”

Note all of the iterations of intention and meaning in these quotations. Banville—or his editor—appears to know he can't get away with saying these things with absolute certainty, but the cumulative impression is that he's pretty darn sure what's going on in McEwan's mind. Towards the end of the review he elaborates on why Saturday is a “dismayingly bad book,” which is deeply rooted in Banville's theory of McEwan's mind:

“It happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and preparation. I have read all those books, he thinks, I have made all these notes, so how can I possibly go wrong? Or he devises a program, a manifesto, which he believes will carry him free above the demands of mere art—no deskbound scribbler he, no dabbler in dreams, but a man of action, a match for any scientist or soldier. ”

Banville concludes by saying that Saturday's “arrogance” gives it “the feel of a neoliberal polemic gone badly wrong; if Tony Blair—who makes a fleeting personal appearance in the book, oozing insincerity—were to appoint a committee to produce a "novel for our time," the result would surely be something like this.”

If reading Barthes made me run to McEwan as an ally in the cause of the live author, reading Banville made me long for a bit of Barthes's scribocidal hemlock—in much the same way that Henry, when talking politics with the unflaggingly self-assured Jay Strauss, finds himself drifting towards the anti-war side of the Iraq debate, I found myself drifting towards Barthes.

It's precisely this sort of drift from fixed positions that Banville's patternicity, primed by McEwan as best-selling outspoken celebrity author, has to edit out in order to make his reading of Saturday hold up. If the presence of the author in this book is to be detected, it is not so much in isolated, offhand statements made by Perowne, as it is in the overall pattern of speculation, error, doubt, backtracking, correction and revision that is the hallmark of a devotee to reason and science.

Molly Clark Hillard's essay on Saturday, in part a response to Banville's reading, is salutary. In it, she observes that McEwan's “novel ... turns upon reading and reading again, that apparently requires re-reading to amend misprision. ... [Hillard] would remind us of our own capacity for misprision, for taking the newspaper interview for the novel, the man for his text, the narrator for the protagonist.”

Hillard cites several instances of misprision in Saturday, many of which I would say are the product of patternicity, and focuses in particular on the “Dover Beach” scene as a case of multi-layered misreading. I'd like to conclude by looking at that scene as a reification of patternicity.

On page 220, the narrator says that Henry “only half remembers” the poem that Daisy is reciting. This is likely true, since—as Banville points out, missing the irony, as usual—what English schoolchild of Henry's generation can have escaped exposure to “Dover Beach” altogether? But because he is primed by the context to believe that Daisy is the author of the poem, Henry shoehorns it into his memory of reading her work, even while he recognizes that the “wilfully archaic” tone of the poem is unusual in Daisy's work.

In the first reading of the poem, Henry commits speaker-as-author fallacy, an irony apparently lost on Banville. Primed by the unexpected revelation of Daisy's pregnancy, he deduces that the poem must be about her, her lover and the child they're expecting, set against the backdrop of the Iraq war, as he accidentally substitutes “desert” for Arnold's “ignorant.” He does this even though the poem is not supposed to be a new work of Daisy's, but is included in the Van Dykes of her book and therefore almost certainly predates her pregnancy, which is only in its first trimester.

On page 221, at Baxter's insistence, Daisy “reads” the poem again and Henry realizes that he “missed first time the mention of the cliffs of England” and this time sees the poem not through the eyes of its “author” but rather through those of its auditor, Baxter. Strikingly, Henry imagines Baxter “standing alone, elbows propped against the sill” of an “open window.”

This brings us back to Perowne “standing alone” at his window, watching the flaming plane streak by. On page 126, we learn that Henry has come to regard the story of the Russian cargo plane “as his own,” much as he comes to see “Dover Beach” as, first, Daisy's story and, second, Baxter's, before he is finally disabused of these erroneous perceptions and learns that the poem is Arnold's—the “truth” of which he mangles further by wondering about Arnold's surname.

Saturday is loaded with instances of miscommunication, misunderstanding and misidentification. As Ruth Scurr puts it succinctly in her review of Saturday: “free people with choices are sure to mess up.” If the book's author intends a moral lesson, it is nothing so crude as what Banville posits, but perhaps something along the lines of: because we are human, we will err, but by revisiting our assumptions, interrogating our beliefs and rereading people, events and texts carefully, we might make fewer and less grievous mistakes. As Mark Lawson put it in a review for The Guardian:

Saturday ... is subtle enough to be taken as a warning against either intervention or against isolationism. Is the foreign policy of Henry's government exposing him to danger, or is his moneyed, bouillabaisse-eating existence a self-delusion in a threatening world? As in the best political novels, the evidence and arguments are distributed with careful ambiguity.

Pace John Banville, it's awfully hard to imagine Tony Blair's stamp of approval on a book in which he is made to look foolish – by mistaking Perowne for someone he isn't, and yet carrying on boldly as though he had the right guy all along.

WORKS CITED

Banville, John. “A Day in the Life.” New York Review of Books 52/9 (May 26, 2005). http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2005/05/banville_on_sat.html (May 26, 2007).

Barthes, Roland. Trans. Richard Howard. “The Death of the Author.”
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/barthes06.htm

Doherty, Martin J. Theory of Mind: How Children Understand Others' Thoughts and Feelings. New York: Psychology Press, 2009.

Fray, Peter. “The Enduring Talent of Ian McEwan.” The Age. January 29, 2005. http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/01/28/1106850082840.html#

Hillard, Molly Clark. ““When Desert Armies Stand Ready to Fight”: Re-Reading McEwan’s Saturday and Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, (6:1), 2008 Jan, 181-206.

Lawson, Mark. “Against the Flow.” The Guardian. January 22, 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jan/22/bookerprize2005.bookerprize

McEwan, Ian. Saturday. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2006.

Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton, 1997.

Scurr, Ruth. “Happiness on a Knife-edge.” The Times. January 29, 2005. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article507285.ece

Shermer, Michael. “Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise.” Scientific American. November 25, 2008.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=patternicity-finding-meaningful-patterns

Weich, Dave. “Ian McEwan, Reinventing Himself Still.” Powells.com. April 1, 2004. http://www.powells.com/authors/mcewan.html

Zalewski, Daniel. “The Background Hum: Ian McEwan's Art of Unease.” The New Yorker, February 23, 2009. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/02/23/090223fa_fact_zalewski

Wall of Miracles

So here's a cool thing that happened recently. Through expat poet Suzanne Steele, I heard about a call for submissions for a project at the University of Exeter, where Suzanne is a PhD candidate. The project is called The Wall of Miracles:

A unique collection of original nature poetry printed onto handmade cards the size of luggage tags from writers around the world will be exhibited on a wall outside Reed Hall on the University of Exeter’s Streatham Campus. The Wall of Miracles poetry installation makes use of a particularly beautiful section of masonry near Reed Hall, hanging poem cards about animals and nature by string to the wall. 

The organizers of the WoM chose my poem, "Doe," which I think is pretty darn cool.

Wee update

Been a while since I posted anything, largely because my computer decided it no longer wanted to connect to the internet and I had to get a new one more willing to do my bidding.

I returned home on the 6th from the Irving Layton symposium at Ottawa U, where I gave a talk on Layton's improbable relationship with Black Mountain. I recorded said talk and will be uploading it once I get it off my defective PC and load it on to my shiny new MacBook (a purchase I could ill afford, but I just couldn't face the prospect of continuing to use the invective-inducing Beta-grade software known as Windows).

Anyway, the symposium was very stimulating. Kind of fun to take part in such a thing as a non-academic interloper, if only for the sociology of it all.

More anon.

I don't think you can spend your whole life questioning whether language can represent reality. At some point, you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent.

--Christian Wiman

What are virtues in a person can be liabilities of poems. Diffidence, gentleness, satisfaction with one's self, a certain sort of immediate sympathy for the troubles of the world and of others: all these can keep a poem from rising above the merely pleasant. Frost once remarked that poetry was a way of taking life by the throat, but for so many contemporary poets it seems a way of taking life by the hand. Certain tactics become deadeningly familiar: the privileging of specific subject matter ("Relate to me," you can almost hear some poems cry); the primacy of personal experience and the assumption that language can contain it; the favorite foreign country that becomes a sort of grab bag for subject matter; the husk of anecdote cracked for its nut of knowledge; the serious intellectual and psychological issues that do a soft-focus fade-out into imagistic unknowingness; the ease, even pride, with which the poet accepts such unknowingness. much of this poetry isn't "bad," exactly; you wish it were worse, in fact, because then you could more clearly explain to yourself why a large dose of it--a batch of books to review, say, or an hour spent browsing magazines--leaves you feeling not simply numb but guilty for that numbness, as if you were the only tainted thing in a world where everything was perfectly clear, perfectly pleased with itself. Intensity is the only antidote--of language, of experience, of ambition. In the presence of that intensity, all that is merely pleasant falls away.

--Christian Wiman, Ambition and Survival

Audio: ZW and Rachel Lebowitz in Tatamagouche

Finally got around to uploading and editing the audio from the reading Rachel and I did at Fables Club in Tatamagouche, NS, earlier this month. Not a huge crowd, but a very attentive one. Fables is such a great venue.

Christian Wiman on poets who review

I'm not at all sure what causes or enables some poets to persist. ... Less generous motives are not difficult to imagine. it's easier to make a name for oneself as a reviewer than as a poet, though anyone who would value this lesser recognition is probably not a real poet anyway. Then, too, there are always those who are keen on accumulation "power" in the poetry world, and reviewing may be just one more means of doing so. One hardly knows what to say about this. Wielding power in the poetry world is roughly the equivalent of cutting a wide swath through your local PTA.

--"A Piece of Prose," from Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet

Rachel Lebowitz and I read at the Killam Library

Zachariah Wells and Rachel Lebowitz March 26, 2013 from Dalhousie Libraries on Vimeo.

On Mentors and Tormentors

Alexandra Oliver talks about her forthcoming collection, Meeting the Tormentors in Safeway, a book I had the pleasure and honour of editing for Biblioasis. It's a good one, kids.

"The poems in Tormentors are not all about bees or bullies, but they do deal with the way in which life torments one in small ways, in the most mundane of environments. When I wrote these poems, I was living with my family in a bedroom community reputed to be the third best place to live in Canada.

If you’re the kind of person who longs for a split-level home with a two-car garage, who likes lining up for an hour at festivals to buy ribs and listen to Guess Who cover bands, who enjoys doing boot camp fitness, playing laser tag with co-workers, campaigning for the Conservative party, or getting plastic surgery, this would definitely be your kind of town.

It wasn’t my kind of town."

Initiation Rites

I had a fabulous time last night being inducted into the University of King's College's Haliburton Society, the longest running university literary society in North America. I wasn't quite quick enough on the draw with my dictaphone, so the recording starts in the middle of Haliburton President Ariel Weiner's introductory remarks, alas.

Upcoming Doings

Just got back from a two-week jaunt in southern Portugal with my mother and my son, and I'm now looking forward to a spate of events over then next couple of weeks. If you're in the vicinity of any of these gigs, I'd love it if you dropped by:

Monday, March 25; 8:30 pm; University of King's College, Senior Common Room: I have been named this year's "Honorary Member" of UKC's venerable literary club, The Haliburton Society, and as such will be giving a reading. This is particularly cool from my p.o.v. because I attended King's way back when. Snacks and drinks, I'm told, will be provided at the post-reading reception.

Tuesday, March 26; 7:30 pm; Dalhousie University Killam Library, Special Collections Room (5th Floor): I'm reading with Rachel Lebowitz. This will be the first Halifax reading for Rachel from Cottonopolis, following a very successful mini-tour in Ontario and Montreal. I'll be reading more or less exclusively from my not-yet published chapbook, Baffle.

Thursday, April 4; 6:30 pm; The Company House, 2202 Gottingen St., Halifax: I will be hosting the launch of Rachel Lebowitz's Cottonopolis. Joining Rachel from Ottawa will be her fellow Pedlar Press author Sandra Ridley.

Friday, April 5; 7:00 pm; Fables Club, Tatamagouche, NS: Rachel and I will be reading at this fantastic venue, one of Nova Scotia's hidden gems.

Reading lessons

The notion that it was animals who taught us to read may seem counterintuitive, but listening to skilled hunters analyze tiger sign is not that different from listening to literature majors deconstruct a short story. Both are sorting through minutiae, down to the specific placement and inflection of individual elements, in order to determine motive, subtext, and narrative arc. An individual track may have its own accent or diacritical marks that distinguish the intent of a foot, or even a single step, from the others. On an active game trail, as in one of Tolstoy's novels, multiple plots and characters can overlap with daunting subtlety, pathos, or hair-raising drama. Deciphering these palimpsests can be more difficult than reading crossed letters from the Victorian era, and harder to follow than the most obscure experimental fiction. However, with practice, as Henno Martin wrote in The Sheltering Desert, "you learn to rread the writing of hoof, claw and pad. In fact before long you are reading their message almost subconsciously."

--John Vaillant, The Tiger

Review online

My review of Walid Bitar's Divide & Rule is now up at Arc's website.

Cottonopolis Tour

Rachel's book arrived from the printer the other day and, as we've come to expect from Pedlar Press, it is drop-dead gorgeous. If you'd like a signed copy, you can drop me a line. It's $20, but can also be purchased along with her first book, Hannus, for a total of $30, or with our children's book, Anything But Hank!, for $35. All prices include tax, but not S&H, if required.

Speaking of which, if you'd prefer to get a copy from her in person, Rachel will be touring Cottonopolis in Kingston, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal very soon. Details:

Monday, March 11: Kingston, The Grad Club (upstairs, 162 Barrie Street), 8 pm. Reading with Michael e. Casteels and Elizabeth Greene. 

Tuesday, March 12: Toronto, Art Bar, Q Space, (382 College St West). 8 pm. Reading with Robert Colman and Clea Roberts.

Wednesday March 13: Toronto, Pivot Reading (The Press Club
850 Dundas Street W), 8 pm. Reading with Dave Cameron and Cary Fagan.

Thursday, March 14: Ottawa, Raw Sugar Cafe (692 Somerset St W), 5:30 pm. Reading with Sandra Ridley.

Friday, March 15: Montreal, Argo Books (1915 rue Sainte-Catherine ouest) 8 pm (doors open at 7:30 pm). Reading with Stephanie Bolster and Sarah Burgoyne. 


There will also be readings and launches coming up in Halifax, Tatamagouche and Moncton. I'll post about those as the dates draw closer. I'll be sharing the stage with Rachel for some of these and also have some events of my own over the horizon. Seems the winter ice is starting to thaw.

DEBT

life's abrupt abatement
expiry robbed of its last breath

dead pledge paid dearly
negative legacy left

a loan is only heavy
when the borrow's badly spent

Anthologised

I returned home from an unexpected railroad trip last night and waiting in my mail pile was The Puritan Compendium I. In it are poems and fictions drawn from five years and eighteen issues of The Puritan. This includes two very weird poems of mine, "New Standards" and "Dramatic Stories." The book is beautiful, contains lots of good writing and has been printed in a ltd. edition of 100 copies, so if you'd like one, you'd best act fast. The Puritan has been very good to yours truly over the years. Besides the poems, they also published this great interview I did with Jesse Eckerlin.

Don Paterson interview

Don Paterson, besides being a brilliant poet and critic, is one of my favourite literary curmudgeons:

Unfortunately [experiment] is a word we do sometimes use in that context—as if there were any sexy virtue in experiment for its own sake, which I just don't believe. I mean—so you've done a homophonic translation of Cavafy in three-letter words and substituted every noun for one four entries along in the dictionary—big fuckin' deal. It's kid's stuff, only kids wouldn't trouble themselves with it because Minecraft is far more fun and creative. Wee word games.

Thanks to Carmine for pointing out the interview.

The terrible thing about ... any of the mechanisms and patented insights that make up so much of any style, is that they are habit-forming, something the style demands in ever-increasing quantities. We learn subtle variations or extensions we once would have thought impossible or nonexistent; but we constantly permit ourselves excesses, both in quantity and quality, that once would have appalled us. That is how styles--and more than styles--degenerate. Stylistic rectitude, like any other, is something that has to be worked at all the time, a struggle--like sleeping or eating or living--that permits only temporary victories; and nothing makes us more susceptible to a vice than the knowledge that we have already overcome it. (The fact that one once used an argument somehow seems to give one the right to ignore it.)

--Randall Jarrell

Essay in Print

I received my copy of The New Quarterly 125 today, in which you can find my essay, "A Walking Shadow." It was one of the hardest, most personal things I've ever written and while looking at it in print saddens me, I am very proud of the essay. The issue looks like it has some really fine stuff in it, including work by D.W. Wilson, a talented young fiction writer I read with last year at IFOA, and the always interesting Jeffery Donaldson.