David Marcus Dissent Magazine

J.M. Coetzee made an early career out of ambivalence. Restrained and impersonal, he mined the caverns of despair from the safe distance of allegory and literary appropriation. Life and Times of Michael K, his 1983 Booker Prize winner, tracked the itinerant life of a slow-witted gardener in the sparse prose of Kafka. Foe, a work of revisionist and feminist genius, challenged the rugged masculinity of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe by inhabiting the voice of an imagined female companion. Master of Petersburg occupied not only the melancholic timbre of a Dostoevsky novel—it was, after all, about the great master—but also the stilted Victorian English of a Constance Garnett translation.

Over the past decade, however, Coetzee has adopted an increasingly direct and confessional style. Once dedicated to ectomorphic reticence, he has now allowed himself the fattier tissues of biography. Beginning with his second Booker Prize winner, the 1997 Disgrace, he has spoken through a series of half-selves. Reclusive and dissatisfied, the protagonists of Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello, and Slow Man laid bare the moral and psychological crises of a midlife colonial: shame and guilt foremost, but also the persistent anxieties of physical and sexual decline.

At first glance, Diary of a Bad Year, Coetzee’s most recent entry, seems to follow this “late” tendency toward novelized autobiography. A book of journal entries, it maps the tortuous cartography of Coetzeean doubt through a near biographical stand-in: the eponymous John C, author of Waiting for the Barbarians and recent émigré from South Africa to Australia (a migration Coetzee himself made in 2002). (Read More)

It’s not hard to find an expert on Master of Fine Arts programs in creative writing—if you’re looking, that is. Check your local bookstore, or any online marketplace, and you’ll discover that there are only three books on the market that address this particular field of graduate study, almost certainly the fastest-growing field of study in the United States. And only one of these books profiles even a single MFA program in detail. Log on to Google and you’ll witness a similar phenomenon: There are only four high-traffic community blogs, anywhere on the internet, that cater specifically to current MFA students or MFA applicants. Check out the national magazines and the numbers are even grimmer—only one comprehensive ranking of full-residency MFA programs has ever been published in print. And yet applications to the top 50 MFA programs in creative writing are up 25% to 150% since last year. If anyone at the New York Times Education Desk were aware of this you could probably expect an article on the surge in MFA applications sometime in the next week. For any field of graduate study to see an increase of such magnitude in just twelve months is astonishing and surely historic; yet equally astonishing is how little time it would take anyone interested in this phenomenon to answer the “how” or “why” of it. If you want to know—if you really want to know—it only takes a magazine article or two, or a blog or two, or a single used copy of a book, to get you your answer.

Poets in particular love to talk about MFA programs, usually in tones appropriately categorized as apocalyptic and with a level of prior research knowledge that could only be expressed as a negative integer. MFA programs will destroy American poetry, we are regularly told. Ron Silliman recently likened these graduate courses of study to “polio” (he later apologized, on the grounds that the comment was unintentionally insulting to physically-challenged persons). Linh Dinh sagely informed the readers of Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation, that MFA students and applicants were “suckers” and that MFA programs constituted a “racket” run by, in many instances, “careerist creeps.” A recent Pulitzer Prize-winning poet translated the acronym for the degree into a three-word epithet involving mothers that can’t be repeated here—and then posted this felicitous discovery on Facebook. This is only a glimpse of the general tenor of MFA-related discourse among poets; in fact, poets have been waxing apoplectic about MFA programs for years now, and what’s more, in numbers. What the above detractors and nearly all their predecessors have in common is that they didn’t write any of the books on MFA programs alluded to above. They don’t participate in online MFA-applicant communities, either, though such communities now boast a daily readership in the thousands. Nor do these detractors appear to have read much—or anything, really—about MFA programs in national magazines. Or anywhere else. In fact, they didn’t even attend MFA programs themselves (and argue, implicitly, that they don’t know any truly innovative poet who did, so we can assume they either have no friends with an MFA or else no friends with identifiable talent). Yet the poetry community has hustled far more than is usual for the artist class to give these folks whatever microphones are available. Poets love their doomsayers.

So how often, one might ask, do major contemporary American poetry fora (like Harriet) publish commentary about MFA programs by MFA faculty, MFA graduates, current MFA students, current MFA applicants, or MFA experts? About as often as contemporary poets write paeans to happiness, one might say. Good news is substantially less interesting than bad news, whatever the topic or the medium.

So, the good news: The national network of MFA programs is well on its way to becoming the largest and best-funded patronage system for artists in the history of Art. To liken the MFA to the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944—also known as the G.I. Bill—would at present be only moderately rather than thoroughly ludicrous. And in ten years’ time it may well be something approaching entirely apt. To provide some of the history MFA detractors don’t know or don’t care about and therefore can’t or won’t provide their readers: Twenty-five years ago, when there were only a few dozen MFA programs, rather than the two hundred there are now, it was possible and perhaps (at a real stretch) reasonable for MFA programs to employ the “professional-school” model of education funding because competition for teaching jobs was keen but not—as now—literally unthinkably fierce. A single book might possibly land one a full-time job with some regularity, and MFA programs were enough of a boutique concept that they were more likely to be recognized and favored by those with the present financial means to pay for them. Also, there was minimal oversight of the field, so no watchdog institution stood ready and willing to call foul. (Spoiler: That’s still the case.) The professional-school funding model is one in which the student pays his or her own way, because the program, the theory goes, is preparing the student for a paying job in the field immediately or near-immediately upon graduation.

In 2010, the conventional wisdom is worlds away from what it once was: Trawl online communities or published articles pertaining to the creative writing MFA and you’ll see repeated, endlessly, experts and aspiring poets’ and writers’ belief that the MFA, as a terminal degree, should be fully funded just like other terminal degrees; that unfunded offers of admission should be turned down with the same alacrity by poets and writers as they are scorned by aspiring doctoral students in physics and chemistry; that as there are no jobs for MFA graduates available, broadly speaking, and as the MFA is not, by itself, anything like sufficient qualification for full-time employment at a university, anyone who graduates from an MFA should expect to find some other kind of employment unless and until they publish widely enough to merit consideration for a professorship (assuming they want one); that because the MFA is not a time-sensitive degree, one ought to feel comfortable applying to MFAs in successive years until one receives a fully-funded offer of admission; that in light of the foregoing, one ought not go into debt for an MFA program; and that MFA programs that still rely on the professional-school model of education funding are increasingly likely to be scorned by applicants and thus widely considered less august as institutions. Anyone who follows MFA programs with any regularity knows that all this is only a small piece of the current conventional wisdom about the degree—it might also be said that students today are more interested in finding a community than receiving hierarchical instruction, more interested in having time to write unmolested by the workaday world than gaining teaching experience—but for present purposes the distinctions made above suffice to set the scene.

The facts on the ground do not belie this conventional wisdom—they confirm it. Approximately forty programs now fully fund three-quarters or more of their incoming students. Roughly two dozen more fully fund between a third and three-quarters of matriculants. (It can rightly be said, now, that there is no evident cause for an aspiring novelist or poet to apply to any program where full funding is not a distinct possibility.) More and more programs are three years in duration instead of two, and allow students to fulfill a majority of their credit requirements with internships, independent study, thesis hours, and workshops. Across the board—nearly without exception—programs that do not fund their students well are seeing drops in their national ranking. The best-funded programs are—again with startling consistency—seeing the nation’s highest increases in applications and notable increases in prestige. And just as the G.I. Bill made it possible for a generation of soldiers to pursue their higher-education ambitions largely on the public dime, so too are public-school MFA programs, especially those not on the coasts, increasingly the most likely to be using their largely-government-sponsored endowments to fund MFA programs that pay young poets and writers simply to write (and perhaps teach two or three hours a week for thirty weeks a year; not bad, when the rest of the nation is busting its hump sixty-plus hours forty-nine weeks a year). Every current trend in MFA admissions suggests that the unfunded MFA is a dying breed, and that the notion of the MFA program as preparation for immediate post-graduate professional employment is wholly obsolete—yet to hear MFA detractors tell the story absolutely nothing has changed in graduate study in creative writing in the last half-century. That it is these ill-informed Nostradamuses who are being given the largest microphones is a tragedy; the nation’s young poets and writers deserve better. They deserve a public dialogue about MFA programs that depicts the MFA application experience—and the in-program MFA experience, and the MFA-as-cultural-phenomenon experience—as they themselves have understood and lived it, and as can reasonably be projected out into the future with even a rudimentary understanding of Where We Are Now.

The present conversation over the propriety and efficacy of MFA programs presumes much and explains little. We are told that MFA programs are the “but-for” cause of a massive de-fanging of American poetics, yet no case studies, anecdotes, or exemplars are ever provided, nor could they be—the same poets might well have developed in the same way without an MFA, which is (coincidentally) precisely the position of the MFA programs themselves, as despite crowing over the successes of their graduates these programs are also quite clear that they can’t and don’t teach anyone “how to write.” Often, MFA detractors like Donald Hall fall back on the comparison of unlike things: The work of inexperienced twenty-two year-old MFA students is compared, incredibly, to that of the Masters, and then when it is found (shockingly) to be wanting, the MFA and the MFA alone is blamed. (Instead, we might compare a random set of twenty-two year-old untutored and isolated poets with a similarly-aged and similarly-sized set of poets attending programs of study more difficult to gain admission to than Harvard Law School, where they are now being taught by, say, Peter Gizzi, Cole Swensen, Dean Young, or Alice Fulton; or, we might compare a large number of older poets without MFAs, and a large number of older poets with MFAs, and see whether a single twenty-one-month immersion in the Academy many years or even decades ago ruined any of the latter group for the rest of their writing lives. Of course, only a handful of MFA programs have even been around long enough for historic comparisons of this sort to be made. Unless Donald Hall thinks such disparate Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduates as Dan Beachy-Quick, Joshua Clover, Albert Goldbarth, Jorie Graham, Matthea Harvey, Philip Levine, Alice Notley, Bob Perelman, D.A. Powell, Mark Strand, and Rachel Zucker are all writing identical “McPoems”?)

It is implied, then, that the Academy is a hotbed of cronyism—yet it was Academy-sponsored first-book contests which became the “first adopters” of “blind submissions” and rigid CLMP ethics standards, even as the non-Academy publishing scene has for decades taken evident pride in basing publishing decisions (i.e. aesthetic decisions) in significant part on social relationships and group dynamics. While it’s not clear that any sub-community of contemporary American poetry has yet found an open path toward “meritocracy”—and while it’s not even clear what a meritocracy in Art would look like or mean, apart from a commitment to fair and transparent process (e.g., blind submissions, no cronyism or nepotism, and comprehensive published guidelines)—the Academy is certainly as far down this road as anyone else is. Nor is there any indication that Academy sub-communities are any more exclusive (as in, “excluding”) than non-Academy sub-communities: The proof of this is that anyone seeking admission to one of the nation’s two hundred MFA programs can, with sufficient time and effort, do so, whoever they are, whereas breaking into the hipster scene in New York, Chicago, or San Francisco requires social skills as much as artistic ones. And certainly there are even smaller sub-communities outside the Academy that are even more hostile to those they perceive as being unlike them in any of a series of specified ways. In contrast, the Academy offers young poets and writers all across the country, whatever their background, access to an increasingly diverse community of peers—in places like Lawrence, KS; Richmond, VA; Laramie, WY; Corvallis, OR; and San Marcos, TX—whereas non-Academy communities, particularly those with publishing organs, are located primarily in major urban areas where young people find it difficult to get a decent job or afford decent housing (often forcing those who seek out such communities to spend more time bussing tables than writing poems; a sixty-hour work-week doing back-breaking labor in New York City is a far cry from teaching a single, two-hour-a-week section of composition in, say, Ann Arbor or Madison). In short, when we are assured, in sage tones, that avoiding an MFA altogether is clearly and unambiguously better for the psyche and wallet and talent and sense of belonging of the young poet, such assurances are always conspicuously and dare I say suspiciously light on details.

The MFA hasn’t killed, won’t kill, and can’t kill the ingenuity of the American poet, and those who’ve thus far stood on the sidelines and cast stones as much or more at the next generation of poets as they have at MFA faculties and administrators should consider putting their time and energy where their words have been and are. Yes, there are some MFA programs that continue to exploit their applicants and their students; in many instances, these programs are partially staffed by friends and acquaintances of those who’ve to date reserved their ire for the twenty-somethings who innocently apply in the thousands to such programs every year. Want to help the next generation of poets rather than merely excite the air with your hands and mouth (and in so doing denigrate their ambitions)? Urge your friends and acquaintances to tirelessly seek out even a fraction of the funding for their students that their employers currently find for faculty salaries. Urge more experimental poets and writers, not fewer, to find jobs in the degree programs that now act as patrons to thousands of poets and writers every year—as if poets and writers will in the future find their communities in, and receive daily inspiration from, their peers and mentors at MFA programs, instead of railing against this circumstance to no evident effect why not make sure the education these poets and writers are receiving is worthy of their promise and their courage in pursuing an artist’s life? Perhaps you could pass round a contract amongst your friends and acquaintances saying that none of them will accept employment at any university program that makes a majority of their incoming students go into deep debt for a non-professional, non-marketable art-school degree. Perhaps you could offer a word of kindness, publicly, for a program like the University of Texas at Austin, which annually gives a bevy of poets and writers more than $27,000 apiece in non-teaching fellowships. (This is exactly the sort of government largesse that many MFA detractors regularly seek for themselves in the form of government grants, suggesting that the shirt-rending over MFA programs has less to do with whether such programs serve writers well, and more to do with an historic and aesthetically-based opposition to the Academy—an opposition that was more grounded in fact when Allen Tate, not Lyn Hejinian, was one of the nation’s most revered creative writing professors). Perhaps you could engage actual MFA applicants in conversation in the handful of easily-located communities where they dwell online. Or read a book or a magazine from the last ten years that speaks to the MFA phenomenon. Or sponsor roundtables in your online magazines in which MFA detractors are put in dialogue with MFA advocates rather than allowed to shout them down or (far more likely and more often) crowd them out entirely. Perhaps greater intellectual honesty—like not failing to mention the prior MFA study of some of the experimental poets you most admire, or conceding that the old European patronage system was far more destructive to Art than the new one Americans have devised, or recognizing that young American poets have been paying for poetry instruction ever since the first university initiated a Creative Writing track in its English major—is what’s really called for here.

Or perhaps it’s merely a matter of common sense: If a poet spends sixty years writing, what harm does two or three years under any particular poet’s on-again off-again tutelage do, and/or how is such tutelage different from non-Academy mentorship, and/or why would anyone assume that any independent-minded poet is going to offer up his or her individuality as a artist on the altar of this-a-one or that-a-one? If you wouldn’t, why would anyone else? Poets who attend MFA programs are as stubborn and egotistical and arrogant as those who don’t, surely. In any case, whatever you choose to do—whether you are an MFA detractor, the publisher of such detractors, or a current higher-up in a program that may be ill-serving the financial futures of its incoming students—do not continue to do what it seems many of you are doing now: Speaking from a studied ignorance and/or an instinctive defensiveness, and accepting any and every invitation to hold forth on things of which you have, it must be said, much opinion but little understanding. The singer-songwriter Jewel one day decided to become a “poet” (cf. A Night Without Armor), and you, it sometimes seems with equal forethought and preparation, have cast yourself in the role of someone with an understanding for how the MFA phenomenon has developed and is still developing in America. Whether this is a convenient truth for you or not, the fact remains that the American poetry community is early in the third decade of a fifty-year revolution, one which will change forever how American poets live and write and are invested in and are encouraged. You can start spending your time and energy and money fighting for positive change within this emerging but still imperfect cultural framework, as many others are now doing, or else continue to stand in the schoolhouse door. It’s your choice—and, until cooler heads at the larger fora prevail, apparently your microphone as well.

The title of Taylor’s book, Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, seems like the latest in the trend of pronominal jests (or homages) that have no referents but the hyper-relative, pluralistic, twitterfied era in which we live, the era of post- (modern, feminist, ironic, etc.). It is and it isn’t this. Taylor’s work is a product of its time, but it takes the overwhelming contextuality of modern life, and the abstraction it encourages, and puts them in the service of honest human experience.

Taylor is not always on—there are a few experiments in this collection that scrape like a worn down flint in a Zippo—but when is he on, sparks fly. It is difficult to pull out the best lines from a Justin Taylor story, for they are, more often than not, contextually dependent. These sentences are like powerful machines, computer processors, that are inert outside the structure of the larger apparatus. Take the end of “Somewhere I Have Heard This Before:”

It wasn’t his play on the jukebox yet, but all he had to do was wait. All he could do was wait. When he heard the opening chords—certainly, at the latest by the bridge—knowledge would rise up inside like water seeping into a basement or an unfurling rose—or better yet, it would arrive in his mind fully formed, ex nihilo, like how when somebody calls you with bad news your first thought is always “I already knew that, I have always known.” The words a lie at the moment you first think them, they immediately become true and stay true forever, just like the lyrics to any song.

Out of context, this is merely beautiful. But in the story, it serves as the culmination of a subtle chain of referents, a hidden and central mechanism driven by a dependent series of gears.

Taylor treats his characters as worlds in and of themselves. Their minute thoughts and actions become abstracted in a form of high-level emotional reasoning.

The principal elements are introduced early on—the characters’ motivations, fears, the invisible elephants they sit with—and the story plays out in an opera of abstraction. Taylor often reaches a point where he can say something meaningful or moving with only a handful of pronouns and indeterminate adjectives.

He is both the watchmaker god starting the universe of the story with a bang, and Aquinas taking some subtle bit of syntax—the veins of a leaf—and finding in it evidence of creation. And yet, at times, these moments of abstraction are atheistic. They are separate from creation, from the impetus of the story, from the referent of the pronoun, and they are beautiful in their humanness, not their divinity. In their physicality, their carnality. Earlier in the same story:

He tried to imagine what the thing he touched looked like based on what it felt like but everything he thought of seemed insane. It made no sense for anything like what he was thinking to be a thing that was part of a person.

Perhaps Taylor is able to get away with such abstract and pronoun dense sentences as the one above because his sense of the body is rooted in such abstraction. Consider that line in the context: a paragraph before, a fifteen year old girl takes an eleven year old boys’ hands and sticks them into her clothes, saying, “I’m going to teach you something today. When you’re older your girlfriends will thank me.”

There is often an uneasiness with the physical, as in “The New Life,” where the narrator describes (again, layers of mediation) how his friend views a fat goth girl. “She had never learned to molt, and seeing her in the sweaty cage of her body unearthed the worst of what he had struggled to bury.” This sense of the body is perhaps best summed up in a word Taylor is fond of: thereness. These stories get close to you, they nestle in your heart and in your pants, not unwelcome, though sometimes uncomfortable—like, as a character in “Go Down Swinging” imagines, the “weird thereness of the cup in his underwear.”

When the speaker is totally comfortable in his body, there is delight in protracting time. “I touch her speckled shoulders, graze my fingers down her fleshy upper arms, the light hairs of her forearms, the backs of her hands, until our fingers touch: tips to tips: I lean in to kiss her. We kiss.” This sense of protraction also leads Taylor to the humor and social acuity of Larry David or Nicholson Baker, as in “A House in Our Arms:”

Am I going to laugh at this? He’s laughing.
Okay, I’m laughing.
We laugh.

And it fits well with his penchant for abstraction (“It takes maybe a minute. I hold him down another minute to be sure, and then I am sure.”). The speaker has just strangled a cat while holding it under water. But the pivotal moment refuses the word “cat” or “strangle” or “dead” and instead uses “it” and “him” and “to be sure.” This use of abstraction suffers somewhat when compressed, as in the two page short “Finding Myself.” At its best, Taylor gives it room to breathe, being hyper specific about the structure of an inherently indeterminate moment, as in this passage from “A House in Our Arms:”

I’m imagining the two of us at a party together, her wearing a black dress with a plunging V neck, me not in anything particular, and she’s talking to some old friend of ours. She’s telling a funny story about something I said on account of having misunderstood something she said, and how we argued until we realized what the original miscommunication had been, and how afterward everything was okay.

Part of the reason these abstract moments work is because Taylor is aware of himself as the author of his characters—he both loves them and mocks them. Knowing his character is incapable of finding the perfect word, he has her thinking “The heart can be funny but the mind can be even funnier. Funny is almost certainly not the right word.”

In “Estrellas Y Rascacielos,” he gives us a group of young anarchists in a hardcore band, and a sample of one of their delightfully atrocious lyrics. The narrator tells us that “The bassist always said he wrote the line in homage to the great Spanish anarchists, such as whoever.” It is hard not to laugh, and to feel pity for these uninformed or misguided youths, all the while knowing that we haven’t figured things out any more than they have.

At other times, when these characters slip into literary reference (speaking of Barthelme or Keats’ “negative capability”), this meta-awareness becomes grating. But those moments are rare, and more than made up for by Taylor’s other gifts.

The fluid movement between the abstract and the concrete make for some achingly good metaphors. From “Tennesee:”

Home is not the place you own, or even where you go back to. Home is the place whose exigencies you most fully comprehend and can account for. I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark.

Or from “A House in Our Arms:”

But it’s what goes unsaid between people that builds up like masonry. You have to either knock the bricks out with other things, or let them keep stacking until eventually you are alone in a room. So the important thing is that we are sitting here, together, sharing a silence that is both charged and cozy, working on a fresh round of drinks.

There are writers who leave behind brilliant metaphors like cicada shells; and there are writers whose byzantine inter-dependency and abstraction place you halfway to halfway to halfway to something delicious and urgent that you can’t quite name and that you will only truly know when you’ve lost it forever. (Taylor is more of the latter.) But neither of these gifts guarantee a great story. For many, despite all their skill at the micro, things fall apart at the macro. The fragmentation of modern life has become an excuse for stories and poems and novels that do not cohere; it is as if “almost good” or “contains moments of genius” has become the standard of sufficiency for a great work of art. Taylor’s stories live in their fractured moment in time without abandoning the emotional and narrative order needed to create a great story. They refuse to justify themselves simply on the merits of a few great lines or metaphors. This is all a way of saying that Justin Taylor’s stories know how to end.

You’ll know what I mean, if you read James Wrights’ poem, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.” Better yet, take a second and read Cliff Crego’s translation of Rilke’s “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.”

The Archaic Torso of Apollo

We do not know his unheard of head,
in which the seeing of his eyes ripened. But
his trunk still glows like a thousand candles,
in which his looking, only turned down slightly,

continues to shine. Otherwise the thrust of the
breast wouldn’t blind you, and from the light twist
of the loins a smile wouldn’t flow into
that center where the generative power thrived.

Otherwise this stone would stand half disfigured
under the transparent fall of the shoulders,
and wouldn’t shimmer like the skin of a wild animal;

it wouldn’t be breaking out, like a star, on
all its sides: for there is no place on this stone,
that does not see you. You must change your life.

The second story in Taylor’s collection, “In My Heart I Am Already Gone,” ends, like Rilke’s poem, with a psycho-kinetic punch to the xiphoid process. But it’s not ending a story like this that’s hard; what’s hard is writing something that can legitimately justify that end, and all without telegraphing your punch. Justin Taylor can do that, and that’s reason alone to read this book.

Luc Sante The New York Times

[We] continue to crave reality, because we live in a time dominated by innumerable forms of extraliterary fiction: politics, advertising, the lives of celebrities, the apparatus surrounding professional sports — you could say without exaggeration that everything on TV is fiction whether it is packaged as such or not. So what constitutes reality, then, as it affects culture? It can be as simple as a glitch, an interruption, a dropped beat, a foreign object that suddenly intrudes. Hence the potency of sampling in popular music, which forces open the space between the vocal and instrumental components. It is also a form of collage, which edits, alters and reapportions cultural commodities according to need or desire. Reality is a landscape that includes unreal features; being true to reality involves a certain amount of wavering between real and unreal. Likewise originality, if there can ever be any such thing, will inevitably entail a quantity of borrowing, conscious and otherwise. The paradoxes pile up as thick as the debris of history — unsurprisingly, since that debris is our reality. (Read More)

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON for the NY Times
Published: March 22, 2010

Since its publication in 1958, “Things Fall Apart,” the story of a Nigerian yam farmer who is unable to accept the changes wrought by British colonialism, has become the best-selling novel ever written by an African.
Well, I hear such exaggerated comments. I just leave them alone.

It’s a staple of American high-school English classes, and it has supposedly sold more than eight million copies.
That would be possible. I’m not grumbling; I have done well. But don’t imagine I’m a millionaire.

Things are again falling apart in Nigeria, which was in the news this month, when a predawn massacre occurred near Jos and all the world saw images of Christian villagers, many of them women and children, laid out in mass graves. Do you think the incident is related to the spread of Muslim extremism?
It is, but it is other things as well. My own explanation would be the failure of the authorities in Nigeria to address the issue. The nation cannot be trusted to use the machinery oflaw and order. And in that kind of situation, all kinds of people who are normally sort of put aside suddenly find an opening for evil.

What do you think of Nigeria’s acting president, Goodluck Jonathan, who just dissolved the cabinet?

(read more)

By EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL

1.
My mother has me on a Canadian literature program. Twice a year, birthdays and Christmases, a package arrives from British Columbia with one or two Canadian books in it. I have strong opinions about selecting books for nationalism, but these gifts are wonderful, among the highlights of the year. She sends me novels and poetry that I might not have come across in an American bookstore: Shani Mootoo’s spectacular He Drown She in the Sea, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s The Way The Crow Flies,Patrick Lane’s poetry. The most recent package included Vanishing and Other Stories, byDeborah Willis. I’ve been reading it in the subway to and from work all week. It’s very good.

The title seemed familiar when I first saw it, and then I rememberedVanishing: A Memoir, by Candida Lawrence, which I’ve been meaning to read ever since it came out last year. Which made me think of something I’ve noticed lately: with no disrespect intended to either Willis or Lawrence, an awful lot of books have vanishing in the title. A cursory search on Amazon reveals about a dozen novels and books of poetry called either Disappearing Act or Disappearing Acts, and at least twice that many titled Vanishing Act or some variation thereof—I confess that I stopped counting after the first couple search pages on both counts—and that’s not even counting the scores of books with the word Disappearance in their titles. (read more)

Kenneth Turan LA Times

Genre is powerful, especially in the hands of as gifted a filmmaker as France’s Jacques Audiard. His new film, the masterful “A Prophet,” is an answered prayer for those who believe that revitalizing classic forms with contemporary attitudes makes for the most compelling kind of cinema.

Part prison film, part crime story, part intense personal drama, this all-consuming narrative with the power and drive of a Formula One racer has been something of a phenomenon since it took the grand jury prize at Cannes last year. A “Sight & Sound” poll of 60 critics worldwide named it the best film of 2009, it’s one of the five foreign-language film Oscar nominees, it took Britain’s prestigious BAFTA award in that category and, with 13 nominations overall, it’s a prohibitive favorite to win the Cesar, France’s Oscar, for best picture. (Read More)

A.O. Scott of The New York Times has an interesting review of “Ajami,” Israel’s submission to the Oscars for Best Foreign Film. “Ajami” is opening in the States now to a limited release, so check your local times and listings.

Written and directed by Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab (who also plays an important supporting role), and Yaron Shani, who is Jewish, the film is acutely insightful about the social divisions within Israel, but it examines them without scolding or sentimentality.

There is no finger-pointing here, and no group hugging either. Instead there is a sharp sense of just how deep and wide the schisms are, not just between Jews and Arabs but also between Christians and Muslims, rich and poor, farmers and city dwellers, men and women, young and old and so on. (read more)

It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that city life is superior to smaller town life, to rural life. In “Surrender,” Maso describes how she had been hired to teach at Illinois State University, and how low her expectations were of living and working there, but also how her feelings shifted:

I was expecting nothing. Then, after a while I was expecting an extreme provinciality from my Central Illinois. But finally I came to realize that it is not more provincial than one of the minor cities: Pittsburgh or Milwaukee, say.

Maso’s eventual openness allowed her to see the Midwest’s beauty:

This land of stark miracle springing from the extraordinarily fertile earth. Flat earth. Where each night on the flatlands I dream of a curvaceous woman. She cups water in her hands. And I marvel at the beauty of the cornfields and the sky. Count pheasants. Visit what I’ve dubbed the Beckett tree, straight out of Godot. The land is breathtaking in its austerity, in its uncompromising forever, as gorgeous as anything I’ve ever seen. A different sort of ocean.

She also developed a real love for her students and wanted to “celebrate their instincts, their feeling for language, their willingness to try anything” with her:

Writing classes are about trust, of course, and after a while, in the safe place that we have created together they begin writing their dreams, their fantasies, their desires. What many of them write about again and again is a thing they have never seen—the ocean. I am moved by their longing—these children of the Midwest, these children of ISU—cinder-blocked, landlocked. They swim in high water. They never tire. They begin to learn how to write themselves free.

Imagine a classroom built not on stranglehold notions of discipline, of policies and procedures, but on trust, on reciprocity, on freedom, a classroom that’s a safe haven for, as Maso writes, dreams, fantasies, and desires.

My experiences in the classroom have rarely felt that way. More often, it was structured around fulfilling requirements, about having to prove acquisition of key concepts, about putting my guard up rather than being encouraged, and given a safe space, to be vulnerable. So, have you ever had an experience in the classroom where you were free to dream, to fantasize, to express your desires? Have you ever been in a classroom where you felt you could try anything as a student? as a teacher?

(originally published by and reprinted in partnership with www.bigother.com)

Daniel Grandbois, The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir, Los Angeles, Green Integer Books, 2010, $13.95

How shall I review The Hermaphrodite? One could simply label it a humorous book that revels playfully in the unraveling of received meaning, of apparent opposites, of anything under, over, or between the sun. To be sure, one could start with the tired and true convention of placing Daniel Grandbois’ latest hallucination within its larger literary context. One could mention his name along the likes of Richard Brautigan, Italo Calvino, Woody Allen, and Dr. Seuss. Yet does one truly experience the fundamental essence of The Hermaphrodite from this approach? Yes, you say, this is a fabulist work, Mr. Reviewer, I see! An enema for the habitually realist mind! Indeed, this assertion appears to be as true as “true” can be, but what of our sacred yet bowlegged hermaphrodite, its unfresh breath “pungent with the odor of protoplasm?” What is the meaning of this El Hermaphrodita? you demand. Meaning? I demur, sliding rather pleasurably into convention number two of my literary arsenal, AKA, genre identification.

The Hermaphrodite, I exclaim, could be described — like Grandbois’ previous collection of tales (Unlucky Lucky Days) — as a tour-de-force in various short forms such as the fable, the parable, the fairytale, the allegory, and the creation story.

But what does any of that explain? you observe, rather willfully.

Similarly, I shout, one could say that Grandbois has written in tour-de-force fashion a novel in prose poetry — quite often stunningly beautiful in its hallucinatory lyricism — wherein the sentence as a unit of meaning functions much like the line in traditional poetry, to undermine expected meaning, to defamiliarize rather than linearize: “Simone’s surrender commingled with the cotton fibers of her panties, staining them with fertility icons and incomprehensible crystalline formations like snow. Oceans can be drawn into glaciers to reveal connections between lands.” To expect the unexpected, therefore, is surely one meaning that can be abstracted from The Hermaphrodite’s often startling juxtapositions.

I hate the unexpected! you pout, packing your bags for an Iowa workshop.

Stop, dear reader, I interrupt, one can go even further and point to the journey as an essential form here; although unlike Cervantes’ Don Quixote, The Hermaphrodite’s cast of characters do not, as Milan Kundera says, “go out freely and come as [they] please.” No, here the journey is best understood as the multidimensional adventure of the mind, perceptually tripping balls off LSD/other hallucinogens: “One day, as Alfred was meditating in his tree, using the knocking of a woodpecker as his mantra, the significance of the hole became clear. It revealed itself as a kind of bird that took him in its beak and soared through the stratosphere and out into space, until the man’s humble hole took on the properties of an astronomical black hole, to which Alfred surrendered, as one must.”

Drugs are illegal, you observe, rather preachily.

Reader dearest, I sigh.

Yes, sir?

Just hush.

And finally, one would be remiss without addressing the supposed memoirist nature of this “memoir.” Just whose memories exactly are we remembering here? Grandbois? The hermaphrodite? The answer probably falls somewhere in-between, as most of the meaning does here, but one could read this as an absurdist’s metaphysical riff on humanity’s various and sundry attempts to find meaning in the world, which, of course, brings us rather happily back to the question of El Hermaphrodita. Just what the hell is it? Neither fish nor fowl, male nor female, the hermaphrodite lives happily “in the bliss of confusion, having surrendered unknowably to the unknowable.” And that, dear readers, is my final answer to you: The Hermaphrodite is all about reveling in the experience of life — however confusing it may be — rather than attempting to understand or categorize an enigma. Stop making sense, David Byrne says. Indeed, we respond, with a cockeyed glance, dropping the tab of Grandbois on our tongues. Oh, yes. I see now. Ah.

by Steve Owen