Sundog Rising!
Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog
The Return of Marcel Petard?
What was I thinking?
Me, the guy who regularly blogs about pretentiously nonsensical published literary criticism? I write a review of Ron Romanowski’s new poetry collection A Reader’s Guide to the Unnameable last week, and as part of it I pen a line like “He provides imagery that finds its own path, circling the poems’ themes and leaving the reader feeling surrounded.”?
Portentous, pretentious, and nonsensical? I confess to the first two — hopefully because then the line will therefore also be quotable and may find its way onto the back of Ron’s next book — but I dispute the last. I happen to mean what I say.
I spend all day with words, and as a result, they take on a physical reality for me that not everyone experiences. The idea of words genuinely performing the actions of circling and surrounding a theme and reader is a real thing to me. And I found that happening in Ron’s poetry, with his particular style of inundating the reader with cascading imagery.
Take for example the last few stanzas of “Moon Drops: Wherein Time May Not Equal Light”:
God-scent in a rosehip or the combustion
Chamber of a motorcycle engine the roar
Of a brand name IED see-through yoga pants
Bought for a discount no one will see me
Posing since the sixties after paperbacks of Swami Sutra
Make a glass road of lunar pathway images
Up the lumbar river luna’s petites lunes
Lead from glass to window’s ledge through
Garage edge thorough telephone wires through
Lower earth orbit half her life in sickbeds
Should build our own family hospital
Read The Time traveler’s Wife three time
To realize clothes make the fiction bedclothes
Make doctors into patients sick chapels dot com
Leading to the moon step on them every
Step to the sea of tranquility breathless
See what I mean?
Ron himself sums up the concept best perhaps in one of the central pieces in the book “One-Minute Date Night: Cubic Woman May I Introduce Cubic Man”:
Let’s forget our eyes for a while, don’t need the eye test
Run over the work as texture, optic nerves as fingers.
Think of the friends one can make by just stepping
Into their embrace. Where is desire? It’s in holding thingness.
I’ve always thought words hold physical presence as well as meaning. Seeing words take form flowing from my pen across a notebook page or waterfalling down a computer screen is an necessary existential part of my day. To my eye, that is beauty and order appearing in the world. No matter how nonsensical what I may actually be writing may be at the time.
I picked it up from good company. Can’t possibly list them all here, but some best examples might be the lugubrious Howard Phillips Lovecraft and my much loved William Burroughs to start with:
Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The witch — old Keziah — Nehab — that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz — the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek — worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream — Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young …
from “The Dreams in the Witch-House”
With their diseases and orgasm drugs and their sexless parasite life forms — Heavy Metal People of Uranus wrapped in cool blue mist of vaporized bank notes — And The Insect People of Minraud with metal music — Cold insect brains and their agents like white hot buzz saws sharpened in the Ovens — The judge, many light years away from possibility of corruption, grey and calm with inflexible authority reads the brief — He appears sometimes as a slim young man in short sleeves then middle-aged and red faced sometimes very old like yellow ivory — “My God what a mess”
from Nova Express
Words that step up and physically assault you. It can happen.
China Miéville’s Embassytown novel uses this concept as the central core of its theme. On an unimaginably alien — except to China Miéville — planet, the natives actually make use of their human invaders as part of their language. The female protagonist of the novel physically becomes a metaphor in the alien language, having to physically perform the act that establishes her as “A girl ate what was given her”. Whenever the aliens want to express this particular concept and what it means metaphorically to them, they evoke the woman to represent what they want to say.
Sort of like what Marcel Petard’s become for me. A hockey defenceman renowned for scoring goals into his own net.
I just read a book by another science fiction writer, Charles Stross -- yes, that Rule 34 -- who plays the game by an even different set of rules. Technospeak become poetry. Almost. I wasn’t at all certain what he was talking about at times — and by that I mean following the science or the economics, not the plot — but I certainly love the way it sounds.
IRIK’s credit rating has got to be in the shitter, so betting they’ll collapse is a sucker bet. What I think Kyrgyzstan is doing is, they’re selling CDSs to foreigners who expect IRIK to collapse under the debt. And they’re over-selling, selling multiple CDSs leveraged against the same asset. Meanwhile they’re using the income from the CDSs to reduce the debt load — until they arrange for reunification, which, with 72 per cent in favour, isn’t going to be hard. The idiots who bet on IRIK collapsing will miss out on the fat payout they were expecting: Serves them right. What interests me is why the IMF and the credit-ratings agencies aren’t yelling about it. The Kyrgyz government must have figured out a way to buy off the regulators and oversight agencies. So what’s the angle? There’s one obvious one: inward investment.
from Rule 34
As Harold Pinter once wrote:
FIBBS: Which ones don’t they like?
WILLS: Well, there’s the brass pet cock, for instance.
FIBBS: The brass pet cock? What’s the matter with the brass pet cock?
WILLS: They just don’t seem to like it any more.
FIBBS: But what exactly don’t they like about it?
WILLS: Perhaps it’s just the look of it.
FIBBS: That brass pet cock? But I tell you it’s perfection. Nothing short of perfection.
WILLS: They’ve just gone right off it.
FIBBS: Well, I’m flabbergasted.
WILLS: It’s not only the brass pet cock, Mr. Fibbs.
FIBBS: What else?
WILLS: There’s the hemi unibal spherical rod end.
FIBBS: The hemi unibal spherical rod end? Where could you find a finer rod end?
WILLS: There are rod ends and rod ends, Mr. Fibbs.
FIBBS: I know there are rod ends and rod ends. But where could you find a finer hemi unibal spherical rod end?
from “Trouble in the Works”
Maintaining a taste for this sort of thing is really just a holdover from the childhood wonder of discovering reading for the first time. It’s not a mistake to start children off with the magic of nursery rhymes and the utter musicality of much of what is written for younger readers, hopefully with the intent of enchanting them so thoroughly with our language they won’t want to abandon the practice of it as they grow older.
My girl friend’s name is Lulu,
She comes from Honolulu.
With an ice cream scoop, and a hula hoop —
My Honolulu Lulu.
Dennis Lee — “Lulu” from The Ice Cream Store
No, the mistake is brainwashing children to think they shouldn’t appreciate that sort of word-use anymore when they grow up! Our education system has got a lot to answer for.
Thankfully there’s usually still some subversives out there who embrace silliness as an adult way of life as well.
“What’s the word I’ve heard you use from time to time — begins with eu?”
“Euphoria, sir?”
“That’s the one. I’ve seldom had a sharper attack of euphoria. I feel full to the brim of Vitamin B. Mind you, I don’t know how long it will last. Too often it is when one feels fizziest that the storm clouds begin doing their stuff.”
“Very true, sir. Full many a glorious morning have I seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, kissing with golden face the meadows green, gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy, Anon permit the basest clouds to ride with ugly rack on his celestial face and from the forlorn world his visage hide, stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.”
“Exactly,” I said. I couldn’t have put it better myself. “One always has to budget for a change in the weather. Still, the thing to do is to keep on being happy while you can.”
“Precisely, sir. Carpe diem, the Roman poet Horace advised. The English poet Herrick expressed the same sentiment when he suggested that we should gather rosebuds while we may. Your elbow is in the butter, sir.”
P.G. Wodehouse — from Much Obliged, Jeeves
Marcel Petard may well return to the ice rink of my blog writing — probably on a regular basis, I have no illusions concerning my own consistency. But I think on this particular occasion, I’ve made sufficient argument to indicate even he might manage to miss his own net occasionally.
*****
REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!
Lou Moons and Googie Girls! The Body Snatchers Invade to send up a scifi classic Monday, June 8th in Episode Thirteen, with the results posting on Friday, June 12th. Reality Fiction Three: The Interrupted Edition continues at:
http://realficone.blogspot.ca/
What really happened in avant, beta, after ninety percent of its characters were hijacked into the Contest.
Episodes to Date:
Episode One: Dante-Ish — Mak’s Inferno
Episode Two: Chaucer-Ish — The Hermit’s Tale
Episode Three: Malory-Ish — Le Morte de Mak
Episode Four: Doyle-Ish — Mak the Kipper
Episode Five: Carroll-Ish — Madelyn in Wonderland
Episode Six: Stoker-Ish — The Down For The Count Shimmy
Episode Seven: Tolstoy-Ish — Anna Makerena
Episode Eight: Lem-Ish — So there is …
Episode Nine: Hoffman-Ish — Dr. Hoffman’s Happy Gene Machine
Episode Ten: Shakespeare-Ish — Hamlet the Barbarian
Episode Eleven: Poe-Ish — The Usher Motel
Episode Twelve: Kafka-Ish — Metamorphos-Ish
Episode Thirteen: Finney-Ish — The Invasion of the Hotel Detectives
All with illustrations by the author. The complete roster of 34 Contestants have now appeared, so we move on to the supporting cast, the Judges, and the Guest Judges.
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