The Antigonish Review
Issue 121
John Fell
Altered Biography by Douglas Isaac. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press,
1999, 167 pp., $16.95.
Hammer and Tongs, ed. Brad Cran. Vancouver: Smoking Lung Press,
1999, 152 pp., $14.95.
The world of the small press in Vancouver, judging by what can be seen
in bookstores and, more specifically, in two of its most recent products,
is bulging with writing that is "new" in all the best senses. Douglas
Isaac's first novel, Altered Biography, takes fabulist fiction
to new extremes of the bizarre and has a stranger mix of narrative voices
than I can remember ever having heard before between the covers of a single
short novel. The more I reflect, the more I wonder whether Brad Cran's
anthology Hammer and Tongs may not also be unique, or at least
very rare, in my experience: a dozen emerging writers who are all worth
reading certainly do not "emerge" before one's eyes every day.
To start with Isaac, I wil I attempt to give some idea of what must be
Altered Biography's most remarkable feature: its narrative technique.
We begin at the deathbed ofthe fictional author of the biography, a deliberately
stereotyped "baby-boomer" - but, due to his almost immediate death, there
is no point staying there for long. Before he dies, he directs us to "one
of those sturdy cardboard filing boxes filled with biographical notes"
conveniently located under the bed. The author is then re-conceived for
us in his mother's womb, apparently destined for the life he has just
finished.
The first voice we encounter however, after the dying author's, is not
that of the author-as-fetus, though the unprepared reader could certainly
be forgiven for mistaking it for such. It is rather that of the sperm
which will eventually contribute to the author's conception. The egg,
too, is given its own distinct personality and voice, and the sperm and
egg "characters" eventually metamorphose into the author's male, and female
"sides," continuing to speak as separate voices until the author's birth,
which ends the novel.
The perspective of these two narrators is not as limited as one might
think - they more or less know, or at least strongly suspect, what is
to come. Also, they have the ability to hear (and see, at times) through
the walls of the womb. They present conversations between the author's
quintessentially "post-war" parents-to-be as scripted dialogue, and often
accompany these rather robotic exchanges with analysis of the ways in
which the figures are representative of their generation.
Nor are the sperm and egg / male and female principles always alone in
the womb. Periodically they are visited by what might be termed "patron
saints," though the male's patron saint is, appropriately, demonic. The
mythological-type figures Mephisto Phallus and Gyno-Hecate, who speak
in narrow columns of mock-"poetry", negotiate and do battle ultimately
for the sexual identity of the author. The male side actually sells his
soul to Mephisto Phallus and at one point is scheduled to enter the world
"as is" - with no counterbalancing female side - but in the end the author
is born apparently a complete person, albeit with teeth and an overly
large penis.
The contribution of sperm and egg would be difficult to top as a distinctive
narrative device, but this fact does not stop Isaac from trying. In the
novel's later chapters we get a third- person view of "the author," who,
already dead, still somehow manages to interview his parents-to-be for
his novel-in-progress. I confess to not understanding how this works -
if it does.
In short, Altered Biography is a very ambitious and rather dazzling
experiment that, while owing an obvious and self-conscious debt to Tristram
Shandy - of which it might almost be said to be, like the author,
a "re-conception," bears only the most general resemblance to the mass
of contemporary post-modem fiction.
Less ambitious, no doubt, but no less dazzling is much ofthe writing
contained in Brad Cran's anthology Hammer and Tongs. I'm not sure
I can agree with Patrick Lane's statement on the back cover that this
work is "the next century before it happens" (which by one reading makes
too extravagant a claim and by another suggests, even more dubiously,
that there may be nothing "happening" for these writers at present), but
I will try nonetheless to express some of the appreciation, and the joy,
I felt in reading this book.
Anthologies "like" Cran's present the work of under-recognized, frequently
young, writers who have enough material for the occasion that is, more
material than one would typically see by a single author in a magazine
orjoumal. The purpose is a worthy one, for, on the one hand, the authors
are allowed a wider audience and for a larger selection of their work
than they might have had in the case of a periodical publication, while,
on the other hand, the writing is not entombed within the mediocrity of
a premature single-author collection.
Well, there is next to no mediocre writing in Hammer and Tongs:
the writers, as I have said, are all worth much more than a glance. I
would divide them, with a couple of exceptions, into two categories: the
"justplain good" and the "quirkily good," and, while I confess a preference
for the quirky (hence my fondness for Altered Biography), I shall
bend over backwards to be fair and deal with the merely good writers first.
Cran obviously knows how to structure an anthology: while he has chosen
to present the writers alphabetically, he manages to start off with a
very nearly perfect poem, "With My Father Then and Now" by Lori Maleea
Acker. The theme is as it sounds - the changing perspective of child on
parent; to quote from the poem would be to do it violence.
Shane Book, next on the "good" list, has contributed a longish poem entitled
"Dust," which, since I understand it has already received honours, I will
skip over in favour of a series of shorter poems excerpted from the cycle
"Blue Journal." These poems are well crafted - broken into two-line stanzas
that have the distinction of making sense as two-line stanzas.
What stands out even more, though, is Book's interesting method of "titling"
these poems with italicized notes in small font following the final stanza.
These low-key, purely descriptive notes (for example, Just before being
arrested,- Labadi Beach, Accra, Ghana, 1983.) create a pleasing tension
while at the same time shifting emphasis to the poem itself. The result,
whatever the exact psychology involved, is without doubt very effective.
Adam Chiles (another male contributor who escapes the charge of quirkiness)
is a poet ofgreat sensitivity together with powers of expression. How
many poets, for example, could express the musical charm of trumpeter/singer
Chet Baker so well in words as Chiles does in "Almost Blue"?
He listens
to the girls bang down the stairwell
and thinks of Chet Baker in his final
years, straining his entire body into
song. Not his ability to reach the
melody but the melody made beautiful
by defeat.
The only quaffel I might have with Chiles (or perhaps with Cran, as editor)
concerns the way some of the poems are punctuated. For example, would
the above not have a better flow as one sentence rather than as one sentence
followed by a fragment? Baker, for all his missed notes, did not want
smoothness.
Female writers whom I would put in the same general category as Book
and Chiles (apart from Acker) are Carla Funk and Aubri Aleka Keleman.
To me, these two poets excel beyond the others - beyond the vast majority
ofpoets - in their ability to sustain and develop an idea. This is most
visibly the case in Funk's sequence "Solomon's Wives" and Keleman's "Raven"
poems.
Staying with the female but moving to the quirky, I would like to begin
with Karen Solie, who is perhaps most exemplary of the latter in her poem
"Eating Dirt."
After all,
some cravings are only charming
when you're small.
I've since learned,
when potting houseplants,
to lick my fingers in private.
Also on the edge, and possibly with even more urgency, is Billie Livingston,
the way she machine-gun-fires words all over the page in "Thrills, Chills,
and Aspirin Pills" or in the starkness of "Coat Hangers and the Ivory
Snow Baby." Finally, Hammer and Tongs' one prose contributor, vignette-artist
Teresa McWhirter, amazes me with both her toughness and her sensitivity,
while occasionally challenging my capacity to follow her, as in "Squalour
and Bliss: Punkasses in Bar X" ("I saw Fetus Boy in all his Slayer loving,
thrash rat glory and felt all the old feelings. 'You houseplant!' I screamed,
playing it cool.").
To make the sex leap again (several times over) while remaining quirky,
perhaps my personal favourite of the entire anthology is Billeh Nickerson's
"Why I LoveWayne Gretzky-An Erotic Fantasy" ("Because behind every great
man / it feels good."), though I'm also partial to Chris Hutchinson's
haiku sequence "Thirteen Spiders" ("When you wash a spider / down the
drain, she's reborn / an octopus.").
To complete this review, I am left with two writers (out of a total of
thirteen, counting Isaac) standing outside my classification scheme. Ryan
Knighton, along with Cran himself, is definitely non-traditional but perhaps
too dignified to be called "quirky.,, His poems have a certain gravity,
a maturity thankfully not incompatible with spontaneity. Cran, on the
other hand, sometimes betrays his youth in his subject matter, yet, as
is shown in these lines from his travel poem "Roseau, Dominica,"this youth
is accompanied by a keen perception ofthe anxieties that threaten to destroy
it.
Tourist is a stupid word for yourself.
Somewhere back home a man is working
your job that you never had.
If you think hard enough
he's married your wife, bought your
dog and taken your seat
at the local hockey game.
Newness, re-conceived or otherwise, is a precious and fragile commodity
-in life as in writing. It is amply present in Altered Biography
and Hammer and Tongs.
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