Timothy Dodd – Arrival at Vyškov

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Arrival at Vyškov
by Timothy Dodd

The train station door squeaks
like the floor of grandma’s house
or a smile from 1869. Entering,

facial umbrellas stare my dry days.
With a sneeze I nose in for one
ticket to Brno. In my country, no

one asks what I’m reading. But
here, a young stranger in violin
offers slippery words of bronze

pigeon, Bernard, Root guitar. Together
to platform, she points with her bow
across rainy railroad tracks to road

work buried under the Sunday morning
tarp. From its flapping and swirling
mist, alone, a spectral figure rises

amidst swaying cypress and butterfly
bush, resurrected from their digging
grounds, shocked by this new kind

of heaven where few will see her. Until
this arrival where phantoms move minds,
and Nina plays mournful music, without hands.

Timothy Dodd – Enchantment

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Enchantment
by Timothy Dodd

            for Triis

I have searched long
bedrooms
for the knife lying
under fragmented bloom

to know the stained sunsets
of her dystrophic legs
are more graceful.

I am among the last remaining
to love the lifeless cormorant,
crippled fog and furze, opened tombs—

among the last to say
another baby
isn’t needed,
that the dead rise.

Valentina Cano – A Saturday with Anorexia

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A Saturday with Anorexia
by Valentina Cano

My room was as bitter and dark
as coffee.
Shutters drawn like chainmail
against the morning sun.
I flung my bones against the walls and floor,
bending myself into a nightmare.
Half a bar of ice cream pulsed in my stomach
radioactive with the need to carve it out.

Bryan R. Monte – The Head of St. John

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The Head of St. John
by Bryan R. Monte

Some friends came by my apartment last night asking me to go out.

So I unsnapped my head and gave it to them saying:

Take this and put it on a table in the back of the room
where it can watch the smoke of conversation rise
and people get up to dance.
Then shove drinks down its throat and after it vomits three times
and begs to have its eyeballs taken out and spooned in water
tuck it under your shoulder and roll it down the hallway
to my door

And I’ll pick it up in the morning with the newspaper.

Philibert Schogt – Fragment van Einde verhaal

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Fragment van Einde verhaal
door Philibert Schogt

Voordat hij besefte wat hij deed, had hij een balpen gepakt en iets in de rechterbovenhoek gekrabbeld:

Holysloot,
Monday, May 6

Had hij dat geschreven? Eerder was het zijn alter ego John. Er stond immers “Monday” en “May”, geen “maandag” en “mei”.

Daar bleef het niet bij.

Nu het maagdelijke wit eenmaal was geschonden – waarbij de interessante vraag zich aandiende of een grafoloog een verschil zou kunnen bespeuren tussen Johns handschrift en het zijne – was er geen houden meer aan. Driftig pennend, zonder aarzelingen of doorhalingen, had hij binnen de kortste keren de bladzijde volgeschreven en alweer omgeslagen om aan de volgende te beginnen, heel anders dan hoe het er bij een vertaling aan toe ging. Dat was dan ook geen eerlijke vergelijking: ‘John’ mocht met zijn gedachten gaan en staan waar hij wilde, terwijl je als vertaler zo precies mogelijk in de voetsporen van de schrijver moest blijven.

Johan liet hem voorlopig zijn gang gaan, maar zoals wel vaker wanneer er in het Engels gedacht, gesproken of geschreven werd, bleef hij als Nederlandstalige toeschouwer aanwezig. Het omgekeerde gold trouwens ook: John had staan toekijken bij wat er vandaag was gebeurd en dacht er het zijne van. Dat bracht hij nu onder woorden.

Hij was het er niet mee eens dat Johan deze vertaalopdracht had aangenomen. Hoezo was End of Story een feestelijke afsluiting van een mooie carrière? Eerder was het een nodeloze herhaling van zetten. Maar het ergste vond hij dat het ten koste ging van de memoires. Daarmee liet Johan hem lelijk in de kou staan!

Philibert Schogt – Excerpt from End of Story

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Excerpt from End of Story
by Philibert Schogt

Now where were we? Ah yes. Johan and John. It may seem a bit childish for a man of our age to refer to himself in the first person plural and with two different names. But to us, it’s perfectly natural. In fact, the two names weren’t even our idea. Our parents were already using them before we had learned to speak, and in all probability, from the very day we were born.

Although we have no conscious recollection of the scene in the maternity ward of Bracebridge General Hospital, on February 15, 1946, we have often pictured ourselves as a newborn baby, asleep in our mother Elsa’s arms. Nine months earlier, she and a few friends joined the crowds lining the streets of Amsterdam to cheer as the brave Canadians who had liberated Holland from the Nazi occupation came marching by. One of the soldiers tipped his cap for her, she rushed up to embrace him, and the rest is history.

Bruce Butler, her Canadian hero, was now seated on the edge of the hospital bed, nervously clutching his cap while trying to catch a glimpse of the baby boy asleep in her arms. Back in those days, husbands didn’t help their wives huff and puff during labour, nor did they ceremoniously cut umbilical cords; they waited outside in the hallway until all the screaming was done and the mess cleaned up, the midwife only then stepping out of the room to congratulate them on their baby son or daughter.

“John.”

That is what our father called us. And that is how we were officially registered at the County Hall. Our mother looked at him with a pale smile, meanwhile cradling us a little more tightly in her arms. Everything was new to her in this country, everything so strange. She was already eight months pregnant by the time the paperwork was finally in order, allowing her to board one of the boats from Liverpool to Halifax with all the other war brides. From Halifax she had travelled onwards by train to Ottawa, where our father was waiting for her with his pickup truck and some extra blankets. The trip across the ocean had been enough of an ordeal, but nothing could have prepared her for the bitter cold of an Ontario winter.

“Johan.”

That is what our mother insisted on calling us. Perhaps the Dutch sounds comforted her.

What’s in a name, Shakespeare’s Juliet may have asked herself out loud, but if we compare Johan’s life history to mine, my answer would be: just about everything. From day one, our roads diverged. It wasn’t just that our mother spoke Dutch to Johan, while our father spoke English to me. They introduced us to two vastly different worlds.

Upon returning to Canada from the war, our father had taken over a derelict farm for next to nothing on the shores of Three Moon Lake, just west of Algonquin Park. It was derelict for a reason: the soil in this part of the province was poor, and the growing season too short for any serious farming. Whether it was a keen business sense or a lucky hunch I do not know: long before tourism became the most important industry in the region, he reckoned that the value of the land was not to be extracted from the soil itself, but from the magnificent scenery. Tearing down everything but the main farmhouse and the adjoining barn, he reused as much of the material as he could to build holiday cabins. Slowly but surely, Bruce and Elsa Butler’s Getaway Cottages took shape, Butler’s Getaway for short.

Always outdoors, always at work, he had little time for us, although occasionally he would let us help, or make us believe we were helping him, the way parents do with small children. “Stand back!” may very well have been the first English expression that I understood, my own first word “hammer” or “axe”.

When we weren’t getting in our father’s way, we would follow our mother about. She was usually to be found indoors, cleaning a cottage for the next guests, in the barn hanging the laundry between the rafters or in the kitchen preparing dinner. So Johan’s first words will have been quite different from mine.

Obviously, since we share a body, the two of us have always occupied the same position in space at the same moment in time. Yet when we look back at our lives, it is as though we see ourselves and each other from different camera angles. I too, remember how we used to sit by the wood stove listening to our mother reading us a Dutch children’s book, but there is a built-in distance to the recollection, as if I am standing outside the house, peering in through the window, and it’s only Johan who is actually sitting on her lap. And I am sure Johan will attest to a complementary experience, seemingly looking out the window while our father is in the yard splitting logs, resting his axe every so often to let a little boy gather all the firewood and load it into a wheelbarrow. And that little boy will be me. It’s the difference between looking at a picture and being part of one, between hearsay and first-hand experience, between a translation and the original.

As we grew older and other sources of language became available to us – school, friends, books – the gaps in our respective vocabularies were gradually filled. Once we had moved to Holland with our first wife Cindy and had lived here long enough to catch up with the latest vernacular, any outsider would swear that we were perfectly bilingual. Yet to this day, the original “feel” of both languages has never changed. To us, Dutch will always be the language of the hearth, English the language of the great outdoors. Certain words miss the immediacy that they do have in the other language, as if we’re still that little boy peering in through the window or that little boy looking out into the yard. A cookie will never taste as good as a koekje (“kook-yuh”), a kano (“kaw-no”) will never glide through the water with the grace of a canoe. So in a deeper sense, we are not at all bilingual, we’re semi-lingual twice over.

Philibert Schogt – The End of the Novel?

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The End of the Novel?
An Interview with Philibert Schogt about Einde verhaal/End of Story
© 2015 by Bryan R. Monte and Philibert Schogt. All rights reserved.

On 1 March 2015, Philibert Schogt was interviewed by Amsterdam Quarterly in his Oud-Centrum Amsterdam flat about his new, bilingual novel, Einde verhaal/End of Story. (An earlier interview with Schogt about his background as a writer and his other novels with AQ in 2011 can be found at: www.amsterdamquarterly.org/issues/aq1-philosophy/philibert-schogt-writing-across-two-cultures/ ). AQ discussed with him this new novel’s unique structure and content including its exploration of the themes of freedom of speech, religious fundamentalism, censorship and the end of the novel. End of Story/Einde verhaal will be published by Amsterdam’s Arbeiderspers at the end of May 2015.

Bryan R. Monte: I’m here today to interview Philibert Schogt about his forthcoming double novel called Einde verhaal in Dutch and End of Story in English. One of the most unusual aspects of this novel is its design. One side is written in English in the first person. The other, when you flip the book over, is written in Dutch in the third person. These narratives, however, are not direct translations. How did you happen to come up with this form for Einde verhaal/End of Story?

Philibert Schogt: I’m a terribly slow writer. Rather than taking forever to write my book in Dutch, and then waiting even longer for an English publisher to be willing to translate it into English, I thought: ‘Why don’t I write two different versions of the same story simultaneously, one in Dutch, one in English?’ But then, the more I worked on both, the more they intermeshed, until they became a single, bilingual monster rather than two independent books.

BM: But there is also a difference in point of view between the two versions of the story….

PS: That’s right. The Dutch version is written in the third person, while the English version is in diary form and written in the first person.

BM: Why the difference?

PS: I started out writing both versions in the first person, but I think the asymmetry of the two perspectives makes the book more interesting. Also, writing the Dutch version in the third person allowed me to include some background information that wouldn’t have seemed natural from a first person perspective. And for a number of technical reasons which I won’t go into now, the contrasting perspectives will make it easier to translate the book into a single language version, whether this is English-English, German-German or French-French.

BM: I was wondering, since I’m trilingual, how you arranged these narratives in your head, if you can imagine where they are and what your brain is doing with them. For example, some bilingual people say everything is in one box, but I know I’m completely different. I’ve got a German box, a Dutch box and an English box. Is that how you organized them in your head and if so, how did that affect the writing?

PS: One of the terms I use in both versions is “personality shift”. I truly believe that my personality shifts depending on the language I am speaking or thinking, and I’ve talked to other bilingual people and they have that same feeling. It’s not just that languages are stored in different boxes, but your entire perspective changes. That can start with any simple object here on this table: “cookie” and “koekje” for example, evoke two completely different universes.

In his teenage years, my main character is worried about having a split personality. As he grows older, he comes across the term “personality shift”, which is a milder way of putting it and doesn’t have the same connotations with mental illness.

BM: Yes, as a teen I was considered a bit weird because I spoke two languages. When I lived in America, I felt incomplete because when I switched on the radio in the ’60s to the ’70s, it was English from one end of the band to the other and one of the wondrous things when I came to Europe, was when I switched on the radio, every time you moved the dial it was a different language. And I thought: ‘Ah, I’m home!’

PS: I know what you mean. That’s one thing my main character learns as he grows older. Both languages comprise part of his personality, maybe even his soul.

BM: What is your motivation for writing novels, in general, and this novel in particular? It’s a very solitary occupation and it pays little financially. Why do you feel the need to do this? Are you driven?

PS: I am always reluctant to consider my writing an inner calling. It sounds a little too melodramatic and self-important. Then again, when I look back and realize I’ve been working non-stop on this novel for almost six years, then I suppose you could call me “driven”. I’ve always found the world an extremely puzzling, bewildering place and people even more so. To make some sort of sense of the world, or at least to translate it into my own nonsense: maybe that’s why I became a writer.

BM: Let’s move on, and talk about the circumstances related to this story—what it’s about. According to your blurb, your main character is a 69-year-old literary translator of English to Dutch, about to settle into a happy retirement just as he receives one final assignment, the translation of a highly controversial American novel. So, my next question is: Why is it controversial?

PS: In his forthcoming novel, the young American writer Toby Quinn portrays God as a contestant in a talent show who doesn’t make it to the finals. When the opening chapter appears as a pre-publication on the Internet, the Christian right in the United States is deeply offended. Quinn even receives death threats, which he and his publisher exploit to generate more publicity for his book.

BM: So is this a theme that is explored in both the Dutch and English versions?

PS: In the English half of my book, Quinn’s purported blasphemy serves as a catalyst to move the plot forward, but in the Dutch half, it plays a more central role. The Dutch publisher in my novel wants to import not only Quinn’s book to Holland, but also the hype surrounding it. In doing so, however, he also imports the death threats.

BM: Was there anything, related to Salman Rushdie’s fatwah when he had to go underground, that you maybe thought about when you were writing your own novel?

PS: Yes, certainly. The Rushdie affair is mentioned in my book several times. We all remember what Rushdie went through and consider him a hero of free speech, but one detail that people tend to forget is that his Japanese translator was stabbed to death. I don’t want to give away too much, of course, but the main character of my novel happens to be a translator, so he might be in danger, too.

BM: Like the guy who was at the show in Denmark. He was just at the show. He wasn’t an actual writer.

PS: Yes.

BM: So there is collateral damage that results from writers writing something controversial that gets fundamentalist people all riled up.

PS: Yes.

BM: But this was all before the Charlie Hebdo massacre?

PS: Yes, I wrote this all before the Charlie Hebdo killings took place. I wondered briefly whether I should allude to them in my novel, but decided against it. The events were too fresh in people’s minds for that to be appropriate. Besides, my novel deals with the more specific theme of groups wanting to ban works of fiction, so I stuck to my original plan and limited myself to the Rushdie affair.

BM: So fundamentalism seems to be a rather unexpected theme of the 21st century. How did you decide to write about the Christian right in America? Was it something that was in the Zeitgeist?

PS: Any kind of zealotry is dangerous, so I didn’t want to pin it on Muslim fundamentalism. At the same time, I wanted to explore how freedom of speech is being abused for publicity purposes. As the Dutch publisher in my novel points out, Rushdie’s book wasn’t doing well at all until the fatwah was pronounced. Then it became a mega-bestseller. Now he wants to achieve the same thing with Quinn’s book. That’s how cynical business can be.

BM: Then you’ve really been prescient about what would be on the mark at this moment when you started years ago on this novel. I would be interested to see what the response from critics will be once the book is released and if they make the connection with the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the public discussion about censorship—or self-censorship—that is circulating in the press and among book publishers.

On a slightly different topic, there’s something I want to ask you related to your book’s titles: Einde verhaal/End of Story. Are you one of those people who envisage the end of the novel? Is that why you chose that title?

PS: It was one of the reasons, yes. Sometimes, when I’m in a pessimistic mood, I think the novel as an art form doesn’t have much of a future.

BM: Why?

PS: Because people aren’t reading as many books anymore. I think that Internet and computers have a lot to do with it. Attention spans have shortened to the point where people want to move on to the next site rather than read to the end of an article. I’ve heard that online journalists have even adapted their styles because they know after the first two paragraphs, people will just zap, link or click to some other thing. So yes, the title End of Story can be taken to mean that the art of storytelling is coming to an end.

Plus, while I was working on this project, there were many occasions when I was at the end of my tether and thought to myself: “Never again!” So the title is a self-referential joke as well, announcing the end of my career as a novelist.

BM: So do you think people will be able to read these two stories? What about your public, who do you imagine reading it?

PS: Most educated Dutch people are fine with reading English — although those who consider reading a form of relaxation may find it too strenuous to read the English half of my book. But both parts of my book can be read independently, as separate entities. So whether you are a Dutch reader unwilling to tackle the English part, or an English reader unable to read Dutch, you will still be getting an entire novel, albeit a shorter one.

Still, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. So I’m hoping that one day, Einde verhaal will be translated into English, so that English-speakers will be able to read the entire book, too. Or that End of Story will be translated into Dutch.

BM: Philibert Schogt, thank you for your time.

PS: Thank you, Bryan.

Bryan R. Monte – AQ12 Spring 2015 Exhibition Reviews

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AQ12 Spring 2015 Exhibition Reviews
by Bryan R. Monte

Ed Atkins, Recent Ouija Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 21 February to 31 May 2015
Rembrandt van Rijn, Late Rembrandt, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam  12 February to 17 May 2015

Is Anyone There?

“Is anyone there?” was usually the first question asked at the beginning of a Ouija board game, played during adolescent sleepovers just before bed. Ouija is a game which requires the suspension of disbelief that one or more persons whose hands are resting on the planchette are not actually pushing it around the board to produce answers rather than supernatural powers. Recent Ouija is the name of Ed Atkins’(1982) has chosen for his one man, multi-media show held at Amsterdam’s Stedelijke Museum until 31 May 2015. The show in the museum’s basement is divided into nine spaces: #1 Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths, 2013; #2 Counting 1, 2, 3,; 2014 #3 Bastard, 2014, #4 Ribbons, 2014; #5 Happy Birthday!!, 2014; #6 Untitled, 2015, #7 ‘No-one is more work than me’ flextime redux, 2014; #8 Even Pricks, 2013 and #9 Material Witness OR A Liquid Cop, 2012.

Gallery #1 features a computer generated model, one of Atkins’ avatars, which recites poety as its hair grows longer. One of the poems it recites (and one of the high points of this exhibition for me) is Gilbert Sorentino’s “The Morning Roundup” from his book, Corrosive Sublimate. Sorrentino’s meta-poetry and meta-fiction is intended to stand for itself with images that come fast and change quickly so that one must (at least partially) construct one’s own narrative to make sense of what is going on. (I was introduced to Sorentino’s work when I published my literary magazine, No Apologies, in San Francisco in the ’80s). Borrowing on Sorrentino’s modus operendi, Atkins offers meta-poetry and meta-imagery in his Recent Ouija paintings, video and audio pieces in which the visitor is to construct his/her own narrative. The Ouija effect, however of these installations (where meanings are to arise spontaneously as if created by the incorporeal other and not from the self as in when someone “consults” a Ouija board to find answers to questions) is not all that apparent to me nor was I surprised, perplexed, challenged, etc. by what I saw, heard or felt. In fact, the only image from Atkin’s work that momentarily startled me was on the cover of his Zürich/Mainz Kunsthallen/Julia Stoscheck Collection exhibition catalogue—that of a small hand grasping a much larger than scale thumb which momentarily appeared to me as another body appendage.

Perhaps it’s because I am aware of some of the sources of Atkins spoken or sung texts and visual iconography—classical music, advertising, postmodern poetry, gay culture, world events—that I readily made associations from my own experience or world events for his images and avatars so that this installation didn’t seem magical or its meanings did’t seem to come from unknown sources.

For example, the video of the male avatar in gallery #4 (Ribbons, 2014), naked and hiding under a café tables or shirtless with his head resting top of the café table, a cigarette burning to ash in his hand reminds me of Warmostraat backrooms from the 1990s and the Straight to Hell videos of a decade later, in which various straight-identified, young men were subjected to various sorts of gay sexual bondage and humiliating words for various bodily orifices or appendages were written on their heads. (Although the Internet is full of images and videos of many straight lager lads have also had some of written some of the same phrases on their foreheads of their inebriated, unconscious friends). However, I can’t remember too many of these young men with their heads on café tables singing “Erbarme dich, Mein Gott” (Have mercy upon me, My God) from J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion where Peter begs God tearfully for forgiveness for denying he knew Jesus thrice to save his own life. (Although this pairing of high-brow music with low-brow culture has also been used before in the film, Clockwork Orange, for example). Even the disembodied head in gallery #5 (Happy Birthday!!, 2014) with a bit of blood below its nose emploring: “Look at me, look at me!” and reassuring with: “It’s just a bit of blood” didn’t make me look or feel squeamish as I am of real blood. Thus, this technology and installation did not suspend my disbelief.

Perhaps for less literate, apolitical, twenty-something, virtual-native, X-box, thumb jockeys, these installations blur the distinction between fantasy and reality. But for this literate, political, 55+, virtual émigré (computer mainframe and personal computer user from 1984 onward), X-box virgin, I found Atkin’s Recent Ouija exhibition unsurprising and disappointing. I was always aware I was watching simulations, not reality. My senses were not tricked and delighted as they are when I viewed Rembrandt’s “The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis” with its mysterious, phosphoric-yellow light that seems to radiate from the canvas itself or saw Stanley Kubrick’s ride through time in 2001, A Space Odyssey during which the double planes of speeding lights on the screen made my theatre seat seem to move. Perhaps if Mr Atkins had tried harder to merger high- and low-art as did Kubrick in Clockwork Orange, then his work would be more interesting to me and accessible to older audiences. In addition, if it were possible to talk or interact with the avatars and installations and not know if their answers were computer or human generated (someone behind a screen somewhere) then they would blur the barrier between physical and virtual reality which is the goal of Ouija. Instead, I feel Recent Ouija is a poor example of what a combination of more conventional art and music and modern virtual art and technology can offer.

The Old Man’s Still Got It

From a completely different era, another one man show, not more than a few hundred metres away, the Rijksmuseum’s Late Rembrandt tries to unlock the secrets of the great man’s last years by bringing back together prints, etchings, pen and ink and drypoint drawings and paintings from all around world (but mostly from the UK). These media help demonstrate Rembrandt’s virtuosity and inventiveness even in the last decade of his life including some exceptional portraits he painted in those years.

These different media have been hung together into galleries with the following themes: “From Life,” “Conventions,” “Emulation,” “Light,” “Experimental Technique,” “Intimacy,” “Contemplation,” “Inner Conflict” and “Reconciliation.” The temporarily assembled collection (this exhibition will hang for only 100 days) includes the addition of the life-size Portrait of Frederik Rihel on Horseback, 1663 two versions of Lucretia from 1664 and 1666, The Jewish Bride, (which according to Vincent Van Gogh, was Rembrandt’s masterpiece) and which hangs next to the Portrait of a Family, both from 1665 and sharing some of the same poses and hand gestures and, of course as previously mentioned, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, 1661-1662 with its mysterious yellow light which seems to radiate from the canvas itself. With so many media and paintings from the same decade, this once-in-lifetime exhibit should have something for everyone interested in Rembrandt’s later life. A good guide for making your way through the galleries is the Rijksmuseum’s own pamphlet, Late Rembrandt, which individually names and describes all 105 items in the exhibition. This pamphlet can be found in a rack in the stairway beyond the lift in the “entrance” hall and is available for a free-will donation.

Despite the richness of this collection however, it’s shame that the galleries are so filled with people that it is difficult to see many of these masterworks, let alone move about. (Note: De Telegraaf, a Dutch national newspaper reported on 25 February, five days after my visit, that the number of visitors per two hour slot would be reduced from 1,500 to 1,000).

Hopefully, by reducing the number of people present by one-third, visitors will have more of a chance to view the masterworks and perhaps even sit down to contemplate some of them occasionally. Another problem, however, is that the etchings, drawings and prints, are hung at eye-level for visitors standing up. Those in wheelchairs have difficult viewing them even though the usual metal curbs have been removed in most places so it is possible to roll up right under them.

It’s unfortunate there wasn’t room available in the middle of the galleries to put these prints in glass cases, but of course, with the great number of visitors and the necessary safety precautions, this probably wasn’t feasible. Even with all the overcrowding, I’m sure visitors will see things they will remember and enjoy for years to come. However, they should also consider booking twice to come back and see what they’ve missed before this exhibition closes on 17 May 2015.

Dianne Kellogg – Riverview

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Riverview
by Dianne Kellogg

IMG_20140615_riverrotate

Meryl Stratford – Winter Music

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Winter Music
By Meryl Stratford

It has grown more urgent.
It has grown into a rocket on a launch pad,
              a final countdown.

It seems, after all, you aren’t going to live forever.
Not even as long as a sequoia tree
              or a Galapagos turtle.
It seems your view of things has changed
              again.

Perhaps it’s time to fly to Greece,
              to swim in the Aegean.
Perhaps it’s time to write
              what you loved about this planet,
              what you hope to find
                             among the stars.