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Post Valentine's Dance Rant

I should begin by saying that I had a lovely Valentine's Day and that the feelings expressed by the robotic voice in the recording in no way reflect the opinions of its author.

What happens when you read a long list of words with negative emotional connotation? What happens when a synthesized voice reads the list? What happens if it is to a dance beat?

To me, it is remarkable how a personality emerges, or, perhaps, two personalities: the speaker and the spoken of. A relationship.

And let's just say this. It isn't good.

I'm intrigued by the effect created by the unrelenting nature of this dance rant. My response to it changes over time. There's also a strange semi-teleological drama to it. I know that the list is alphabetical so I know where it is going, but I'm also waiting for the emotional release, a grammatical release, a formal release. I want it to end but yet I can't turn away. Just like many bad relationships...

The Tell-Tale Heart Retold: A Tale Told by Heart:

I was invited to perform at a fundraiser for GritLit, the Hamilton Literary Festival. The fundraiser is at the Edgar Allan Poe-themed Baltimore House. I wrote this story to read at the event. It is a retelling of Poe's "The Tell-tale Heart," but from the perspective of the heart. 

THE TELL-TALE HEART RETOLD: A TALE TOLD BY HEART

         We live with the old man in a rented room on the ground floor of our landlord’s house. We did not know the landlord was mad until it was too late.

          The old man sleeps. Wakes. Stays in bed gathering warmth like a pile of old leaves. Sometimes he moves to the chair by the fire. The landlord brings him tea in the late afternoon. The newspaper. A book. We are in the closing chapters when the adventure is over. We are the four red chambers of the old man’s heart, a drum down a dark well. A drum tolling over distant hills.

         We did not know that the landlord was mad. Not until it was too late. But a heart lives in darkness. Our world is a cave. Outside we hear murmurs only.  Voices. His voice. The muffled bell of a tram. An axe striking wood, a thump like a heartbeat. And inside, the old man’s ribs are a cage, an alternation of light and dark, dark and light, like the lines of shadow and sun deep in a forest of leafless trees.

           We beat steadily. We do not stop. It is a persistent march into night, then day, then night again. A trudging alternation of dark and light. We keep on. We do not relent. A heart beats because we know what we must do. A heart beats so we move forward. A heart beats.  We know what we must do. A heart beats and now that we are old, we feel it more intensely. We hear each beat and remember. When we were young, we did not count each dance step, each footfall, each pump of the heart, the warm blood creeping around inside the flesh. Now each beat is measured and deliberate. It is a deep sounding like a tomb door closing. And so we keep on before it closes forever.

          We did not know that the landlord was mad. At least, not until it was too late.

          For seven nights, each night after the chiming of midnight, he creeps toward our room. The latch lifted, he opens the door a head’s width only. We hear him muttering. His weaselly breathing, his obsequious mewling. There is a faint flickering of lantern-light as he listens to the old man’s sighs. A heart beats. He believes that we are asleep. But inside, we are beating. The slow clock ticking, the hours of a life.

          We did not know that the landlord was mad. Seven long nights, he creeps into our room to watch and listen. The old man’s eye. It is nothing but the eye of an old man but, still, it frightens him as he watches, though it remains closed as the old man sleeps. The old man’s old eye, staring out as the landlord greets us pleasantly in the morning, asks the old man how he slept. How he slept indeed. The old man’s eye is vulture blue, the colour one might imagine a mystic third eye. But age needs no such mystic folderol. It is its own third eye, understanding time and the slow supernatural unfolding of the body. The third eye of age which knows the beating of the subterranean heart. The heart in the body beating like a hammer on an anvil. A heart beats and we temper the days with such beating.

       The landlord returns each midnight for seven nights. We did not know that he was mad. His breathing faster, anxious, irregular. An animal trapped by its own fear. The old man sleeps and yet we march on, a sentry pacing the parapet of blood and ribs. Then the landlord’s finger slips and the lantern knocks against the door frame. The old man starts. Sits up. “Who is it?” he calls. “Who is there?” But the landlord remains silent with the lantern closed. The old man strains to see in the darkness. “Who is there?” he says again. Heartbeat. Heartbeat. Heartbeat. We are as a bass drum in this parade of fear and dread.  The old man does not lie back but remains staring, his eyes blind, but open.

          Hours pass. We did not know that the landlord was mad. One o’clock. We mark them with our dull but quickening tolling. Two o’clock. The door moves slowly, opening almost imperceptibly. Three o’clock. The landlord enters our room. Heartbeat. The light from his lantern a single beam and all is dark but the old man’s eye. Heartbeat. The eye does not move but fixes on the man in the doorway. The old man’s eye fixes the man in the doorway with the unforgiving gaze of a hawk. The breath is held. Nothing moves. Heartbeat. Time itself is marked only by the crescendo of our beating. It is as if this beating would burst the old man’s chest and fill the room with his beating. His chest the dark room around us, and our pumping shaking its walls. Heartbeat. A red knot of muscle unfurling, pressing the landlord and his lantern against the door. Our beating the raging of a giant’s fist. Our beating, as if the endless bell of heaven were sounding. As if time itself and Death’s infinite axe were ringing.

         The landlord leaps into the room with a banshee wail. He is upon us. And in a moment, the heavy bed is overturned, the old man trapped beneath. A gasp. A sigh. A last breath. The old man asleep forever.

        But we keep beating because a heart must keep beating. A heart knows what it must do. The landlord takes the old man—the dead weight of his body—from under the bed and drags him across the floor. With his axe, he cuts the body to pieces, like a tree turned to firewood. He lifts three floorboards and drops the severed body into darkness. Replaces the boards. Heartbeat. We keep beating. A heart inside the torso of a corpse inside a narrow cave beneath the floor. Heartbeat. We keep beating. There are sounds above us. The bed moving. We know what we must do. Heartbeat. Men’s voices. Police. There is nothing here, the landlord says.  We are alone, he says The policemen mutter. We keep beating. We know what we must do. Beneath the floor. His heart, beating. Nothing here, the landlord says. His heart, beating. Beneath the floor, beating. Beneath the floor, we know what we must do. There is nothing, the landlord shouts. His heart, beating. Beneath the floor, we keep beating. It is clean here, the landlord wails. There is nothing. We keep beating. We know what we must do. His heart, beating. We know what we must do. We keep beating. Beneath the floor, the landlord wails. His heart, beating. Beneath the floor, the landlord wails. His heart, beating. Beneath the floor, the landlord wails. We know what we must do. We keep beating. We know what we must do. Beneath the floor, his heart, beating, the landlord wails. Beneath the floor, we know what we must do. His heart, beating, the landlord wails. We know what we must do.

Fershtupt on Dog Watch: a novel excerpt.

An excerpt from my novel-in-progress, Yiddish for Pirates is now online at Joyland Magazine. I'm thrilled to have some of this very large thing that I've been working on out in the world. Thanks to editor Emily Schultz for including it. If you don't know it, Joyland is a great online site for fiction and, just announced, poetry.

Shopping for Deer

Last night, I performed at the Society for the Preservation of Wild Culture New Vaudeville show at the Rivoli in Toronto, last night. It's a great concept -- a series of interesting performances, short demonstrations, and talks for the audience. Performers included Paul Dutton, Jim Shedden, and the chef d'affaires, Whitney Smith. The whole thing was framed in a kind of Prairie Home Companion for the Post Modern age feel there were voice-over radio hosts and announcements and transitional music played from old records playing on neolithic record players.

I performed a PowerPoint-enhanced reading of a few poems including Shopping for Deer, Inverting the Deer, and Ancient Constellations: Dinosaur Porn. Here's one short video of the poem (with music) and the visuals.

Toothbrush, Molar, Deer

for Craig Conley

Two

BLACK HOLE

BLACK HOLE

Our neighbor takes out bags of garbage. Our neighbor walks the dog. She washes the car, sweeps the walkway, shovels the snow, carries groceries home. Our neighbor has remarkable legs and has a birthmark which covers most of her face. It’s not the shape of Jesus, her birthmark not the shape of Mother Theresa. It’s not the shape of the Great Rift Valley, nor of this story. Her birthmark is a black hole, vast and mysterious, unknowable and terrifying and we cannot look, cannot look away.      

 “Why do you obsess about our neighbor’s face,” my son says. “There are other things to think about. For example, her remarkable legs, her knowledge of celestial naviagation. When she was my Grade 2 teacher, she explained about pulling girls’ hair and the right way to form the letter F.“

            “Look at her birthmark.” I say. “Look with both eyes or with one through a telescope which you have coyly hidden behind the almost closed curtains of our living room. Gaze into her birthmark and you will see time and space collapsing. Light disappearing. The glint of the sideview mirror, new quarters flipped into the bright morning air, a sudden shine from the policeman’s badge. Your poor red heart turns to some kind of ground beef and gets sucked in, sucked into her birthmark. Along with streetsigns, seniors hobbling before our front window, horses, the planets, spiral nebulae, great gas giants, and the memories of entire civilizations, the Mezozoic, skipping games, philosophical paradoxes, and the sadness when youth is over. I’m sure you will feel that soon, son, its dull metal taste, its acrid, static melody.  But you will have your children, their consolations, rewards, and material support. And so, in the dim fossil glow when time has just about called it a day, your progeny orbiting bedside, splittle dribbling from your weak and juddering lips, your sallow lungs will wheeze, “Hank, Bob, and Sheila. Janice and Julie; Neptune, Gloria, Saturn and Pluto,” you’ll whisper. “George, Henry, Earth, Venus, and Gwendolyn; Mars, Jeremiah, River, and Dwarf-Star,” you will call to them. “I have something to tell you.”

            “Wait,” my son interupts. “Hold that thought. This just in.“ His eyes roll back in his head. I worry that this might be some kind of seizure, something medical and life ending. But he is gesticulating dramatically toward our neighbour, and he begin to speak.

“Look across the street,” he  says. “Our neighbour’s tawny and spectacular legs shudder like earthquakes, her breath rises as if were a solar flare. Her eyes are obsidian headlights filled with the shadows of deep space. Her pert teeth are constellations which tell their own legends. Who are we? What is our place in all this changeable uncertainty? If communication is dark matter, what are our mouths, our wild exhalations like solar wind seeking night?”

 As always, my son is trying to upstage me with the febrile drama of his false pronouncements. But I am the great blue earth, and beneath the whorl of my clouds, my plains are filled with blond lions and velvet-nubbed giraffes, pods of great singing whales ranging beneath my chuffing seas. I am the centre of everything yet my son insists on his petty heliocentric legends like some recalcitrant Galileo before the otherworldly and academically accurate lute-playing of Vincenzo, his father.

 “Your quotidian bluster lacks the poetic gravitas of the actual,” I tell him. “The black hole is ravenous. It is expanding. Soon it will cover our neighbour’s entire body, a predatory shadow, an endless mine-shaft through time and space. Then it will engulf her side of the street. Then the world. What sparkles at its core? What does it pull toward its alchemical treasures?”

My son, the foretold spittle now running in delicate rivulets down his upturned pink chin, raises both arms, and calls out some unintelligible equation, rotten with coefficients and imaginary trigonometric pig-Latin. Then he runs blindly across the street. We can be thankful that here, in the cul-de-sac of our lives, there is little traffic. No SUV charges toward its End-of Days assignation with daycare, no delivery truck plows forward, laden with time-sensitive communication and Internet-ordered folderol. The well-kept blades of our neighbour’s lawn part before the quick glossolalia of his sneakers, a Exodus-enabling sea of grass flinching before his mad and unintelligible dance. He dives toward his former Grade 2 teacher searching for who knows what further instruction on the calligraphic mysteries of  the letter F and the hieractic protocol surrounding the grasping of pigtails and the ringing of little girls’ hair.  For a moment his body with its sad white sneakers is parallel to the slight curve of the earth and is beautiful.

My son disappears into the infinite shadow that is our neighbour’s birthmark.

Once again, he has stolen the scene.

I weep.

Our neighbour, with her remarkable legs, leaps the fence.

Songs of the Uncanny Valley:

Songs notice.
Songs do not notice.


SONGS OF THE UNCANNY VALLEY


Readers of this blog will note that the last few posts of pieces are based on the synthesized voices native to MS Word. What's up?


These pieces are my explorations of synthesized text "reading" -- the interface of the fictional persona (the computer 'character') and the human meaning of the text (language, we are trained to assume by default is 'human', has a source in cognition or expression. My texts themselves are supposed to be problematizing this issue, particularly in light of the robotic voice with shares some properties with the human and the expressive voice. Also, the relationship between speaking, song, melody, and inflection. The pieces are supposed to be chant-like and hypnotic and disconcerting in some kind of uncanny valley between human and not, between music and not, between chant and something else. This effect, to me is most present in the whispered text (Old Mother) with its allusion to broken old men voices or ghost-like whispers. 


PUNCTUATION: THE MUSICAL


The short piece, above, is a setting of the punctuation of the first twenty sonnets of Shakespeare. This is taken from my book The Servants of Dust (published by derek beaulieu's mighty No Press). Punctuation. What kind of lyrics are those? Is this expressive? Of what? There's music and play in the reading of the punctuation. I find it disconcerting but yet fun. I'd like to do a set of the entire punctuation of the sonnets. Boring, but in a transcendent, non-developmental way. Like reading the punctuation of the Bible and leaving out the words. (Yes! I have to try that. An adaptation of the Bible, but only the punctuation. )



I kept this setting very very simple and highly repetitive in order to make it more trippy and minimalist. I like the strange rhythms created and the pseudo-meditative effect with sudden accelerations. Also the 'drama' of the minimal and how this highly self-similar piece has its own micro-dramas and nano-suspenses.

So how do you respond to these recordings? Are they unsettling? Boring? Do they exist in an uncanny aesthetic valley? In a canyon of failure or loss? A fissure of imagination or boredom? What's the relationship between the setting and the text? I'm interested in how these play in people's heads.

you did not expect me to live... I have said it. I will live.

 Old Mother by Gary Barwin by himself@garybarwin.com

This is another chant created using MS Word voice synthesis.

This one uses a few near-whispered voices -- shaky, old men's voices, spirit voices. The text is a poem that I wrote nearly 30 years ago while studying ethnomusicology at York University and having listened to some very moving Native chants that were intensively metaphysical and spiritual in their intent and effect. Here's a link to the text.

This recording that I've made on this half raining, half snowing dark afternoon is also strangely moving to me. Preternatural and haunting in its basic assertion. "Old mother...you did not expect me to live... I have said it. I will live.

Future Moon: MS Word Sings Again

 Future moons by Gary Barwin by himself@garybarwin.com

A song, quite pretty, actually, with a melody created by the synthesized voice native to MS Word and that I processed in Ableton Live.

The Drag(Hair)net(Cut)

Issue 4 of Dragnet Magazine is just out and it contains my story "The Haircut" on pages 46-47.  Above is the first page. You have to go to the magazine to see the next page and the exciting conclusion, not to mention the illustration by Illya Klymkiw

Double Tiger Barcode: the musical

 DOUBLE TIGER BARCODE by Gary Barwin by himself@garybarwin.com

I discovered that MS Word could translate a text into voice while revising this poem. There are a number of voice options but "Bad News" created this lovely mellifluous chant which I accompanied with music and added some vocal 'harmony.'

*

a leaf blew through an open window 

driving fast

the colour of skin

I was on my way 

my children’s bones 

covered in skin

there were sirens

ambulances & police 

the trees like fathers

shushing

bending

trying not to personify 

*

SOMETIMES YOU DON'T

think about how

it makes me feel

a broken-headed squirrel

stuffed

down my pants

a music stand

in one ear then out

the next

a papercut

discussed in an email

chimp kisses

with a snow-blower

*

[Looking through old computer files, compiling a MS. What to do with THESE?}

Milkwing

Ampersands: a two dimensional concept in three dimensional space

handpersand

Ampersutterfly

On Reviews, the Unread Book and the Landless Giraffes

"How was the show? Oh, the audient loved it."

Perhaps I am because my little dog knows me, and sometimes the writer feels that a book is because a reader knows it and, even more so,  a book is because a reviewer reviews it and it becomes part of the discourse. Of course, the reception of a book, its traction, whether momentary or long-lasting is part of the meaning of a book, is, ultimately, part of the discourse itself. Language exists apart from use. Apart from words, sentences, speech and books, but it also is made of these things. A giraffe without land or air may be a beautiful thing, but it isn't a giraffe in the usual sense.

I still believe in the unread book. Its mystery. Its potential. What might be behind its hidden doors. Or the secret book, the book known to few. And in truth, some books have an ideal audience which is small, or specialized. If its only her dog, if it's only this single one dog that truly knows Gertrude Stein--and Gertrude Stein knows how it knows her-- it knows her in a way that no others do and Stein has a unique dog-derived self-knowledge as a result of this. Though Stein is also known by many. And she herself knew how she was known by many. But that's another kind of knowing.

All of this by way talking about reviews. I'm always very grateful for reviews. Of course, I'd like more people to encounter my books, to enter into a dog/Stein relationship of their own with them quite independent of me and my own authorStein/dogreader relationship. And reviews facilitate this, they facilitate more readers finding out about the book, and begin a dialogue between them and the book. Or a trialogue. Between the book, the reviewer, and the potential reader(s).

And reviews and their writers often reflect new ways for me to see the book, or at least, to see how others might approach the book. What they notice, what they think about, how it fits into their notion of reading, books, literature, the world. Sometimes the reviews tell me more about how a specific reader has read the book. Of course, I don't always agree, but then again, I don't always agree with my dog.

Should I write here here about how, though I've published, over the last sixteen years, 10 books plus another 4 for kids, and appeared in hundreds of journals and magazines, that I've never had a review in either of the national newspapers nor in the Writer and Porcupine-specific journal? Do I care? Should they? Am I happy with the howling pack of those who know me or learn about my writing through other (less national)(under)dogs?

I am happy with them. I've had good dogs.

I do, though, have a sense of wanting to be part of that other conversation, too. I guess some part of me thinks that it might introduce more readers to my work, which I would like. Some will get something from this exposure, some won't. I do have misgivings about 'the marketplace' sensibility, but outside of the very satisfying networks, the temporary autonomous zones of specialized readers and webs of those who know such work as mine, it still is the primary way readers find books.

There is also, I have to be honest, though I dislike this in myself, a sense of there being a party that I'm not invited to. A sense of validation. Really, it feels all Cinderella-not-being-invited-to-the-ball and I don't like that. Really its only the insecure part of me that wishes for this, not, I don't believe, my core. And I'm certainly not willing to magic myself into some ball gown and coach that isn't mine. I'm good staying in the Coach House with the other mice.

My absolute core belief as a writer is that I must write the books that I must write whether there are dogs around or not, whether the book is unread or not.  The book itself is dog enough for me.

But I delight in an exchange of ideas, of discussions about the book, in a careful consideration of the work. And so, I'm most grateful for this nice little review by Michael Roberson in Canadian Literature of The Porcupinity of the Stars among other books (as well as those by Don Kerr, Tammy Armstrong, and Jon Paul Fiorentino.)

So, thanks Michael. I appreciate your thoughtful engagement with the book. And thanks to other readers and/or reviewers of the book in the past. I'd also like to thank those who bought the book but didn't read it, but would rather just imagine --with fear, trepidation, wonder, and disgust--what might be behind its deer-coloured sports-sock-infused front gate. And finally, I like to thank those who have never heard of the book--all these on this planet and all those lifeforms extant in other places of the present, past, and all possible universes. You help make my book mysterious, unknown, a sanctum for initiates and cognoscenti. You make special dogs of those who have dog-eared The Porcupinity of the Stars.

Time for a Vispo: anamevispoem

for Amanda Earl