Descant BLOG

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.

I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future.

The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me.

I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!”

Happy Holidays to our Descant friends and family!

As this year comes to a close we look back on another busy and successful year here in our office. Another year of beautiful poetry, prose and artwork – as well as the beautiful people who shared them with us – has passed, and I feel very lucky to have been able to participate in it and thankful to everyone who continues to make this publication a possibility. However, with the swell of pride still in our chest from 2011’s hard work, we are already looking forward to the future. This upcoming year is already proving to be full of new and exciting opportunities to share our love of language with you, our readers and contibutors, and we are already working busily like Santa’s helpers to prepare for a jam-packed January. Don’t feel to bad for us though! There is no shortage of Christmas cheer here… with the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack on repeat and Paul rocking out on his air guitar.

Looking forward to seeing you all in the new year.
Happiest of holidays,

Courtney, and the entire Descant team.

Just when we thought all the cowboys were dead (the vampires had killed them all), Patrick DeWitt breathes new life into the Old West with his Giller Prize nominated novel The Sisters Brothers. In his highly acclaimed second novel, Dewitt introduces readers to Eli and Charlie Sisters, a widely-feared duo of assassins under the omniscient yet violent reign of the Commodore. The story begins as the two conflicting brothers embark on a new mission to find and kill one Hermann Kermit Warm who has done some unnamed crime against their blood-thirsty master. However, their task brings them into some difficult and unchartered territory, and the brothers find themselves involved relentlessly in a struggle which is both physical, and worse, psychological. Readers quickly find that these cowboys are not all bars, brawls and brothels – although there is quite a lot of that too.

The novel reads like an old Hollywood western, complete with two intermissions, an epilogue and concise chapters you’ll race through with the ease and speed of a belly through the bush. Although written in short, choppy chapters and sentences – true to real Southern-twang and free from frivolity – five or six words alone will hit you with such a force that there is nothing left to do but sit back and say “dang!” There is a striking contrast between the abrupt form, the crude subject matter and the entirely heart-warming sentiment behind DeWitt’s words. It is at all times humourous, tender and tragic. While the Sisters brothers reign in a time nearly unrecognizable to our own, the chaos and destitution of the California gold rush, Eli’s insights are no less relevant today. In this short excerpt, Eli discusses life in San Francisco in a description that is still fairly comparable, and eerily so:

“It is a wild time here, is it not?” I said to the man.

“It is wild. I fear it has ruined my character. It has certainly ruined the characters of others.” He nodded, as though answering himself. “Yes, it has ruined me.”

“How are you ruined?” I asked.

“How am I not?” he wondered.

“Couldn’t you return to your home to start over?”

He shook his head. “Yesterday I saw a man leap from the roof of the Orient Hotel, laughing all the way to the ground, upon which he fairly exploded. He was drunk they say, but I had seen him sober shortly before this. There is a feeling here, which if it gets you, will envenom your very center. It is a madness of possibilities. That leaping man’s final act was the embodiment of the collective mind of San Francisco. I understood it completely. I had a strong desire to applaud, if you want to know the truth.”

“I don’t understand the purpose of this story,” I said.

“I could leave here and return to my hometown, but I would not return as the person I was when I left,” he explained. “I would not recognize anyone. And no one would recognize me.” Turning to watch the town, he petted his fowl and chuckled. A single pistol shot was heard in the distance; hoofbeats; a woman’s scream, which turned to cackling laughter. “A great, greedy heart!” he said, and then walked toward it, disappearing into it. Down the beach, the man with the whip stood away from the dead horse, staring out at the bay and the numberless masts. He had removed his hat. He was unsure, and I did not envy him.

Despite moments of cowboy cliche, and embellishments that I’m sure would make any American historian squirm, DeWitt’s writing is deserving of it’s praise and this novel is an insightful, enjoyable and dignified piece of literature. You will find no balderdash here, The Sisters Brothers is an ace in the hole!

With only a few days left until All Hallows’ Eve, there’s perhaps no better way to embrace the sepulchral spirit of the season than with some tried and true works of literature. For all you bibliophiles, here are a few recommendations ranging from the ghastly to the grotesque to the just plain disconcerting.

The Turn of the Screw — Henry James

Critics and scholars love churning out essay after essay trying to decode this enigmatic novella about a governess who struggles to maintain her sanity after becoming increasingly convinced that her wards are mingling with ghosts.

The Cement Garden — Ian MacEwan

Not so much frightening as it is off putting, MacEwan’s early foray into the grotesque—with its dead parents rotting in the basement and consanguineal lust—is certain to make anyone’s day a little less cheery.

The Fall of the House of Usher — Edgar Allen Poe

Perhaps not the best work in Poe’s oeuvre, but this short story centred around a haunted house and its ageing denizens remains a genre staple.

The Changing Light at Sandover — James Merrill

This three-part epic poem chronicles the otherworldly communications resulting from Merrill’s own experiments with séances and Ouija boards over a twenty-year period. Very eccentric stuff from the Pulitzer Prize–winning son of Charles Merrill, founder of Merrill Lynch.

The Birth-Mark — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Sure, nobody’s perfect, but that doesn’t stop an ambitious (and, some might say, deranged) doctor from performing a rather untraditional form of cosmetic surgery on his wife who just barely misses the mark of perfect beauty.

The Monk: A Romance — Matthew Gregory Lewis

Nothing romantic about this Romantic novel with its fascination with all things satanic. The Monk remains a seminal novel of the Gothic genre and an enduring favourite among English lit. students.

Now that the temperature’s dropped, it’s time to gather ’round and get cozy like it’s story time in the city. There are tons of great readings to choose from this fall:

• TIFF’s slightly frumpy cousin, the International Festival of Authors is on from October 19th to 30th. But who needs glitz? Readings by Joan Didion, Ken Babstock, Michael Ondaajte, Gary Shteyngart and dozens of others, as well as an interview with Douglas Coupland on Marshall McLuhan, and Seth in conversation with Daniel Clowes all promise to be more interesting than Brangelinacloonadonnagosling.
• The Toronto Reference Library has some great authors lined up for their Appel Salon series.  Jefferey Eugenides will be discussing his highly anticipated novel, The Marriage Plot on October 24th.  Umberto Eco will be there on November 16th to talk about his latest novel The Prague Cemetery as well as “semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory” for the legion of The Name of the Rose fans out there. The tickets are free, but are sure to go fast.
• For something a little different, check out Ron MacLean, Canada’s unofficial poet laureate, at the Appel Salon series on November 3rd.
• Or, check out The Wrecking Ball, a series that combines heavy metal and short stories, on October 22nd. There will be readings by Jessica Westhead and Jamie Popowich and music by Kosmograd and Black Faxes.

In Descant 154: Sicily, Land of Forgotten Dreams, Gaetano Cipolla discusses the origins of the triskelion symbol on the Sicilian flag: three bent legs radiating from the centre of the coat of arms (perhaps representing the three corners of the island). At the centre of the symbol is the head of the Gorgon Medusa. According to myth, those who gazed at the ghastly Medusa with her head of snakes were turned to stone. Cipolla gives us the history of this symbol as it was used in Sicilian heraldry:

The head of Medusa became part of Athena’s shield, symbolizing the goddess’s invincibility. At the time of the Romans, the head of Medusa was replaced by a sweet-looking young maiden with stalks of wheat protruding from her head instead of the horrifying snakes. The substitution was probably made to emphasize the fertility of Sicily. The Romans, in fact, used the island as the granary that fed its legions. (p.141)

As an interesting aside, the coat of arms of Dohalice, Czech Republic (pictured on the right) hasn’t undergone such a revision. It prominently displays the ugly, snake-tressed head of Medusa.

Also in the Sicily issue, Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews draws on the myth to characterize the island in her poem, ‘Sicily’: ‘Medusa’s Gorgon lair / of unexpected dangers / rising from her deep, dark seas.’ (p. 131)

With her great metaphorical potential, Medusa has been invoked variously in literature, visual art, psychology, and feminist thought. Some sources indicate that the early stories of Medusa portrayed her simply as a monster with snakes for hair. The myth evolved, however, and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Medusa was once a beautiful maiden whose hair was her most alluring trait. The goddess Athena turns her into a petrifying monster as a punishment after Poseidon rapes her in Athena’s temple. The irony of her fate is horrific, and the images associated with her annihilating power are haunting enough to have endured and captured many artistic imaginations over the centuries.

In the resolution of the Medusa tale, Perseus succeeds in approaching Medusa and decapitating her by looking at her only through the reflection in his shield:

Across the fields and along the tracks he had seen the statues
of men and of beasts transformed to stone at the sight of Medusa.
He, however, had only looked on those terrible features
as they were reflected in bronze, on the shield which he held in his left hand

(Metamorphoses Book 4, trans. Raeburn)

Extrapolated beyond their literal context, these four lines are fascinating for what they imply about the relationship between fear and representation. Perseus’s method resembles the superstitious way we use images to mirror reality, thinking that they will allow us some degree of control over it. We arm ourselves with symbols and ideas as we approach the unknown, not wanting to look at it directly — only ‘as it is reflected in bronze.’

We do the same thing when we assign an emblem to a place. When the Medusa image on the Sicilian coat of arms was replaced with a benign agrarian symbol, the latter represented only one facet of the island’s reality (which, after centuries of war for its control, must have been complex). So perhaps the original Medusa head, as a symbol of the totality that we refuse to face head-on, is a more faithful image for the inscrutable nature of the real world at any single time, in any single place.

Once a year, Word on the Street moves the written word off of dusty shelves and radiating screens and into the fresh air of Queen’s Park. There is always a surprising amount of energy and fanfare, especially for a literary event, as local publishers set up shop on the city streets that so often inspire their books. Though the festival has wrapped for another year, Toronto publishers Diaspora Dialogues are cleverly keeping words on the street with their interactive project, the LitToronto Map, which asks writers to contribute their site-specific flash fiction or poetry. The creative snippets of writing are then pinned to an online map, for everyone to explore. A look at the map reveals stories around every corner and behind every door, intersecting in surprising ways as they are read at the fleeting pace of a stroll through the streets. As a bonus, if you submit your piece before October 15th you are automatically entered in a contest to win some great prizes.

The project is well timed with the recent release of Amy Lavender Harris’s Imagining Toronto, an engaging survey of representations of Toronto in fiction, poetry and essays. Harris’s book reminds us of some of the fantastic writing that has been inspired by our city. She cites Dennis Lee on the Annex: “Drifting north to the street-storey / turrets and gables, the squiggles and arches and / baleful asymmetric glare of the houses he loves / Toronto gothic”. For poet Corrado Painia, “the summer is different on College…the pantograph of a streetcar / tears through the viscera of the sky / hunks of watermelon / bits of pistachio ice cream / scraps of tomato / and threads of parmesan and pecorino / rain / upon the tables of College”. Alvin Rakoff portrays Kensington Market: “Baldwin Street was a mass of colours. Not organized. Not neatly planted arrays. Not row on row of pristine perfection. As with the front of other peoples’ houses. Not here. But higgledy-piggledy. Random. Colours Bombarding the eye. Colours.”

The writing featured in Harris’s book doesn’t always glorify Toronto’s streets and landmarks, but it is always vivid and evocative. In his book Consolation, Michael Redhill offers a cynical image of Toronto’s city hall, which looks “like a broken ice-cream cone with a tumour in the middle.” The C.N. Tower is also often a lightning rod for civic skepticism, called an “…unplunged hypodermic — / a bubble of thin air” by Diana Fitzgerald Byden, and “a monument to nothing, a space-ship that would never have lift-off” by Gwendolyn MacEwen.

Imagining Toronto presents us with some of the best writing about Toronto so far, by some of our most celebrated writers; with Diaspora Dialogues’ new project, Torontonians can add their own writing to a living anthology about this city.