PREFACE
Karen Mulhallen

THE CRITICS
Asia Cats & Goji-Girls: The Rise of Dojo Cinema
Larry Frolick
(Photographs by Donald Weber)

Adventures Under the Dome:
Astronomers in Literature
Philip Teece

Crayon in the Brain:
Machining Happiness in the Time of Homer (see excerpt below)
Mark Kingwell

Looney Tunes and Unheard Melodies:
An Oulipian Colonescapade with a Critique of
"The Great-Ape Love-Song Corpus" and its Lexicon
Jerome McGann
(Illustrations by Johanna Drucker)

Structural Unity in Fiction
Sandra Novack

THE POETS
Truckers in Parking Lot: Jefferson, OH
Kirk Gonnsen

The Weather Stone
The Movement of Ice
String
Suet
Harry Humes

The Double Helix
A Murmuration of Starlings
King Macbeth
Chewing the Cud
Family Bestiary
David Gravender

Islander
Land scape
quietus (see excerpt below)
R. Johnson

These Fugitive Days
Ian C. Smith

Wanuskewin
Carla Milo

January
McGinnis Lake 1975
Kathryn Mockler

baby saint
Theresa Emrick

Brick Poems
Mark Laliberte

The Frozen Food Aisle
Kanina Dawson

Notes from Paris
Virgil Burnett

THE SCRIBES
Daredevil (see excerpt below)
Linda Breneman

Alvie’s Landscape
R.M. Kinder

THE BIBLIOGRAPHERS
An Index to 35 Years of Descant
Sarah Ward with Kordula Prentissimo
and Mary Newberry

back of the book
Antanas Sileika/ Co-Editor’s Diary

Happiness is for idiots.
- Charles de Gaulle

1. Homer and Lisa
A STORY OF TWO PEOPLE, one happy and one sad:1

In an episode from the 2001 season of the animated television series The Simpsons, Homer discovers that he has a crayon lodged in his brain, the result of a childhood incident in which he was dared to insert a whole box up his nose, and hence his brain. A sneeze brought all but one crayon flying out, but in the interval Homer lost count and one remained.
Now that it has been surgically removed, Homer discovers that he is actually a man of towering intellect. His wardrobe, vocabulary and demeanour all change instantly. So does his relationship with his daughter Lisa, to this point the sole intellectual in the Simpson family, maybe in all of Springfield. Formerly distant, father and daughter now find they are close friends, together living the life of the mind.

There is a cloud, however. Homer’s restored intellect allows him to realize that the nuclear power plant where he works is a maze of safety violations. He blows the whistle, much of the town’s population is laid off, and Homer is vilified as a conscientious troublemaker. He is burned in effigy in the local bar, Moe’s. As he is saying, “I notice a distinct strain of anti-intellectualism in this bar,” one of the patrons hits him in the head with a plank and the rest throw him out of the bar.

He goes to a popular movie starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, Love is Nice, and watches with growing irritation and boredom as the clichéd plot lurches towards its banal conclusion, perhaps reflecting on Adorno’s complaint in Minima Moralia that “every visit to the cinema leaves me feeling stupider and worse.”

People notice that he is not enjoying the film. “Don’t blame me,” Homer says. “This movie is tired and predictable.” He complains that, of course, they all know the two main characters will end up together, and the audience, shocked by this thoughtless revelation, attack him, hit him with a plank and eject him from the theatre. “Point out your plot holes elsewhere,” the pimply usher shouts. Homer wanders the streets in a forties-style cinematic montage of despair, neon signs of a dumbed-down culture floating past the despondent Homer: Smart People Not Welcome, Dum-Dum Club, Lunkheadz, Disney Store.

Homer goes to Lisa and asks her why she never said that being intelligent was so painful. Why is he unhappy if he is smart? She acknowledges that it is true, and in fact shows him a graph she’s plotted demonstrating the inverse relationship between intelligence and happiness. “I make a lot of graphs,” she says sadly. How does she cope? “Tai chi,” Lisa says dreamily. “Chai tea.”

At this point, Homer decides that he no longer wants to be smart. The scientists who removed the crayon will not help him, so he goes to Moe, the local bartender who doubles as an amateur surgeon, to have the crayon re-inserted in his brain: a procedure Moe calls “the old Crayola oblongata.” Moe positions it in his nose and begins hitting it with a ball-peen hammer; the further it enters Homer’s cranial cavity, the dumber he becomes. When he says, “Extended warranty? How can I lose?” Moe knows he has gone far enough and Homer has been restored to his former state of happy stupidity, retaining no memory of his crayon-free condition.

Only Lisa is devastated at the return of the familiar Homer. Her father hands her a letter he has discovered in his back pocket, apparently written before he underwent the backroom operation. In it he explains that he “took the coward’s way out” in returning to his status of blissful stupidity. He could not endure the sense of isolation and discontent, not to mention the plank-blows to the head, entailed by being a smart man in a dumb culture.

...

My people die in bed.
No thunderclap defiance, madscenes on the moor,
no comet in the sky, no battle cry,
nor yet the private passion of an opened vein.
We remain, and keep our brittle barricades secure,
gathering our grievances in shopping carts,
following the dotted line along the asphalt path.
We sort, we fold, we wither in the yellowed sheets
and wonder at the contents of a dusty drawer.
Frayed at cuff and collar, we endure
the silence of the arc-lit treeless streets
and sift the rubble of our unremembered wars.

GIL FAVOR BARGER, a stuntman in space operas, horror flicks, cop movies, spy series and gangster romps, was my Holy Grail ex-boyfriend. All middle-aged divorcées have one. Maybe the man you married gambled all your money away on real estate schemes or drank all your money away in dive bars or gave all your money to young flight attendants, but the one you didn’t marry — the one who never had any of your money in the first place — lived an exciting but blameless life these thirty years. The wonder and the tragedy of modern life is that on a whim you can go on the Internet and find your frozen-in-time ex-boyfriend. I went on the Internet because I was depressed. In a two-year period, I’d suffered through a divorce, a bankruptcy, two relocations, a surgery, a job search, two Christmasses and an irate teenaged daughter with a serious boyfriend. I felt wrecked, fragmented and sick, as if I were trapped in the Klimt poster on my wall — a swirling soup of ash-coloured faces, flattened breasts and helpless limbs.

I put cartons of yogourt and milk in the fridge and apples, grapes and pears on the counter and told Chelsea that if she let her boyfriend within a thousand feet of the house while I took a much-needed weekend away, she would be grounded forever. Her allowance would be docked for many years, her room would be stripped of all electronic devices that ever existed or ever would be invented and her car privileges would be permanently revoked before they had ever been given in the first place. She screamed insults at me. She knows how to get to me.

I alerted our neighbourhood busybody.

I ignored a flood of guilt and worry.

I climbed into my aged Dodge minivan. My overnight bag contained new lipsticks and lingerie.

I drove north from my home in Seattle to the Anacortes exit, which is just south of the Canadian border. Anacortes is a bleak ribbon of highway that extends from I-5 west to Puget Sound through wholesale marts, warehouse stores, lumber yards and fast food joints. At the ferry dock I waited in line for an hour. It was two o’clock on a November Friday afternoon. The sky was smoke grey and the light was thin and slanted, as if the sun had already given up on the day. Drizzle soaked the cars, soaked the ferry workers, soaked the walk-ons in their waterproof hoods and hiking boots. I wanted to admit my life was over, and then it was time to board.

...