jaunt a Friend and Page :)

There I’d say another one bites the dust, but then you’d have  ew? soap in buds

wait there was this like Eliot line that was kind of inaccessible? HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

o right my sins are point blank to a Ferris Beel but

bro look a Basque on the ground be gentleman at sea

and yeah come at me

The post Inkwell appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The post Inkwell appeared first on The McGill Daily.

*

It’s 1891 and Cream’s killing women in London. He’s fresh from a Chicago prison – having killed a dude, his Dad’s money subsequently bought him clemency – and mostly bored. He spends his days at home reading and writing, his nights at music halls and “having connection” with prostitutes. He’s restless, and always afraid of being alone. He wears a dark mackintosh and a flat-topped Monopoly©-man felt hat. His cross-eyes squint tight like a caricature of evil, and he’s bearding like Freud and balding like everyone else. He has a penchant for showing people photographs of 1) himself and 2) porn. He’s addicted to strychnine, morphine, and cocaine, which our man considers an aphrodisiac. And he’s obsessed with women.

His day job is as a doctor, but, mostly, he performs abortions. Girls come to him for abortifacients (abortion-inducing chemicals) to “get them out of the family way.” He tells friends back home he has “lots of fun with women” in London. Like an ashamed New Jerseyan abroad, he tells prostitutes he’s from New York. One night, after fucking a prostitute, one Violet Beverley, he prepares her what he calls an “American drink” made of the pills he often carried with him. (Violet declined). Most likely, it’s strychnine, his recreational drug of choice, which is lethal in large doses. Strychnine is a colorless, bitter alkaloid/pesticide – C21H22N2O2 – and it carries out the following procedure once about 30 milligrams get in you:

1. An overwhelming, blood-level feeling of terror and apprehension (consciousness is never lost; mind is 100% clear and aware throughout)

2. Sea sick nausea and stomach-emptying puking

3. Uncontrollable facial twitching; pupils & eyeballs like carrion-Jackson in the “Thriller” video

4. Mouth frothing

5. Exorcistic convulsions of the entire body

6. A respite

7. Continued violent holy-fool spasms

8. A sense of suffocation and of being stamped out

9. Blue lips, muscles rigid, lungs contracting

10. Death, setting in over the course of 1-3 hrs from lack of oxygen; your body locked in hyperex- tension; your face sometimes fixed in a macabre grin (risus sardonicus)

Another list – this of Cream’s victims, the people most familiar with the preceding sequence:

Flora Eliza Brooks (died August 12, 1877)

Kate Gardener (May 8, 1879)

Mary Anne Faulkner (August 23, 1880)

Ellen Stack (December, 1880)

Daniel Stott (June 13, 1881)

Ellen Donworth (October 13, 1891)

Matilda Clover (October 20, 1891)Emma Shrivell (April 12, 1892)

Alice Marsh (April 12, 1892)

Even by murderer standards, Cream’s a jerk. When he thinks one guy didn’t pay his medical bill, Cream snail-mailingly spams him: one letter says his wife and kids contracted a disease from their pater familias; he has a bastard child; his wife’s a “low, vulgar vixen.” He once killed a guy – Daniel Stott, see lists – by a strychnine overdose, claimed the druggist from whom he bought the admixture was responsible, blackmailed him, tipped the police off to him, and then helped the daughter of the deceased sue him.

But remember: our man Cream was known to the London cops as an “extremely sensual person.” It’s an attitude he picked up in his frolics at Old McGill.

*

Thomas Neill Cream – born in Glasgow, raised in Quebec City – signed the McGill register on November 12, 1872. He studied medicine, and lived on Mansfield. Cream was aptly named for a denizen of Victorian Montreal, which hosted a soul-crushing whiteness of Lords and Sirs, men who could still pass with names like “Lord Strathcona” and could still bald and beard themselves unpathetically and unironically.

The son of a shipbuilding and lumber firm manager, he was classic fin-de-siècle nouveau riche stuff. He had a pleasing voice, rode down St. Denis in a stylish carriage, wore ostentatious clothes, and lots of jewelry. He was known as a “fast and extravagant liver.” Cream was that guy at frosh who barked out drink-commands, but kept to himself between pubs, that guy who would whip his dick out at Miami without being asked – those quotidian sociopaths, the “that guy”s of retrospective fun-making, who we disassociate with by third year and hope that they’ve calmed down. Or maybe he’s that dandyish, archly sartorial guy with the fedora, black and gray toned prom-suit-vest-and-tie, and ambitious plaid patterns here and there, a cigarette always at hand. Either option’s got pretty well-off parents.

In September 1874, fresh into third year, Cream took out some fire insurance. In his last month here, he set fire to his room and caused a little damage. He sent off a claim for $978.40, which was promptly disputed, but was ultimately reduced to $350 and paid out.

His graduation photo shows him with short bristling hair and long side-whiskers, a sporting young man and a good musician who occasionally taught Sunday school. During his four years as a Redman, he worked summers in Quebec City. His teacher was Sir William Osler, of Osler Library renown. He specialized in obstetrics and graduated with honours in 1876. He wrote his thesis on chloroform. His official registry document, as it reaches us in 2011, states in hurricane-windy-slanted cursive under “other information”:

DEAD

Tried for murder at central criminal court London England 

Found guilty 

Executed at Newgate 

It’s no small mark of merit to have your McGill transcript – that irreducible yet petty ticket of bureaucratic ontology – held in some actual human regard, even if it’s gravedancing. Cream did what countless anonymous student #’s never could: make an institution individualize and flesh out a man with his short plot and death. One wonders twice: why did McGill record the legal life and death of a specific alumnus? And will I – or: can I – receive the same honour?

*

Now, with Cream, there’s always Women. Soon after graduation, he meets a nice girl named Flora Brooks from Waterloo, Quebec when she’s visiting Montreal. He promptly knocks her up and, then, flush with his new degree, performs the abortion himself. Mr. Brooks finds out shortly, and drives off to Montreal, where he exacts a marriage from Cream. Cream comes to Waterloo and weds at gunpoint (at the point of Mr. Brook’s gun, in fact), then sets off for England the following day. From there, he mails back some pills to Flora, who dies mysteriously, though her doctor suspects Cream of “foul play.” Regardless, Cream stakes a claim to a thousands dollars, willed out in his and Flora’s marriage contract, though Mr. Brooks only coughs up $200.

Moving between London and Chicago, he frequents prostitutes and haute society gatherings – nothing was more a la mode in 1878 than a well-kept Scot. Except for the killing part, he largely treats his prostitutes with patriarchal charm, giving them wine and roses, hopefully listening to them, and definitely talking to them. As an obstetrician, most of his patients are women. In 1803, getting an abortion became punishable by death in Britain. With the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861, Parliament cordially reduced the woman’s punishment to “penal servitude for life.” Surely, our fellow Martlet Cream, with his mellifluous name, was performing a service for women that the state would not abide.

Except he was a sordid motherfucker. Cream, to another hoary, creepy white guy (his lawyer): “I made a practice of poisoning dissolute girls in Canada.” His main conversational topics:  Money, Poison, and Women, a telling triumvirate. He’d brag of the cheapness of London prostitutes, of having three women in five hours for a shilling each. Cream wantonly blurred the usually firm line drawn between the sexual proclivities and day jobs of responsible medical practitioners. As Angus McLaren put it in his A Prescription for Murder: The Victorian Serial Killings of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, “the straps and stirrups of the obstetrical consulting room conjured up too readily images of pornographic bondage, a pornography in which Cream indulged.”

Late Victorian medicine was all about deceiving women re: abortion practices, even to kill them in “retributive deaths.” As these of-the-era M.Ds said: “Women are obliged to believe all that we tell them. They are not in a position to dispute anything we say to them, and we, therefore, may be said to have them at our mercy.” Or, “To save a child from death, and a mother from crime, what could be a more wonderful result.” File those under Things Doctors Said That I Wish Weren’t Said.

So, women come to him in full confidence, ask for something illegal, and Cream kills them for their trouble. In the murky, whale oil-fired light of Victorian mores, you see the sick logic: these women dwelt in crime and sought more by their abortions. If they were found out, they would spend the rest of their lives in some bronchial prison somewhere. The abortionist keeps them alive at his discretion. And, of course, failure rates for these proto-back alley abortionists were murderously high. Cream’s esteemed kill count surely balloons beyond official numbers – those untold botched abortions that were neglected, even appreciated.

Maybe W. Teignmouth Shore was referring to something more than Cream’s obvious psychopathy when he wrote in the preface of 1923’s Trial of Thomas Neill Cream,  “He may have had a half-crazy delight in feeling that the lives of the wretched women he slew lay in his power.”

So uh, McGill once, McGill twice…

*

In his 1993 play, Thomas Neill Cream (Mystery at McGill), David Fennario wrote that “Cream was indeed the school spirit of McGill University.”  I can’t really speak to the aesthetic merit of the play – there’s this Greek chorus of women who repeat names, cliches, and finish each others’ lines, like a grimmer version of St. Laurent and Prince Arthur any given Saturday night; stage directions like “THE DEAD, LAURIER and CREAM climax”; and this gem:

CREAM: The essential condition for the male is sufficient erection of the penis.

WOMAN 1: The cock.

WOMAN 2: The prick.

WOMAN 1: The tool.

However much I shit on Fennario’s play, wrenched out of context, he’s got a decent take on Cream for the 2011 vintage of McGill:

CREAM: But no, we don’t talk about such things, do we, gentlemen? We don’t talk about why you had me erased, oh yes, from your bibliographies, purged from your official histories and expelled from my profession. A man who was your friend and associate, who shared your dreams and ambitions and helped you created the McGill that we have today. A McGill that lies, a McGill that cheats, a McGill that has very good reasons for hiding the fact that I ever existed…

I want very much, however spuriously, or half-comically, to echo that Cream is the school spirit of McGill. It’s an institution that matriculated a class-warring serial killer and hasn’t changed much internally since that Victorian epoch. I mean, run your eyes over the e-portraits of the current administration: it’s a thick, rich vanilla that loses out to even the Bush Administration in demographic stats. It’s an idea of a McGill that can produce a man able to solicit clemency through his father’s money and influence, a man who can – and did – sit undisturbed on a transatlantic sail after being convicted of murder, with chiefs of police as dining companions. This is a McGill of brutal injunctions, brutaler biking policy, and brutalist buildings, one that unilaterally shuts down beloved cafes, wars against the very use of their name, and generally just hates its staff and students beyond photo-ops in the pages of the McGill Reporter or the THES/QS rankings. I can’t shake this idea that perhaps we students, we vessels of Cream-y ambition, are Thomas Neill’s, McGill’s Miltonic Satans, carrying a Martlet fluttering in our breast wherever we go. It’s an idea about the ambition that keeps us in class and many of us politically remote, that fulfills McGill’s cancerous motto, grandescunt aucta labore – “by work, all things increase and grow.” Including iniquity, I guess:

CREAM: Oh yes, I was ambitious. A young man, a young British gentleman at the very time and peak of the British Empire. And I wanted the Good Life. I wanted my share of the power and the glory, and the fuck and the suck and the moan and the groan of it. And did you think we were only photographs? Did you think we were very much different from you?

The post Death by Cream appeared first on The McGill Daily.

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But wait: there’s something hubristically funny in these original names. Since 1672, there’s been a double intent in the practice of naming Montreal streets that feels really unsettling and weird. Dollier de Casson baptizes this approximately 18 by 220 foot dirt rectangle as “St. Jacques,” ostensibly after the itinerant apostle and witness to the Transfiguration. But, in fact, it’s a gesture at his late pal, Frère Jean-Jacques Olier, a stout, decent guy and hater of dueling. Then there’s “St. Gabriel,” celebrating the archangel and messenger of God who spans three major monotheisms, as well as M. Gabriel de Queylus, another Sulpician clergyman. St. Lambert commemorates Lambert Closse, who was killed by Algonquins at the corner of his now “namesake” street.

This pattern of self-serving street names goes well beyond the Sulpicians’ survey – St. Urbain references the farm of Urbain Tessier (of great historical obscurity); St. Denis concerns a barrister and publicist named Denis-Benjamin; St. Hubert, the Hubert Lacroix family of landowners. So we have these saint-streets, where men appear to be circumventing the whole two-posthumous-miracles-and-life-of-heroic-virtue thing to immortalize themselves in Montreal’s collective memory. However dead these street names are, they never were alive. When the dead string of letters (S-t-D-e-n-i-s) begs close examination, that signifier speaks more of a militiaman and lawyer than the third century Parisian bishop beheaded on Montmartre. I don’t know how I feel about this yet.

I read about most of this stuff in the 1897 History of Montreal, including the streets of Montreal by J. Douglas Borthwick, a clergyman. It’s a hysterical read if you don’t find it troubling – one of his primary concerns whenever introducing a new street: “No great manufactures are found in this street.” He has this pasty, cocksure British voice that’s probably representative of his contemporary English Montreal: “A square is seen in this street. ‘Richmond Square.’ It is one of the blots on the city. I don’t think there is such a miserable square in Montreal.” Taking this guy as a synecdoche, he’s also representative of a sea change in street names as Englishmen began occupying the city council and naming the streets they created on their estates. “Roy Street is called after a man of this name and so is Drolet Street named after a well-known citizen (still living) of that name, Chevalier Drolet.” Drolet was 31 at the time. The result of all this is a city named after governor generals (Sherbrooke, Amherst, Aylmer, Cathcart, Dorchester, Metcalfe), politicians (Drolet, Laurier, Viger) ,and landowners (Beaubien, Clark, Bagg, Decarie, Durocher, Guy, McTavish, and, of course, McGill). As with anything humans do unilaterally, many don’t make sense: “Pine Avenue is a misname. There is not a single pine tree to be seen in the whole street.” Rachel Street is named after – if you can follow this chain – Christine-Rachel Cadieux de Courville, wife of Jean-Baptiste Verneuil de Lorimier, brother of the patriot Chevalier de Lorimier, executed in Montreal on February 15, 1839.

Beyond this completely batshit power-tripping rests the question, how should a street name be? Religion seems like too flimsy of a gesture now (and apparently, then too), and industrialists and aristocrats feel disgusting. In such times of need, we turn, of course, to Art. But, what we find on the Montreal map is that this impulse to name streets prettily came only after the main arteries already had referents. There’s avenue Calixa-Lavallée, after the pianist and composer of “O Canada,” but it’s squirreled away in Parc Lafontaine (how often do you check street signs in the park?). There’s boulevard Cremazié, of metro-station renown, referring to a rather patriotic French Canadian poet, but that’s sandwiched between lanes of the Autoroute Métropolitaine. But I’m being McGill-centric (I mean, there’s you and me here, and a lot of the Hochelaga archipelago to cover), as there’s Louis-Hémon in Parc Ex, named after a suicidal novelist. In Little Italy there’s Dante, just below Mozart. I’m talking as if this is progress, but I don’t actually know – the whole act’s spoiled once you think of some possible, gentle, bougie motivations, like your mom appreciating how “avenue Mozart” looks on a letterhead or something.

This is the kind of thing I feel when I read that the latest street name adopted by the City of Montreal is “la rue de la Sucrerie,” which has been in effect since mid-September. Official documents stress that the name alludes to the importance of the local Redpath sugar factory, but I mean, it’s still candy street, the very definition of saccharine. And, I can’t blame just one bishop in 2011. Someone applied to the Toponymic Council of the City of Montreal for this name, argued it before them, then pushed it to the city council, before a decision was sent to the provincial level Toponymic Commission of Québec. Many people read this over and approved. A name will be made. My unease here isn’t easily communicable. There are approximately 5,993 toponyms in Montreal, a hunk of earth we’ve mostly made that’s been named for us, maintained by a Commission that claims “jurisdiction regarding all types of places.”
It’s not just the names alone that feel sad, but that we need names, that to communicate “the macadam rectangle abutting florid graffiti and some mansard roofs that extends from park to park” requires the syllables “Duluth.” It’s some kind of pre-verbal thing that makes me want to shut up.

The post From Urbain to Hubert appeared first on The McGill Daily.

BUT: Ms. Cirillo thought it’d be mindful to prompt this kind of animal thing in others and keep the cones for herself. That’s the dream. So she went about researching eyes online and in-class and learned enough to the point where she forgot about her original dream and became an optometrist because she found she already knew everything that her hobby allowed her, and she might as well make money. Ms. Cirillo was a practicing optometrist in the sandswept parking lots of Long Branch, NJ where the one person who knew her extinct dream would occasionally stop by to check up on her and make sure nothing excited or depressed her to the point of making little surgical catch work on irises, or flooding cones, or incising pupils. There’d be a lawsuit stirred up in the brown shit of legal pads with DAVE HESSELING written right below, or beside: COMPLICIT NEGLIGENCE. It was ugly but the terms weren’t up to him.

Hesseling was Ms. Cirillo’s one friend, who worked two part-time jobs when he should of/could of worked one full-time, which would of even paid more, but he likes variety, that’s what he always valued, so let him be, alright. Hesseling was thirty years old or so and the only thing that kept him going was that he kept reading symbols into things, which was some mild cognitive slight that he was well aware of but didn’t exactly hit the clinic for. Instead Hesseling kept the thing around and let it swell, eventually forgetting that it was originally a disorder type thing, which was fortunate for him. I mean, let him be, alright. But this guy would read symbols into everything, like, for example his optometrist-friend Ms. Cirillo was part of this arcane revelation rivaling John and Zarathustra but fitted for E-Z late capitalist dollars (his words, trust me). He was always very unclear about the structure of this revelation but he always called it a “RELEVATION” for a reason. He would hint at the structure of the relevation, and there definitely were chapters and hymnal choruses and he said you had to play all seventeen minutes of the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” as you read the hallowed piece or you were going to miss the point. Dead serious when he’d say this. His friend Ms. Cirillo played a prominent role in his vision, something of a siren figure with wings open, feathers lightly spiraling down, harpy cawing someone over to go ape-shit on their eye sockets. Hesseling said that in the entirety of What He Sees there was A LOT (he underscored) OF PAIN involved in the actual de-colouring process, but once etiolated and B&W stasis achieved, the patient was so overwhelmed with the new sight so as to forget any pain. But beyond this, he was waiting for more symbols.

When pressed about it, he said that yeah he saw the whole thing in this internally coherent code, but what, you want me to tell you what the ciphers mean? What does this eye sucking siren mean? Hesseling would shake his head and say you’re just missing the point you always miss the point, and your inability to get the point’s probably a symbol as well. I’ll get back to you on that one.

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Mr. Gilles Blouin, of seventy-so years, of white face and beard, of gentle white casualwear, points to sprawling blotches on a lone violin back. They’re the result of a cancer in the tree, and as an experiment, he plans to make two violins from this 100 year old piece of wood that he was given as a gift 21 years ago (I’m twenty-one years old). He runs his fingers along the clusters and invites me, a cautious customer, to do the same. He’s rapt, and moves through the cancer like a mouse arrow would over pixelated lily pads – “look at these unorganized phenomena.” His voice trails, my attention flags. Behind him there’s a pile of horsehair bows beside a late-nineties laptop.

Mr. Gilles Blouin talks history on one seamless plane, where asking about his wood-cutting family background results in a requisite greater-Quebec geography lesson, which in turn becomes a digest of the violin-making tradition in North America, which comes back to how his father made his first violin with a pocketknife. He then extols the virtues of pocketknives beyond mere self-defense. “Everyone in Quebec countryside had a pocketknife.” He brandishes the knife. He says sorry when it gets too close to my face.

My notes are a mess, but I have his story: his family lived in rural Quebec, actually cutting trees and actually making things like tables, chairs, violins – everything made on the spot. At seven or eight (all time is fluid and uncertain here – in lieu of precise dates he often prefers to say “the old days”) he learned how to use certain tools, how to sharpen knives, chisels, saws, how to work with wood. When he was of age, he went to Université de Montréal and theorized about language and generative grammar. He identified that Quebecois “joual” was actually how old Parisian French was spoken. He briefly spoke with Noam Chomsky at McGill in order to better understand his work, but was no sycophant. He soured of linguistics, and of the reality that he could only take more examples and regurgitate evidence for papers to be published in obscure, unread journals.

He felt he was writing these papers alone in his room, words to no one, and being from a family of Makers, he was Depressed.

II. Violins

He tried jewelry. Here I must note he speaks superlatively about beauty, and it’s beautiful. Mr. Gilles Blouin liked the trade, but he didn’t have the expensive tools, mainly, precious stones. You need diamond to break jade. From there, he returned to Wood. At 22, he read a book on violin-making, its social allowances as well as its history, detailing the 1850 Parisian market, where it was the social equivalent of an HD TV, when artisans made 2 to 2.5 violins of the highest quality each week. Mr. Gilles Blouin was amazed that humans could make an object so beautiful – “it is a fight with nature” – from American lumber, white spruce and maple, ebony, steel. He felt a fruitful kinship between linguistics and violinmaking – by hearing plosives and the like in the strings, he could replicate the mouth’s sounds in a machine.  He’s been a luthier (violin-maker) now for some time, among many in Montreal, whether official or basement based. It’s a trade he insists is not at all secret or lost. And he’s here in 2011 on St. Urbain, creating a violin a week, where “the emotion is in the next one.”

The cancerous violin was unique, he said, because of its old age. Trees begin low and get scathed in stone, sand, and dirt. Once they get taller, they bend subtly because of the wind. Mr. Gilles Blouin notices that Montreal trees tend to bend in a certain direction because of a dominant wind. But when the tree takes on enough wind, it develops a fiber for this wind-induced internal stress that’s better for a violin. He points me to the skeletal beginnings of a piano soundboard, lines of silver pegs where keys will go. Long white hair covers everywhere it can on his face, and I never see his mouth.

The post Strings that speak appeared first on The McGill Daily.

David Fiore’s Chimera Lucida: A Technodiegetic Romance attempts to unfurl the banner of Internet literature. At 72 pages, it follows the story of Roberta Flackjacket and her adrenaline-infused ups and downs, as told through flashbacks primarily voiced by members of an online message board. These sources demonstrate how rowdy and caustic Flackjacket is, going to pains to form a one-dimensional character, one who acts outrageously without applied purpose.

Flackjacket is a punk rock singer for a band called Schmeiss Queen, and at the beginning of the novella she “drops the tools of her tirade in favour of an automatic weapon.” So begins a multitude of masturbatory puns and rhymes – the reader is driven away from any content, directed to only appreciate form.

Fiore seems convinced he is doing something innovative by employing puns, shifting between poetry and prose, and by using the Internet as the platform for Chimera’s plot. This righteous self-consciousness is consistent throughout the novella. A conversation between Flackjacket and the administrator of the site:

“Good! We oughtta be on the same page – present a united front.”

“To whom?”

“To whom it may concern.”

“God Damn!”

“Aw’d’I go n’ leave you out on an iamb?”

“Go ahead and leave me there. Let’s talk about you.”

Yes, for Christ’s sake, let’s talk about you. Flackjacket’s character is the type to push people away from the content of her life, perhaps as a defense mechanism to escape from general vacuity. However, Fiore’s tireless presentation of diversionary puns and over-charged hysterical realism that stems from the postmodern tradition (one is tipped off by the Pynchon-esque character names), does not operate on this further level of irony, which we can justly title as (god-forbid) seriousness. If the text was designed to be entirely void of meaningful content, entirely concerned with form, we may begin to accept this as an accurate parallel with the reality of Flackjacket’s character: no substance, only image. But, Fiore does legitimately attempt to define the roots of the protagonist’s behaviour using the voices of friends, family, and peers – still, they all end up with commonplace conclusions wrapped in hipster discontent or mundane sentimentality, like “there was such a thrill in being crazy there together.”

Chimera Lucida is yet another example of the pandemic of our day’s literature to misinterpret the contemporary consciousness as vapid, and as a result, content is unnecessarily subservient to form: an error seen in both the novella’s characters and its narrative style. Authors are not afraid of making exactly what they are doing, their thoughts and theories, obvious to the reader. But presented with works that consist of English lit inside jokes and watered-down versions of Ulysses or The Crying of Lot 49, contemporary readers have to step aside and murmur, “remember when there was feeling?”

If there is anything entirely absent from Chimera Lucida, it is feeling. One reads the entire text as a playful exercise in literary theory, with cute manipulations of the English language. In Fiore’s defense, he seems to have found a way to convey the contemporary consciousness, with the Internet looming around, in the modes of hysterical realism – even if his outlook evokes a Foucault piece.

Curiously enough, contemporary fiction often inspires comparison to the eighteenth century, which was obsessed with specific rules for writing: proper literary conventions like iambic pentameter. What emerged from such rigourous formal discipline was a general vapidity of feeling; The Rape of the Lock and Gulliver’s Travels, the two towering works of the age, were satirical and designed to make us think critically, not feel passionately. Ironically, contemporary fiction, in its determination to break down rules, has accomplished comparable results, consulting loftier theories that can ultimately issue only shallow critiques of society.

The Romantics responded to the neoclassicism of the eighteenth century, countering the dry culmination of neat little satires with gushing, overwhelming emotion. Today, we must enact a similar response; we cannot present ourselves solely as subjects of the impenetrable systems detailed in Cultural Studies courses. Forgetting what we cannot change is partially necessary if we are to maintain an accurate and seething depiction of emotion, direly needed with the introduction of the Internet. The Internet in its magnitude can easily make us feel meaningless and insignificant in comparison. Yet, we must not forget that our blood keeps flowing, that our heads will still laugh, that what we feel is foreign to theory.

At the end of Chimera Lucida, Fiore mimics an Internet hallmark: “Click HERE to begin again.” With force and replenished vigour, writers must begin again – not through refreshing this tired web page, but rather, by clicking on an entirely different link.

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“This pose is 4,000 years old,” says Concordia’s Professor Terence Byrnes. “So many of the photographs are so highly conventionalized that you can almost substitute the letters A-U-T-H-O-R over the photo.” Byrnes recently published a collection of author portraits entitled Closer to Home, a sweeping revision of the field’s monotonous norm.

In Closer to Home, Byrnes took photographs of authors in their intimate dominions, “where they lived, worked, or played.” The portraits show a diversity of approaches to the literary photograph, beginning in part with the pose itself. Byrnes did not guide his subjects on their pose. Any aesthetic distance from the false modesty of the typical author snapshot is welcome in the collection – some authors stare maniacally, many seem entirely disinterested, while others look pleasant and warm or agonizingly conscious of their atmosphere and demeanor.

A previously unseen spectrum of emotion envelops the portraits: senses of weariness, nostalgia, activity, and concern. There is a conscious effort to defy the norm of literary portraiture. The photo of writer Mikhail Iossel is a notable example; he sits on the edge of his bed, looking tranquil, holding a frame of an old portrait of himself in which he stares menacingly, smoking a cigarette with a glossy Hollywood-face, shadows burrowing over his eyelids. The juxtaposition of what Byrnes has designed as the “real” author in his natural setting, with this romanticized snapshot of exaggerated personality, comically engages with the discrepancy in literary photographs between the author as an individual and as a marketing product.

Similarly, we see writer Raymond Filip standing idly in the center of a barren walled room. Paint marks typical of a construction site streak the walls and ceiling, debris litters the floor, and Filip smirks with distinction. There are no signs of authority to support this writer, no arcane tomes or busts of Homer to illustrate that he is endowed to write, that you must listen to him. The environment no longer makes allowances for deficiencies in the individual’s talent. The author is on his own.

“Writers generally have a strange kind of vanity,” Byrnes says. “There is this romantic, anti-intellectual strain in Anglo-American writers’ view of themselves. It says, ‘I’m all about experience, with my roots in the soil, or the asphalt.’ A specific Hemingwayesque rawness.” This strange vanity seeps into most authors, a complicated kind of self-conscious – with consciousness of one’s audience, and the anxiety of the influence of hundreds of years of literature mixed in. Byrnes actively deconstructs this anxiety with a sense of domesticity and intimacy, as the photographs are, eponymously, closer to home. The authors look less like authors (whatever that means), and more like your uncle, aunt, or cousin. Writer Glen Rotchin, bespectacled with his arms hanging down on his side, stands like a child with contained giddiness amongst the mechanical pipes of an empty manufacturing room he knew as a boy. The pipes wrap themselves around the room, dotted with metal valves, while Rotchin stands in the center facing the camera. This no longer seems like a man concerned with literature or the anxious business of art, but a man taking delight in who he was and who he is.

At one photo session, poet Anne Carson told Byrnes, “You can only take one picture of my face.” He began taking photos of everything in her room, the writing desk, the globe, the window, and slowly made his way onto her body, her back, her hair – a strange crescendo incrementally building up to the moment where she looks to her left, leans back in her wooden chair, and stares glumly at the camera, her toes pointed on the ground. She sits there still, transfixed and looming, made whole by the shutter of the camera.

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