Burn Man: Selected Stories

Burn Man

Selected Stories

Mark Anthony Jarman

Introduction by John Metcalf

biblioasis

Windsor, ON

reSet

Cape Breton is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada

Ray Smith

A Night at the Opera

Ray Smith

Going Down Slow

John Metcalf

Century

Ray Smith

Quickening

Terry Griggs

Moody Food

Ray Robertson

Alphabet

Kathy Page

Lunar Attractions

Clark Blaise

Lord Nelson Tavern

Ray Smith

The Iconoclast’s Journal

Terry Griggs

Heroes

Ray Robertson

The Story of My Face

Kathy Page

An Aesthetic Underground

John Metcalf

A History of Forgetting

Caroline Adderson

The Camera Always Lies

Hugh Hood

Canada Made Me

Norman Levine

Vital Signs (a reSet Original)

John Metcalf

A Good Baby

Leon Rooke

First Things First (a reSet Original)

Diane Schoemperlen

I Don’t Want to Know Anyone Too Well (a reSet Original)

Norman Levine

The Stand-In

David Helwig

Light Shining Out of Darkness (a reSet Original)

Hugh Hood

Bad Imaginings

Caroline Adderson

Damages (a reSet Original)

Keath Fraser

This Time, That Place

Clark Blaise

You Are Here

Cynthia Flood

Contents

Introduction: Wurlitzers and Chicken Bones

Burn Man on a Texas Porch

Cowboys Incorporated

Assiniboia Death Trip

19 Knives

Bear on a Chain

Dangle

My White Planet

Knife Party

Song from Under the Floorboards

Flat-Out Earth Moving

Skin a Flea for Hide and Tallow

Night March in the Territory

The Scout’s Lament

Pompeii Book of the Dead

Jesus Made Seattle Under Protest

Dancing Nightly in the Tavern

Goose, Dog, Fish, Stars

Righteous Speedboat

California Cancer Journeys

Bluebird Driver

The Hospital Island

About the Author

Copyright

To John and Myrna with gratitude and affection,

and with love to Clarissa.

Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats. Yeats.

Why wouldn’t the man shut up?

— John Thompson, Ghazal IX

Wurlitzers and Chicken Bones

Mark Anthony Jarman’s memoir writing and travel pieces are sharp with observation and hum with vibrant language. I was charmed by the beginning of the following memoir piece about an old-timers’ hockey evening.

Drive the night, driving out to old-timer hockey in January in New Brunswick, new fallen snow and a full moon on Acadian and Loyalist fields, fields beautiful and ice-smooth and curved like old bathtubs. In this blue light Baptist churches and ordinary farms become cathode, hallucinatory. Old Indian islands in the wide river and trees up like fingers and the strange shape of the snowbanks.

It’s not my country, but it is my country now. I’m a traveller in a foreign land and I relish that. The universe above my head may boast vast dragon-red galaxies and shimmering ribbons of green, and the merciless sun may be shining this moment somewhere in Asia, but tonight along the frozen moonlit St. John River the country is a lunatic lunar blue and the arena air smells like fried onions and chicken. We park by the door, play two 25 minute periods, shake hands, pay the refs, knock back a few in dressing room #5, and drift back from hockey pleasantly tired, silent as integers. And I am along for the ride.

Wind-carved snow drifts curved like old bathtubs, Baptist churches and farm houses in the blue moonlight become cathode, hallucinatory. How marvellously seen and captured! How essentially Jarman!

And here is Mark Jarman, tourist in Venice.

Walking the fondamenta on Venice’s north lagoon, I see the snowy Dolomite Alps as if through a lens. This rare sight, such clear skies in February—a good omen, I decide. Somewhere out there in the bright lagoon is an island of bones, a mountain of skulls; skools says Antonello the bearded Italian archeologist. Plague victims from the 1300s to the 1600s and bodies exhumed from San Michele and moved by bone-barge to the ossario, thousands of nameless skeletons.

Antonello tells me he worked mapping the north lagoon and its many scattered islands. He tries to think of a word in English and I realize it is drone. Si, si, his drone passing over a mountain of skulls, bones dumped over pestilent centuries. Antonello mentions the poet Joseph Brodsky buried on the cemetery island of San Michele close to Ezra Pound and Olga Budge and a few drowned sailors. Antonello likes Brodsky but says Ezra is problematic, fascista. Stravinsky lies there and Russian dancers and Doppler!

We drift to a bar on the canal, amber Nuda e Cruda beer and outside tables in the sunny afternoon. Winter, but we’ve had such good luck with the sun. A speedboat pulls up beside our table, at the wheel a man yelling wildly, Ubriaconi! Molesto!

Clarissa translates: Drunkards! I molest you!

Someone inside the bar waltzes out and bear-hugs the man beside the canal. I like a table where locals can roar up in speedboat-wash and shout such a line.

After reading several of these travel pieces, one begins to feel that wherever Jarman seats himself for a beer, surreal events will inevitably unfold; they are less dispatches from Venice or Oporto than serial reports from Jarman Country.

A recent report received, a summarizing postcard from Marseille:

Much dog crap, many rats.

Yet it is not the charm of such as the above that secured Mark Jarman’s place among Canada’s pre-eminent writers. Quintessential Jarman is suggested by the following quotation taken from near the beginning of a story entitled Cowboys Incorporated, which appeared in his first collection, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern (1984).

The big country. Asleep. Wake up, Wake up. Near Easter time too, the Lenten tornadoes touching down around the women in their gardens. Wake up buddy. Jankovitch closes his eyes to rise from cancerous dreams of flooded towns dying in silt rivers, farm land leaching out, drifting away, Ironchild toying with his needles and grinding blue pills in the failing light. Wake up. Jankovitch jerks forward: What? Saliva drying upturned in his stupid throat. Crows, nothing grows, gears gnash in testimony to bad driving and the Swedish car’s endless capacity for punishment. This is the way they go: We want you to drive again, okay? Virginia in fedora and shades leaning over the seat to gently rouse Jankovitch who’s down in shitkicker country again . . .  as Carlene Carter said, put the cunt back in country . . . Johnny Cash’s girl . . . the car swinging hard across the blue plains and raggedy-ass cottonwood, the endless flight through pale aspens and truck stop botulism, Kmart, snakeskin cowboy boots, cheating songs, box elders. This is just after the grain elevator blew over to Missouri burned for days and they couldn’t get at the bodies. In the blind pigs and roadhouses, lizards cringe under the crashing rain of Wurlitzers and chicken bones. God and country are toasted. Wake up buddy. Jankovitch supposed to be loyally prone and deceased in the smouldering ruin, not snuck off from work in the cross-tracks bar when the elevator spontaneously disintegrated, providing half-cut Jankovitch an all-too-neat opportunity to duck the warrant, the women and possible pregnancies, the big debts, the whole grieving family. Missouri: Show Me State, population 4,676,000. Capital Jefferson City. Best diner in Nine Eagles county. Hines Cedar Crest for Sunday brunch, fried chicken and eggs and thirty-one salads or Saturday night fishfry with their special recipe for carp and catfish. Jankovitch stares at the outlines of her breasts shifting in a soft halter top. Yes yes, I’m awake now.

What approach can we make to this extraordinary piece of writing? I have long advocated that we should ask of a work of art not What does this mean, but How does this mean? This simple question is fairly simple but, because rarely asked, perhaps requires elucidation.

Quebec painter Claude Tousignant wrote: What I advocate is the notion of paintings as beings, not representations.

Lucien Freud wrote: Leaning to paint is literally learning to use paint.

Robert Motherwell wrote of ". . . the depth and the intimacy of the marriage between the artist and his medium. A painting is not a picture of something in front of your eyes—a model, say, primarily. It is an attack on the medium which comes to ‘mean’ something." [Italics added]

British art critic Roger Fry wrote as early as 1912 of paintings as visual music.

Seamus Heaney wrote that poetry must not submit to the intellect’s eagerness to foreclose but must wait for a music to occur, an image to discover itself.

All these comments suggest that What is not the question to ask; they suggest that painters would wish us to look at paint, that writers would wish us to listen for a music to occur, an image to discover itself.

(Heaney is using discover in the sense of revealing itself.)

Asking What of any being is already positioning the questioner intellectually and emotionally outside the thing being questioned. Current university jargon refers to asking What of a text as interrogation, pompous tone-deaf cant with its unintended shadow-twin, confession. To approach poetry or fiction asking What is putting the poem or story in the dock and casting the critic as prosecutor.

What possibly could be the charge?

If, on the other hand, we ask How we are inside the work, experiencing it, entering into an emotional relationship with it, in a sense submitting to it, though such submission does not, of course, preclude our reaching a negative conclusion. By asking How, we become not invading marauders but explorers with settlement in view.

Understanding the closeness of many of Jarman’s stories to poetry and knowing that I was currently grappling with getting across to readers the How of Jarman’s work, Alexander Monker, fellow Jarman fan, drew my attention to a passage in the Introduction by Dana Gioia to Aaron Poochigian’s 2022 translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal:

Music was central to Baudelaire’s method. He considered poetry an art of enchantment. A poem should cast a verbal spell that suspends the reader in a trance state of heightened attention and receptivity. That momentary enchantment allows the reader to experience contradictory thoughts and emotions, to feel hidden suggestions and connections that are never fully disclosed or resolved in the poem. The reader interprets the poem—not as a deliberately constructed puzzle, but as a shared experience still in the process of being understood. [Italics added]

Before all else, we should listen.

In an essay in Canadian Notes & Queries, Stephen Beattie, books columnist and reviewer, wrote of Cowboys Incorporated—"this early story—so assured, so fresh in its approach and execution—offers one of the first shouts from a voice that is sui generis in the annals of Canadian fiction."

We must listen to that voice.

But let me expand on the nature of that voice by quoting from another of Canada’s finest short story writers, Douglas Glover, who suggests something of the tradition with which Jarman allies himself, and directs us brilliantly towards the heart of the stories.

Of course, what drives a writer’s hand always remains secret, sometimes even from himself. We surge toward the shapes we love without knowing why we love them. Jarman’s taste is rhetorical—not just because his narratives are monologues, speeches. He harks back to an ancient tradition of eloquent speaking much despised, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, by Plato, the logician, who saw no place for poets in his republic. This tradition of literary revel has come down to us through the Elizabethans and thence to Joyce and the Irish and also, somehow, to the American South. But always it has been in conflict with a counter-tradition of the plain style, of pure representation, of telling a story the good old-fashioned way without the author drawing attention to himself and his oral pyrotechnics. Jarman doesn’t care for the plain style. He’s intoxicated with words and the playful ways they can be strung together using sound and rhythm and repetition. And the meaning he is after is not the meaning of the didact or some mirror of the world, but a meaning that murmurs through the words of a text like wind in leaves and reveals itself mysteriously in the play of language itself.

(From: How to Read a Mark Jarman Story in Glover’s book of essays Attack of the Copula Spiders, which explores in searching detail Jarman’s story, Burn Man on a Texas Porch.)

Having in mind, then, that Jarman is, in essence, a language performer, a builder of rhetorical structures, a writer attacking his medium, let us go beyond conventional and perfunctory listening and let us hear, really hear, how the performance works. Let us imagine that you, as reader, are now called upon to deliver our excerpt from Cowboys Incorporated to a theatre audience. You must become a musician; your voice has to re-create the music of Jarman’s score.

(In the opening section of the story preceding your excerpt, the fugitives Jankovitch and Ironchild are in the washroom of an Interstate rest area. Ironchild, in a cubicle, shooting up, overdoses, buys the farm. Jankovitch bundles up the corpse, stuffing boots and ankles into the toilet bowl and, with a matchbook, wedges shut the cubicle door leaving on it a scrawled notice on a paper towel: Out of Order.)

Putting it very crudely, those three words resonate throughout the story.

Our excerpt starts with:

The big country. Asleep.

Are these the words of the narrator or are they the driver’s thoughts? Jarman, intent on immediacy, goes out of his way to disguise or magic away even the notion of an omniscient intelligence telling the story, so it is probably safest to consider the words as Virginia’s summarizing thought.

In either case, the words need to be spoken slowly. A pause between them. A sort of, "Well! Here we are! We’ve reached the plains. And he’s still asleep."

I think if I were in your shoes I’d give slight emphasis to big.

Wake up. Wake up. Obviously Virginia. And as she’s described later as trying to gently rouse him (Jankovitch being possibly dangerous) the words should be an intense whisper, sibilant rather than commanding.

The big country. Asleep. Wake up. Wake up. Near Easter time too, the Lenten tornadoes touching down around the women in their gardens. Wake up buddy. Jankovitch closes his eyes to rise from cancerous dreams of flooded towns dying in silt rivers, farm land leaching out, drifting away. Ironchild toying with his needles and grinding blue pills in the failing light. Wake up. Jankovitch jerks forward. What? Saliva drying upturned in his stupid throat.

How to deliver this? Not loudly. Certainly, I’d think, slowly. Perhaps slightly slurred? It is a semi-dreamed vision of the physical world dying mixed in with their own complicity in that death in the person of Ironchild toying with needles and narcotics in the failing light.

What rhythms, what stresses are demanded?

Notice the brilliance of the first sentence and the word too, which needs a stress as it indicates that Jankovitch has been dreaming of other, probably violent events taking place around Easter time. It is also a deliberate echo of a Dylan lyric. The tornadoes themselves touching down around the women in their gardens continue a chain of surreal imagery that dominates the story.

That little word too combined with the rather peculiar word to be coming from a Jankovitch’s dreaming mind—Lenten—reminds me of Dana Gioia’s enchantment that allows the reader to feel hidden suggestions and connections that are never fully disclosed or resolved . . .

(Lent, I will remind readers, is the period of forty days devoted to fasting and penitence in commemoration of Jesus’s fasting for forty days in the wilderness. Lent leads up to Easter Day, the festival celebrating Christ’s rising from the dead. Lenten seems an odd word to crop up in Jankovitch’s mind. Later in the story we read, Jankovitch can still see the nuns and old school maps . . . There seems to be in Jankovitch’s thoughts and feelings a faint residue of Catholic instruction, a religious sense of the world, as if in an ancient church with whitewashed walls the faint colours from medieval frescoes are bleeding through. And the story does end with a resurrected figure, though not a saviour bringing the hope of salvation.

Readers may well sense in the work of Denis Johnson, a writer influential in the forming of Jarman’s style, a similar faint residue of traditional teaching.

Crows, nothing grows, gears gnash in testimony to bad driving and the Swedish car’s endless capacity for punishment. This is the way they go: We want you to drive again, okay?

This brilliant hinge sentence records his hearing the cawing of crows; nothing grows is his slipping back again towards dream; gears gnash, the violence of the sound before he sinks again back into the dream of their journey.

What follows next is a considerable challenge:

Virginia in fedora and shades leaning over the seat to gently rouse Jankovitch who’s down in shitkicker country again . . . as Carlene Carter said, put the cunt back in country . . .  Johnny Cash’s girl . . . the car swinging hard across the blue plains and raggedy-ass cottonwood, the endless flight through pale aspens and truck stop botulism, Kmart snakeskin cowboy boots, cheating songs, box elders. This is just after the grain elevator blew over to Missouri: burned for days and they couldn’t get at the bodies. In the blind pigs and roadhouses, lizards cringe under the crashing rain of Wurlitzers and chicken bones. God and country are toasted.

Starting at swinging hard . . . Jankovitch is capturing their flight in a collage of pictures and details. Before thinking of how to deliver the collage, it’s essential to discover the dominant emotion of the details and pictures. That discovery will deliver to the performer the tone and the speed of delivery.

The collage rises towards the explosion. This is the rising tension of a blues harp solo, of a revival meeting, the eloquence of preacher or poet that the Welsh call hwyl.

The build towards the Wurlitzer sentence starts with:

This is just after the grain elevator blew over to Missouri: burned for days and they couldn’t get at the bodies.

But how to make this seemingly flat sentence build. Does the rhetoric sag at this point?

I read it as being akin to colloquial speech, so read: emphasis on blew, slight pause, over to Missouri: burned for days and they couldn’t get at the bodies.

Notice that the next sentence switches into the present tense and is very much not colloquial: it presents not so much the sight of the explosion as Jankovitch’s imagining of its indescribable magnitude.

The passage ends abruptly with the seemingly flat, God and country are toasted.

This seemed to me when I first read it as a limp letdown after the brilliantly hyperbolical lizards cringe under the crashing ruin of Wurlitzers and chicken bones. But subsequent readings gave me a different take. I read God and country as the boastful patriotism of USA exceptionalism, followed by a pause, followed by are toasted, a colloquial cliché that dismisses that assertion.

(Blind pigs, a term for lowlife illicit drinking establishments, is used here not only for its meaning but because the words, grotesque in themselves, reinforce the surreal aspects of the explosion. We might associate chicken bones with blind pigs, Wurlitzers with vulgarly tony roadhouses.)

The rhetoric of the story now changes again.

Wake up buddy. Jankovitch supposed to be loyally prone and deceased in the smouldering ruin, not snuck off from work in the cross-tracks bar when the elevator spontaneously disintegrated, providing half-cut Jankovitch an all-too-neat opportunity to duck the warrant, the women and possible pregnancies, the big debts, the whole grieving family.

This paragraph poses a problem. It would seem on a first reading to be the words of the story’s narrator but Jarman has avoided or disguised direct authorial intervention. So perhaps we are not reading with sufficient intensity?

The words loyally prone are funny and should alert us. It struck me that if we emphasized the words supposed and not in "not snuck off from work and if we paid attention to providing half-cut Jankovitch an all-too-neat opportunity to duck" we can read these words as the dozing Janovitch thinking of himself in the third person, as a character, a clever and wily man who has outsmarted the law, escaped from debt and pregnant women with their claims and his whole grieving family. This is Jankovitch seeing himself as a Jack the Lad brilliantly escaping from the tedium of family life.

Such a reading chimes, of course, with God and country being toasted, all constraints removed, all platitudinous expectations denied.

Missouri: Show Me state, population 4,676,000. Capital: Jefferson City. Best diner in Nine Eagles county: Hines Cedar Crest for Sunday brunch, fried chicken and eggs and thirty-one salads or Saturday night fish fry with their special recipe for carp and catfish. Jankovitch stares at the outlines of her breasts shifting in a soft halter top. Yes yes. I’m awake now.

Again we should read this not as authorial but as Jankovitch’s thoughts. The guide book detail of population size and capital city, the detail of the menu of the best diner in Nine Eagles county, thirty-one salads or Saturday night fish fry—all this comically serious detail, plonkingly delivered, is Jankovitch’s self-justification for his flight from the boredom of this life.

How to capture all this in your voice and delivery? I think I’d be trying different takes on the word salads, food towards which I suspect Jankovitch would feel contempt. And the special recipe for carp and catfish—I think I’d play up on special recipe and down on those two bottom feeders.

The excerpt’s final lines play with s-sounds.

The outlines of breasts shifting in a soft halter top. Yes yes. I’m awake now.

The yes yes sounds, (not separated by the conventional comma) suggest the slight slur of his still not fully awakened state and these and the other s sounds (which the reader might lightly emphasize) perhaps suggest what he is awakening to.

When readers-as-actors have won through to answers to these Hows, all the knots of Whats will have untangled themselves and now remains the task of putting all the paragraphs together to judge the rhetorical flow of the whole.

*

Where does all this consummate razzle-dazzle come from? The short answer is the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

In the Salon des Refusés issue of CNQ (No. 74), an issue of the journal that will live on in Canadian writing history, Mark Jarman wrote about our story:

The story Cowboys Inc. was a watershed for my approach to writing. There are stories in my first collection that I wrote before Cowboys Inc., and stories I wrote after Cowboys Inc., and I can tell which are which.

I wrote Cowboys Inc. while at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I lived in a wrecked house that cost me $50 a month and I worked with Bharati Mukherjee, Clark Blaise, Barry Hannah, and the late poet Larry Levis, and in Iowa City I met Ray Carver. I had driven numerous road trips through the Dakotas and Colorado and Wyoming and Montana and Iowa en route to the west coast and Alberta, and back to Iowa and Chicago, and I had a shoebox of notes, matchbooks, cocktail napkins, maps, scraps, beer coasters, and postcards. I wanted to write a road piece. I wanted a triangle, and I wanted to make use of the guy I worked with as a janitor, a guy who popped speed and was always ready to punch someone. I also wanted a dead man as an ongoing character, and I wanted a sex scene on an ironing board (the ironing board was not biographical; I never iron).

Usually I would try to make a story as smooth as possible, work on every word and segue. Some earlier stories took forty drafts. But Cowboys Inc. quickly hit a point where I had an early draft, albeit a draft with jagged edges. The story wasn’t easy to digest, was not A to B, and not tied up with a pretty bow, but I realized I liked it that way. It had the power of pastiche or collage, a quality that was accidental and brutal, but attractive to my eye and ear.

I felt I had stumbled onto something evocative, broken through to a new way for me to smash together matters of head and heart. Not everyone agreed, some reviewers said to skip that story and read the others, but I was happy with it.

Jarman was much influenced by the Zeitgeist, by the matrix of the pulp and pulse of pop culture, by the tone of the times, by post-punk bands such as The Jesus and Mary Chain, Brian Eno, Talking Heads’ The Big Country, to Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, to Wall of Voodoo’s Call of the West, music of geography, maps and movement. When younger he was listening to urban blues from Chicago, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, and the harmonica legend Little Walter.

In his voracious reading there were probably faint echoes of Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey—and he was reading Alice Munro—what Canadian writer wasn’t?—but he was more in tune emotionally and technically with Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, The Violent Bear It Away, and A Good Man Is Hard to Find, with the Joan Didion of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, with Renata Adler’s short stories in The New Yorker, with Tom McGuane’s Panama, a book that obsessed him.(I was rather surprised to learn that he hadn’t been reading Harry Crews.)

When we were chatting one day about this mélange of influences, he said It was fragmentation that interested me. Fragmentation as an end in itself. In some of Laurie Anderson’s pieces there was a strange looping-in of fragments, sounds, pirated conversation, a sort of layering, other stuff, ‘found material’ I suppose you could call it . . . fragmentation as a way of feeling a way in deeper.

He paused.

Of course, he said. Eliot did all this so long ago.

Jarman’s assaults on form, his attacking his medium, when seen in perspective, are simply new expressions of necessary assaults that have been going on for centuries, assaults to tear away the veil of language that covers everything with a false familiarity. Coleridge writes of Wordsworth stripping away the film of familiarity. Wordsworth in his Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) stated that he had repudiated what is usually called poetic diction and claimed that his poems were written in the real language of men. Shelley wrote that Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world. The Russian Formalists wrote of ostranenie—making strange. Ezra Pound vigorously mucked-out the Augean Stables of Georgian prose, yelling Make it new! Samuel Beckett wrote in a 1937 letter to Axel Kaun:

And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask.

Two major influences on Jarman’s style and reach were Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson. In another CNQ article, Jarman wrote:

The wild southern writer Barry Hannah was teaching at Iowa when I went to school there. His collection of stories, Airships, was a huge influence on me; it was liberating to see the way he’d mash up a sentence; he made me realize it didn’t have to be noun verb, noun verb. And his language was a weird, risky, inspiring mix of Elizabethan and cracker. Testimony of Pilot, from that book, is a great, great story.

Barry died of a heart attack in Oxford, Mississippi this past March and I saw his obituary in the New York Times. The obit spoke of his novels and his attempt at Hollywood screenplays, but he said he was a short story writer first, a fragmentist, with an imagination calibrated to the short burst. I like that idea. I think I’m calibrated that way and I’m going to keep living that line from a dead man.

The story does it for me. The short form has parameters and it works for me because of the parameters. Don’t fence me in, the cowhands sing out west, but perhaps I like being confined. I think the