With an emphasis on fabulism, magic realism, and genre bending
Somewhere in the depths of winter, this review emerged. Thank you, Benjamin Lerner and Saratoga Living. I would have thanked you earlier, but I am just learning about it. Love the line, the “metaphors that underlie Davidson’s work serve as powerful catalysts for personal growth and reflection, prompting her readers to dive inward as they ponder the true meaning of intimacy and transcendence.”
Cimarron Review
Winter 2017
Issue 198
Quarterly
Review by Lâle Davidson
With prosy poems and poetic prose, Cimarron Review provides fodder for intelligent readers. Founded in 1967 and a member of CLMP, the magazine regularly nominates its writers to “notable contests.” The Winter 2017 issue is a clean, slim volume, the pages almost square and formatted with a lot of white space so the reader can breeze through. Of the 25 writers, 14 are male, and a different 14 had published one or more books, while 8 were either MFA graduates without publications, or had published in fairly unknown magazines.
Most of the poetry in this issue leans toward spare prose, sometimes based on a vivid anecdote that leaps deftly into philosophy. For example, Karen Skofield’s “Abbreviated Guide to Unusual Phobias” begins with a wry list of eccentric fears posed as questions, “If I abide crowds but not the man in the fringed vest…If children are welcome but identical twins cause sweating.” Then it builds to fears that have shaped civilization: “The fear that I will outlive/ my children is called parenting” and “A fear that the lion will never lie down with the lamb/ is called Revelations…”
Michael T. Young’s “High Dive” explores how body and mind navigates the laws of gravity, while Michelle Menting and Katharine Kaufman’s poems enter and exit dreams. Amy O’Reilly’s poem “Girls in the City” paints a vivid picture of girls playing sidewalk games that grow into adult despair: “…Like so many girls/ who become bigger girls. Fish in dim,/ shallow bowls. Their suns,/ wounds in the sky’s flesh…”
Just when you think you’ve figured out this magazines’ prosy esthetic, it springs a few poems on you which experiment with form, like Doug Ramspeck’s “Field Anatomy,” which is formatted like a double-spaced prose poem, but is written with choppy syntax and juxtaposed images, or a highly abstract poem, like Michael Hurley’s “Samuel Explains Departure:”
It will discredit you
to look too longingly
at a thing like this,
the way a laugh is
half
for the other person.
The poems make you work some, but not too hard before they yield rewards, which is always my personal preference.
In addition to the 25 poems, there are four short stories and two essays. The stories range between 8 and 14 pages, some straight up realism, and two that challenge.
Jessica Hollander’s “Oracle,” explores a relationship from a man’s point of view, whose emotions flicker on and off like the streetlight outside his apartment at twilight…”nervous about its judgment.” It finishes with a de rigueur unresolved but thought-provoking ending. Miriam Cohen’s realistic “Wife” deals with an old story in a vivid yet humble way, a woman’s rage at being cheated on, while William Haas narrates the downward mental spiral of a “one-hit wonder” in prose that is dense logic defying.
My favorite was Michael Biel’s “La Négresse,” narrated in first person, which starts out seemingly realistic, but gets stranger and stranger. The first person narrator tells the unlikely story of twins who turn out to be doppelgängers, who join him at a café in France. Narrated in tongue-in-cheek, false-British style, using words like “moue,” “chap,” and “a frisson of delight,” the narrator wanders farther and farther afield of logic, with observations, like, “I would have despaired of telling the two apart had I not noticed almost right from the start that Jack was right-handed and Jed was left… Shouldn’t all Jacks be left-handed? Marys right and Marthas left?” I’m not sure I understood it, but I think a send-up of narcissism.
That leaves me with the two essays. Both are richly figured, written by men dealing with male issues in not particularly male ways. “If It Had to Perish Twice,” contrasts childhood vignettes with adult vignettes to explore the complexity of intentional and unintentional racism and aggression. “A Man of Action” features the aggressions latent in a relationship of father and son.
All in all, Issue 198 of Cimarron Review delivers highly but subtly crafted mainstream writing with some boundary pushing pieces that provide fodder for the intelligent reader without demanding more than their due.
I wrote this review for NewPages.com, which posts news, information, and guides to literary magazines, independent publishers, creative writing programs, alternative periodicals, indie bookstores, writing contests, and more. Check it out here!
When I grabbed Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude off the shelf to re-read, I didn’t realize it was the 50th anniversary. Stifling my academic urge to write a long literary analysis, I’ll just tell you a few things that struck me the second and third time through.
There’s very little dialogue in the novel. It’s almost all narration, more like a vivid summary rather than a series of scenes. He’s taking a leaf from his grandmother’s storytelling oral tradition, in which the beauty of the story is in its shape rather than the individual characters’ progress. Add to this the narrative’s digressive tendency and spiraling treatment of time, and you get transported.
The narrative describes event after event, covering years in a paragraph, pausing to provide half a scene, then galloping twenty years into the future, then spiraling back to whatever the present was, and twirling off in a different direction following another character’s trajectory. Sometimes, he’ll be talking about one character and he’ll digress into other character’s life and follow them up to their death, then return to the original time period, but not necessarily the original character, and then follow the line of another character, like he’s tracing the branches of an enormous tree, which of course he is, the Buendía family tree.
He doesn’t use the past perfect tense to make clear when he’s going into flashback, or the subjective tense to flash forward, or any other signal when he returns to the main time period, as the famous first sentence exemplifies, encompassing three time periods, the first of which is never clarified: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aurelian Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” (1). It isn’t until the middle of the book that we get to the rest of the firing squad story, and then it’s almost a side note.
This tendency casts the reader awash in time, and develops the novel’s theme of time’s circularity and stagnant pockets, much like the mythical book Jorge Louis Borges wrote about in “The Garden of Forking Paths.”
The novel traces 100 years in the town of Macondo, from its founding by the Buendía family, through 32 civil wars lead by Colonel Buendía, through the arrival of capitalist enterprises in the form of the banana company with the attendant immigration of white foreigners, prostitutes and gamblers. The arrival of the capitalists culminates in a massacre of thousands of labor union protestors which the government hushes up. Then the town is washed away by “four years, eleven months and two days” (320) of rain, ending in the wildly decadent but transcendently pure lovemaking of the last Aureliano with his own aunt.
Having just recently traveled to Ecuador and studied Ecuador’s history and modern novels, I see better how the absurdity and circularity of the novel is shaped by Colombia and South America’s history.
Just like Ecuador, Colombia was invaded by the Spaniards who imposed an oppressive feudal system on the indigenous people, and it was both oppressed and liberated by the Catholic church. While Ecuador had 17 different constitutions since its independence, Colombia had nine civil wars between its independence from Spain in 1810 and 1850. Then there was the war of 1000 days from 1899-1903 in which 120,000 were killed, and then another civil war, “La Violencia” between 1848 and 1957 in which another 300,000 were killed, all between the liberals and conservatives (Britannica).
This is what much of the novel is about, and perhaps explains the theme of solitude that is the clear center of the book, though I must confess I don’t quite understand how. In what way is/was Columbia any more cut off from the world than any other Latin American country? Was he implying that Columbia is somehow more inbred and isolated than most countries? Is the rise and fall of Macondo an analogy for the whole country or just for Columbia’s rural past? Or just a certain kind of family? Why does he say that the Buendías were a “race…condemned to one hundred years of solitude” with “no second opportunity on earth?”
Though there are characters in this novel, they keep repeating, as do their names, so there are many Aurelian’s and José Arcadios, and after a while they all get mixed up in your mind, underscoring the circularity of time.
I love the character of “active, small and indomitable” Úrsula, Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s mother, who lives to be more than 100, running the household and family business until she is blind. I love the story Remedios the Beauty, who ascends bodily to heaven, and I love Úrsula’s great granddaughter Amaranta Úrsula who has a genius “for erotic mischief” and arrives home from Europe “leading her husband by a silk rope tied around his neck” and who shouts with laughter rather than alarm when she finds the family home is total chaos.
Though I can’t pretend to grasp it all, I adore this novel because of the whimsical blend of history, farce, passion, and magic typified in this winding sentence: “Jose Arcadio Buendía…gathered the men of the village… and he demonstrated to them, with theories that none of them could understand, the possibility of returning to where one had set out by consistently sailing east. The whole village was convinced that Jose Arcadio Buendía had lost his reason, when Melquíades [the traveling gypsy] returned to set things straight. He gave public praise to the intelligence of a man who from pure astronomical speculation had evolved a theory that had already been proved in practice, although unknown, in Macondo until then…” (5).
I think I’ll have to read it again.
Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Harper and Row. 1970.
In the 20s, 30s, and 40s, if I remember correctly, when the country was experiencing social and economic upheaval, Hollywood started putting out these cheesy, blockbuster, fantasy, feel-good movies along the lines of Zeigfield Follies. This period, not coincidentally, was also the birth of worldwide fascism. We seem to be here again, all of us drunk on disappointment and yearning for escape.
I don’t like to cut down the work of others, especially when it represents such an huge effort on the part of so many. This movie gave a lot of good jobs to a lot of people, with a cast that looked to be at least 45% black. I wanted to like it, but I didn’t. Hated it in fact. I wouldn’t have gone, except that my 16-year-old daughter invited me, and when your teenager asks to spend time with you, rule of thumb, drop everything and do it. I had to keep my scathing criticism to myself, because she loved it.
Let me start with the good stuff. Emma Watson did a great job, and who knew she could sing? The fact that she was able to take her role seriously and lend genuine character to this vapid role is a mark of true talent. Also, besides having a cast that 45% people of color at least (even though all the stars were white), there were a few bows to gayness. Kudos.
Now for the bad. First of all, Disney/Hollywood needs to realize that there are more than six fairytales, and we really don’t need another Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. Been there, done that five or six times.
Second, from the moment the old woman/witch appears in the first two minutes with thunderous music, a clap of lightning, and door thrown wide, I thought, “Where can they go from here?”
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good, escapist fantasy, and have high tolerance for Hollywood formula films that has some inventive subscript, like the humor in Guardians of the Galaxy. Then again, maybe I’ve finally seen one too many, and am one of the few that wants to shake Hollywood off its fanatical devotion to that formula to the exclusion of all else.
Even for Hollywood, though, this movie was overblown, hyper-stylized, and vapid. Do I repeat myself? Very well, I repeat myself. The movie contains multitudes of sins in tastefulness. It was the Disney cartoon made flesh. They didn’t try for any new interpretation, nuance or depth.
The set was beautiful but so ornate that it was constantly calling attention to itself. Maybe it was just that the one-dimensional characters couldn’t stand up to the set design. That’s all the movie was, really, a vehicle for set design. To be fair, the only seats left in the theater were about three feet from the screen, so that might be why I was choking on the set.
However, it’s ironic that a movie whose message was to look beyond the surface, was all about surface.
At one point the director appeared to be trying for depth by giving the beast a backstory (or maybe that was in the Disney original; I don’t care to waste time looking it up). The poor vicious prince was wounded by the death of his mother and twisted by an evil father. I wasn’t convinced. I doubt Trump was abused, for instance. I think he’s just insane and spoiled, but we can blame the Trump phenomenon for why this movie is so popular right now.
Also, they were trying for some depth when “Chip” the boy teacup asks his mother why they were all punished for the wicked prince’s callousness. She, played by Emma Thompson, explains because, “We all sat around and watched [the abuse] and did nothing.” But they were servants. Disney seems to forget that servants have no power, and could have done nothing. Oh well, it’s fantasy, right?
Still as John Gardner famously said in The Art of Fiction, and this isn’t an exact quote, the reason we believe that the bird is talking is that when it flies to the top of the house with a nut in its mouth and opens its mouth to speak, the nut obeys the laws of reality and rolls down the roof.
I just don’t understand why anyone would spend so much money on a project like this. Oh right. Money. It made a lot, and got rave reviews, even from the New York Times, which is testament to how bad American cultural tastes are right now, and how desperate we all are for pretty escapism as we navigate our way through this nightmarish political turning point of American history. I guess it gave a lot of jobs to artists….
Watch Moonlight instead.
I’m pleased to welcome a guest to my site, Holly Wright, as she reviews Hayao Miyazaki’ film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind:
One of the things I’ve liked most about the Hayao Miyazaki films I have seen is that characters that would typically be seen in black or white terms, are in shades of grey. In Nausicaa, one can see this element in Kushana, princess of Torumekia. Sure, she conquers a peaceful village and kills their beloved king, but she’s doing this because she believes this to be the only way. She knows that the giant warrior cannot be brought back to her homeland, not only because the creature is too large, but because they will use it for their own gain. She wants to destroy the toxic forests, and the monsters that inhabit it. For Kushana, she is saving the world and uniting the kingdoms for the good of humanity. I love Miyazaki’s ability to make what could be the antagonist into a real human. But of course, the real antagonist of the movie isn’t in one single person, just as it often isn’t in life. In this particular movie, the antagonist is in the establishment of beliefs centered around the toxic jungles and her creatures.
Kushana, in a sense, can be seen as the embodiment of these beliefs, but again, she is somewhat of a pawn rather than the most concerning opponent to the peace of their world. She’s humanity; even her body has been industrialized. She feels rejected by nature, and why wouldn’t she? She was literally scarred by its protectors, the insects, embedding in her a lifelong hatred for what had physically and emotionally maimed her. She wants so badly to believe in the ability and power of humanity to finally take their earth “back.” This desire leads her to place her conviction in the form of the giant warrior, able to destroy what is keeping humans from dominating. Unfortunately for Kushana, she misses what Nausicaä, the main character, has the wisdom to understand. Nature is not there to control. The people of the Valley of the Wind know that they must live beside the toxic jungles, that they must coexist with the terrors Kushana wishes to annihilate. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is the polar opposite of Kushana.
Nausicaä easily communicates with the animal world, rides the winds, and even cultivates what was believed to be toxic plant life. She is unafraid of the toxic jungles, leisurely laying within the toxic spores at the very beginning of the movie. As a child, she befriends a baby Ohmu, a creature that horrifies most of the people of the world. She still considers herself a component of the natural environment, and this is proven with every daring feat she accomplishes within the movie.
Clearly the movie is a story that has been told many times, but is still unheard. Nature is terrifying, and destructive, but it is also the giver of life and a creator of beauty. (Mind you, this is not the type of beauty that this word is now often inclined to be used for. Nature’s beauty doesn’t have to be just aesthetically pleasing to the eyes, it can even be found in things even humans do, things like love or altruism.) The movie warns of what happens when we cut off our connection with nature and take up a fight against it. It warns of what happens when we take and don’t return. Either we like it or not, we are a part of nature, it is evident in our abilities for destruction and creation, but if we lean too far on the side of destruction, it will not take long for nature to correct us, and then maybe we will be seeing the red eyes of the Omhu.
Holly Wright is a returning adult student currently pursuing her bachelor’s degree in psychology and hoping to be accepted into a PhD program at SUNY Albany. She initially wrote this for my SUNY Adirondack course in science fiction and fantasy, English 217. In between school work she likes to write, read, watch TED talks, and spend time with her husband, daughter, two cats, and dog.
A Writing Life: Lâle Davidson 