The Porcupine's Quill

‘Paul Glennon is a rare bird. You would never guess it from his photo on the final page of this debut collection. He stands quite ordinarily under a snowy spruce tree in what could easily be Ottawa, his home since 1975. Contextually Canadianized, he squarely faces the camera, quietly earnest and unthreatening. It’s a perfectly expected portrait of a fledgling Canuck writer -- and perfectly misleading. This bird’s song is complex, refreshingly impudent and previously unknown.’

Paul Glennon makes a commanding debut with a writing style that is both quirky and elusive. His stories -- strange, yet funny -- are about madmen, paranoiacs and the allegorically burdened. For the characters in these stories life is a board game to which we have lost, or perhaps never had, the instructions. Their predicaments are impossible, absurd but strangely genuine. A husband wonders if his wife has always been made of wood. A scientist suspects his left hand is plotting against him. A tourist visits a museum dedicated to his own failed romance. The world is trying to communicate something to these characters, but they cannot interpret it.

These stories navigate an unusual course between science fiction, satire and psychology. It makes for a journey that is strange, disturbing and surreally comic.

Table of contents

The Museum of the Decay of Our Love
My Babylon Cells
How Did You Sleep?
The Terror
The Triangle Man
The Bear Story
One Hand
Self-Loathing Stymies Council
Reminiscence
Chrome
The Manikin
Via Crucis: A Retrospective
A History of My Mistakes
Touched
Icarus’s Sister
Save the Barbers
An Anthology of Nestorian Literature
Our Flotation on the Bourse
The Secret Agent

Review quote

‘Glennon, however, is an inspired and skillful writer. His rhythm is nearly flawless, and I ended up wishing he had written these as prose poems. ‘‘Chrome’’ is one story that is beautifully realized: a man awakes to find that everything has a sheen of chrome. The narrator’s fascination leads him inward and away from people, towards (ironically) the almost hyper-delicious nature of the visual and sensual. Sometimes the surface of things has its compensations.’

—Andrew Lesk, Canadian Literature

Review quote

‘Paul Glennon is a rare bird. You would never guess it from his photo on the final page of this debut collection. He stands quite ordinarily under a snowy spruce tree in what could easily be Ottawa, his home since 1975. Contextually Canadianized, he squarely faces the camera, quietly earnest and unthreatening. It’s a perfectly expected portrait of a fledgling Canuck writer -- and perfectly misleading. This bird’s song is complex, refreshingly impudent and previously unknown.

‘In One Hand, a man tries to piece together the final weeks of a friend’s life from the scribbled notes he has left in an edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. The friend, having by his own admission not ‘an artistic bone in [his] body,’ borrows da Vinci’s technique of using left-hand, mirror-image writing, in hopes that the left-hand/right-brain neural connection might stimulate his creative side. As his left-hand notes produce involuntary palindromes, anagrams and increasingly mysterious poetry, his right-hand, analytical prose tries to make sense of the psychical Pandora’s box he’s opened. The final left-hand note offers two riddles that explain the friend’s untimely death.

‘The Museum of the Decay of Our Love describes a scholar’s visit to a Central American history museum. The tale hovers dreamlike between dry events and the inner sparks they ignite. The museum’s inert displays, steeped in the mythology of conquest and revolution, become interior metaphors for the man’s own failed ambition in love. What feels initially too schematic evolves into a subtle probing of how external things morph into symbols as they enter the mind. The award-winning title story offers a bracing and revealing reconception of a very mundane sort of domestic squabbling. Other tales amuse with their satirical quirks, or wrest attention with deft observation.

‘In Self-Loathing Stymies Council, we meet Mayor Nolan Plunge, a grandstanding windbag who bleats to council that self-loathing is ‘‘a Nessus’s shirt’’ he wears daily. In Chrome, we’re treated to a fluid metallic world evoked with keen imagination and riveting detail.

‘Glennon’s charms have much to do with his originality, a willingness to veer from the safer formal path. Some stories feel overly glib or disappointingly contrived, and his repeated authorial winking is sometimes too obvious. But the eccentric and penetrating psyche at work here should not be missed.’

—Jim Bartley, Globe and Mail

Review quote

‘In his first collection of short stories, How Did You Sleep? (Porcupine’s Quill, 2000), Ottawa writer Paul Glennon eschews dirty realism and thinly-veiled autobiography for clever conceits and absurdly-extended metaphors. In one story, the president of a corporation is voted out of power by his executive board, which then votes unanimously to change him into a bear. In another, a man awakes to discover that his entire world appears to him as being made of chrome. Fiction which is funny and smart, without being either cloying or disposable, is a rare commodity in Canadian literature.’

—Nathan Whitlock, Danforth Review

Excerpt from book

My Babylon Cells

On high balconies and in certain quiet restaurants is when I’m most aware of it, when I have to be most cautious, but it is always there, an impulse to self-sabotage, a sudden compulsion to do the wrong thing. Where does it come from, this voice that urges us to jump from that high balcony or to shout that inappropriate word across the restaurant table? For the longest time I had no idea. I suspected it was some psychological flaw.

But I’m not modern enough. I’ve never been satisfied with psychological explanations of my inner conflict. The urge to these self-destructive acts is too real, too physical. It is like some dormant suicidal muscle or organ inside me. I can completely imagine, in exact detail, the thing I do not want to do. I can feel within my legs the leap that would propel me over the balcony railing, the breath that would hurl the obscenity from my lungs.

The medieval view of human behaviour as determined by elemental fluids like phlegm and bile always seemed right to me. I can understand how these humours might wage war and negotiate truces that control a body’s temperament. I fall on the side of nature rather than nurture in the behavioural debate, and believe that much can be explained by genetics. DNA supplies the modern humours, the chromosomes that at meiosis form up in soldierly battle lines and fall together in hand-to-hand combat to claim the right to determine our identity. I have to believe in genetics; it is the only thing that gives our bodies any unity. Without it we’re merely a tangle of tenuously linked organs, a mess of heterogeneous cells connected by the mere biological whim that threw them together into the sack of our skin.

DNA, a genetic identity, allowed me to think that the rebellious voice within me was a phantom, some echo, something that was not really a part of me. Other people were troubled by this urge, this will to and immediate fear of self-destruction, weren’t they? I persuaded myself that it was a cultural thing. But I was deluding myself.

There’s this stuff called mitochondria. Think back to your grade ten biology. You might remember the word, if not its meaning. I know I certainly didn’t pay much attention to it, but I came across it again not too long ago, in a borrowed physiology text. There it was, the explanation, the damning truth revealed by the same DNA that had been my refutation, my defence, the line of entrenchment between the me and the not-me.

Mitochondria do not share our DNA. It is as simple as that. A body may be a fortress, but there are sappers inside, foreign DNA in the very building materials of our bodies.

I’ve done some investigation and this is the history of their infiltration as far as I can reconstruct it. It started a long time ago, before I or any other multicelled thing ever glycolysized or oxygenated blood, before life became multicellular, when we were whole and complete in one cell. We were undermined from the beginning, sold out by our cells. Mitochondria are bacteria, simple, stupid, hardly alive. They invaded the single-celled creatures that are our ancestors, exploiting some protozoan weakness to insinuate themselves inside the cell walls. This happened once, only once. In one moment of weakness we let the bacterial interloper inside and that was aeons ago. But as we evolved, they remained within us, growing up within our body’s fortress. It may not have been entirely their decision of course. Our weak unicellular ancestors found them useful.

It might have been different though, if we’d been more even-handed, if we’d continued the partnership, the symbiotic relationship with the little purple bacteria, but we became proud as we evolved. We demoted them -- enslaved them. No, I will not refrain from anthropomorphizing my own mitochondria.

Mitochondria have toiled for ages within our cells doing those essential but negligible tasks, producing energy from digestive raw materials and oxygen. And now that we depend on them, now that we can’t evict them, they want to get out. They’d like to break the contract they made with us, to leave the cell walls that once protected them. But we can’t let them. We have built this great complex structure on their backs, and now the slaves are rebelling. I am sure they are conscious, sure they have finally recognized themselves. After ages of obedience and subservience, they recognize that they’re different, that they are prisoners, in exile. They yearn for a homeland, for repatriation, for escape, but much as we might like to, we can’t allow it. We’ve come too far to expel them now; we can’t live without them.

And I suppose they also realize that their dream of escape, of life beyond the cell wall, is impossible, so they’ve descended to terrorism, to sabotage. They take every opportunity to smash the machine that oppresses them. They would rather destroy me and themselves at the same time than remain captive in my Babylon cells. So in moments of weakness, it is the mitochondria that produce a rush of steroids, that surge of energy in the knees that would propel me off that balcony or in front of that speeding car.

Knowing all this is no comfort to me. How could it be? What solution does it offer? I am at war with myself. My enemies are within me and are working at every opportunity to sabotage me. Within you too; I’m not alone in this, but you would be better not to know. Recognizing them -- understanding them, even, against all reason and self-interest sympathizing with them -- makes it worse, makes me more susceptible to their attacks. So I remain wary, more on guard against myself than ever. I suspect myself continually, remain alone and attentive, and, not wanting to tempt my rogue organelles, avoid high balconies and delicate situations.

Excerpt from book

Self-Loathing Stymies Council

Council met again last night in a last-ditch attempt to come to terms with the municipal self-loathing problem. Despite submissions from staff, the provincial government and community groups, council could not resolve the troublesome issue. ‘We’ve done a lot of soul-searching, but everyone’s so firmly entrenched, it’s difficult to make any progress. Unless something changes we’re at an impasse,’ said Mayor Nolan Plunge after the meeting.

Little was achieved by the night’s disputations. It was a night like too many others before it. No viable alternatives to busing or dumping of despair emerged, but these initiatives remain confounded by not-in-my-backyard attitudes and fears that a municipal self-loathing dump would depress local property values. Outside council chambers one long-time resident complained that, ‘This has been going on for so long. They’ve done study after study and nobody’s done anything about it. It’s sickening. We’re all really just fed up with the whole thing.’

At times the council chamber looked like it was hosting a shouting match rather than a debate on the Sisyphean nature of human existence. Many seemed satisfied with finding someone to blame. Some representatives accused the media of exacerbating the problem by magnifying the look of the other. One resident blamed the death of God, another the dissolution of role and identity. Most blamed themselves, but Mayor Plunge took his share of criticism. Perennial mayoral opponent Ann Opellung accused the mayor of grandstanding. Mayor Plunge, who campaigned last year on a ticket designed to appeal to voter apathy said that his own self-loathing was ‘a Nessus’s shirt’ that he wore every day. He reacted bitterly when Opellung countered it was more like the emperor’s new clothes. ‘That’s the worst of it,’ the mayor responded sombrely, ‘Our self-loathing is so self-important, so fashionable, so farcical, it only makes us more loathsome.’ His confession seemed to settle the meeting down a bit, and opened the discussion for new ideas.

Conservatives on the council made a call for old-fashioned stoicism and self-reliance. Even while they acknowledged that this urge was nostalgic and embodied an outmoded positivistic view of the self, they felt it was important to do something --- anything. Mayor Plunge refused to be moved from his morass. ‘I don’t want to do something just for the sake of doing something. Nor do I just want to spend our way out of the crisis. There must be a plan, a purpose.’

But neither he nor anyone else in the room was able to supply this purpose. Though travel and personal journeys were put forward, there was no broad support for this solution. ‘Really, it’s just exporting the problem,’ explained local ennui activist Pol Nolngen. ‘If the self is a burden in your laundry room or in the staff cafeteria, it will be just as much of a burden in Benares or Fort Lauderdale.’

Reacting to a suggestion that the business community take a more active role in the problem, a representative of the board of trade quoted figures from other jurisdictions where corporate sponsorship of self-loathing has been tried unsuccessfully. He showed a graph that demonstrated that corporations already contribute significantly to the economy of nausea and claimed that the market should be allowed to sort itself out. ‘So far we’ve looked on it as a problem. I suggest we try to see self-loathing as an opportunity.’

Staff took advantage of the reflective mood that followed this comment to table their own proposal, but opposition to the so-called Annihilation of Consciousness plan was vocal. Members of a group calling themselves the Coalition for Persistence in the Face of Absurdity shouted down the distraught town planner when he protested that their petition was received after the deadline for public submissions. In the ensuing debate, a representative of the local Synchytic Religious Foundation read a letter signed by the bishop of the Roman Catholic archdiocese, the United Church moderator and the head of the rabbinical college expressing the hope that ‘by looking to a higher meaning beyond the temporal and the individual we might see some hope of a way ahead.’ This presentation was met with jeers, snickers and mock retching noises. As the debate descended into chaos, one resident even blamed the landscape, lamenting that the monotony and monoculture of lawns perpetuated a culture of sameness and dissatisfaction. He was dismissed by most present as a crank and fined for violating the pathetic fallacy bylaw.

It was early morning when the meeting finally broke up. Nothing was really resolved. Council, staff and attendees merely exhausted themselves with recriminations, unspoken hopes, false ideals and recollections of past failures. Councillors postponed the conclusion with points of order and routine business. Many waited for a rumoured appearance by the Norwegian performance art troupe Deus Ex Machina (literally ‘Zeus’s former Mechanic’). When it became clear that this much vaunted comic relief was not going to materialize, a final motion was passed to revisit the issue at the next meeting, the meeting dissolved, and the attendees drifted home to their beds and no doubt fitful sleep.

Unpublished endorsement

‘How Did You Sleep is highly innovative and well-wrought. It intrigues in its layered texture, it discomforts and richly rewards its reader.’

—Dionne Brand

Unpublished endorsement

‘Here’s inventive writing of a very high order -- very nuanced, very droll. ... a voice I want to hear much more from as soon as possible.’

—T. F. Rigelhof

Unpublished endorsement

‘The author, while creating a work that is by times whimsical, by times dark, has succumbed to neither sentimentality nor predictability. The story which unfolds is presented to us almost entirely in image and metaphor: a risky undertaking but one that, in the end, leaves the reader satisfied. What has been accomplished here is really quite remarkable.’

—Jane Urquhart