Charles Bernstein | Pitch of Poetry / 2016

pitching poetry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Bernstein Pitch of Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)

 

Charles Bernstein’s new collection of poetic essays, Pitch of Poetry is precisely that: a “pitch” for innovative and challenging poetry, and a statement about the “tune” or “key,” the sound of poetry itself. Bernstein’s poetry is necessarily a thing made out of pitch, the black, sticky substance of coal or wood tar:

 

                 Poetry’s the thing with feathers (tethers) tarred on, as

                 in Poe’s “system” of Tarr and Fethering (fathering).

                 The kind of poetry I want gums up the works.

                      A tangle of truths.

 

    Of course, from the very beginning Bernstein’s always fought for a poetry of leaps and fissures, the in-between’s of logic and irrationality; but here he furthers and refines his argument through, first a series of short essays that reiterate his ideas of “sounding the word,” and what was once called, through his and Bruce Andrews’ promotion, “Language” poetry, restating his concerns with “disjunction, fragment, recombination, collage, overlay, and constellations,” while redefining poetic genres such as “prose poetry,” “free writing,” “The New Sentence,” Williams’ “Sprung Lyric,” eco-poetics, performance, and other possible poetic inclinations, including areas of “translation, transcreation, idiolect, and nomadics.”

       In the second part of the book, the “pitch” itself, Bernstein tackles long and shorter essays on his influences and the contemporary figures he admires in order to define the territory, so to speak: Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Paul Celan, Barbara Guest, Jackson Mac Low, Robin Blaser, Robert Creeley, Larry Eigner, John Ashbery, Hannah Weiner, Haraldo de Campos, Jerome Rothenberg, and in the latter category, Maggie O’Sullivan, Johanna Drucker and others (in full transparency, he even says some kind words about me, both my own poetry and publishing). Not all of these essays are equally convincing, but together they lay out a kind landscape which helps any reader comprehend what Bernstein the critic and poet finds of interest, and in so doing establishes a broad range of his bases—the all-important territory of his poetic embracement.

      The next section, devoted to 11 interviews and conversations seemed, when I first scanned this book, to be the least interesting. I’d already read so many other interviews and participated in a few with Charles myself. Yet this large swath of self-revelation is in fact the most poetic and revealing. In several of them, Bernstein—a highly gifted talker who is often given to linguistic arpeggios is particularly charming with foreign correspondents such as the Nepalese Yubraj Aryal, the Canary Island writer Manuel Brito, and the French interview Penelope Galey-Sacks. With these writers he obviously feels freer to restate his interests and turn them over in his own mind, exploring the depths of his numerous poetic commitments over the years. A passage from the Galey-Sacks essay will have to suffice as an example:

 

              You said something interesting at the conference yesterday:

              that the intimations of verse occur on the teleological horizon

              of the possible. Yet you’re also presenting language poetry

              as breaking with convention, and I imagine you mean

              breaking with American convention specifically? How does

              this idea of continuity tie in with the idea of rupture, the

              idea of breaking? You said yourself that there was a con-

              tinuity in your work as well as an evolution—an expansion of

              yourself. You are yourself an expanding poet, and you are

              expanding through language…how do these intimations of

              verse occur on the teleological horizon of the possible? To

              cite Eliot, how do you connect your beginnings with your

              endings?

 

              There are different overlapping strands that twist and loop

              back, as in a Möbius strip or Klein bottle. The issue of con-

              vention is an important one, and it relates to the idea of process.

              The best formulation for me is one indebted to Emerson by

              way of Cavell: “aversion of conformity in the pursuit of new

              forms.” The concept of aversion—which is a swerving-away-

              from—is more appealing and also more audacious than the

              idea of breakage and transgression. Still, in poetry the difference

              between those terms is more about emotion and desire than

              accurate philosophical description or decision. And so there

              are reasons why some poets talk about transgression and

              breakage, or coupure, blows (Le quatre cents coups). And in

              France you have that, of course, partly with the French Revolution

              itself versus the British Revolution; when you’re cutting off

              heads, that’s a vivid image for this spectrum. But what’s interes-

              ting about aversion or swerving—to think of it in Lucretian

              terms—is that you actually feel the process of moving away

              and moving toward rather than a splitting or disconnection or

              decoupling. That’s what I interested in as a poet. I’m interested

              in the rhythmic relationships that occur, moving in, around, and

              about convention. Because my work is entirely dependent upon

              convention.

 

I wish I could quote further, but that would be to repeat the wonders of this book itself.

      Yet, the last section, “Bent Studies,” is the most remarkable, simply because the author jumps onto the tightrope, challenging his ideas and wit to the full. Here, with a “whoosh & higgly hoot & a he-ho-hah,” Bernstein takes on a remarkable cast of “Countrymen, Cadets, Soldiers, Monkeys, a French Doctor, Porters, an Old Man, Apparitions, Witches, Professors, etc, along with the ghosts of Poe, Dickinson, Williams, Blake, Crane, Whitman, Mallarmé, Emerson, Wittgenstein, and Fanny Brice to explore and celebrate his idea of the messiness of real poetry. In the process he brilliantly lampoons academic writing, particularly taking justified pot-shots at D. W. Fenza, executive director of Associate Writing Programs (who argues that it is “morally repugnant” to question the merits of the literary prize system), The New York Times Book Review (which I, myself, have taken to task for their “doublethink” self-complacency), the New York Review of Books, and other official “protectors of poetry” who apparently want their poetry squeaky-clean and sweet, or, as Bernstein implies, to not really want poetry in their lives.

       In a poetry of “pitch” and “tar,” such a vision of the poem simply cannot exist, and Bernstein seems to be delighting in debunking such delimited notions. Personally, I’ve seldom had as much fun in jumping into the muck and mess of the necessary poetry wars before. Pitch of Poetry made me laugh—and sometimes even cry—but never was I bored or disinterested for a moment. How many critical works can be described in that manner? If you love poetry, and you don’t mind a major poet attempting to sell you on his ideas, I’d advise you dive into this work immediately. And if you take your poetry serious, then this book is a must.

       If my title suggests Bernstein might be a kind of genius-devil, the book’s cover probably reveals something closer to the truth, that he is a kind of Christ-like figure nailed to the wall with words.

 

Los Angeles, New Year’s Eve, 2016

Reprinted from Hyperallergic Weekend (April 9, 2016).

Carey Perloff | Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View / 2022

life meeting art

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carey Perloff  Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View (London: Bloomsbury / Methuen Drama, 2022)

 

Theater director Carey Perloff’s 2022 publication Pinter and Stoppard: A Director’s View is many things at one time: a memoir of her own encounters as both director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco from 1992-2018 and before that of New York’s Classic Stage Company from 1986-1992 with the two most significant British playwrights of the 20th century Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard; a handbook of how to direct their plays, particularly given the fact that on several occasions she worked in close collaboration with the playwrights during the rehearsals and early productions; and, perhaps most importantly, a sophisticated analysis of their works based on her own readings, their personal comments, and the history of critical dialogue that proceeded her involvement with their works.

      I can’t recall when I so enjoyed a book of theater history and artistry. But then Perloff has long been an acquaintance and over the years those of us who have known her are no longer surprised by her intellect and immense knowledge of theater, her instinctual insights into each work she and her companies have produced, and her utter enthusiasm for all things concerning language, particularly that of the theater.

     One’s first reaction to the book, obviously, is that she could not have chosen two more different British playwrights, differences with she herself summarizes in her “Introduction”:

 

“…It might appear that the differences between these two writers outweigh the similarities, when viewing them across the landscape of post-war English theater. Pinter is a playwright of intense observation, with an uncanny ability to mine the simplest of situations for the hidden current of menace, violence, and power play underneath. His is a drama mystery, of subtext, of terror. ….His plays usually take place in a single space, in an atmosphere so denuded of superfluous detail that the slightest move is a radical act. He is uniquely able to take seemingly ordinary speech and lift it onto the plane of poetry without ever disconnecting it from the guts and heartbeat of his characters. Stoppard, by contrast, is a writer of ideas. Following his own internal dialectic, he sets off the create characters and situations that can best reveal his own debates in dramatically satisfying ways. ‘I’m a playwright interested in ideas and forced to invent characters to express those ideas,’ Stoppard told the critic Mel Gussow in 1979.”

 

     Yet by the time she is finished, we recognize that, despite the vast differences of how the works mean and are performed on the stage, there are perhaps just as many similarities between the two major figures of the late English theatrical revolution of the second-half of the 20th century.

      The most important similarity, perhaps, is that both playwrights are profoundly Jewish, something which has previously received little attention, but to which Perloff devotes an entire highly revealing first chapter. Her first paragraph indeed summarizes her discoveries about these two writers:

 

“If finding a playwright’s ‘voice’ is a key to realizing their work onstage…a crucial aspect of both Pinter’s and Stoppard’s life histories is that both are Jewish. Not only Jewish, but Central European Jews who came of age in the traumatic period of the Second World War and the Holocaust. ….In the New York, where Judaism is pervasive, the fact that these two major figures happened to be Jewish may seem inconsequential. I would like to argue that Pinter’s and Stoppard’s Jewish heritage ultimately had a profound impact upon their plays and is a useful angle to explore in the rehearsal room.”

      Speaking extensively of his ties to family and the Jewish traditions he inherited from his growing up in Hackney in London’s East End to parents very much bound up their Jewish heritage, Perloff quotes Pinter himself: “I’ve no religious beliefs whatsoever, but I’m still Jewish. I don’t know what that means, really, nobody ever does.” Through her discussions of The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and Mountain Language Perloff shows how the centrality of language, the continual sense of loss and displacement, and the importance of ritual in characters such as Goldberg in the first play, and the entire patriarchal family in The Homecoming echo from his cultural and religious roots. In The Caretaker she observes how characters such as Davies, “a man robbed of his name and identity and desperate to find a way to get to Sidcup to get his papers,” reveals just how permeated is Pinter’s consciousness by the Jewish world which often shared a sense of non-belonging with Kafka, one of Pinter’s favorite writers.

     By the time she was finished, I saw Pinter in an entirely new way, realizing just how radically different he was from the first wave of British playwrights of the 1950s and 1960s such as Alan Bennett, David Storey, Edward Bond, Alan Ayckbourn, Michael Frayn, John Arden, Simon Gray and Caryl Churchill and even from fellow Jewish writers such as Arnold Wesker who dealt specifically with Jewish themes and characters. For Pinter power lies in language and when that is taken away, even momentarily, it evidences a loss that is immediate and devastating.

       Stoppard, born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 with the name Tomas Staussler, was the son of a Jewish surgeon employed by the company hospital of the Bata shoe factory. That company’s owner had arranged for the evacuation of his Jewish employees to various world-wide factories to escape the inevitable invasion by Hitler. Accordingly, the young Stoppard, nicknamed Tomik, with his parents ended up in Singapore for two years before heading to Australia and being diverted to India, where by that time the boy called “Tommy” ended up with his mother and his elder brother Peter in Darjeeling. It was only later that he was told that his father had died.

       Stoppard’s memory of that revelation was: “For my part, I took it well, or not well, depending upon how you look at it. I felt almost nothing. I felt the significance of the occasion but not the loss. How had my father died? At sea? No one seemed to know. As far as I was told, he had simply disappeared.”

      The family remained in India for the duration of the war, an experience that Stoppard fondly recalls, afterwards moving to England (Retford, Derbyshire) where he attended school and quickly grew up to be an “honorary Englishman,” adopting the new language along with a new identity that only occasionally resulted in a slip that made him conscious of his transformation. Perloff quotes him in a Guardian interview: “I fairly often find I’m with people who forget that I don’t quite belong in the world we’re in. I find I put a foot wrong—it could be a pronunciation, an arcane bit of English history, and suddenly I’m there naked, as someone with a pass, a press ticket.” Perloff demonstrates how that sense of alien being, the temporarily loss of identity, haunts a play such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in which the two characters are not quite certain of who they are or what role they are to play in Hamlet’s world in which they find themselves.

       Yet Stoppard did not actually explore his own roots until later in his life, a lacuna driven primarily by his mother’s refusal to talk about her life in Czechoslovakia and her own family. When he finally met a distant cousin Sarka as a full adult at the National Theatre, when he asked, “How Jewish are we?” she replied that the family was completely Jewish and that most of the family had been lost to the gas chambers. He hadn’t even been quite certain that his own mother was Jewish. And it was only when Stoppard later met the daughter of one of his mother’s best friend, Vera, that she and Sarka took him to the Pinkas Synagogue, next to the famous Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, where he witnessed in the 1990s the names if 80,000 Czechs murdered by the Nazis during the war, names that included both the Becks (his mother’s maiden name) and the Strausslers.

 

      These discoveries eventually made their way into his plays, particularly in the Czech-based 2006 play Rock n’ Roll which Perloff bravely directed in San Francisco and in Leopoldstadt, which as I write this piece is about to have its premiere on Broadway. When Stoppard and his wife made a surprise visit to San Francisco in 2018 in celebration of Perloff’s farewell party from the A.C.T., they drove after down to Los Angeles to visit her mother Marjorie, whose parents had left with her from Vienna the day before the Anschluss. Marjorie had written a memoir The Vienna Paradox about growing up as a child in pre-war Vienna and traveling with her family to resettle in the US. And clearly those very issues were very much on Stoppard’s mind as he was working on that play, which premiered and quickly closed in London in 2020 because of the COVID pandemic. As Perloff reports: “Over a long afternoon, he asked her innumerable questions about pre-war Jewish life in Vienna. She was amused by how surprised he was about certain aspects of that complicated, assimilationist, culture-obsessed Jewish universe, and tried to make nuances clear to him,” just such issues that arise in Leopoldstadt. The guilt Stoppard now clearly felt for his previous ignorance of the truths of his own ancestors was played out, so Perloff reveals, in his Rock ‘n’ Roll, The Hard Problem, and The Invention of Love, discussed in a chapter titled “Anatomizing Guilt.”

      These two very different authors also shared a remarkable interest in observing, commenting on, and in Stoppard’s case actually remaking their plays in pre-production. Despite the many warnings Perloff had received about Pinter’s difficulty, given his media outbursts and his well-known disliking of US politics, the young director found the former actor and director completely caring and accommodating with regard to her actors David Strathairn, Peter Riegert, Richard Riehle, Miguel Perez, Jean Stapleton, Bill Moor, and Wendy Makkena at CSC. Although only occasionally interrupting Perloff’s own directorial comments, he was loathe to tell the actors how to play their roles and respected the characters he had created as individuals who were as unknowable as the humans around him, on several occasions quietly asking questions and posing answers that helped his fellow thespians to come to terms with his works and the figures they portrayed. Indeed, Perloff found his presence necessary and reassuring, and enjoyed the pleasure of working with someone who had had years of acting experience himself and was a brilliant director as well.

     With Stoppard she corresponded for long hours via fax wherein he would completely explain seemingly impenetrable scenes, often rewriting passages to make them clearer. Working with her in New York on his early play Indian Ink, he completely reconceived the ending of the play, restructuring it thoroughly and rewriting various moments.

      In both cases she appears to have become close friends with the playwrights neither of whom threatened her role as director but contributed to the final fuller dimensions of the actual productions.

        When I was younger I had long imagined, given my deep interest in theater, that I might someday be a theater director. With my abilities to rather thoroughly analyze theater works and my managerial affinities, I might have, in fact, been somewhat successful in such a role. But I cannot imagine conceiving the play with regard the wide range of details that Perloff outlines in relationship to the sets, lighting, and props. Particularly in Pinter’s plays in which the space is so particularly defined and free from unnecessary objects one has to think about how to reveal a staircase, as in The Birthday Party that leads to an invisible upstairs which is both a fortress to Meg and her boarder Stanley, and a territory to be breeched by Goldberg and the other intruders, or another, much longer staircase in The Homecoming which represents an entire kingdom to the males of the house and later to Ruth who will reign as their queen after her husband Lenny leaves her to them almost as a “homecoming gift.”

 

       How do you represent a box of Cornflakes to the audience, one of the most important props in The Birthday Party, particularly to viewers who cannot comprehend the importance of that staple in the post-World War II British diet? How do you shred newspapers into even strips as McCann is required to in the same play? Or how do you destroy a toy drum each evening, as the same play requires, without buying endless numbers of such drums for each production?

      How to create lighting that conveys the vast shifts of time and place that occur throughout Stoppard’s plays? These questions are not only brilliantly answered by Perloff, but the significance of their roles in these plays is thoroughly explained by the writer in terms of ambience and overall thematics.

      By the time I had finished Perloff’s book describing the works she had directed by Pinter and Stoppard—in a couple of cases in two different productions—I could not imagine them differently than the way she described them, and I wished to rush out immediately and see productions of them, even if they were conceived by other directors in completely different manners. I discovered, alas, that I had missed a production of The Birthday Party by a small Glendale-based theater by just a few weeks!

      If nothing else, I was convinced at book’s end by the genius of both the playwrights—both of whose work I had long admired—and their director. I have always believed that coincidence has something to do with evidence that one has made the appropriate decisions in life. And I was absolutely delighted, accordingly, when Perloff reported that in the midst of their A.C.T. production of Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, the cast met up by accident with the band that had helped to inspire the play. The Plastic People of the Universe had regrouped long after the events in the play, had somehow managed to stay together, and were suddenly performing in San Francisco.

      Perloff writes:

 

“We could not quite believe that those famous ‘pagans’ had shown up on our doorsteps just as we were trying to tell their story onstage. The night before their gig at the Independent, they came to see our production (in which we had used their music at strategic moments), and afterwards met with the audience, chatted with the cast, and sold merchandise which we all eagerly bought. …The next night, when our curtain came down, we all descended upon the music venue in our “Plastic People of the Universe” t-shirts, exulting at the sight of a group of passionate aging Czechs playing their unique brand of cacophonous, rebellious rock ‘n’ roll. The rest of the San Francisco audience, totally unaware of what this band had done to change the world, bopped along, happy in their ignorance. It was a surreal and moving example of life meeting art.”

 

Los Angeles, August 23, 2022

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2022).

Ivy Compton-Burnett | Manservant and Maidservant / 1948, 2001

the man who would not die

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ivy Compton-Burnett Manservant and Maidservant (published in the US as Bullivant and the Lambs) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948; reprinted New York: New York Review of Books, 2001)

It may sound by my title as if I am calling up shades of the Russian monk Rasputin to describe events in Ivy Compton-Burnett's masterful dialogue fiction. Horace Lamb, the dictatorial and peevish husband and father at the center of her fiction certainly outlives all manner of possible murders. Although none of the family and servants actually plot or enact Horace's brushes with death, they certainly all harbor some reticent desire for his demise.

     The fiction begins with the rather tyrannical father arguing with his cousin Mortimer or whether or not the fire is smoking. Mortimer's suggestion that the fire "appears" to be smoking outrages Horace, who cannot tolerate nor think of abstractions. For him, everything is concrete, "black or white," "yes or no"; and that problem is at the heart of his difficulties with others, who dream and plot, wish, scheme, or just desire!

     That first morning already hints of his own wife's exasperation with her husband. Called away to her ill mother, she is only too happy, it appears, to escape Horace's temper. What we don't yet know, but soon discover is that she plans to leave Horace and marry Mortimer, hoping that the children may join them.

     That is the first of the dark events that permeate Compton-Burnett's fiction, and build up a web of near melodramatic incidents that often seem at odds with the intelligent and witty commentary through which the story is told. Of the British dialogue fiction writers (Elizabeth Bowen, Ronald Firbank, Anthony Powell, Henry Green, and Evelyn Waugh among them) Compton-Burnett is the purest in the sense that almost all of her tale is told through conversation rather than description. And since almost all of her figures—except perhaps for lowly servants George and Miriam—speak so literately, it is hard to imagine them playing in what at times appears almost to be a Victorian gothic romance.

     There are no ghosts in the Lamb house, just the personal secrets and frailties of the entire family.  While Horace is obviously the most flawed, and the least likeable figure, he perceives himself to be the most rational being in the house. Once he has gotten wind of his wife's intentions, he begins also to see himself as a kind of tortured man, betrayed, a bit like Lear, by his family members.

     Rather than railing against events, however, Horace determines to change his relationship with his children, which he achieves, bringing them from open fear and opposition into a more-loving family circle wherein he reads to them, embraces them, and opens himself to their expressions in a way he had not previously done. Despite her intentions, his wife, Charlotte, does return, and discovering the changes in family life, realizes she cannot now leave without losing her children.

     Mortimer perceives that his relationship with her cannot persist, particularly since she is more in love with her children than with him. While accepting Charlotte, Horace sends Mortimer away, hoping he will marry a local girl and live in the mill house. But Mortimer breaks with the girl when he discovers that it she who has read Charlotte's letter to him and revealed the truth to Horace. With a small allowance from Horace (who controls what is his wife's money) Mortimer leaves the Lamb house, staying in a rented room in another town.

     While neither Mortimer nor Charlotte have sought Horace's death, they were certainly ready to spiritually and emotional destroy him through their acts. And from these events Horace gives rise to new suspicions he might have previously been unable to imagine. At times his fears grow into a kind of paranoia.

     Nonetheless, Horace is secretly pleased when Mortimer unexpectedly returns to the house, having missed their conversations.

     Hardly has family life returned to normal, however, before Horace, trying to sort out events, takes a walk in the direction of a bridge which most of the family members know to be ready to collapse, but have failed to notify Horace. His two sons, Marcus and Jasper, watch him as he passes, and soon recognize that he is on the way to the bridge. At first they think about warning him, but realizing it is probably too late, ponder what his death might mean to them and the family. Within a few moments, however, they are penitent for their thoughts and come running into the house with tears and cries of their fears.

     People are called forth to check on Horace, as the family waits in horror. But Horace returns unscathed, a recently placed sign having warned him away from crossing. When he hears the series of events, however, he is shocked by what he quickly perceives was his sons' momentary desire for his death. His reaction, as of old, is extreme. He seems to threaten no possibility of communication or even, in their minds, expulsion from the family.

     While Mortimer and Charlotte argue for their innocence and his patience, Horace grows angrier and angrier:

 

         So I am placed like this. My children desire my death. That is their feeling for their

         father. I have escaped from it to find it is what is wished for me. And I can honestly

         say that I have never wished it for anyone else. I have never grudged anyone the

         right to live.

 

This from a man who has seldom allowed others to be what they might.

     As Marcus later retorts:

 

         We are afraid of you. You know we are...Your being different for a little while has

         not altered all that went before. Nothing can alter it. You did not let us have

         anything; you would not let us be ourselves. If it had not been for Mother, we would

         rather have been dead. It was feeling like that so often, that made us think dying an

         ordinary thing. We had often wished to die ourselves.

    

     A third "attempt" on Horace's life occurs when the young servant George, ill-treated by the head butler, Bullivant, and virtually ignored by the family, is discovered stealing treats from the cupboard which he plans to award to his friends. Called into a conversation with Horace, the boy refuses to attend, claiming his day off. What he plans to do is to kill himself by leaping upon the bridge, leaving Horace to suffer the consequences of guilt.

     George cannot bring it off, but instead removes the "Danger" sign. Again, Horace approaches the bridge, wondering if it might now be repaired, before discovering the sign a ways off along with a knife that he has given his soon.

      Accusations again resound throughout the Lamb home, only to be cleared when neighbors report having seen George with the knife a few hours earlier in the town general store. George, who has returned to the house, is upbraided—although in kinder terms than Horace might have accomplished—by Bullivant.

     Pneumonia, a far more dangerous opponent, takes over Horace's body, and, as the family quietly suffers in silence, his end seems to be near. The wonder of Compton-Burnett's tale is that as Horace finally encounters a real threat to his life rather than the imaginary ones he has battled throughout the story, family members and servants grow more and more contrite, expressing their need for and love of their tyrannous father, who has been just if not wise in his behavior. And experiencing the weakness of his own body somehow changes Horace as well, as if he begins to perceive the human frailty in himself, not simply in others.

     Horace's miraculous resurrection is also a family reconstruction, each of them returning to their proper roles. Marcus and Jasper, along with Avery, Sarah, and Tamisin, can return to being children. Aunt Emilia, Charlotte, and Mortimer again become the core of love in this cold house. Bullivant, Cook, George and Miriam remain in loyal service to the whole. Horace, for all of his weaknesses and blunders, has once again survived.

 

Los Angeles, August 21, 2011

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (August 2011)