BLUE DUETS

Literature and Memory III: The Hare with Amber Eyes

2012-02-16T09:31:00.001-06:00

Ideas seem to ricochet through my nind like bullets in a steel-lined elevator. For my book on Woolf, I re-read Percy Lubbock's 1921 The Craft of Fiction, which Woolf said was the first book (after James's prefaces, of course) to call the novel an art. Lubbock was an acolyte of James's, and much of Lubbock's attempt to illustrate the resources of point of view makes use of examples from the master. Talking about The Ambassador, Lubbock notes that James's use of Strether as a narrator provides us with a kind of doubled layer of narrative. One layer concerns Chad Newsome and the European life Strether hopes to rescue him from. The second layer concerns Strether's thoughts, reactions, analysis of the events that are unfolding. Lubbock's suggestion that James had managed to make someone's thoughts and reactions the centre of a narrative primed me in some ways to read deWaal's The Hare with Amber Eyes. I read it partly for pleasure, partly because it's written by a fine ceramicist who has a wonderful way of describing the lives of objects, the way objects circulate in people's lives and in material culture. It's research for Soul Weather. Hence the ricocheting bullets.

De Waal's narrative is, on the surface, a simple if twisted one. When he inherits 264 pieces of Japanese netsuke from his uncle, he wants to know the history of the collection. So he learns about Charles Ephrussi who is the intellect and art historian of the unimaginably wealthy Jewish Ephrussi family who managed to turn their handling and shipping of grain from Odessa into a banking empire that rivalled the Rothschilds'. During the nineteenth-century Parisian craze for japanisme, Charles (who is part of Proust's source for Charles Swann and can be seen in Renoir canvases), began amassing his collection of netsuke, in between collecting Manet, Monet, and Renoir. He was an important part of the Parisian art scene, writing about art in the best journals and often serving as the patron who gave financial help when needed, or encouraged an artist to finish a canvas. When Charles's Viennese cousin Viktor marries, he sends Viktor and his new wife Emmy the collection, which is then housed in Emmy's dressing room where the children come to see their fashion plate mother every night as she dresses to go out. While she's undergoing her hour-long encasement in layers of undergarments, the children play with the netsuke and she tells them stories about the lively, imaginative figures.

About the time the children leave home to go about their lives, the Nazis march into Vienna. Mayhem ensues, and families like the Ephrussis have their "ill-gotten" collections confiscated for museums or for the personal pleasure of high-ranking Nazis. Emmy commits suicide, but Viktor and the children escape, settling down in Mexico or America or Britain. When the war ends, Elisabeth, deWaal's grandmother, who studied law in Vienna, revisits that city to see if she can reclaim any of the family's property or their shares in the bank that was made over to their father's Gentile partner. But Vienna doesn't like unpleasantness or uncomfortable memories. So the partner says he doesn't remember any Ephrussi (whom he worked with every day for years) and Elisabeth returns to England only with a suitcase full of netsuke. Emmy's maid Anna confiscated them piece by piece as she worked for the Nazis and sewed them up in her mattress for the duration of the war.

Seen through the lenses of anti-Semitism, the story is anything but simple. Attempting to understand Charles's social life, de Waal read some of the French anti-Semitic literature, learning, for example, that even in a culture that thrived on duels, Jews were outsiders. After all, a Jew has no honour; he can hardly duel to get it back. Jews are insatiable; their taste in bric-a-brack is the taste of children. Newspaper articles speak slyly or venomously about the various members of the Ephrussi family. De Waal even finds in his London library a translation of one of the books on the Jews of Paris; next to the paragraph on the Ephrussis, someone has written in block capitals "venal." De Waal writes "I wonder how these brothers lived their lives in these conditions. Did they shrug their shoulders, or did it get to them, this incessant hum of vilification, mutterings about venality, the sort of constant, bubbling animosity that the narrator in Proust's novels remembers of his grandfather" (94-5)

Several years ago I went to a concert of Strauss waltzes and music from Viennese operettas. I remember thinking, careless of my history, that I was hearing the beginnings of Nazism. There was something about this enthusiastic delight in the saccherine or the sentimental that I suspected was ripe for turning mean. Yet the picture that de Waal gives us of Austria's rapid capitulation to Hitler, of buses and police cars that are marked with Swastikas mere hours after Hitler begins his march to Vienna, of the Viennese delight in breaking into the houses of wealthy Jews and looting and destroying as if they've been granted permission to be drunken adolescents suggests I wasn't terribly far off. This was a side of Nazism I knew nothing about. I mostly knew about Kristallnacht, and imagined small shopkeepers threatened and destroyed; and of course I've read The Diary of Anne Frank and I've seen the shocking footage taken when Allied soldiers open up the death canps. But even money didn't protect you from anti-Semitic opportunism, reminding me that it's important to see events like the Holocaust from as many directions as you can. Emmy's suicide notwithstanding, none of the Ephrussis we come to know died. But de Waal does not allow the miracle of the netsuke's survival to be some kind of life-affirming, art-affirming miracle or redemption: "The survival of the netsuke in Anna's pocket, in her mattress, is an affront. I cannot bear for it to slip into symbolism. Why should they have got through this war in a hiding-place, when so many hidden people did not? I can't make people and places and things fit together any more. These stories unravel me" (283).

What is redemptive in this story, and what Lubbock made me attuned to, is de Waal's narration. The Hare with Amber Eyes isn't simply about the historical context for the netsuke's movement from Japan to Europe and back to Japan before de Waal inherited it. De Waal is a dogged, imaginative researcher and does everything possible to situate these tiny, lively objects in the cultures which appreciated them. But the most remarkable moments are those where he stops to attempt to understand the inner lives of the people who owned them, like that passage above about the way Charles and his brothers coped with the anti-Semitism that pervaded Paris. Here is another: "I have Viktor's passport and a thin shake of letters between members of the family, and I put these out on my long desk. I read them again and again, willing them to tell me what it was like, what Viktor and Emmy feel as they sit in their house on the Ring. I have folders ot notes from the archives. But I realise that I can't do this from London, from a library. So I go back to Vienna, to the Palais [the Ephrussi family hom in the Ringstrasse]" (248). There, standing on the balcony, using the details of the story that have come down to him--the six members of the Gestapo in their perfect uniforms who walk straight in, the looters that threw Emmy's dressing table over the balcony and laughed when it smashed, Viktor comes as close as he can to understanding the experience of his family.

It's the attempt to understand someone besides yourself that serves as one of the best ways of preventing holocausts or pogroms or acts of terrorism, and this attempt is threaded through de Waal's narration. The final part of the story shows de Waal doing this with the lightest hand. De Waal often travels to Japan, sometimes simply to see his great uncle Iggie, sometimes to work on his ceramic practice, and he comes to know his uncle and his uncle's partner Jiro Sugiyama quite well. Their living arrangements are carefully described and there are photographs of the two of them, but de Waal never uses the word "homosexual." Because that's a label like the word "Jew"; it allows you to put someone in a box, to write them off. Rather, these are two men who went to the opera, bought some land outisde Tokyo for a cottage and bought a plot for their tombs. Jiro is an excellent cook. In a moment of remarkable cleverness, Iggie adopts the younger Jiro. Again, de Waal doesn't comment, but this is clearly a way of getting around inheritance laws. If Jiro can't inherit as Iggie's partner, he can do so as his son.

It is possible to see netsuke as mere bibelots, tiny, clever carvings. But de Waal tells a story of a carver who disappeared for several days into the forest and came back to explain he had wanted to watch the deer, which he then proceeded to carve with an elegant, intimate understanding of them. It's that curious, that close attention to the particulars of someone or something other than yourself that helps us be more humane.

Questions about home

2012-02-10T22:17:00.001-06:00

Wednesday night, after a day of banging and sanding that made my house seem more like a beaten drum or a cave beneath an avalanche, Bill and I were driving home in the dark from a workout. Somehow my experience of home--the retreat to the crowded treehouse, the relentless noise beneath me, made everything strange, and as I drove down a familiar street it was if I was seeing it for the first time. You could have told my I was driving in an older residential neighbourhood in Edmonton or Montreal and I'd have nodded in agreement and asked for directions. "Home" has been redefined by the limited space and the limited kinds of space we have, as well as by the ways other people occupy that space, shutting us out of it while they try to make it a more beautiful home. We can do everything we need to live here--eat, sleep, shower--yet there is no space that's just for living in. We spend most of our time in my small study (nicknamed the treehouse) where I read, write or work on quilts.

Today, after a short sanding this morning and another coat of stain, the cats and I had a quiet early afternoon in the treehouse. Some things are becoming familiar for them. Whether the door is closed or not (as it certainly is when Greg is putting something surely toxic to cats on the floor), they hang out with me. When someone comes up the walk, they head for the back of "their" closet. About three, in an attempt to stave off boredom, I put treats in a kong that Sheba rolls over the floor, puzzled but eager, trying to get her favourite food to fall out, while Twig watches. I read and sleep. The noise has made me incredibly tired, so tired I can sometimes nap right through it. Veronica's friend Jenny thinks that we're worn out by trying to ignore the noise below, which is often alarming. Or perhaps it's a week and a half of being at home in a small room and inside Virginia Woolf's head that is at least partly the cause of my sleepiness. But today, because we finally had a respite, I was intensely aware of the more peaceful sounds in the house. Tiny Sheba snores like a lumberjack. We have two squirrels living in the eaves above the alcove where I have my desk. They were chatting with one another today over my head and then scrambling in the eaves and up the stucco walls of the house to the roof. For small creatures, they were quite noisy. In the middle of Friday afternoon, even College Avenue is quiet, the odd car sounding almost laconic, perhaps even bored.

Late this afternoon, we needed to collect ourselves and leave again for about four hours. I'm not good at "killing time," but Bill is an enormous help. We went downtown for coffee, read our respective books, and then roamed Cornwall Centre. We went out for dinner. Then for the last hour, we went to the MacKenzie Art Gallery.

I love the MacKenzie on Friday nights. There were perhaps one or two other people there, but for the most part we had the gallery to ourselves. You can take your time. You can look closely at a work and then back up slowly to consider it from different viewpoints without worrying that you'll back into someone. You can talk out loud without worrying that your inane, clueless--or even perhaps insightful comments will disturb the thoughts of other viewers. But I think it's mostly the lighting, which is designed for normal daytime viewing. At night, each work seems to occupy its own penumbra of light, setting it off in a mysterious yet celebratory way. This was particularly true of the Schumiatcher Sculpture Court which has an exhibition called "Hard Rock. Heavy Metal." It includes a charmingly foreshortened view of a Joe Fafard cow and a whimsical bench by Vic Cicansky. Also a pair of overdone Rodin lovers (I preferred the honesty of the cow). Some of the sculptures, though, were assemblages, and in the unusual light you were sure for a moment you knew what they were for. Then their wonderful strangeness suddenly returned again.

But my favourite was a video installation called "Sunrise" by David Claerbout. The scenario is simple. We see a maid bicycling to work in a modernist glass house, and watch her work there: washing floors, cleaning glass, sweeping up debris on the modenist deck, cleaning the chrome that envelopes the classic leather chairs. The camera work is extraordinary, turning the geometry of the glass house into abstract compositions that the maid either resolves or muddles. Like the maid's uniform, the house is black and white. The simplicity of the space is both appealing and estranging. There is none of the untidy effluvia of life; rather, the natural world provides most of the decor, beautiful, even on an early spring or late fall day. But of course you need a maid to keep its impossibility clean. In one of the final scenes, she puts out the simple white plates, cups and saucers for breakfast and fills up the Bodum coffee press. The scene looks serene until the camera's vantage point changes and you realize that the house's three inhabitants will sit in a row on small metal stools about four feet apart, removed from one another by verticals holding up the long tabletop so that any intimacy is impossible. The ideal of the clean white modernist space (perhaps this was built by Le Corbusier or by one of his acolytes--"a machine for living") so free of the untidiness of life, suddenly looks like a prison. A beautiful, balanced, serene, inviting prison. The eighteen-minute video asks a dozen questions about home, as does my empty living room with its beautiful floors.

The comfort of slow

2012-02-04T17:28:00.000-06:00

Life is chaotic in our household. For the last couple of weeks, bit by bit, we've been packing up the china and the crystal, the pottery and the plants, getting ready to move the furniture from our living room and dining room into an improbably small PUP that's been parked out front. Then Thursday a cheerful, amiable, but noisy crew of young people moved in to take off the baseboards and pull up what was probably the house's original hardwood, laid in 1919 when it was built. It's a noisy process, pulling up boards, pulling the nails out of the diagonal ship lap and screwing it down more firmly in an effort to get some of the creaks out. I was rather fond of the creaking floors, frankly. I knew where everyone was; I even knew when a cat was coming around the corner.

For all the chaos, I'm also aware that we're in the middle of a very well-run machine. The crew was a day later than expected coming in to take up the floor because they took a day longer on the previous job. All the same, the fellow who does hardwood floors in old houses is still scheduled to start Monday and needed to bring in the wood on Friday so that it could get acclimatized. It needs time to get used to my house. So Saturday morning Mike and Richard were back bright and early.

I have needed an antidote to the constant planning that would make the packing and moving less of a nuisance. Over the last couple of days I've also needed an antidote to the rush of sound coming up into the room where I was hunkered down with a couple of traumatized cats. Somehow I needed something slow. My colleague Craig Melhof had loaned me Carl Honore's In Praise of Slow, which I read rather quickly one night to see if it could explain this odd craving. Interestingly, it's a very fast book with lots of little examples and facts about who's doing slow in what part of their lives--cooking slowly, working more slowly--without any attempt at reflecting on the hunger for slowness. This way of writing a book on the wonders of slowing down strikes me as counter-intuitive: isn't time to reflect one of the main things we're looking for when we choose to slow down? Apparently older people (yes, like me) have slower reaction times because we choose to ponder or consider. We can be trained to be just as speedy as a 24-year-old playing a video game. I find this comforting; I want slow to be a choice.

I've long called poetry the "slow food of literature," a form so many-sided that the best way to enjoy it is just to read it (hopefully aloud) over and over until the sounds and the words and the rhythm with its smoothness and its breaks seem familiar enough to make a single effect. Unfortunately, electric drills aren't conducive to this particular kind of slow.

Slow food was better. We're eating up in what we've nicknamed "the treehouse," since everything but cooking is now done on the second floor. Just because we carry our trays upstairs, though, doesn't mean we have to live on sandwiches. Being home with the cats meant I could start a casserole of chicken and chickpeas and currents and bulgar, well-laced with cinnamon and allspice, in the middle of the afternoon and let my oven do the work. Cooking with the banging of hammers echoing through the empty rooms needed extra concentration, but it could be done. For me, slow cooking is often about the process, about standing at my kitchen window chopping vegetables or kneading bread while I muse about the birds or squirrels at the feeder or the clouds scudding by. This slow cooking was quite efficient and was about results.

What I found most oddly comforting was applique. In the quilting world, which is slow to begin with, applique is just about as slow as you can go. You choose or create a design. You mark it on your background fabric. Then you find a way to mark it on the smaller pieces of fabric that you'll be sewing onto the background to create your design. It may take you half the afternoon to choose the right six fabrics for the petals of a poppy or a morning glory, combining whimsy (why not a plaid leaf of a wild chintz petal?) with the necessary shades of red or blue or green. You baste these on the background over the lines, and then you get out your thinnest, hardest-to-thread applique needles and begin the process of using your needle and your left thumbnail to turn under, smoothly, a scant quarter inch. Your stitches are probably a sixteenth of an inch long, particularly around right corners. They should be invisible, coming up one thread into the folded edge of the leaf and going down slightly under it, and you should tug your thread every third stitch to pull it into the fabric. This time-consuming little self-conscious habit of counting to three and tugging really matters. Somehow it brings the two surfaces--your background and your leaf or stem or petal--together.

What I've loved about it is the focussed self-consciousness that still manages to be concerned only with colour, pattern, and line--getting the play of colour right and turning the fabrics so that the edges are smooth. Each time you round a curve smoothly, or botch it with sharp little points, you wonder "What made that work? What went wrong?" And you wonder what it would be like, always, to live with that kind of self-consciousness. Whether you could make something beautiful from the chaos, or whether it would eventually bring all creativity to a self-conscious halt. That's what the wild chintz petals are for: to remind you of another set of virtues altogether--wildly, creatively colouring outside the lines.

This is the quilt I've been working on to create an antidote to the chaos. It's called a "strippie": rows of pieced or appliqued blocks are used to create the quilt. There's another panel of applique and another rows of pieced baskets. I've borrowed the flower shapes from Nancy Pearson's book, but the arrangement, particularly the winding stems, is my own. As you can see, even traumatized cats know when you're playing around with a quilt top and have to get into the act!

Hearing Voices: Chantal Hebert and the Vertigo Reading Series

2012-01-25T08:59:00.001-06:00

I failed high school physics. Admittedly, this was largely because I had been seconded out of my physics class and into the orchestra as a much-needed pianist. So I read the textbook, other people's notes, and took the first exam. My physics teacher--a dear man--had a kindly chat with me the day afterwards and told me I couldn't really expect to grasp physics under these circumstances. I was quickly and quietly un-registered: no stain on my record.

Still, I know enough physics to tell you that the old conundrum--"If a tree falls in a forest and there's no one there to hear it was there any sound?"--has no meaning as a physics problem. It's a metaphor, clearly. If we have stories but have no one to tell them to, do we exist?

Last night, you could say that Chantal Hebert talked to us about this problem in the 32nd annual Minifie Lecture at U of R. In the twitter-verse, you would think, there would be lots of voices telling their stories. But she had two observations about how our wired world now works. First, she described Rene Levesque's discussions with Quebeckers about nationalizing hydroelectric companies, travelling across the province, explaining to a wide range of Quebec communities that it was important for people to control their own resources. His careful explanations of why this was being done and what the benefits would be is in direct contrast to the response you get to a querying email from just about any federal civil servant: "The government of Canada is committed to the well-being of Canadians." Is that under 142 characters?

Her second observation is that twitter is used by a particular minority. While politicians and journalists might tweet, the person who cuts Hebert's hair or who takes her blood at the clinic doesn't tweet between clients. As a result, the twitter bubble is a mirror, not a window, something that's simply reflecting "the chattering classes"--politicians, journalists, and academics--back to themselves. Consequently, election results have been catching us off guard. Politicians and journalists (I'm not going to speak for academics!) simply don't know what the issues are for the woman who packs your groceries or the mechanic who fixes your car.

Maybe we need to revise that metaphor, then: if there's too much noise on the line, when the trees fall we can't hear them.

The Vertigo Reading Series is one of our ways of addressing this problem of the same stories being told over and over to the same cast of people. I gave a reading of Blue Duets at Crave on Tuesday night, sharing the stage with Rolli, Nicole Pivovar, and Jack Walton. Jack warmed the audience with songs he'd written on the trek between Willow Bunch and Gravelbourg; he sang of love (of course) but also of prairie skies and east coast weather. Nicole, who had never shared her work before, showed us photographs and read poems that described good friends and a little girl with cystic fibrosis who cheered her at the end of difficult days. Rolli's stories are off-beat parables; one of his used the voice of a blind old woman who managed to kill a cougar terrorizing her community. Jack introduced the second half with more music (he plays a mean guitar!) and read an essay about meeting Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen in his favourite Toronto pub. You couldn't have found four writers with a wider range of experience or styles; that's Vertigo's value to the community. It reminds us that all stories are valuable and that the sharing of varied stories is one of the ways we create a meaningful community.

Tara Solheim, who runs the series on her own and is a host who makes everyone feel comfortable and ensures that the audience is encouraged to respond, has given me information on the next two readings. On February 13, Caitlin Ward, Fionncara MacEoin, Bernadette Wagner, and Ken Fox will be reading at Crave. On March 12th, Vertigo will celebrate Irving Layton's 100th birthday with readings by Allison Kydd, Gillian Harding-Russell, Christian Drake, and Shayna Stock. Events start at 7:30.

Tara also shared with the crowd that Vertigo has lost its Saskatchewan Arts Board funding and may, as a result, have to depend on other sources, on what people put in the hat at the end of the night or even on a small attendance fee. Brown Communications gives them free posters and Crave gives them the space for free, but there are other expenses that Vertigo needs to cover.

So we need some creative thinking here. Hearing voices is a good thing: we need to preserve venues like Vertigo.

New Year's Resolutions 2: Anger and Frustration

2012-01-17T09:58:00.002-06:00

My brother-in-law, Bill, has a saying I love: "Sure is stupid out."

And indeed, at this very moment, it is fairly stupid. Politics is broken in the United States. So focused are the parties in their own power that they have lost sight of what's good for people and the planet. Stephen Harper doesn't like evidence, so we're getting prisons (which evidence proves are expensive and ineffective) and we're not getting any leadership on the environment. I find people are less aware of those around them because they're walking or driving in a virtual world. Because I'm short, I get an awful lot of backpacks in my face from someone who's walking backwards, texting away.

In a review of two books on the environment, U of T philosopher Joseph Heath talked about the real reasons we're not doing enough that's effective. It's not that we don't understand the causes and effects of climate change. Dear David Suzuki thinks if we just knew more, we'd make the decision to be responsible. William Marsden thinks we need to sort out our political structures. But Heath makes a convincing case that there are two challenges to our addressing the problem of climate change that belong to each of us. First, humans aren't very good in long term thinking, and I suspect this is particularly true now, when we're impatient about the amount of time it takes our computers to boot up or find a WiFi signal. Second, we're even worse at putting the interests of someone else ahead of our own, so we don't think about how the environment will be liveable for future generations; we think about wanting the truck that will let us look manly. We can hang a large set of blue balls from the trailer hitch and be really cool. Heath argues that saying "I don't believe in climate change" is merely a socially-respectable way of saying "I don't care about anybody but me."

Don't even get me going on masculinity. The other day, looking at said pair of blue balls on the truck in front of me, I thought nostalgically about how idealistic and hopeful the sixties was. (Nostalgia is always a bad sign.) We thought we could change ideas of gender, and in many areas we have. But it's still not "normal" for a father to stay home with a newborn. And guys in the RCMP can still be sexist bastards.

But I've made a new year's resolution about this anger and frustration: if I can't or won't do anything to change what's bugging me, I'm going to let it go. I can't, for example, talk to Stephen Harper about evidence-based decision making. (Better yet, I'd like to hogtie him while Julia McKenna talks to him about evidence-based decision making.) And I'm not going to walk up to the man in the large pick-up and tell him that if he's cold he ought to go inside and not sit there creating CO2 emissions. Nor am I going to tell the woman who's idling her car on a beautiful day to turn her friggin' car off and open her window!

As my mother cruised through her eighties and well into her nineties, I could see that she couldn't do reality checks any longer: the pre-frontal cortex is simply shrinking too fast with age. So the attitudes she took into those years were the attitudes she lived most of her days inside: anger, frustration, fear. Wonder, occasionally. I could see that you don't only have to plan for retirement. You also have to plan for brain's retirement. Whatever your defaults are, you're stuck with them. So I resolved quite some time ago to become the most cheerful, optimistic old lady you can imagine. I will not become the old fart who's always angry. Who listens to them?

But I need to take one more step: be optimistic and be cool with it. I find that my days can be poisoned by my attempts to think up the right speech to convince someone not to drink bottled water or to shout at someone for the clueless, unobservant way they're driving. But that poison doesn't accomplish anything. Instead, I'm going to go Buddhist and be in the moment. Instead of lecturing Stephen Harper while I drive to work, I'm going to notice how the trees look today. Is there enough humidity in the air so that they look like ink on wet paper? Or is it dry and cold so that they look like taut black lace? Because all that energy that's wasted on things I can't do or can't change is taken away from things I might be able to influence. I'll teach a class on literature and the environment. I'll write about the way art's autonomy creates a space for it to be truly critical. I'll write a novel about the younger generation and the way we're not welcoming them into their adult lives. I'll find a way to be heard, a context in which I can address the challenges of this particular historical moment.

Because it sure is stupid out.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf and the blogosphere

2012-01-09T22:12:00.003-06:00

Tuesday 3 January 1922
It is a good resolution that sends me to this page so early--only came back from Rodmell [the Woolf's country home] last night--but it is parsimony--a gloomy forecast that makes me use the odd leaves at the end of poor dear Jacob [the notebook in which she wrote her first experimental novel, Jacob's Room]. Blank leaves grow at the end of my diaries.

Home, as I say, last night, after 10 or 11 days at Monks House--days when the wind blew from every quarter at the top of its voice, & great spurts of rain came with it, & hail spat in our fire, & the lawn was strewn with little branches, & there were fiery sunsets over the downs, & one evening of the curled feathers that are so intense that one's eyes see nothing for 10 seconds afterwards. Mr Shanks had the double pneumonia & was prayed for in Church, as indeed I thought advisable when I saw Dr. Vallance's face at the window. We drank tea at the Rectory, & I was knocked over by the blast of crude emotions which that festival always releases. In the morning I wrote with steady stoicism my posthumous article upon Hardy....Leonard planted, pruned, sprayed, though the cold & the wet & the wildness made his behaviour a heroicism to be admired, not comprehended.

So begins Virginia Woolf's diary for 1922, the year she would publish her first experimental novel--the kind of work we all think of when someone mentions her name. I am reading Woolf's early diaries (perversely, I've just finished re-reading the last volume for my work on Between the Acts) because I'm back to writing and thinking about her early work. The tone is quite different: in the last volume, she and Leonard can see Europe in crisis; they follow the Spanish Civil War in which one of Virginia's nephews dies; they make a suicide pact and hoard petrol so they can gas themselves in their garage should Hitler cross the channel; Leonard, you see, is a Jew. The sense of the oncoming tragedy of history is palpable in every page; the way that tragedy affects artists is startlingly clear and insightful. But in these early diaries Virginia attempts much more to record the natural and social worlds she greeted with such joyful enthusiasm when she was well. These diaries are more like those any of us would keep, except that they're written by one of English literature's most extraordinary stylists.

Reading them makes me want to back to keeping a diary. I've kept one for years, first during my own struggles with depression in an attempt to record and understand what I was experiencing. Later during my divorce, where the possibility that my daughter might someday read them meant that I couldn't indulge in vitriol or blame, but needed to record as accurately and dispassionately as I could what the experience was like. "Diaries" and "censorship" don't usually mix; feminist scholars have long claimed the diary as the one place where you could hear women's real voices when publishers otherwise rejected their work as eccentric or self-indulgent or simply bad. But occasionally self-censorship's lens helps you to move beyond histrionics; in turn, you perhaps get a better purchase on what is really happening in your life. When I moved to Regina, my diaries simply became a way of celebrating or wondering about the world. Carol Shields and I used to talk about our diaries; for her, it was the chance to write the one beautiful, perfect sentence of the day, and indeed diaries have all kinds of aesthetic uses. Woolf used hers to record the progress of her work, or to put down early thoughts about a novel's form. But sometimes they're simply gossip.

Friday 17 February

Molly Hamilton sits for her portrait today....She is a crude piece of work, one of the strugglers; & thus a good deal of time must be wasted upon facts--how she is to get a job--what she can live on &c. Besides, the strugglers are all worn & muscular with struggling. She is bitter against people--seems to me to snap, as a dog does with a thorn in his foot. And something of her pleasure in seeing me is the charwoman's pleasure in talking of her bad leg: by a grate which she need not polish, & with things which she need not wash up. However, to give her her due, she is a warm, courageous, bustling woman; & I like her spirit, & the trophies she brings me of buffeting & rejection--'real' life; if one chooses to think so. Never was anyone more on their own; & I think she means it when she wishes the motor omnibus would swerve in her direction, but can't be bothered to step to meet it.

Woolf called the diary a "capacious hold-all," and herself made use of its lack of generic rules. We get weather; we get arguments with the cook; we get conversations with her illustrious friends; we get descriptions of her health and her mental states. Really, is there anything you can't put in a diary?

Except that I've found the time I would otherwise have given to my diary is now given over to thinking about writing another blog post. Surprisingly, I've loved blogging--something I was more or less required to do by my publisher. You can't launch a book in the twenty-first century without having an online presence, the publicist assured me. So I visited a number of blogs (not nearly enough I now confess) and more or less stumbled into my on M.O. (I know, using that word makes it sound like I kill people), which is more or less a loosely conceived essay or meditation that might wander quite far, but must always come back to a central point or observation or question. But much of life's accidental whimsy, which might have otherwise gone into a diary and made one of Shields's beautiful, perfect sentences, gets filed away until a blog post begins to cohere around it. And I can't decide whether or not I like this change.

In the meantime, my husband Bill has taken to FB with a vengeance, often writing rather long status updates, or status updates in a sequence (like his twelve meditations on the word "wanting"). I've come to see Facebook as his diary, as a casual, accidental record of what he's thinking about or seeing in the world around him. Facebook, like the diary, is a capacious hold-all: he can comment on a meal I've made, tell you about YouTube videos he's seen, offer his opinion on current events, link you to the Heart and Stroke Foundation page, confess that on December 10, 2011 he officially became a cat person.

Tuesday 14 February
Fergusson...pronounced that my eccentric pulse had passed the limits of reason & was in fact insane. So I was laid in bed again, & set up my state in the drawing room, where I now write sitting up in bed, alongside the fire, with a temperature a shade below normal & a heart become naturally abnormal, so that perhaps I shall be up and creeping this time next week. I am reading Moby Dick; Princesse de Cleves; Lord Salisbury; Old Mortality; Small Talk at Wreyland; with an occasional bit at the Life of Lord Tennyson, of Johnson; & anything else I find handy. But this is all dissipated & invalidish. I can only hope that like dead leaves they may fertilise my brain.

When I began writing a blog, I began formalizing and organizing the kinds of meditations that I might have put in my diary, dressing them up, plumping them out for public consumption they way you plump fruit in liquor before making fruitcake. In contrast, when I read people's status updates on Facebook, I have the sense of intruding on snippets of their diaries. Sometimes I'm delighted to know my friend Deb is having a wonderful time in Newfoundland and that FB has given her an easy way to share her adventures with all her friends. Sometimes I'm dismayed to learn that X has just eaten a yummy burger at Y. I can't quite decide what the blogosphere has done to the diary. Is it keeping a record for people who otherwise wouldn't bother? Or is it stealing time away from other people's diaries? Is it convincing us that the banal is significant? Is it prompting me to formalize my thoughts before they're quite ready because I've committed myself to a post a week, more or less? Or is it giving me an opportunity for talking with you, or giving you a chance to listen to me as I think my way through the ideas and experiences that matter to me? The jury is still out for me. Do tell me what you think.

P.S.: I know I've got some students out there for whom this is a question. Weigh in, please!

New Year's Resolutions

2011-12-31T17:20:00.002-06:00

Rise from bed.                                       6:00              a.m.
Dumbbell exercise and wall scaling         6:15- 6:30   "
Study electricity etc.                               7:15-8:15      "
Work                                                     8:30-4:30     p.m.
Baseball and sports                                4:30-5          "
Practice elocution, poise, and
     how to attain it                                  5:00-6:00    "
Study needed inventions                         7:00-9:00    "

This is a heart-breaking passage found in the late pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. The schedule is written on the back flyleaf of Hopalong Cassidy and found by Gatsby's estranged father after Gatsby's death; it's proof that Gatsby had the self-discipline to be great. I often think of that passage toward New Year's, convinced that if I could just find the right schedule, I could be more productive. But of course, there's no room for eating, trips to the loo, or a genial conversation with colleagues or students or lovers or partners. There's no room for the accidents of life from which we learn so much.

Twenty-seven percent of us do not make New Year's resolutions. Here are my husband Bill's non-resolutions:

Resolutions: The flotsam of the year end brings to mind the choice to reflect on a life. My life, the lives of friends, the still life of words not spoken or dances not unwrapped. I choose not to make resolutions. I tend to dissolve into a puddle of anticipation.

I anticipate: love, being with someone in anger and hearing their voice, potential to be part of change for the better, being mindful of what my body needs, challenging those I love to challenge themselves and rise up from complacency, accept head spinning laughter and deep sadness as part of being human, not tolerating bullying by peers or anyone in a position of power or authority, making a difference by being me, breathing, accepting rigid ideas as the walls some choose to hide behind, recognizing all of my gifts, abide with Roger (that makes sense from a prior post- trust me, his life is very important), accepting that mistakes happen as I learn, beginning each day by being curious.

Quite a puddle ;)

Of course, if 27% don't make resolutions, that meant that 73% of us do. Given our failure rate (I can see the failure rate in the drop in visits to the U of R FLC by the end of February), why do we do this? The "On Fiction" blog suggests that the time between Christmas and New Year's prompts us to tell stories about our life: about the past year and about the future we'd like to create. I like to think of New Year's as a kind of tune-up of my life choices; it's an admittedly arbitrary time to consider what's working, what's satisfying, and to think about changing what I'm finding frustrating or unsatisfying. I've made some really practical resolutions in the past, like never letting my cheque register get out of date, that I've kept for years. Other resolutions, like changing the way I eat and the way I use my time, I need to revisit every year. But I don't completely backslide. Several years ago, I decided to stop worrying about whether I would have enough time to do everything I needed to do. Because worrying it multi-tasking, and human brains don't do that very well; each time we switch tasks, there's a drop in productivity and energy. So I'd make a list of priorities and simply work at them one at a time. I'm still doing this, though I continue to feel as if there's always something else that I could have done. That's what I'm giving up this year: my dissatisfaction with how many (or how few) hours in the day there are. I'm going to try to be more mindful about being at peace inside those limitations. That, of course, makes me think about what's really important to me. Guitar practice or appliquing a quilt I've been working on for several years? I'll go with my gut, rather than trying to over-think it. And perhaps I'll take Thoreau's advice about time as well as about things: "Simplify! Simplify!" And in the meantime, I'll remember that it takes about eight weeks to change a behaviour, so I won't simply throw up my hands and tell myself what a failure I am.

Craig and Mark Kielburger, the founders of the Canada-wide "We Day," made a great suggestion in last Monday's Globe and Mail. Rather than making our resolutions about ourselves and then feeling a failure because we can't keep them, why don't we resolve to take some opportunities to help others. Here's what they said:

"This year, consider resolving to make more socially conscious choices. Little ones and big ones. Often or occasionally. Instead of a better you, try aiming – modestly or boldly – for a better world, starting with you.

"Sounds intimidating? Try this: Choose organic meat or eggs next time you shop. Just one time and already you’re healthier, the animals are happier, and the environment is cleaner. Or turn down the thermostat and throw on an extra layer to compensate. You’ve saved money, fought climate change and made Grandma happy because you’re wearing the sweater she made.

"The more you do, the better you feel, and the more resolutions you keep.

"Otherwise, it’s the same as any other resolution: Start small, with concrete first steps, and gather your own momentum. The joy you feel from helping others – a scientifically proven rush of endorphins equal to vigorous exercise known as the “helper’s high” – feeds your next action, until you’re happier, healthier and “better” in whatever way you want to define it."

I think we need to make some resolutions as a culture, though the various "Occupy" movements began this process for us. But I'm a bit baffled: how do we decide as a culture that change is necessary? And how do we get ourselves moving in the same direction? Perhaps that questions answers itself (and to some degree was answered by the de-centralized structure of the Occupy movement): in a democracy, you don't worry about going in the same direction. But we do need, at this historical moment, to think about going in some direction. The status quo doesn't cut it. I can think of two huge things we need to call into question. First, that the good life is only available for some and that it involves lots of money and power. Let's make 2012 the year of people who are creative and helpful in small ways. Second, I'd like to change the way the political process now works and the vacuum in leadership that it produces. Because everybody is worried primarily about getting re-elected, they're not thinking about providing leadership on the huge questions that face us: social justice and the opportunity to live peaceful, productive lives for those who are marginalized, and the justice for the planet that supports us all.

Time Magazine made 2011 the year of the protester, analyzing the protests in Arab countries, continuing by exploring the situation of people living in Europe and Russia, ending with a discussion of the North American "Occupy" movement. I'm going to do a riff on this observation. Let's make 2012 the year we all protest in varying ways. Call your MP or MLA about upcoming legislation. Sign a Lead Now petition. Refuse to submit to your need for the latest cool whatever. Volunteer and spend the year on "helper's high." Or ask for help when you need it, rather than suggesting that we all need to be self-sufficient, self-made people, like Jay Gatsby. Refuse to believe that someone who is different from you--someone whose sexual orientation is different, who lives with mental illness, whose values or circumstances are profoundly different--is "other." If 73% of people think they need to consider their values and habits, perhaps whole cultures need to engage in asking questions about what matters.

Holiday Reading: Midterm report

2011-12-29T21:00:00.000-06:00

When I start my feminist theory class, I always begin with the same sentences: "Men are not the enemy in this class. We do not do any male-bashing here. The enemy is our idea of what's 'natural' for men and women." Then I ask them to try to identify any characteristics or experiences that all women share. They propose quite a number of shared experiences or qualities--like motherhood or nonviolence--and then become aware of how many exceptions there are. So they get very basic, down to women menstruating, but then I tell them that young girls who have had cancer and radiation or girls who are anorexic or very thin athletes or ballet dancers don't necessarily menstruate, and we're delightfully puzzled about why we're all sitting in this room talking about women--which is exactly where we should be. Later I will tell them that our ideas about gender--about what's natural for men or women to feel or experience, about how some behaviours are natural (like men being aggressive and women being nurturing)--are a set of boxes and expectations that imprison all of us.

One of the early articles that we read is about the number of children born with ambiguous sexuality, and the way the largely male medical profession works to turn anyone ambiguously male into someone more decidedly male. Enter Kathleen Winter and her hermaphrodite Wayne/Annabel. It's as if Winter took my feminist theory class and really got it--which can't be said for everyone, try as they might. It's kind of hard to think yourself outside the boxes of gender. I can do it for other people, especially if they're young, but there are facets to being a stereotypical woman that I actually like. I like being nurturing and making quilts. I loved being a mother. But I would fight long and hard for any other woman's decision to discard or avoid those roles.

I finished Winter's Annabel shortly before Christmas and so I'm trying to tell you about it without having to writer "spoiler alert!" at the beginning of every paragraph. So maybe I'll stick to the theoretical issues. Wayne has to take a lot of medication to establish his masculine musculature and voice. No one's told him exactly what the pills do to him, but it simply doesn't feel comfortable, so he quits. Then he's dropped into the ambiguity of sex and gender. Winter does a wonderful job of letting us feel what it's like to be in Wayne's own skin (or letting us imagine we know what it's like to be in his skin), but it's her treatment of society's wildly varying anxiety about Wayne/Annabel's sex/gender that seems to me dead on. Not surprisingly, the person most uncomfortable about it is Wayne's father, though Treadway also redeems himself brilliantly toward the end. My one theoretical disappointment is that Wayne's mother, Jacinta, gets no say or role in Wayne's life once he's decided to stop taking the medication and embrace the way his desires (and these are wonderfully varied: intellectual, aesthetic, and physical) lean toward what we usually think of as feminine. I realize that Winter is suggesting that men still hold the cards with respect to deciding whether someone is masculine or feminine enough, or whether someone's decisions are valid and acceptable. But Jacinta would have so loved a daughter, and my heart broke as she became more and more withdrawn after Wayne left their small Labrador community.

On Boxing Day, I began Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues, and would recommend it even more strongly. It's a plot-driven novel, which I don't usually devour (I hate being manipulated into devouring a book by its plot!) but because the plots are so compelling, so tied up in both individual desires and weaknesses and historical horrors, because the plots parallel one another in interesting ways, but defy those parallels in others, it's really a novel about how people choose to act when history throws them into the cauldron of Nazi Germany and the Nazis' quick march into Paris. Our guide is Syd, a "high yellow" African American (which means he can pass for white unless you think a lot about race and observe him carefully) who plays the bass in a jazz band in Nazi Germany. Between 1939 and 1940, he has to come to terms not only with Nazi policies regarding negroes and jazz (one example of the decadent art--created by even more decadent negroes--the Nazis cleansed from their culture) and effect an escape from Germany with his fellow musicians, but has to watch as his solid but minor gift is eclipsed musically and romantically by that of Hieronymus Falk, a half-blood German trumpet player who has a remarkable gift. In 1992, he has the chance to reconnect with Falk and to confess (or not) to the way his actions inadvertently put Falk in harm's way, sending him to a Nazi labour camp. The novel's shift between the two time frames keeps the tension delightfully high, but also draws a possible comparison between Syd's jealousy and rediscovered delight in playing jazz as the group records the "Half-Blood Blues" of the novel's title, and the kinds of personal animosities and hatreds that drive the German "boots" who beat up the band and necessitate their escape from Berlin. At other levels, there is simply no comparison between Syd's behaviour and that of the Nazi army, and it's this ethical dance that Edugyan won't simplify that keeps us thinking about the characters long after we've finished the novel.

But Half Blood Blues is also about music. It's about people's need for musicians to express the whole range of human emotions and experiences, regardless of whether they're "decadent" or not. It's not a simple thing to "rid" Nazi Germany of jazz. It's also about the particular qualities of jazz, about the way it depends on a group dynamic and the way it invents expression out of thin air when musicians improvise. It's also about the power of music to be rebellious. The song they are trying to record when the Nazis march into Paris is based on a poem written and set to music by Horst Wessel, a thug the Nazis try to turn into a martyr after his wife has him shot. It is a kind of anthem to Nazi nationalism and ideals. But in the hands of jazzman Falk, it is ironized, and turned into the blues for those who are Nazism's victims. Although it's believed all the takes are destroyed, a set turns up in the walls of a house undergoing renovations, as if musical expression, no matter how temporary or tenuous, won't be silenced.

I finished reading Half Blood Blues this afternoon, and was strangely and wonderfully aware of the soundscape of that experience as I turned out my reading light and sat in the blue dark with only the lights of the Christmas tree. There was the silence of newly-fallen snow; there seems to be less traffic on College between Christmas and New Years'. Sometimes the silence was interrupted by people's tentative attempts to clear walks and the particularly hollow sound of a shovel trying to clear stairs. Prompted by CBC earlier in the day, I'd decided to put on some Beethoven, and wanting to hear the lovely under-performed Fourth Symphony, I also had to listen to the Third, the Eroica. Of course I couldn't help thinking about the difference between the carefully-scripted symphony and the improvisation of jazz. Then came the second movement, Beethoven's funeral march for the men who died in Napoleon's absurd quest to become emperor of Europe, and then I couldn't help hearing the enduring similarities.

Holiday Reading

2011-12-20T08:38:00.003-06:00

In a teaching year, as I would be watching the pile of exam booklets dwindle, I would also be thinking about what I'd read over Christmas. I want at least one book of a certain kind: the kind of novel that so engrosses you that you look up between chapters or when you're called for meals and are surprised at where you are. If I hadn't already started it, I'd put Kathleen Winter's Annabelle at the top of my list. It's a remarkable book about a hermaphrodite born in Labrador--and when I write those words I realize that Winter has made Labrador sensuously present (if "Labrador" and "sensuous" aren't an oxymoron) and an unfriendly environment for a hermaphrodite. (Is there a friendly environment for a hermaphrodite?) Wayne's father wants a son, a son of a certain kind, so before Wayne is even conscious there's some ambiguity he has surgery that establishes the least problematic masculinity possible. (And perhaps "least problematic" and "masculinity" are also oxymorons.As are "least problematic" and "femininity.") Through the life of a young man who finds he's a hermaphrodite only when he's twelve, Winter explores two things at the same time. One is the arbitrariness of masculinity, which unfortunately is presented to men in the novel (and elsewhere) as a set of inviolable codes--sometimes subtle, sometimes stark--they either live up to or fail to live by. The other is the complexity of gender--how, if we're honest, most of us don't experience masculinity or femininity in any completely coherent or unproblematic way. I've gotten to the point where Wayne/Annabelle has graduated from high school and left home, and I'm so engrossed that it's going to be read well before Christmas.

So Esi Edugyan's Half Blood Blues is the next one on my list. The premise fascinates me, and I've read the opening paragraphs to make sure that I can hear a voice that will envelope me in its experiences and its world views. I've often felt irresponsible for reading a page or two of something and deciding whether it will captivate me, as if I'm a style snob or can only accept the perspectives of a narrow range of people. But I only do this at certain times of the year--usually at the end of a term, when I want to be transported by a voice. And there's nothing overtly predictable in my judgements: I don't need a male voice or a female voice; I don't need a particularly educated voice; I don't need the voice of a particular class or political outlook. I need someone who can sing of the world, someone who is so taken with the world that she or he can't help singing. Not for me, those times of the year, the reasoned voice of cynicism or satire. I often say that it's as reasonable to say that the glass is half empty as it is to say it's half full, but at the end of a term I want the half full version. Perhaps I want to believe that my teaching over the past thirteen weeks has accomplished something, just as I want to believe now that the ideas I've struggled to express will mean something to someone besides me.

During my Christmas reading, I also want one "big" book--something that has a certain kind of scope. I don't know if Edugyan's book will meet this need, so I'm holding a new translation of Doctor Zhivago in reserve. I haven't read this novel since the seventies, when I was studying Russian history at the University of Manitoba with a professor who couldn't figure out why I kept talking about fiction. It's a kind if historical evidence--no?

Some of my reading over Christmas will be done on my new Kobo. You can blame Hilda Lessways for the purchase. She's a character in three of Arnold Bennett's novels; Bennett, in turn, is one of the writers that Virginia Woolf criticizes relentlessly. I thought I should see what she was on about and so read Clayhanger this fall. I'm sorry, Virginia, but I loved it--mostly. The end was a bit tedious, as if Bennett was being paid by the word and not by the adroitness of his plotting. I can see that Woolf, with her modern sensibility, would be put off by the endless detail about daily life in "the five towns," a group of industrial communities where clay ware is made, but I found it soothing to relax into the completely-realized world. Clayhanger tells the story of Edwin Clayhanger, the son of a printer, as he makes his way in his father's business, leaving behind his dreams of becoming an architect. Quite early on--and much against his will--he falls in love with Hilda Lessways, marrying her in the end and after seeminly endless complications. Hilda Lessways tells this story from Hilda's point of view, and I'm naturally anxious to see what Bennett will do with a woman's life. But alas, the U of R library doesn't have a copy of Hilda, so I am forced to depend on Project Gutenberg. I have no idea whether I'll like an e-reader, but I think it's time to find out.

But I'm going to inaugurate my Kobo with Thoreau's Walden Pond. You can't imagine Thoreau and a Kobo? Have you seen the reconstruction of his hut at Walden? It's about the size of a small bedroom. It has a single bed, a stove, a bookshelf, a small cupboard, a table, and a chair. Looking in the door, you wonder what else one needs. Thoreau has a saying that has skulked around my life for around the last year: "Simplify! Simplify!" His motto has prompted me to clean out my fabric stash and send anything I won't use to the quilt guild, to edit my cookbooks and bring them to the third floor of the university where they disappear rather quickly, to get rid of kitchen tools I no longer use. My Kobo is an effort to simplify. I can slowly bring my Hemingway, my Fitzgerald, my Hardy to the third floor and try to seduce some eager undergraduate to take them home.

I didn't think I'd need to do this wishful thinking this year as I brought my chapter on Woolf's Between the Acts to a close. But both writing and teaching demand that you are fully, deeply yourself; they relentlessly demand that you muster all your intellectual and emotional resources in a way that's sometimes exhausting--though, of course, it's a satisfying, exhilarating exhaustion. So I want to be somebody else for a while over the holidays; I want to inhabit and explore another world altogether.

The photograph at the top is of a Christmas quilt I've been appliquing and quilting as the days get shorter for the last four years or so. The figures on the bottom are a shepherd, a sheep, and a charming donkey that come from folk artists around Atlanta.

The black and white photograph of Walden Pond was taken by Veronica Geminder. You can find more of her work here.

Christmas Archeology

2011-12-14T11:09:00.000-06:00

This December, my memories have run riot, in part because the Saskatchewan weather has been much more like the Michigan winters I grew up with and in part because this is the first Christmas I'm spending "orphaned into my mortality" as my good friend Deb put it. I've been finding since my mother's death last February that memories of my parents are rich, warm presences that seem to rise out of nowhere in my daily life. Veronica thinks this is because I don't have to worry about them any more--I don't have to worry whether my dad will eat or wonder how my mother's angry despair at losing her mind feels to her or how it will effect the people around her--and I suspect my daughter is right. In any case, getting our Christmas tree up last Friday started a flood of memories.

When I was in junior high school and had a long walk to school in the morning, I had to get up before anyone else. Do you remember those fifties burnished, coloured metal glasses with their curving rims? Perhaps you still have a set at the cottage because they're indestructible? I learned that I could make very good eggnog by putting my milk, egg, honey, and nutmeg in the metal glass, and using a single beater on my mother's mix master to make it frothy in less than a minute. Once the Christmas tree was up, I'd have my eggnog in the dark in front of the tree, which my mother had decorated with nothing but blue lights--the large heavy kind you had to attach to each branch, getting sap all over your fingers. She'd copied the idea from my childless, creative Aunt Hazel, giving us the most stylish tree in our neighbourhood. Bringing a tree indoors has always seemed to me a magical accident: our admission of the way the natural world gives its beauty to our daily lives. Sitting alone in the dark with only the blue lights tinting the grey walls gave me time to simply be with this odd beauty that was half nature, half ritual, and half longing for something I couldn't name. If I had time or was bored, I'd run my fingers around the edges of the smaller parcels to see which were books. In a time when only hardcover books were printed, you could always tell a book by the dip between the covers, which you could feel through the wrapping paper.

Christmas also marks my first Academy Award performance. One Christmas Eve, my father decided to polish his shoes before he and I went to see his Aunt Nell. Polish then came in bottles, and was spread on shoes with a fuzzy round applicator at the end of a twisted wire. We'd just had new carpet put in--a very taupe-y grey which my mother was proud of because of its elegance. Of course the bottle tipped and made a large stain on the new carpet. Argument ensued, in spite of the fact that my mother thought that Christmas Eve was "the most magical night of the year." Perhaps because my mother thought it was the most magical night. Noisy arguments were rare in my childhood, and perhaps all the more terrifying because they were rare. Or perhaps it was terrifying because conflict is always terrifying for a child. I knew my father would never give in and admit he'd been foolish because he was never wrong (men weren't in those days), and I could see that Mother was not going to let this go. It was an affront to her every effort to give us a beautiful home. So I very calculatingly burst into tears. I remember, oddly, deciding that this was the only way to change the subject. And of course it worked.

But beyond these memories that come flooding back, there's the archeology of the box of Christmas decorations. I still have a few glass ornaments my first husband, Dan, and I bought in Boston for our first Christmas tree, and they still bring back the mood of shopping in tony Cambridge, feeling both free to create my own traditions and student-poor. There are the ornaments we bought the Christmas I was pregnant--a small wooden train car, a wooden rocking horse, and a fuzzy teddy bear. Then the ornaments that marked Veronica's first Christmas--a blue satin giraffe that comes from another land altogether, and a little girl in an oversize rocking chair. These memories spin out of control, bringing with them glimpses of Veronica's Christmases as a little girl. There is the flock of sheep bought over the years of Christmastime visits to Atlanta and the hand-carved wooden Santa Clauses my sister sent me. There are the ornaments Bill and I bought together the first year his family's Christmas decorations mingled with mine. There are the hand carved wooden Santas that Bill put in my stocking one Christmas, and the Santas that Veronica buys each year. She still remembers where she got them, and we tell the stories as we put them on the tree. There are the decorations that are not there, particularly a large glass ball my mother bought me; several years back the fully-decorated Christmas tree fell over, breaking some of the glass ornaments. I wasn't there when it happened, so Bill and Veronica still talk about the slow motion shock of seeing the Christmas tree beginning to topple and their sense that, slo-mo as it was, there was nothing they could do to stop it.

Stories. That's the archeology of Christmas. Some of the stories we don't tell one another but simply fondle in our minds as we find the right space for a heavy ball or a long hand-blown glass icicle. Some memories are too brief and fleeting to even call stories: it's so hard to explain the aura of memory surrounding a bell or a bird. It's a memory that has fragments of weather or a loved-one's gesture or even the mood of a particular phase of our lives clinging to it stubbornly. The Santa Clause who has a night-time village painted around the edge of his long robe has a whole story, and we tell it over again, perhaps as a kind of protection for or an affirmation of the stories we can't tell. It's what we do to comfort ourselves and re-create family and community at this dark time of the year: tell stories.

Home Alone

2011-12-09T10:35:00.000-06:00

I have to admit that I've never seen the whole movie "Home Alone,"--just clips on airplane screens. But working on my book on Virginia Woolf's aesthetics last Friday made me feel as if I were home alone. I have never felt so profoundly that a chapter--in this case on Woolf's final novel, Between the Acts, which I see almost as her artistic manifesto--was thin and trivial, and that there was no one there (like my thesis supervisor) to help me do a reality check. I was home alone. So I came in on Monday to take a second look and discovered that I was right: thin and trivial it was. Back to the sources. I re-read Woolf's diaries and essays from the period (as a scholar you don't even write the name "Virginia Woolf" without reading the five volumes of diaries and the six volumes of essays. Reading the five volumes of letters would also be a good idea.) to see what she was thinking about the role of art as she watched the rise of Fascism across the channel. Her husband Leonard was Jewish, so they had extra petrol and plans to commit suicide together if Hitler invaded England. They also listened to his broadcasts, hearing his hysterical voice and the crowd's equally hysterical response. Wonderfully, the essays from the time, "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid," and "The Leaning Tower" as well as her diaries from the time reveal her profound ambivalence. She sometimes felt that "Thinking was her fighting." At other times she felt that the reader's inattention to art during times of chaos made it impossible to write. Taking my time, reading and re-reading, I wrote this paragraph about Woolf's biography of the great art critic Roger Fry who was one of the first people to begin to articulate a theory of the autonomy of art:

Society may make “statements and send…forth instructions, edicts, laws, definitions,” but the autonomous work of art, through its use of formal strategies that are a declaration of independence from the exigencies and discords of life can send forth “counter-statements” (Donaghue 114). Certainly, Woolf’s diaries reveal a tense awareness of Hitler’s “instructions, edicts, laws,” of his anti-Semetic policies, and of his pursuit of dominance and war, made all the more dramatic and intense because the well-informed Woolfs could hear Hitler’s voice—sometimes “mere violent rant,” other times “a savage howl”—on the radio (Diary 5 169). At the same time, however, Woolf thinks of her work on Fry’s biography as a reasonable (if inadequate) antidote to Hitler’s and Fascism’s unreasonable behavior. As early as September of 1938, when events in Europe suggested that “Hitler meant to slide sideways into war,” Woolf wrote in her journal that “To oppose this with Roger my only private position. Well thats [sic] an absurd little match to strike” (Diary 5 170). In September of 1939, shortly after Hitler had taken Dantzig, Woolf wrote that “this is bosh & stuffing compared with the reality of…writing, & re-writing one sentence of Roger. So this experiment proves the reality of the mind” (Diary 5 233). Three days later, having felt demoralized, horrified, and rebellious, she reflects “And the only contribution one can make—This little pitter patter of ideas is my whiff of shot in the cause of freedom” (Diary 5 235). Writing Roger Fry, a kind of meditation upon the man who both understood and advocated the formal qualities of art, qualities that guaranteed art’s autonomy, and upon the man whose lectures represented “the best way of checking Nazism” (Letters 6, 414-415), might seem like a small gesture in the face of the events leading up to the war, but these comments suggest she believed that such a gesture was perhaps one of the most significant one could make because the autonomy of art, boldly put, guarantees the critical independence and freedom of both the artist and the reader.

I had asked a simple question of Between the Acts and I'd gotten a simple answer. Once I asked a more complicated question and had found the evidence of Woolf's ambivalence, I could begin to write a much stronger chapter. I share this experience here for a couple of reasons, mostly because I suspect that many of my regular readers are also writers or creative people of one sort or another. My first lesson is to listen to your own critical inner voice. It's easy--particularly when your words look so nice and finished on the computer screen--to silence that voice and be unwilling to ditch a lot of material and start over. But Woolf's sense that art mattered at this horrific moment is something we should all remember. There may be no Hitler in the wings, but your ideas, perspective, viewpoint, queries and questions matter. So when you know that you're cheating, when you're pretending with every tap of your fingers on the keyboard that you're being profound but part of you knows this is a lie, listen to that inner critical voice.

The second thing I learned is that if you ask a simple question, no matter how good your analysis of a text or how careful your observation of human nature, you get a simple answer. So ask complex questions, because that too matters. As the Occupy Movement has suggested, there aren't simple answers to the most important questions--questions about equality, freedom, opportunity, justice.

Finally, once you've asked your complex and important question, keep going. The paintings I'm using to illustrate my post are by Lowrie Warrener and are now on display at the Mendel Art Gallery in Saskatoon. Veronica and I went to Saskatoon this week for our annual Christmas shopping trek, and yesterday morning after she went off to her library meeting I went to the Mendel. If Warrener isn't a name that you know, don't feel that your visual literacy is in question. He worked with the Group of Seven, particularly Lismer, but he more or less gave up when he was 31 because he wasn't achieving success--whatever that is. When I saw "The Happy Cottage," the painting at the top of the post, I couldn't help smile. I don't think Warrener is asking complicated questions: who can, at 31? But he's working on the technique and vision to capture a mood that would stand him in good stead if he hadn't decided instead to sell pencils for the Eagle Pencil Company.

So listen to your critical voice, ask complex questions, and keep going. You know, even if an extraordinary work of art or criticism doesn't come of this practice, you'll be a better, more creative thinker because of it. And heaven knows, in this historical moment, we need critical and creative thinkers.

All creative people are "home alone" in some respects. It isn't a very comfortable feeling, but the result is something your community needs.

November Paradox

2011-11-28T11:39:00.000-06:00

Because the leaves turned and fell so gradually this year, it seemed as if I could actually see that each day there was a little more light coming in my windows, sometimes reflected off the golden leaves under the trees. The clarity that winter brings was so apparent this weekend, with light that studied the texture of bark, the rustle of grasses, the transparency of the dried leaves that hung on my clematis. The light and the warmer weather encouraged me to stay outside and study the world instead of huddling inside, noting the pebbled surface of snow, how solid and stubborn it had become in the warmer weather. I filled the bird feeders and stayed outside to watch the nuthatches and the single pine grosbeak peck at the seed. Three or four flocks of pigeons flew in clustered scallops; as they turned, their wings were silvered with the light

But November changes when the blue hour arrives. If I'm not cooking, I sit in the living room, probably with a cat or two, and watch that unusual, indescribable blue come over my back yard. The birds are long gone, and the wind has probably died down. So the back yard is still. I can't decide whether the blue is serene and comforting--because I can only see it from indoors--or a kind of implicit threat. Dennis Arbuthnott, a counsellor I talked to about Soul Weather and about the effect of weather on our moods, says that everything gets harder for us in November. It's harder to see our lives and our actions clearly; it's harder to have the energy for the things that must be done; it's harder to exercise self-control.

This November, I've found myself flooded with memories at the most unlikely moments. When I'm waiting for Veronica to pick up special food for her cat. When I'm sitting at a red light. When I'm driving in the dark in an unfamiliar neighbourhood.

The other night when I was lost somewhere on the western edge of Lakeview, I remembered driving with my father to see his Aunt Nell on Christmas Eves, driving somewhere we never went otherwise, a sampler box of Whitman's chocolates with its cross-stitched cover on my lap. Wherever it was we had to go, there were Christmas lights (something fairly rare in the fifties) that glittered and winked, lighting up my vague unease. I was still young, so my impression of her living in a dormitory about the size of an elementary gym is probably quite inaccurate, but I know that the large room was full of beds and that there was no privacy. One had the vague sense that her living here was punishment for something, probably for being old and unwell. My sister Karen has filled in some of the anxiety this memory brings: my father visited her faithfully every year, and Christmas Eve really didn't start until we returned--something my mother resented. But there's another mood in this memory that I can't quite name. I have no sense that my father went to see her regularly; I only remember these Christmas Eve visits. So this silent, capable man who is driving us: what is he thinking? Is he feeling guilty for not visiting at other times of the year? Does he see this as a simple duty he must discharge? What role does my mother's impatience play in this pilgrimage? What is his tie to Aunt Nell, given that he lost his mother when he was in his early teens?

This summer while I was at St. Peter's Anne Pennylegion said that we all grieve differently and that grief takes on quite different forms. When my father died four years ago, I felt mainly relief. He had been absent for several years and had been getting his nourishment by a feeding tube because he so often refused to eat. Except one afternoon when I listened to the Faure Requiem, a piece of music he loved, or when I caught snatches of the Brahms Violin Concerto, another favourite, I didn't really grieve my father. I told myself that this was because I mourned him each time I left Atlanta, and indeed I have a trail of poems to prove this. But now I think that my mother's death has left me with the freedom and clarity (it's a long story) to see him more warmly.

November has its morning blue hours: I sit with a cat and a cup of coffee, having finished the newspaper but not feeling quite ready to rush into the day. And I can watch the morning blackness turn to blue. And then in some moment when I'm not looking--perhaps I'm reading already, or perhaps Twig is sitting in my lap looking intently at my face and I'm returning the look, and the blueness lifts and clarity returns.

My father thought his daughters could do anything they set their minds to. He believed we needed a university education: to tell you how rare that was, I'd have to say that none of my cousins on either side of the family went to university. He made me his buddy when he worked around the house, so I can now re-wire sockets or install new lights. I'm not a bad carpenter: I can cut molding at an angle and even have my very own mitre box. He loved the Brahms Violin Concerto, and often put it on in the evening after I went bed. But he also loved Quackity Sax. I think I'll leave him with his contradictions intact, and simply turn the memories over in my hands and my mind when they come.

Mindful Sundays

2011-11-21T16:59:00.000-06:00

When I was a kid, my poor father complained about never getting enough sports. The three women in his family would whine "Do we have to watch this?" unless the University of Michigan was playing in the Rose Bowl. Now I love football Sundays. Bill, who retains his loyalty to the Blue Bombers from his Winnipeg days, wanted to spend the afternoon watching the two semi-final games for the Grey Cup. Now of course he's in a great mood, thinking about how Winnipeg is going to "whup" BC next weekend, though he's also a little nervous about the home team advantage.

But what I love about football Sundays is the opportunity to go guiltlessly to my workroom and spend time reading and working on quilts. Today I was trying to get the blocks for the bluegreygreen quilt into rows that I could then "marry," as my mother used to call it, before I created a border of blocks turned on point. I'm about half done. As I pieced, I watched the sun move across the floor. Sheba, who has her spot at the narrow end of the ironing board, supervised while Twig slept on the end of the bed. I'd take breaks reading Frances Itani's Requiem or practicing the guitar. Time stretched like a lazy cat in the meditative space I created.

Matching up those tiny triangles at the corner of the blocks kept my fingers busy, allowing my mind to drift over my thoughts about Requiem: about how I'd have liked the narrator's voice to be less formal and more visual, but how important and touching the story is. Bin Okuma seems to lose everything three times over: first when his family is rounded up and interned in the interior of British Columbia. Not only is their house and fishing boat taken, but the family is charged for towing the boat to the Navy yard. The community they belong to on the Fraser River finds ways to house themselves and earn money growing tomatoes and keeping gardens. While the outhouses continue to be terrifying for Bin, the community does manage to create bath houses and root cellars. His second loss occurs on the happiest day of his life, a day when his father has put aside his characteristic anger about Bin's dreaminess. We learn this is only because Bin is being given away to an elderly widower who has no children. Though growing up in Okuma-san's household is much more peaceful, although his new father manages to find paper so he can draw, Bin's anger at being given away coexists right beside his gratitutde for Okuma-san's generosity and patience, for the introduction to art and music that he experiences in his home. Finally, the loss that precipitates the "road trip" story that holds the novel together is the death of his wife Lena. Requiem is a story that repays thought while you fingers feel the seams to make sure they're meeting in just the right way: a story about loss, about the redemption of art anbd music, about the difficulty of letting go, about home and the various kinds of homelessness, about what our culture does to those who are different.

Perhaps it's ironic, but I also spent quite a lot of that time thinking about the future of the Occupy movement. What could be more representative of home, besides bread or soup, than a quilt? And what could be more "un-home-like" than living out of a tent in a public space and asking whether our society really does what it can to make everyone feel at home? And what could make them feel less like an integral part of the fabric of society than to have the police move in and put eviction notices on their tents--when they weren't taking them down and putting them in the trash?

I'm hopeful that the Occupyers will find other ways to help their ideas remain visible; some groups seem to already have spent time thinking about how they'll cope with this expected outcome. Yet in this time of tweets and sound bites, our attention span is ridiculously short: if the media doesn't keep its ear to the ground about what this group is thinking, the momentum will be lost, and I'm afraid the media doesn't care a lot about what's not in our face. But at the same time, this idea that can't be evicted tells us that we have to change our way of thinking. Even if they continued to live in their tents, the change has to be supported by those of us who vote.

First, we have to stop thinking about taxes as a dirty word. They are, rather, the cost of our collective well-being. Some of the most highly-taxed societies in the world, like Norway, also have the greatest sense of well-being, which is another way of suggesting that individual wealth and success shouldn't perhaps be the most important item on our agendas.

We have to stop thinking of leadership as what you do or don't do in order to get re-elected four years from now. Leadership requires long-term thinking and a willingness to take some risks for the collective good. Yet we continue to elect governments based on immediate promises (often for no new taxes) rather than long-term vision.

While capitalism seems to be the best system human beings have created, it's far from perfect, particularly in the current form that emphasizes the individual's success and the individual's needs and desires. So we're really going to need to re-think the relationship between individual desires and society's well-being. Interestingly, Requiem has some sense of what that might be like: a group of sixty families in shacks backed up against a mountain managed to have enough to eat and continued the education of their children even under very difficult circumstances. Minimalism helps you figure out your priorities, whether you're in an Occupy camp or unjustly interned in the middle of nowhere.

On another note altogether, people have been asking whether there will be something akin to a Ken Probert Scholarship. To answer that question, I'm simply going to paste in an email from the English Department Head, Nick Ruddick:

Before his death, Ken Probert gave $10,000 to the U of R towards a new English Dept. scholarship. This gift will now be used to create the Dr. Ken Probert Memorial Scholarship, with the English Dept. itself to decide the scholarship criteria. The current fundraising target for this scholarship is $5,000. This amount, added to Ken’s gift and with all funds then matched by the University, will generate a scholarship of $1,200 per year.

Further information about how we might help achieve the fundraising goal is now available in the Dept’s main office. Please do pass on the news about the scholarship to Ken’s former colleagues and students.

The Department's phone number is 585-4320.

Ken Probert

2011-11-13T19:58:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was Ken Probert's funeral. That the Speers Funeral Chapel was full; that the groups represented included a large family (the men wearing brightly-coloured Converse sneakers), many U of R faculty and students, Moose Javians, the Regina writing community, and old time friends and drinking buddies; that the word "generous" was on many people's lips, but that we also said there were parts of his life that eluded us--speaks of his complexity and of a largeness in his life that I don't think he entirely recognized or believed in.

Nick Ruddick came the closest to admitting the mystery of Ken when he said that although Ken regularly dropped the Sunday New York Times or a bag full of New Yorkers on his front porch, although they were hired at the same time after spending a year teaching together at the University of Manitoba, although they worked together for 28 years, Nick didn't know Ken particularly well. Nick read "regrets" from people like Joan Givner, who remembered Ken's skills in the kitchen and his great recipe collection, and from Bela Szabados, who talked of what it was like to work with Ken on a collection of essays and of the myriad kinds of intelligence he brought to that task. A former student who became a close friend, Rebecca Gibbons, spoke of Ken's generosity and insight as a professor. Ken's U of S roommate, Rob Pletch, talked of their post-B.A. days seeing the world together, sharing the fact that Ken had spent two weeks in a cave in Crete--something I certainly never knew. Rob also talked about how Ken would throw himself into projects at Rob's Kenosee Lake cottage, but that he was also ready with a critique of the project--something that seemed more like Ken. So we glimpsed, in the former part of our celebration of his life: Ken the encouraging presence for creative writers; Ken the colleague who always knew what one was interested in and brought books, titles, newspapers to your door; Ken the cook; Ken the editor; Ken the guy's guy who liked football, sailing, projects at the lake.

When Ken retired in 2010, I was asked at the last minute to speak; this was no stretch because I'd long had two favourite Ken Probert stories. One involved a graduate student of Michael Trussler's who needed an emergency loan for a hearing test. Ken took $100 out of his wallet, handed it to Michael, and said "I don't want this back, and I don't want anyone to know where it came from." This was vintage Ken: the generosity and the self-effacing humility. The other was frankly autobiographical, but describes an important facet of Ken's personality. I walked into his office one day and said--not very articulately--"Ken, I can't do this." Ken closed his door, seated me in his comfy chair, and said "Kathleen, you have to stop trying to be so perfect." In spite of not giving him much to go in with my cri de coeur, Ken knew exactly what needed saying. I think Ken frequently knew how it was with us, his colleagues and his students. For some reason I can only guess about, he didn't want us to know how it was with him.

Ken loved beauty. In spite of his colour-blindness, it was clear from his conversation that he knew the great works of art and the role their iconography played in our cultural lives. He loved music passionately and with a catholic taste I hope to be able to emulate when I'm eighty. (I'll need the next twenty years to work on it.) He loved Bach's music in particular, especially the Cantatas, and phone calls from Ken were often accompanied by the gorgeous sound of his carefully-constructed stereo system. He could suss out the beauty from a line of Yeats or Eliot; he grasped and revelled in the beauty of Henry James's thick and complex world view. He loved the contemporary world of ideas; so frequently a Saturday or Sunday phone call came from Ken telling me about a Canadian author who was being interviewed on CBC Radio. And I think he simply loved having all this at his fingertips. Rob spoke of Ken's pipe--an early affectation perhaps, for the man of culture? Yet Rob was right: he was never arrogant or elitist about what he knew.

I've known about Ken's death for five days now, and I still can't take it in. It saddens me enormously, often when I'm in the kitchen doing something absolutely pedestrian like chopping vegetables with one of the several knives he gave me and think that Ken will never again be part of the beautiful, magical dailiness of life that is sometimes a matter of getting by and sometimes a celebration. At the end of her collection of poems, Men in the Off Hours, Anne Carson writes of thinking about her mother's death at the same time she's looking at some Virginia Woolf manuscripts that have Woolf's cross-outs and revisions. Carson writes

"Reading this, especially the cross-out line, fills me with a sudden understanding. Crossouts are something you rarely see in published texts. They are like death: by a simple stroke--all is lost, yet still there. For death although utterly unlike life shares a skin with it. Death lines every moment of ordinary time. Death hides right inside every shining sentence we grasped and had no grasp of. Death is a fact....Crossouts sustain me now. I search out and cherish them like old photographs of my mother in happier times. It may be a stage of grieving that will pass. It may be that I'll never again think of sentences unshadowed in this way. It has changed me."

Perhaps Ken had insight into my moment of angst because he was also hard on himself. Yet I've told the story of his comforting words to several graduate students who have gotten to that point in their writing where they're convinced they have nothing important to say. The story almost always brings first tears and then relief. Our stories about Ken will remain the crossed-out words that are sustaining. Please add your own stories here if you wish.

I called the Saskatchewan Writers Guild on Thursday to see if they had any photographs of Ken hosting one of the many reading series, offering introductions that were insightful, quirky, and always always generous. They could only give me a photograph to "publish" on my blog if they knew who had taken it, and this came down to the very dated photo you see above. Ken was the host of the Signature Reading Series at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. I had been here only a year and was reading from my first book of poetry. I remember him saying that I already had a reputation as a fine teacher--words that encouraged me in some of the dicey moments we all have in the classroom. The other people are Rosemary Sullivan and Brenda Riches, who also died far too young, on the left. The photograph was taken by Christiane Laucht Hilderman in 1991.

Jamie Parker at St. Cecelia

2011-11-07T16:47:00.000-06:00

We have water in the basement again. I inherited a rented water heater when I moved to Regina in 1990, and was told it was a good idea: that our hard water was hard on water heaters. It had begun to look alarmingly rusty about a year ago, and I talked to the company about this, but they told me that as long as they continued to service it, it would be fine. Skeptical, but also wanting a more energy-efficient furnace and water heater, I decided about six weeks ago to go through the environmental audit in preparation for new ones. I will get a new furnace and water heater tomorrow. Which is, of course, why the old water heater started leaking yesterday. We had quite a mess before we even discovered it, and spent yesterday (and last night, taking it in turns) emptying every hour the only thing that would fit under the water heater and catch the drips: a 9 X 13 baking pan.

Which is why we threw caution to the winds last night and went to hear pianist Jamie Parker, who was playing in the new St. Cecelia series. We came back to a small lake, but it was worth it.

As you have doubtless figured out, I have some strange habits. One is to go to concerts of course for the music, but also to people watch. I'm curious about what people take away from concerts. These concerts are scheduled for 7 p.m. on Sunday night, which is perhaps one of the reason there were so many relatively young kids there, as well as quite a few adolescents. It was charming to listen to young beefy men and willowy girls with their long hair on top of their head talk about the repertoire they were working on, and how close they were getting to nailing it It was moving to watch the five-year-olds melt into their mothers' arms and listen sleepily, or even stand up and move in time to Parker's wilder choices. But mostly I'm simply curious about how we respond to something as mathematically abstract as the 12 notes of our octave. I blame Diane Ackerman for this. Thinking about whale song in her gorgeous essay "Moon by Whale Light," she considered the mystery of whales' need to sing in a rather metaphysical way. Whales have huge brains, and brains take a lot of energy, so what are they doing with them? Here's my favourite quotation about consciousness:

"After all, mind is such an odd predicament for matter to get into. I often marvel how something like hydrogen, the simplest atom, forged in some early chaos of the universe, could lead to us and the gorgeous fever we call consciousness. If a mind is just a few pounds of blood, dream, and electric, how does it manage to contemplate itself, worry about its soul, do time-and-motion studies, admire the shy hooves of a goat, know that it will die, enjoy all the grand and lesser mayhems of the heart? What is mind, that one can be out of one's? How can a neuron feel compassion? What is a self? Why did automatic, hand-me-down mammals like our ancestors somehow evolve brains with the ability to consider, imagine, project, compare, abstract, think of the future? If our experience of mind is really just the simmering of an easily alterable chemical stew, then what does it mean to know something, to want something, to be? How do you begin with hydrogen and end up with prom dresses, jealousy, chamber music? What is music that it can satisfy such a mind, and even perhaps function as a language?"

Our love of music is physical. When I was at Banff, working on that grand piano, I remembered the physical pleasure of playing relatively simple things on a wonderful instrument. (I need to get my own piano tuned.) What I love about the guitar is holding it up against my body, so the sound resonates throughout me, as well as in the air around me. But there are still a couple of mysteries. Why does Brahms speak to my body, while Bill Evans or U2 speak to yours? How are these languages our bodies and minds translate? I'm sure some of it is almost universal. Give a piece of music a driving beat, whether it's the line of a bass guitar or octaves in a classical pianist's left hand, and we all have the same urge to move. Some of it is surely cultural. You know that it's way more hip to listen to Lady Gaga than to Debussy; to some degree your taste is shaped by the musical culture around you. Yet how can I, the classical nerd par excellence, know that a song by Arcade Fire or Moonalice is fabulous?

Jamie Parker confessed to being a night owl. He usually practices, he told us, between 9 p.m., when he puts the kids to bed, and 3 a.m. Then he takes the dogs for a walk. So appropriately he'd given us a program of music associated with the night: from Schubert's Traumerei or "Dreams" to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, whose presto he played at breakneck speed--letting the dogs out, he called it. This thematic approach allowed him to play some things we wouldn't hear on the standard "two sonatas" program, including some I can actually play, like the Brahms Opus 118 "Intermezzo." So he clearly wasn't going for a program that would impress us, but rather one that allowed us varied occasions for reflection, thought, and daydreaming of our own. He played each piece as if it was a gem that deserved all of his musical, thoughtful attention and every tonal colour the piano could provide. His informal program notes were in turns informative, touching, and playful. At one point, he even made the sound of a Hungarian frog Bartok refers to in his "The Night's Music" from his "Out of Doors Suite." There was lots of solid information about how the music worked, but also confessions about how the music had moved him. It was worth the lake when we got home, and gave us a much needed balm, a reminder of the way beauty and art can sustain us and are really more important and much more enduring than relatively unimportant inconveniences (in the grand scheme of things) like water in the basement.

So I'm thinking about Ackerman's whales again. Somehow scientists have concluded that there's information in whalesong, though we haven't been able to decode it. Perhaps the whales are more interested, though, in soothing or expressing; maybe this is a whale's version of a purr of satisfaction over tasty plankton or a slipstream of water that strokes them in a pleasurable way. Maybe they're waiting for the water cooler to arrive.

Play

2011-11-03T13:36:00.001-06:00

What do Halloween, the World's Series, my cat Sheba and art critic Dave Hickey have in common?

A celebration of play, of playfulness. Play, particularly play that is purposeful and rule-bound, is often thought of as one of the things that makes humans different from the rest of the animals, but two of my cats, Sheba and Ivy, have both challenged this idea. Each of them created "rules" for their play that made it more challenging. Sheba's idea of a good time is to bring me one of her crinkly mylar balls, drop it at my feet, and go stand in front of one of the chairs in the living room. The rule is this: when I throw the ball, she'll be standing on the floor. But by the time the ball is over the chair, she'll be in it and will bat the ball off somewhere else that makes it interesting to scuttle and chase.

Even if we're not cats, we need to play. Play allows us to make things complicated, to ask "what if?" to stir things up a little, even to translate one inexpressible perception or feeling into another that comes closer to expression. Play seems to be very close to both art and craft. In fact, the kind of play we do may determine whether we're working in the arts or the crafts. The crafters will kill me (but leave a comment below before you do), but I'd say the play of craft is more whimsical and less risky. It doesn't take itself terribly seriously. You can knit socks for sign posts, or cover a bus in knitted graffiti without saying anything in particular, or with the intent of leaving a trenchant message. "Content" isn't a big deal; meaning is even less than a big deal. Just have fun, and leave a trace of that sense of fun on the world. Google "guerilla knitting" and see how much fun people are having. Some of the fun has meaning, but it doesn't worry about meaning.

Of course, Halloween costumes (given that mothers don't always have time and expertise) lean toward the commercial: there are Supermen and Spidermen and the easy ghost. But my colleague Medrie is an ace seamstress and her son Rowan has an outside-the-box imagination, so he was a Jedi-Triceratops. That is, he had a wonderful dinosaur costume but also carried a light sabre. Apparently the original "guising" or wearing of costumes stems from a time when it was believed that souls wandered the earth, some of them seeking vengeance, until All Souls' Day. The living dressed up so they wouldn't be recognized by the vengeful (not the Grateful) dead. I'm having trouble following the line from this Sixteenth-century practice and a kid in a triceratops costume, but maybe I'm not being playful enough. Perhaps one affirmation of life is play.

What is certain is that even as adults we need to play. In a walk down Thirteenth Avenue on Tuesday (my brain, exhausted with aesthetics, was offline, so I needed to walk), I stopped into Paper Umbrella, a place that encourages play in wonderful ways. The little easel by the desk had a notice about a Saskatchewan Bookbinders and Book Artists' event, so we talked casually about how much people need to be creative and playful. He told me that there are quite a number of groups that meet to encourage play, one of them devoted entirely to paper. Trying to find information on the bookbinders' event, I ran into another one also occurring this weekend. So you can take your pick and go to the True Knit Art Show 3: Craftermath on this weekend at the Riddell Centre, offering us "renegade art and craft from great local artists." On the same day, the Saskatchewan chapter of the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists' Guild will have a show of hundreds of handmade books at 42 McMaster Place between 1 and 4.

The quilt at the top of the post is called "Sunflowers in the Night Garden." It was made for my wonderful sister-in-law, Gloria, who has this thing for sunflowers. But of course play, as Rowen well knows, involves doing something differently; it's a kind of jazz riff on the world of appearances, the world of stereotypes and cliches. So I couldn't just make Gloria a quilt that looked like real sunflowers, straining, as they always do, toward the sun; I wanted to think about sunflowers at night. And instead of trying to make fabric look like real sunflowers, I used a traditional Mariner's Compass pattern to simply suggest sunflowers. Your eyes have to play a little bit as you look.

This is one of my more recent "what if?" quilts. The pattern is a conventional "log cabin," which usually begins with a red square in the middle and then builds up the block in strips of light or dark fabric. As the name suggests, it's a very North American design, most often made in bright calicoes. But what would happen if I combined the American design with the softness of Japanese fabrics?

In a recent post, I tried to wax eloquent about the fall colours I was seeing. I even tried taking photographs, but they were, as photographs, too washed out. So I asked another "what if?" question. What if I used an American block in a really small scale (the round object is my thimble, so you can see how small the pieces are), along with the soft colours of Japanese fabrics to explore the way you need to see the landscape this time of year?

In his essay, "Frivolity and Unction" (I almost typed that "fun/ction") Dave Hickey talks about a 60 Minutes episode where Morley Safer takes on the pretentiousness of the art world in a Sotheby's auction room. Apparently Safer's critique was way off base, entirely uninformed, and created quite a righteous stir in the art world. He queried things like the "emotive content" of abstract art. But Hickey was okay with it. In fact, he thinks the art world might be better off if it were a bit more playful. "We could just say: 'Okay! You're right! Art is bad, silly, and frivolous. So what? Rock-and-roll is bad, silly, and frivolous. Movies are bad, silly, and frivolous. Basketball is bad, silly, and frivolous. Next question'?" He thinks that if we take art off its pedestal, next to other things we value, we could talk about it a little more vigorously, a little more adventurously. It art isn't on a pedestal, we don't need to be qualified specialists to talk about it. Might that not get a more democratic, more playful conversation about art going?

I took the photograph of that wonderful horse at the Minneapolis Institute of Art this summer.

Happiness and the Good Life 2: Community

2011-10-25T12:02:00.000-06:00

On Saturday mornings, Bill and I begin our day by going out for coffee; sometimes we go to Good Earth in the Scarth Street Mall. This last Saturday, the view was slightly surreal. The tall homeless man (I'm making a presumption--and no, that's not a slip of the fingers) who stands silently at the corner of 12th and Scarth was there, and we talked about the weather, as we often do, while I dug around for my small contribution to his life. Across the way, in Victoria Park, were the tents of Occupy Regina, still mostly peaceful. I imagined what it would be like to wake up on a crisp October morning surrounded by people who shared your passion, your vision, standing around drinking coffee, talking about what mattered. In my nostalgic haze, I hadn't thought where the hot coffee might come from.

Nostalgic it was: because if I thought about the last time I felt embraced in such a community, it would be my early years in the English Department at the University of Regina, when we all taught four courses a year (instead of five every other year) and did far less committee work. Wednesday mornings--because nobody taught on Wednesday--we often gathered in the Faculty Lounge and talked about what mattered: students, texts, approaches to literature. We created a community, and is so often the case, that community was created by our response to literature--to art. Stretching back as far as Kant, the "judgement of taste" as he would have put it, assumed that other people might share your opinion, but that no one needed to. More recently, in Dennis Donaghue's book Speaking of Beauty, he talks about the fact that a definition of beauty eludes us, so we must talk about it. In Dave Hickey's Air Guitar, which I've been reading for my work on Virginia Woolf's aesthetics (an odd pairing if ever there was one: Hickey loves Las Vegas, the one place in the States where he feels at home, and once dealt in psychedelic art), he talks about the feeling that you have when you have read a poem or a story, or have been to a movie or a gallery show, and you say to other people "You've got to see/read/hear this!" This response makes Woolf and Hickey logical bedfellows, in spite of their obvious differences. For what else is Woolf's two-volume The Common Reader but an attempt to create a community of readers? When she heard that the copy of TCR in the Lewes library was spotted and splotched with food, she was delighted. She had indeed reached common readers.

In the same essay, Dave Hickey told another story about community which entirely charmed me--again, with a sense of nostalgia. Because he grew up in the fifties, when people kept their windows open during the summer, his father learned that the Jewish woman down the street who had survived the Holocaust shared a passion of his. Simply put, on summer nights he could hear her playing Duke Ellington 78s. This led to an extraordinary Sunday afternoon jam session, with Mildred, Hickey and his father and two other Irish dudes, two Latinos, and two blacks toking up and making music. Unlike the others, Mildred brought an armload of sheet music, and when Hickey whispered about this derisively to his father, his dad told him to shut up. The more experienced jammers made room for Mildred that afternoon, encouraging her to "take it," and giving her the usual 16-bar space for a solo that never came. But they never stopped making space for her. Who knew when she might finally feel enough courage?

This is a fairly long riff on my part, as it moves from my Saturday morning thoughts about community, to nostalgic memories of my early years in Regina, to an aesthetics of community and a 1950s slightly stoned jam session. But as it turns out, it comes right back to where it began. Yesterday afternoon I bought some cookies and muffins and went to hang out with the folks who are occupying Regina. On the basis of 25 minutes of uneasy conversation between an English professor and a couple of guys, I'm not going to make any generalizations about the people who are occupying Regina with their signs that range from telling me not to trip over tent ropes (which I promptly proceeded to do), to assertions that "In Squirrel We Trust" or "This is Democracy in Action." Interestingly, I talked to quite a number of people who are not occupying Regina, but who came there simply to hang. One young man said sadly that if his wife would simply let him off his leash, he'd move in tomorrow. Another young man had brought his kids.

But Gerry (not his name), whom I talked to longest, said that the response to their occupation has been pretty good. They have their whiteboard up with things they need, and people often read it, go away and clean out their closets, and then return with needed blankets or sleeping bags. Gerry often keeps night watch, however, because when O'Hanlons gets out, they can find dudes pissing on their tents. But a supportive retired couple drove in last week from Fort Qu'Appelle with enormous pans of ham and other hot food. And apparently there were lots of leftovers from a Knox Met pot luck or fowl supper that got brought over to the group of tents.

There have been complaints that the aims of the "Occupy" movement are unfocussed. I don't agree. I think they're critiquing a capitalist system that's way out of tune, and I think they're worried about what we're doing to the planet--since changing our approach to the environment would (shock and awe) cost money (which we could take out of absurd CEO salaries). But what I saw and heard yesterday, and the daydreams that the quiet collection of tents started in my head was the dream of community. We could say this about the "Occupy" movement: that in the place of an excessively competitive capitalism that divides winners and losers pretty ruthlessly, they're offering us a vision of community. They clean up their park; they chant the words of the people who come to inspire them, they move their tents every couple of days so they don't kill the grass. In his essay "What is the Good Life?" Mark Kingwell writes "We are, finally, happier not with more stuff but with more meaning: more creative leisure time, stronger connections to groups of friends, deeper commitment to common social projects, and a great opportunity to reflect. In short, the life of the well-rounded person, including crucially the orienting aspect of life associated with virtuous citizenship. Nor is this basic social commitment something we should pursue for ourselves alone, a project simply to promote our personal happiness. At its best, it is an expression of commonality that creates something greater than the sum of its--let us be honest--often self-interested and distracted members. It creates a community."

On Happiness and the Good Life

2011-10-19T21:45:00.001-06:00

My friend Katherine Arbuthnott has told me that psychologists have come at happiness from a number of angles, using different methods or making different assumptions, and have generally come to the same conclusions. If you have extrinsic motivations--if you think that money or status or beauty will make you happy--you're screwed. Because, simply put, there's never enough money or success. We know what happens to beauty. On the other hand, if your goals are intrinsic, rising out of what gives you pleasure and joy, or out of ideals you have about the human condition or relationships between people--things that can't be seen by anyone but you, you don't need a lot of the money or status to be quite happy. In one study, for example, a kind of bachelor's degree exit questionnaire established whether students' goals were intrinsic or extrinsic and then asked the students to say what they'd like to have achieved at the end of the next several years. Interestingly, in their follow-up interviews, the psychologists found most students had met their goals. Only the students with intrinsic motivation, however, were satisfied with their accomplishments and had an increased sense of well-being.

A few months ago, Bill and I watched a fascinating documentary on happiness. Here's a clue: it isn't winning the lottery. When lottery winners were interviewed, they talked about the attempts to be happy in spite of the money. Perhaps Violet and Allan Large of Lower Truro near Halifax have figured how to be happy with a lottery win: give it away to people who need it. Even with a five-year-old truck and a thirteen-year-old car, they have all they need--each other. Here's another clue: it doesn't mean you haven't suffered in some profound way. Men who had been prisoners of war reported that if they could live their lives over, they wouldn't try to avoid those difficult times because they made them who they are.

But through this entire program, I kept asking a question that no one would answer. Why is happiness the greatest good? Even the economists have begun to use their mathematical models to consider happiness, mostly because they realize that GDP doesn't measure the well-being of a society. As I understand the research, one of the things they've discovered is that I'm happy with my salary if it's more than yours. If it's less--even if that "less" is a lot--I'm not entirely satisfied.

What makes me happy? A good day's writing. A great class where the students have had an "aha!" moment or have taught me something. Meaningful conversation with Bill or Veronica or a close friend. A cat on my lap. Filling the bird feeders on these crisp mornings and listening to the eager birds waiting in the trees for breakfast. A beautiful day--preferably not windy. Saying 'thank you' to someone and surprising them. What I'm trying to work out for myself, on my own terms, is the relationship between being happy and what the Greek philosophers (and many philosophers since) have called living the good life.

To some extent I saw this problem played out in two books I read earlier this fall. The first was Sheila Heti's well-reviewed How Should a Person Be? The passive verb "be" made me slightly nervous, as did the narrator's focus, often to the detriment of the people around her, on how she should present herself to the world. I wasn't nearly as fond of the book as the reviewers were (though to be fair, I've included a link to the good reviews below), because ironized or not, the ethical dilemmas faced by our Sheila-narrator seemed banal and fairly unchallenging and not a little self-involved. There's a certain picaresque energy about Sheila's quest for meaning in her life and success as an artist, and certainly a Facebooky-texty edginess to the style. But for me, this didn't make up for the banality or sheer triviality of the narrator's anxieties and behaviour.

Let's contrast that with Diane Ackerman's plangent One Hundred Names for Love. This work of creative non-fiction records the aftermath of a massive stroke for Ackerman's husband, writer Paul West. The result was aphasia--sometimes an erasure, sometimes a tangling of language in West's damaged brain. Ackerman, who has written extensively about science and recently about the brain, clearly explains what Paul is experiencing, explains the challenges his faces, the way his brain mis-fires, so that he often finds no words at all, sometimes can only create fey quasi-metaphors that need to be decoded. The typical boring, repetitive strategies for bringing language back online don't work for the imaginative West, but Ackerman's encouragement to go ahead and be playful and offbeat does, producing the one hundred names of the book's title. While watching West's slow return to language is inspiring--he wrote three books after the stroke-- perhaps most moving for me was Ackerman's attempt to give him the best care she could at home while continuing to take care of her own creative and emotional needs. This narrative doesn't consider what it's good to "be," but about what it's important to do, and how difficult making those decisions is when your own needs and those of someone you love are in conflict.

As I go back to my question about the relationship between happiness and the good life via my thoughts about these books, I may have a hypothesis. Extrinsic motivation involves being something: being rich or being beautiful. Intrinsic motivation involves doing something, and that something often involves creativity, kindness, justice, craftsmanship, conversation.

These questions about being and doing are given more relevance right now by the various "Occupy" movements we see occurring across Europe and North America. In some ways, we're looking at the effects that the insatiable people with extrinsic goals have on the lives of people who are trying to find enough resources to simply live. When I got all lofty this weekend about the benefits of intrinsic motivation, Bill asked quite pointedly whether that mattered to someone who was simply looking for enough money to pay rent and utilities and buy groceries. Probably not: it's something my privileged status allows me to think about in my spare time. All the same, as Katherine Arbuthnott wisely observed last week, the more our culture spends its time observing and considering the lives of the rich and famous, the more time we as a culture spend thinking about a kind of motivation that isn't really good for any of us.

Here's the link to the reviews of How Should a Person Be?
http://www.sheilaheti.net/hsapb-reviews.html

Undefinable beauty

2011-10-12T18:31:00.000-06:00

Being on sabbatical is making me a boring blogger. When I'm not reading aesthetics or Woolf criticism, I'm walking in the woods or making big dinners. I don't have the delight of students challenging me and teaching me new things, forcing me to go in new directions. In fact, the very point of this sabbatical, from one perspective, is to finally express what I know and have been thinking about Woolf on and off for the last six years. Fortunately--and this probably speaks to what I love about Woolf and about literature and art more generally--that task is always going to be full of surprises, twists, and turns.

Also fortunately, there's sometimes a delightful consonance between walking in the woods and reading aesthetics.

I love this time of year on the prairie. When it's full summer, the world in Regina is an explosion of green punctuated by people's gardens, but I think in the main we feel delightfully enveloped by some whole, large impression of a world in the thick of fecundity. Being in love with prairie autumns is to have your attention captured differently. Mostly, I notice detail. The texture of dried grass punctuated by enthusiastic weeds that have invented playful and effective ways of scattering their seeds. Or the texture of a pile of leaves that has fallen, brown and sere, in arabesques and curlicues. The architecture of trees as they reveal themselves to me day by day. Colour. Colours that can't be captured by a single word, that make you concentrate to express what you see. Much of the green has gone greeny-gold. Or olive-greeny-gold. We're suddenly aware of brown, but aware of how many shades--from the greybrown of bark to the redbrown of those weeds you see at the side of the road, to the goldbrown of fallen aspen leaves.

Bill and I drove out the old Lumsden Road yesterday, and the fields were the colour of creamed honey, except that describing it that way gets the texture all wrong. It's not silky, like creamed honey; it's more like an inventively-combed brush cut. There's one place on the road where I made Bill stop because the farmers, who are on one of the Qu'Appelle Valley tributaries, have had to be very creative ploughing their fields to both get the most crop and go with the flow of the land. In some ways, it looks like the raked sand of a Japanese garden, but that texture isn't right either. It just is itself.

I was delighted today, then, when I was reading Alexander Nehemas's Only a Promise of Happiness (which is how Stendahl defined beauty), to come across his sense that beauty always eludes us. That's part of what makes it beauty: "The problem is with the idea that we already know the features that account for the beauty of the object before us, which doesn't acknowledge the fact that as long as we find something beautiful we feel certain that it can still yield something of value, despite the fact that we don't know what that is....Just as nothing we know is enough to prove that something is beautiful, everything we love is always a step beyond our understanding. The pleasures of the imagination are pleasures of anticipation, not accomplishment" (75-6). We love a poem for its unending complexity that no reading ever captures. We love a beautiful child for a million reasons, but one of these is for the child's sense of potential, of becoming someone who surprises us, often daily. We love a painting, whether it's a Mark Rothko or a Vermeer or a Kenojuak owl because we can never exhaust the delight we take in the image, can never exhaust a sense of significance and vision that lies beyond our ability to describe it.

When I started the Woolf book, I was entirely new to aesthetics (now I'm just new), and began reading anything people would recommend. I thank Betsy Warland for introducing me to Elaine Scarry's groundbreaking On Beauty and Being Just and Ken Probert for bringing in a review of Only a Promise of Happiness. I found Dennis Donoghue's Speaking of Beauty on my own. None of these books on beauty told me what I finally had to learn from Gadamer, Adorno, and Jusdanis: that art's autonomy guarantees its freedom to critique the world it lives in, which I wrote about in my last post. But books on beauty nevertheless do some important things. First, they take the discussion of aesthetics out of the art gallery or concert hall or classroom and bring it to daily lives, which is where most of us experience beauty daily (I hope). But second, these writers agree that we have to talk about beauty, that it can't be simply defined, just as I can't simply define the fall colours I love. And that has a potential to create a sense of community.

When you expererience something beautiful, you want to share it with other people. Think about it. How often have you said "You have to read this book/go to this movie/listen to this music"? As far back as Kant, we have realized two things about what he called the judgement of beauty. One is that you imagine that everyone should share it. The second is that you respect the sense that they don't. You can't force people to agree with you about what's beautiful. And imagine how impoverished and homogenous the world would be if we all agreed on what is beautiful. Somehow a world that totally agrees about what's beautiful evokes images of uninventive, gargantuan concrete walls for me. So if some of you, taking Nehemas's line on the "promise" of beauty, are thinking about my love of fall colours and observing that the only promise is winter and you think Saskatchewan winters suck, that's okay. Because I have this goofy theory that what we find beautiful is an inherent part of our personalities, of who we are.

The photographs are by Veronica Geminder, whose work can be found here.

Ideas of home, and homelessness

2011-10-04T13:07:00.000-06:00

Back from Banff, I'm being "disciplined" and working in a focused way on my book on Virginia Woolf's aesthetics, arguing that for Woolf the "autonomous work of art" and "political art" are not an antithesis, but that an author's use of an engaging and sometimes puzzling form forces the reader to bridge the gap between the work of art's autonomy and the political and social world it critiques. There's no "message"; rather, there are puzzling moments that encourage the reader's reflection. There's a fairly long philosophical tradition, beginning in the twentieth century with the work of Gadamer and Adorno and continuing in the twenty-first with the work of Scarry, Nussbaum, Donaghue,and Jusdanis, for this conception of the autonomous work of art. I think the upshot of all this theory is that autonomy provides both the writer and the reader with the most freedom. The writer doesn't need to come up with answers or tow a party line, but only to ask how it is in the world. And the reader is only urged to reflect and consider, to bring their own knowledge, context, and experience to bear upon the human questions.

Working on Woolf is not "being disciplined" because this is what the University expects me to do. It's being disciplined because it's hard work balancing all I know about aesthetics (and, at my age, remembering all I know about aesthetics), all other critics have said about Woolf's novels and essays, and my vision of the work itself. It requires a kind of single-minded focus. And frankly, I want to get it done. It's the last big project of my academic career.

And then there's the matter of timing. After working on Soul Weather flat out at Banff, I needed some time away from the novel to think both deeply and freely about my characters and about the questions I have decided to explore in my own novel. And frankly, thinking about how Woolf examines and critiques her culture without sending a "message" provides a lesson for the novelist, urging me to keep questions, not answers, top of mind as I work on Soul Weather, leaving my readers free to consider their own answers to the problems posed by this particular historical moment.

That free and deep thinking takes place in life's interstices--those moments when you think you're doing something else, like quilting or taking a walk with your daughter on a lovely fall day. Veronica and I walked the Marsh Route around White Butte Trails east of Regina last Friday, and the smell of leaves and desultory conversation about what we'd cook for Thanksgiving prompted me from time to time to think about ideas of home. I found myself considering "home" from Dirk's point of view. I could see Dirk toward the end of the novel concluding that home may be as much about time as about space. It's true, he thought, using my brain to do his thinking, that we think of home as a place because our memories are so physical: the fall of light in the kitchen on an October afternoon mingling with the smell of a turkey that's nearly done, and the sound of family and friends talking in the next room; the feel of the linen napkins we inherited from Grandma and the texture and smell and taste of Grandma's pumpkin pie, which a daughter now makes.

But maybe "home" is also a time, Dirk thought, still using my brain, a time in our own lives and growth when we finally feel at home in our own skin and our own histories, a time when we've made peace with our mistakes and losses and decided that they're now a part of ourselves that we actually rather like. A time when the past, the present, and the future seem to exist in comfortable harmony, when a sense of adventure mingles with a sense of being grounded. Given that Soul Weather is trying to query and problematize the idea of home, I rather liked what Dirk was thinking.

And then I began to read Jack Layton's Homelessness: How to End the National Crisis, as much for research as out of respect for this remarkable and hopeful man. Layton must as some level understand rhetoric, for us realizes that it's going to take both statistics and moving portraits of real homeless people to allow us to see that there's no "stereotypical" homeless person. While fifty years ago we might not have been far off concluding that many homeless people are single male alcoholics, the economy of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries have made homelessness a much wider problem that involves families as well.

Here are some startling, admittedly selected facts:

Homeless people have a death rate 8 to 10 times higher than those who are housed.
It costs significantly more to house a homeless person than to provide them with a secure and stable roof over their heads. In Toronto, keeping them in a shelter costs about $1990 a month; subsidizing their rent costs about $700 a month; providing them with affordable housing costs about $200. This doesn't include the enormous costs to a health care system trying to deal with the problems caused by stressful, overcrowded conditions in shelters or the even worse conditions for those "living rough." Nor does it put a dollar amount on the struggle of the homeless person to survive and to keep some dignity and spirit intact.
Only about 3% of people lose their housing because of mental illness.
On the other hand, depression is widely experienced by the homeless. You try not having any privacy. Try not having a "home" in a culture that so stridently values success and equates success with a large house and two-car garage. Try panhandling to get enough money for a coffee so you can have access to a washroom where you can go to the bathroom and clean up a little. Here's the one that got to me: you try not sleeping well, either on the street or in a shelter, for weeks on end and see if you don't become depressed.
Most people are catapulted onto the streets by poverty: by unemployment or by low wages in communities with a high cost of housing. Others find the street a safer option than an abusive partner or parent.
Climate change is only making it harder for the homeless: more people are now dying of heat-related causes than of cold.

At one point, Canada was considered by the United Nations to be a leader in providing housing for those living on society's margins. We're now a scandal, particularly since we have the world's 8th largest economy.

Homelessness is not a choice, as politicians perhaps like to think. Nor are the homeless simply the "undeserving" rather than the "deserving" poor--a distinction that Charles Dickens questioned back in the middle of the nineteenth century in works like A Christmas Carol, but which still remains robust among politicians who think that a free market will fix everything. "Homelessness is a political phenomenon" Jack Layton writes "--if we understand politics to be, among other things, the process that determines the allocation of our resources. Housing is one of these resources. Has out society determined that its resources will be distributed so that some community members have no housing?" (29).

So it's a good thing I'm working on Virginia Woolf, thinking about the autonomous work of art, blogging about homelessness, and letting my thinking about home settle for a while before I return to Soul Weather. I like Dirk's idea about "home" being temporal as well as spatial. But Layton's book makes me realize that there's more to it than that. I need to discover how to let the reader see these other facets of home and homelessness without giving the reader a message. But I don't need to be quite so true to my aesthetic ideals in a blog.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Appreciate home.

Goodbye to Banff

2011-09-22T19:19:00.000-06:00

Wednesday night as I was thinking, after I wrote my last post, about what I wanted to do as a novelist, about the resources I have at hand for accomplishing this--a narrator's voice, the choice to creates scenes or summaries, the ideas about the world that shape these choices, every word in our rich language, the rhythms of a sentence or a snippet of dialogue, the ways I can capture the complexity and even inexplicability of human character--I was listening to the choral music of Arvo Part. He's an Estonian composer of choral music that's minimalist and that has harmonies that call forth all that's beautiful in the human voice. The Valentine Studio only has a little Sony CD player, but the lofty ceiling in my cabin makes it sound sublime. While I listened to Part, the sound of a train added a dissonance that is also a kind of harmony in the mountains. And beneath that there was the sound of wind in the lodge pole pines around my cabin, threaded through with the rustling that only aspens and birch can make. I've done a poor job of describing this: it can't be described, really, only experienced.

But I suppose what I'm trying to do with that awkward description is to talk about the creative act itself. How it's made of plans and chance and accident. Of course you need a vision of what you want to make. But how often do you solve a problem by daydreaming in a coffee shop and hearing an exchange that in turn suggests possibilities that might get you out of the corner you've painted yourself into? Or that might reveal that ill-lit corner of a character you want your reader to understand. That you wanted to understand.

On some days, reaching out and touching the mind of someone else simply with your words is unimaginable, but must be done anyway.

And then on other days, your creative spirit is simply spent. You want ordinary comforts like your husband and the purring of your crazy little cat. And then you realize that they're not ordinary at all.

Five deer and the edge of disaster

2011-09-21T16:43:00.001-06:00

On Tuesday evening I went for a walk and was rewarded with the company of five deer: two does a and three fawns. There are two sides of the road here. One side is "safe," that is, there are woods and mountain. The other side, where the Banff Centre is, is more settled. The fawns were a little skittish when they were on the settled side and at one point raced and bounded back to the safe side, bleating away like little goats when their mothers wouldn't come. Finally they ambled across the road again to join their mothers. Countless people stopped their cars, got out and snapped a couple of pictures, got back in their cars, and raced away. I stayed about half an hour watching them; so I got to hear the bleating and got to watch the fawns' awkward grace as they pronked and scallopped over the road. The lady at the top of the page wasn't more than two metres from me when I took the photograph.

One of the things I love about Virginia Woolf's work is that she can take an "ordinary" day--any day Lily Briscoe spends with the Ramsays in Cornwall, or any afternoon Elinor does her benevolent single-lady errands in early twentieth-century London--and infuse it with the significance we should all be attentive to in every one of our days. If one of the things literature should do is to prompt us to think about our own answers to the "overwhelming question," "How should one live?" then Woolf's answer is "Attentively."

I brought only one book with me to Banff, Per Petterson's latest novel, I Curse the River of Time, which I suspect I didn't get. (In any event, I didn't particularly like it. I may write about this at another time, or I may let it drop.) I decided I'd let serendipity and the library here decide my reading. I've been finding myself trying to accumulate less stuff, and taking books out of libraries rather than buying them seemed like a good idea. So I took out Elizabeth Hay's Alone in the Classroom. I loved Late Nights on Air, reading it twice, for pure pleasure, not because I didn't get it. Hay is incredibly skilled at evoking a world: I love her attentiveness to nature and weather and the places people live because it takes me right where the characters are. I love the complexity, even the contradictoriness of her characters.

But we are so aware that all of the characters of Alone in the Classroom are on the edge of disaster. We know that two pretty young girls are going to die. We know the young mother of two is going to fall disastrously in love with a much older man who is the former (and younger) lover of her favourite aunt. We know that something is seriously wrong with Parley's mental health, but we don't know what.

The part of me that's a defensive writer--which is to say someone who has spent about ten hours a day for the last week and a half writing a novel--both admires Hay's descriptive and narrative skill and wants to argue with her. "Why don't we write novels any more about the way people go about their everyday lives, struggling to make sense of them and--every day--to realize their own desires while being caring members of communities and families? Why do ethical dilemmas only involve extremes in novels these days? Is there something about the early twenty-first century that dictates that drama lies only on the edge of disaster? That it is only in the extremes that we are tested? You can be kind or patient or heroic or committed or deeply thoughtful once a week. Try doing it every day. Try even trying to do it every day."

Am I hopelessly old-fashioned?

Nature and creativity

2011-09-19T09:35:00.003-06:00

Friday
We had snow overnight in the mountains--at least higher up than where we are. The effect is to outline the striations on the rock. Driving to and from Canmore (where I go to a comforting little Communitea Cafe to get a people-watching fix and to check out Knit and Caboodle to see if I can't tempt myself with something), you get a more fluid sense of the mountains than you do from a townsite or a place like the Banff Centre where buildings keep getting in the way. I find I simply can't imagine the force that led to the Rocky Mountains uplift millions of years ago. But snow on the mountains makes something of their structure clearer to me.

Today I had to go into Banff for groceries. It's Saturday, and people are out and about in spite of the relative cold and rain that fell from time to time. You don't come into the mountains for the comfort, I thought to myself. You come to be awed, to experience the sublime, and maybe you can do that even better a little cold. While I've worked this afternoon, rain has fallen on y wooden roof, even while the sun was shining.

Monday
For some reason, as I walked through the rain this morning to my cabin, I thought of the childhood game, "rock, paper, scissors." The clouds have veiled the mountains. We don't think about these towering erruptions of earth that are millions of years old being erased by anything, but the clouds can do it very softly. The woods beyond the window where I work are very still, but their colours are heightened and deepened by the rain.

I've been thinking about why we come to nature for "retreats." Who goes to NYC for a writer's retreat? You might well go there for inspiration and for ideas, but you go to Yaddo or Emma Lake or Banff to get the work done, to go beyond the draft you scribbled on the back of your boarding pass.

The slightest thing delights me here. My pine marten, whose dark glossy fur moves like water over the fallen logs. A small flock of juncos yesterday. Sometimes the wind is even higher than the mountains, and a birch outside my window winks its yellow-tinged leaves. My friend Katherine Arbuthnott says that nature provides "soft fascination" that tickles our attention but doesn't grab it by the throat. Woolgathering, my daughter would say.

So I'm going to hunker down with one of her very urban photographs and write another poem.

http://blueduets.blogspot.com/2010/11/woolgathering.html

Research at Banff

2011-09-16T08:02:00.000-06:00

Doing research as a scholar and as a creative writer are very different processes. When I work on my book about Virginia Woolf's aesthetics, I'm absolutely fastidious: I read everything I can get my hands on and document every half-idea that interests me. Creative Writers, however, need to allow their impressions more sway. I've heard at least one writer remark that you have to immerse yourself in a topic and then forget most of what you've learned when you bring research into your creative work. This is because you don't want you characters to sound like lecturers--something I'd find particularly easy, I'm afraid. It's one of the discourses I live inside

In the next chapter of Soul Weather, I'm introducing a young character who is in the last year of her undergraduate degree and is beginning to work on a history honours paper on Simone Weil. Samantha is borderline anorexic (so I've been learning about anorexia too, mostly by reading people who've been anorexic: experts are no help here at all!) and is drawn, consciously or unconsciously, to Weil because of her anorexia. I've read a couple of biographies, but today it was time to begin to read Weil's own work.

There are many interesting facets of Weil's thought that might attract a young person, though one element of her character informs all of them. Even as a child, she felt a remarkable sympathy for those less fortunate than herself, whether for soldiers at the front during World War I, for her lycee students, for French industrial workers--and workers everywhere, for those fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and later for a humanity in the midst of anti-Semitism and of Nazi Germany's overrunning of Europe as its individuals struggled to define their relationship to God and to what was ethical. For a while I wondered which of Weil's personae Samantha would find most powerful. I think this would be Weil the mystic, but since that's all but impossible to write about in a brief honours paper, Samantha will look at Weil's political thought from an earlier part of her career.

Because I didn't want to bring a ridiculous number of books with me, I ensured that Weil's Oppression and Liberty was available as an eBook. Wanting a different view from that in my forest cabin and thinking that a larger screen would be better for reading (I was wrong, it turns out), I took myself off to the Paul D. Fleck library here at the Banff Centre that they make available to anyone with an artist's card. As you can see, the scenery is stunning, though because it dwarfs you it may encourage you to pay more attention to your work rather than less.

Weil's Oppression and Liberty is remarkable, not least because she insightfully critiques her own historical moment in 1934. Unlike most of the French Left, she can see even then that the communist experiment in Russia is more oppressive than the Czar and is horrified that the German working class--the best-educated in Europe--has embraced Hitler. Her analysis of Marx's errors will only be fully revealed in a couple of years when she begins working in French factories and realizes that the working conditions of the proletariat--the noise, the long hours with few breaks, the physical demands and danger of the work, the quotas set by management that she felt forced you to put aside your very soul and every feeling or individual thought you had in order to survive a day as an automaton--so exhausted the workers that they had no energy left for rebellion.

Interestingly (and I have no idea what this says about my current frame of mind or my own working conditions), I found startlingly incisive her critique of bureaucracy. She described government in the Soviet Union this way: "there is a professional bureaucracy, freed from responsibility, recruited by cooption and possessing, through the concentration in its hands of all economic and political power, a strength hitherto unknown in the annals of history." They were entering, she felt "the age of the technicians of management," and felt that they produced nothing but their own hegemony and control.

More philosophically, she equated human individuality with our own determination to insist that our actions echo our beliefs.

And perhaps, to beleaguered environmentalists who can't convince North American governments to take some leadership on environmental issues, she had this to say: "There is no difficulty whatever, once one has decided to act, in maintaining intact, on the level of action, those very hopes which a critical examination has shown to be wellnigh unfounded; in that lies the very essence of courage." Facing the fact that her own historical moment was on the edge of war and that workers would soon be sent to die at the front, facing governments indifferent to high levels of unemployment (which stood at 20% in the early Thirties) and to the working conditions the remainder had to endure, she wrote these remarkable words: "Nothing in the world can prevent us from thinking clearly."

As you see, I've done exactly what a Virginia Woolf scholar would have done: I've copied out the great quotations. How am I ever going to translate this into a young woman's passion and thought? Keep reading! Maybe stop taking notes!

Soul Weather: July

2011-09-15T10:11:00.000-06:00

I've had the sense that I was focussing too much on my computer screen to see any wildlife besides my little acrobatic marten, but this morning my eye was caught by a doe and fawn eating around my cabin. They look so peaceful, perhaps because they're vegetarians and seem to find food everywhere: their coats blend in with the bark of the tree trunks, and light up in the same dappled way when the sunlight hits them. The fawn was peacefully oblivious and hungry, but the doe would take a bite, sniff the air, and take another bite. They ambled, it's true, but only after the doe's sense of smell told them it was safe. Of course I didn't have my camera!

Here's the beginning of the second chapter I've been working on here:

In July, even the weather slowed down to watch the paint dry. After the weather gods had flooded Maple Creek, Yorkton, the Kawakatoose First Nations reserve, Saskatoon and most recently North Battleford, they’d decided to blow in one of those characteristic Saskatchewan summer days – the kind we make nostalgia from: dry, breezy, the sky so infused with dense blue that it's almost hot. It was the long weekend, and everyone seemed to have left town for Regina Beach or Echo Lake.
Lee is working on the second bedroom, giving Dirk a chance to finish downstairs. He’d allowed her to choose the colours, and she’d decided to find paint that reminded her of celadon glazes. She's used her favourite, an ambiguous blue-grey-green, in her garret and will use it again in the immense downstairs room that stretches from kitchen to living room when it was ready. Perhaps only a potter would have known how smashing it will look with the dark, reddish-brown cabinets. She calls her celadon “green,” but it isn't the colour of leaves – not the grade-school green of elm trees or the yellow green of the trailing sweet potato vines people put in pots with their annuals that has such punch. Celadon is more like water, and just as ambiguous: celadon could be the reflection of that hot blue sky in the green-grey wrinkled elephant skin of Wascana Lake on a windy day. Or the colour of water from melted glaciers, cloudy grey-green where the water is ruffled; cooler, clearer green in peaceful backwaters where the silt has a chance to settle. Celadon has layers. She’s chosen a brown that looks like an iron oxide rich celadon for the larger second storey bedrooms. It's deep and chocolatey with what she liked to call “aubergine notes,” as if it were a wine. She has a pale taupe-y green for the “master” bedroom that looks very Japanese, and a soft teal green for the smaller room, which she is now working on. Like all the colours she's chosen, you couldn't name this one with a single word, and it changes with every breathe of warm July air. You wouldn’t think watching paint dry would be so busy, but it is.

Painting her eyrie, she worked out a system she suspects was like reinventing the wheel. Somehow Dirk assumed that if she could glaze her pots she could also paint walls, but these are the first rooms she's done by herself. It's tempting to do all the work on the ladder across the top of a wall and then to push the ladder away and do the bottom half , but when she tried that on the first wall of her room, she found the nearly-dry paint where the roller strokes met was coming away from the plaster. So now she goes up the ladder with her yogurt carton of paint and her brush, strikes in as far as she can reach, comes down, goes up again with the tray and roller, stretching both up and down, comes down and strikes in the baseboard, finishes the section that demarcates her furthest reach, moves the ladder in again, goes up to strike in along the ceiling. It's not only the room that makes a big circle. By the last wall of a second coat, her thighs are like soft lead, malleable and heavy. Her arms, which should be strong from her work on the wheel, are used to containing and balancing force, not to stretching beyond her balance point.

But in spite of the ache in her thighs and arms, she's learning what painting does to your eyes, how it turns you into an animal made for seeing. Going for a walk or even running errands after several hours of painting is like being high. The world was suddenly irradiated with colour. Aaron Nelson, a potter who now runs the Shaw International Centre for Contemporary Ceramics in Medicine Hat, talked once about travelling in a canoe – or was it a kayak? – all the way down the west coast from Alaska to Vancouver. If you want to know everything there is to know about vessels, he said, spend seven weeks in one. Perhaps the same could be said of colour. If you want to know about colour, paint a whole house. In a world saturated with logos and branding, her colours don't have a meaning; they don't signal your destination: the red and white PetroCan or the green and yellow Superstore or the gold letters that would read, when you got closer, “ Bay.” They aren't the colour of your loyalty. Colour simply is, and you realize how endlessly variable it is as it dries: how it goes on slightly darker but with a damp sheen, and then becomes dappled, grows light and matte. Colour on walls is simply where you are, a pleasure you can live inside.

First day in Banff

2011-09-13T09:15:00.000-06:00

Arriving at the Banff Centre of the Arts, at least if you're in the Leighton Artist's Colony, involves forays all over the campus to check in, to move into your room in residence, to get your "artist's card" (which is also your meal card), your Banff National Park sticker for your car, and then wandering off into the woods to see if you can find your cabin. I'm in a small cabin designed by architect Fred Valentine with a composer in mind. So it has a piano and wonderful acoustics for my guitar. I didn't bring any piano music with me, but I'm hoping I can borrow some from the library. From my little hut, I don't see the mountains; what I've been watching out my huge windows today are wind, light, a single marten who, like an acrobat, trotted along one deadfall log after another.

What I love about writer's retreats is that it somehow reminds you of how many hours there are in the day. I was working by 8, and then nipped out to the Banff townsite around 10:30 for food to make myself breakfasts and lunches. Even with that errand and a brief nap I completed and revised a chapter I hadn't quite finished at St. Peter's and got good work done on a poem. So what happens to time during our ordinary days? Can I bottle this discipline and take it home with me?

Today it's cloudy, and the mountains seem to have quietly closed in on themselves. The forest is quiet, expecting rain perhaps.

Creativity on Saskatchewan's Country Roads--revisited

2011-09-06T17:09:00.000-06:00

Today, Bill and I drove up to North Star Pottery, Mel Bolen's and Karen Holden's studio and home, because I needed to do some research on ceramics before I head to Banff Centre for the Arts next weekend to work on Soul Weather for two weeks. They live and work in a church south of Carmel (and east of Humboldt) that they've rebuilt to be a studio, home, and shop. When they bought the land in the 1970s, there were no trees surrounding the building: just a church on a hill. They have since planted 10,000 trees which threaten to cut off the view from some of the dormers they've added to the second storey barrel-vaulted space. A renovated farmhouse is an artist's retreat and the second storey of a rebuilt barn holds Karen's painting studio.

Artists are often generous people. Mel was certainly being generous with his time today, giving me his Labour Day afternoon to talk about the art and science of ceramics. He told wonderful stories--of taking a fine arts ceramics class at U of R as an elective and finding Jack Sures working his magic at the wheel. Jack, he said, didn't baby anybody. He didn't guide you around the pottery studio and tell you what everything was for. He simply sat down at a wheel and started to throw. Mel was instantly attracted to the physicality of it, to its embodiment of the laws of physics. He still gets quite lyrical when he talks about this plastic medium that hardens in the most remarkable way and of his desire to leave in each piece an echo of its plastic, earthy origin. He was also attracted to the science of it: inventive potters know the secrets of earth, glazes, and the ways of fire. Mel talked of working with Jack Sures in a kind of intense apprenticeship that involved everything from moving house several times to preparing clay and building kilns.

But he also talked about the generosity of making art: that when you invite people to a show or into your booth at Bazaart, it has to be with generosity. Your work is a gift, and people will sometimes take it and sometimes leave it, but the generosity--and the risk-taking that comes with it--has to be there. If you are lucky, you will find yourself with the stories, doubtless fragmentary, of the people who buy your work; in turn, your work will become part of their stories. This is what he loves about ceramics, that people take it into their hands, put it to their lips, cook in it, always trusting the craftmanship. "Intimate stuff goes on," he says.

But Bolen likes to work the line--one he describes as crooked, sometimes brightly coloured, sometimes grey and fuzzy--between art and craft. When he hasn't thrown for a while he always starts by warming up his craft by making mugs, moving on to bowls and plates, until something demands that he begin to explore the borders of ceramics and take some risks. At this point in his career, this seems to involve his use of "terra sigilatta," a slip made from clay that he burnishes by hand into the surface of a leather-hard piece; then he fires it at 2400 degrees in his kiln and then, just to add another variable, throws damp salt into the kiln once the temperature has been reached to release caustic sulphur. The result is quite wonderfully unpredictable: the sulfur doesn't reach every part of each piece evenly, so the effects vary; in some places the silica from the clay he uses for this process breaks through the slip; at other places the slip bubbles and crackles. The time and place these pieces occupy in the kiln are written on their surfaces: the side of a piece that's turned away from the blast of salt looks entirely different than the side that takes its full force. Some pieces are fired on their sides, propped up on clam shells, so that their undersides are completely different and may have vacancies in the glaze that show where the shells were. He varies these effects even more by making some of the slips out of "wild clay" just to see what kind of a surface they'll make. Tradition meets experiment and innovation in these pieces. That double sidedness of this work can also be seen in the shapes of the vessels he throws for this work--often very classic vases. But then he might flatten the sides and score them with a nail. Or he might use an old broken fishing pole to make folds in their sides, sometimes rhythmically and regularly, sometimes randomly and playfully.

This is an inventive and inspiring body of work.

The drive north to Humboldt and back was also quite beautiful. I don't think I've seen this gently hilly landscape so soon after combining, with the swathes of straw still on the fields. There was something intimate about the curves and arcs and dips made by the swathes, as if the farmers knew each fold and curve and cranny of their fields. Toward the end of the day, the setting sun came through a haze made by combining, making the whole landscape ethereal.

Reading like an Editor

2011-08-30T13:00:00.000-06:00

I've been spending the last week and a bit putting together the proceedings of the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs proceedings from the first, hopefully annual conference, held at the University of Calgary and the Banff Centre for the Arts last October. (See blog posts on October 13, 15, and 21.) Reading like an editor has its down sides. Do you know how many different ways there are to do a "Works Cited" page--many of them wrong? Or how inconsistently an individual writer can use dashes? Or how often you need to check facts: is "Greenwoods Bookshoppe" really a shoppe, and is there a missing apostrophe there? (It really is an Edmonton shoppe, and there is an apostrophe at the end of Greenwoods'.) Why does "Throw Mama off the Train" list a writer and not the author of a screenplay? (I don't have an answer for that one.) A change in the MLA style guide means that you no longer need the date you accessed a web site or the web address for your "Works Cited" page. So I've done a lot of deleting of very tiny print. But just as a fine writer knows that the credibility of her or his voice is bolstered by careful attention to detail, so do conscientious editors know that if a proceedings looks professional and consistent, it's likely to be taken more seriously. In turn, the papers, which authors gave a lot of thought to, are likely to be taken more seriously. So here it is: it's my job. So I just do it--and take a certain amount of not-quite-perverse satisfaction.

But reading like an editor has more up sides than down sides. Normally, I read quite a lot of strong fiction and poetry; sometimes I get an opportunity to help an author make a work even stronger. Sometimes I get to deliver a useful, encouraging rejection. All of this makes our collective stories stronger, our collective use of language more precise, playful, and inventive.

In the editing the proceedings, though, I felt like a student all over again. I learned so much from all the presenters. Over the next couple of posts, I'd like to share these with some of you; maybe you in turn will share some of your insights and experiences in comments.

Here are two of the inspiring, over-arching observations and beliefs. First, creative writing classes, whether they're taught in prisons, mental health drop-in centres, colleges, neighbourhood centres, or universities, are thriving (despite the disbelief of administrators and the difficulty they have understanding the value of these classes). People want to write. Some of them will simply explore their experiences, their world-views, their culture and society, their imaginations through the written word; others will strive to be published writers. But who can argue with either goal? If art is a way of helping a culture think through its dilemmas and challenges, its joys and delights, then both kinds of writers are engaging in that work in their own way.

Second, the people who attended the conference are doing a thoughtful, inventive, compassionate job mentoring their students. My mantra as a teacher has always been "Find out where your students are and take them farther." Preconceptions about where that "farther" should be only lead to frustration and a sense of failure. But look at how much more articulate Greg Hollingshead is: "Creative writing teaching is like any teaching: eventually you learn that there is what the student needs to understand but there is also when the student will be ready to understand it. It's this second consideration that separates the good teachers from the bad and that makes good teaching more like psychotherapy, in a way, in that it's all about sensing what the student is ready to know. This is particularly true of creative writing teaching, because the student is very likely to have an emotional investment in what is being discussed. Bad writing is a set of strategies for containing, distancing, walling off that emotion, for rendering it safe for the author. A large part of teaching writing is communicating to a writer the hard fact that emotion is going to need to be re-experienced if it is ever to be experienced by the reader--which should be the primary reason for the story, or the poem, being written in the first place." I might want to add to Hollingshead's sense of what bad writing is; I often find that it's an unthought-about formula (often generic) for pretending you're writing without thinking about writing. But other than that, Hollingshead's sense of what we try to accomplish when we teach writing is unerring.

Hollingshead got his experience teaching at the University of Alberta. Lenore Rowntree, in contrast, teaches creative writing in a Vancouver drop-in centre for people with mental illness. In some ways, what she has to say isn't that different from what Hollingshead wrote: "The level of expression may not be as uniformly high as you have experienced with other groups, but don't become disheartened. The completion of two or three sentences in an hour-long session is a big success for some. Occasionally a really good poem or story will be written in a very few minutes and then destroyed. Try to record at least the idea of it for future use. Other times a poignant piece is written and then given to you to keep--the writer may have nowhere to keep it or may not yet be ready to live with his or her own words. If it feels right, accept the piece and have it ready in a file for a later time. Remember that you may be the only one in the room with access to a computer and a printer. A typed poem or story is often much appreciated."

Another, inevitable theme was the way the internet is changing how we connect with readers. I'll write about that later this week. And I'll make sure you have the web address when the whole proceedings goes online.

And your stories? What does writing help us do?

Soul Weather: Summer Solstice

2011-08-26T08:41:00.001-06:00

While Lee was glazing and firing pottery for Bazaart, and trying to winkle her way into people's daily lives, Dirk was mudding the kitchen. In all his years of renovations, he'd left the walls of the houses more or less intact. So when he decided to open the kitchen to the living area, he'd had a lot of destruction to do, and his inexperience made the process not very pretty. He hasn't figured out how he'll fix the hardwood floor where the studs and footing for the walls had been, but perhaps something clever will occur to him while he puts up Gyprock and begins taping and mudding. This last is a process he likes. He tries to do it with as little energy and mess as possible, as if the carefulness of the physical labour gives it more dignity – moves it closer to craftsmanship. But his inexperience has left him with some spectacular holes in the kitchen walls, so he's filling these in slowly, letting them dry, taping a crack or two, and then going back to add another layer of Polyfilla to the pits and furrows in the kitchen plaster before he returns to mud the cracks and the divots lefts by the screws.

Last year at this time, he'd missed spring. In April and May, life completely went missing as he spent early mornings burrowing around in his basement digs with his eyes closed, like a mole, and then came rushing out into the light, dashed into work, and then buried himself completely and sympathetically in his caseload. Because he wasn't noticing the weather, he was almost grateful for the rain that drowned the fields around Melville and Yorkton, and for the women who flooded into Regina to visit sisters and daughters, needing to talk with someone about their men's despair and helpless fury. In the more worrying cases, daughters and sisters encouraged the wives to call Mobile Crisis Services. Sometimes they simply had difficulties understanding their husbands' ranting and railing: surely crop insurance would get sorted out and it would be tight, but they'd be okay for a year. These calls weren't taxing. Being a guy, Dirk could try to explain what it felt like not to have meaningful work. Income wasn't the only issue for men, whereas a farm wife always had work, and that work counted, whether anybody said it or not. A meal on the table or a clean shirt said it. These were also men whose last emotional words might well have been uttered on their wedding days, so getting the farmer to talk about his feelings was probably impossible if not counterproductive. The urban women's magazine strategies of probing and questioning wouldn't help her deal with his moods. So Dirk, feeling deeply conflicted, had to talk to women about how to ignore men's moods. Make a quilt. Knit a sweater. Start a reading club or a 'Stitch 'n bitch' group – something that gives you pleasure. That would get you and your family through. At the end of the day, he dodged unseeing back through the rain, down into his burrow, and did anything he could to get through to tomorrow. He watched crummy TV. Sports and sitcoms required no concentration. He sometimes played with his sons' gameboy. Or he played computer games that allowed him to save the universe.

Then he looked up one day, and found the sky blue and the leaves full-sized. He'd never before in his life lost a season. So this year as he works at remaking the ground floor of his house into a space for the group of undergraduates Lee will organize for him, he has all the windows open, which means he's sometimes cold. But the fresh air keeps Ruby's nose busy when she isn't asleep on the floor in the middle of his workspace, and he simply pulls on the old sweater with its elbows out that's already got its patina of polyfilla and paint. He turns his Bob Dylan or Bruce Cockburn up loud and gets to work. While people continue to complain about the rain, wondering if cold grey springs are going to be the new normal on the prairies, Dirk is even happy with the rain. Well, not happy exactly, but comforted by weather he can inhabit, comforted by a frame of mind that can haunt something besides itself and its distraction.

So he watches every millimetre of change. At first, the trees seemed untrusting, which he understands. Then their buds, snail-like, crept to the ends of branches, where they looked like the round heads of finishing nails. Then he notices that, in the midst of people's soggy whiny complaints, the leaves on trees and shrubs tended to stretch after a couple of days' rain, though whether this showed enthusiasm and gratitude, or whether they're clutching at sunlight, he doesn't know.

The weather doesn't seem to be moving in a straight line, though it never does on the prairies. The weather gods will give you a tiny taste of sun and warmth and then lapse far back into an earlier season. So that now it is a breezy June day, close to the solstice, and he can hear the rustle of leaves, but the sound is dry and fretful enough that it could be a fall day rather than a prelude to summer.

He wants to know where he is, meteorologically speaking. He doesn't want to look up to be suddenly enveloped in the grief of last fall: the kids buying supplies, going off to school, meeting new friends, all elsewhere. Hungry wretchedness fills you when your wife tells you that your kids are happy with the new life they're living without dad. You stare out the kitchen window while she tells you this. And afterwards every rainy day when leaves lie in sodden golden puddles under bare branches will carry echoes of this conversation. It's as if seasons – their smells, their whispers on your skin, the particular angle of light – have a clock that turns back at will and can plummet you again into that mood. This vision will forever stand for the fact that there's a whole other world you know nothing about. You aren't living here, among the glorious Regina fall days, but in a world where you have no senses, no touch or sight, and your kids report on home runs and new video games matter-of-factly in your weekly phone call, without any engagement in their voices. Is this because they're as grief-stricken as you are, because their mother is standing right there, or because they've forgotten the smell of you?

The photograph at the top of the page is of an installation at the Walker Art Center. Unfortunately, I've lost the name of the artist and the installation is no longer listed on their web site.

Minneapolis Institute of Art

2011-08-14T21:27:00.000-06:00

There's something very civilized about your first impression of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Their website says there's parking on the south side of the building, and there it is. And it's free. So is the gallery itself, though they reasonably ask for donations so they can keep it free. There's a room for children to play and explore in, and a sunny cafe where families can sit at large or small tables and have engaged conversations. There's a quiet, flower-filled courtyard where you can rest your feet in the shade. The gallery spaces, unlike MOMA, all have some place to sit down and contemplate the work. The collection ranges widely, though there's one very good Van Gogh, two Monets, a couple of Picassos, two Seurats, two Georgia O'Keefe's--single works by most of the important North American and European artists of the twentieth century--including (Tracy, this is for you) an Egon Schiele portrait that is haunting.

They also balance their collection between art and the "fine arts." In fact, one of my favourite exhibitions was called "Conversations with wood: selections from the Waterbury Collection." The artists represented here had taken "wood turning" into entirely different directions. Many of these pieces were more sculptural than reminiscent of lathe-turned vessels we find at Bazaart or Wintergreen. There was a carefully carved "vase" that would hold nothing: its boundaries were made with flowing carved grasses of dark mahogany. There was a kind of tiny frieze that looked both realistic and otherworldly with a really long title that made clear it was a piece of beautifully imagined visual science fiction. There was a small flat bowl into which the artist had inlaid a constellation of silver wire that whirled out to nothingness. It's one of the most peaceful things I've ever seen. While the MIA lets you photograph most of the work in their collection, as long as you don't use flash, this work is so new that photographs weren't allowed.

As I've been writing, I've been trying to think how I'd describe the difference between my reactions to sitting on a room full of late impressionism or cubism, and standing in a room full of wooden sculptures. Looking at paintings, I'm gobsmacked. I'm taught to see all over again, and taught to see the ideas in what I see. Taught to see an historical moment colliding with a particular sensibility, taught to see a culture thinking through the work of individual artists. When I leave the gallery, it's as if everything is more intense and meaningful. Minneapolis, as you can see from the photograph above of downtown seem from the window of the MIA, is a well-treed city. And they have every kind of tree: oaks, several kinds of maples, ginkos, trees I can't even name. When you come out of the gallery, that world is suddenly more intense and present: you notice every variation on 'green.' The t-shirt worn by the young man walking toward you probably has cultural significance, as does the way he struts, the music he listens to, his chat with his girlfriend. After looking at paintings, you are reminded that the visual world has meaning, that meaning is everywhere. On most days, we're just too busy or too overwhelmed to pay it full attention.

When I'm in a room that's full of work that edges the boundary between art and craft--the Gees Bend quilts I saw several years ago in Denver, or the conversations in wood I saw in the MIA, it's my hands that the work speaks to. If you Google "Gees Bend Quilts," you'll see the brave, adventurous quilts these women made out of worn clothing. That they took the more serviceable pieces of dresses or workpants or jeans and made them into these visual explosions is remarkable. But when you see the quilts in the flesh, you see the patterns of wear, the way the threads have been gentled by time, the subtle patina of use. They speak to you of daily lives, of the conversation between daily life and the determination to create beauty. And you want to touch them. Similarly, "Conversations in Wood" made my hands itch and ache. Though like the paintings, this work has ideas that challenge traditional ways of making and being and seeing, it appeals through our sense of touch in a way that reminds us of how this work is connected to our daily lives.

This is the other work that blew me away, and forced me to think more about Soul Weather. It's called "An exile dreaming of St. Adorno," and it was created by Siah Armanjani, who came to Minneapolis from Iran. Because the photograph is taken without flash, so I was sitting against the wall to get enough stability so keep it from blurring, you can't quite see the "exile" in his prison-like room nor can you quite see the way the bars of the inner room echo those in the outer room or the way the black and white ticking on the mattress echoes the bars of the prison/room. Monastic cell for contemplation or some kind of prison cell the exile has agreed to occupy? Like the work of Manders at the Walker, this installation is both very peaceful and very unnerving. The didactic panel referred the viewer to a quotation from Adorno--the "saint" that the exile is dreaming of: "It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home." What does that mean? My character Lee, when she talks of Empedocles, thinks that sometimes we're simply too uncritically comfortable in the present moment, leading I suppose to complacency. But "home"? Isn't that the one place where we're allowed to let our critical guard down for the day? Or, as I'm coming to conclude, does "home" have the perfect balance between peace and challenge that gives us a space where we're both safe and forced to grow and stretch and be more human than we would be if we were swathed in some kind of cocoon? Please, tell me what you think.

I'll post some photographs to the other blogs I sent from Mpls in the coming days. Time to practice my guitar.

The Walker Art Gallery

2011-08-11T20:11:00.005-06:00

When people asked me why we were visiting Minneapolis, my inevitable answer was "The Walker Art Gallery." It says something about a midwest community that it can support a gallery devoted to edgy, challenging, moving, provocative, and funny contemporary art. I hadn't been to the Walker for over twenty years, but this visit was even more remarkable than past ones, probably because Veronica has done a good job of bringing me up to speed on contemporary art. Bill is also a challenging, thoughtful, quirky companion. I have good company for art galleries.

Two exhibitions stood out for me. One was Mark Manders' Parallel Occurrences/ Documented Assignments, though I have no idea what the title means. Manders originally thought he'd become a poet, but turned to sculpture instead, and the didactic panels rightly identified his sculpture as inherently poetic. There's a kind of abstract poetic juxtaposition of images that he can wrench out of context in a way that he perhaps couldn't do with words. They're so powerful that I felt I couldn't take photographs, even though the gallery allows you to; it seemed voyeuristic. Manders works mostly with clay and wood. One powerful image offers the viewer a slice of an enormous clay face wedged in between large plinths of wood, the largest of which is a table turned on its edge. Because the table legs are slightly inset from the top of the table, they have to be propped up to keep the work vertical. Manders uses two untitled hardcover books to do this, so that this massive piece ultimately rests on two volumes. Your reaction to the face wedged between the wood is visceral and immediate: "There are days when I feel like that," you immediately say. And then the fragile balance of the whole piece on the books adds another layer to your reaction. If I were to reduce the idea to something I could say here, I'd say that again it gives you a visceral sense of how finely, tenuously balanced civilization is: there are some days when it could go either way.

In another piece, he wanted to create a balance that was "both serene and painful." A beautifully sculpted child's body, with one of its legs torn off at the hip, is tethered to an inverted cross with three piles of sand at the foot. The stability of the piece, the piles of sand, the expression on the child's face are all serene, yet you simply can't ignore that torn body. The balance between serenity and pain is provocative and powerfully saddening.

The second remarkable large exhibition was called Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870. The very mass of images--from black and white war photographs dating back nearly to the Civil War, the erotica, the surveillance camera imagery--combine to create a single uneasy enveloping effect: we are watching one another and are in turn being watched. One photograph called "The photography club" (I'm sorry I don't remember the photographer: the image simply stuck in my mind), depicts a photographer photographing a member of the photography club who is in turn photographing a woman splayed in a bay window seat. (The photographer whose image we see is rather kinder to her than her pornographer: we only get the suggestive pose of a knee so that the image we see isn't entirely objectifying.) Its layers are disturbing: even while the pornographer (dressed in very clubby flannel trousers and sweater) believes he's "an artist" capturing the woman, he in turn is subject to surveillance. Any domestic, tranquil associations you might have with window seats are undone by the woman's pose.

The most powerful group of images were the war photographs: they reminded me, like the images of the Spanish Civil War I saw with Veronica in New York City this spring, how powerfully photographers bring fractions of the truth back from the front. There were, of course, some of the remarkable photographs from the Vietnam War. But I was most moved by a collage of photographs taken in Rwanda superimposed upon a body; the collage in turn had captured events from the life of this man, so that his story was superimposed upon his corpse. What better way to say that every time someone dies in war stories also die? What better way to make the victims human?

In the midst of all this, there was a photograph that made me laugh out loud. We see the back of Queen Elizabeth II while she watches one of her ceremonially dressed servants throw a soccer ball for two of her beloved corgis. My first reaction was "How sad! She doesn't even play with her own dogs." The didactic panel told us, though, that photographs in this series only pretend to be celebrities. How it takes the hot air out of celebrity-hood.

Across from the Walker is an immense sculpture garden with a glass fish by Frank Gehry, several sculptures by Henry Moore, trees full of wind chimes (how do you photograph sound?) that are so out of context on a busy Minneapolis street that they surprise you, a huge spoon with a cherry--and lots of work whose provenance I don't know. What was delightful was how people played among the art, reclining in a huge swing, dancing among plinths, mugging for one another's cameras, even a pair of lovers sleeping. They were living among the art, finding their experience made richer and more imaginative.

I'll upload some photographs when I get home, but I needed to get the words down tonight while the images were still fresh.

Literature and the environment II: the Minneapolis Zoo

2011-08-09T20:56:00.001-06:00

Bill and I are in Minneapolis, and he suggested we go to the zoo this morning. While zoos aren't quite my thing (animals in captivity tend to make me sad), compromise on holidays is. It was fabulous, partly because it's a huge, really humane zoo and makes an important contribution to animal conservation. Each didactic panel tells you how the animal you're looking at is doing in the wild. I couldn't help write.

This is how we meet nature:
our hands against the glass,

ranks of us in limegreen daycare T-shirts
almost down to our fragile knees.
We believe the sea otter is drawn
to the reach of our curiosity,
can imagine him,
Ernest Borgnine-faced, curious
about us, the sparkly new barret,
the stuffed parrot, the proud ball cap.

Our hands against the glass,
we try to reach beyond distortions:
the African penguins who fly through water
fetch up as questions:
Are they three inches or nine beyond our grasp?
Is that feathers or fur, a tail or fin
they shake with glee as they surface?
(Is it glee?)

This is how we meet nature:
learning to see, to find the patience
without words
for the colour and texture of snow monkey fur
slowly groomed in the sunshine.

Aesthetics and the Environment

2011-08-01T12:40:00.000-06:00

First, before I go all theoretical, let me say that I want stories from you. What kind of story will become clear as we go.

In my work on Virginia Woolf's use of form to engage readers in a kind of meta-reading of her novels and essays, I have suggested that the reader's attempt to discover what her form means creates a kind of "hinge" between an autonomous work of art and the world we live in. It's the place where we are the most active and engaged interpreters of her work. Ever since Kant, in his Critique of Judgement, talked about the disinterestedness of the beautiful, philosophers and lovers of art have tended to see a work of art as living autonomously in its own world, unsullied by politics or our daily cares. To some degree, this is supported by the way we experience art: we go to art galleries and concert halls--places we don't normally frequent--to look at paintings or hear music. Because most of us don't use paint or song to communicate in our daily lives, we'll easily accept the assumption that a Mark Rothko painting or a Beethoven string quartet have an autonomy that separates the work of art from the daily concerns of our lives. But literature has always been problematic, because language is inherently social.

We'll accept that T. S. Eliot isn't trying to effect social change in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." At the same time, we suspect that Dickens, in The Christmas Carol, is making some claim on our hearts and is hoping to change our behaviour and perhaps even our attitude toward the poor. He's trying, in short, to challenge the distinction between the "deserving poor" and the "undeserving poor" that unfortunately lingers in government policy even today, about 150 years later. My examples, you will realize, are a set up: they were chosen to be emphatic. Dickens was writing novels, which is often seen as a "less autonomous" form than poetry, which can be completely autonomous. (There's a whole line of thinking I won't follow here. Can poetry be autonomous because so few people read it, or do so few people read it because it seems so divorced from their daily lives?) Dickens was also writing a good fifty years before Henry James actually used the phrase "the art of the novel," implicitly suggesting that the novel was an art, not a kind of aesthetic reportage.

For my work on Woolf, I've been reading a wonderful book by Gregory Jusdanis called Fiction Agonistes (Stanford University Press, 2010). Jusdanis has (at least) three observations about fiction that relate to this question of the environment. First, he argues that "Only autonomous art can be oppositional" (55; italics in original). It's art's autonomy that allows it to call our present situation into question. Its autonomy is also its freedom. The artist cares about whether the work is well-made and accords to her or his vision, not whether it tows an ideological line. Second, "Art is metamorphosis, the craft of making changes. It imagines the impossible and inconceivable because of its endless potential" (55). In other words, a craftsperson like Atwood can terrify us in Oryx and Craik by posing a vision of the world quite different from our casual sense that while the environment is changing, we'll adapt.

Third, Jusdanis has borrowed from the Greeks the concept of "parabasis." There's a point in a Greek tragedy where the members of the chorus take off their masks and speak to the audience, citizen to citizen. Novels find a variety of technical ways to do this--by using frame narratives that forge a link between the work and the world, or by discussing the making of art within the novel itself, so that this issue of art's role is foregrounded. But I suspect that there are moments in many novels, poems, or essays, that, the author's intentions aside, seem to speak directly to us.

As Katherine Arbuthnott and I have worked on our SSHRCC grant proposal, I've come to learn two important things about literature and the environment. First, it's fairly easy to change attitudes, and I think that in general our attitudes about the environment are changing. Here in Saskatchewan, we only need to think of the farmers whose fields are so wet that they're unworkable, or about the string of unusually humid days we've had this summer. We know we need to do something about the environment.

But the second things I've learned is that what we need to change are behaviours, not simply attitudes, and this is much harder. This is because our goals are sometimes in conflict. While the part of us that is influenced by ethical, normative goals recycles, the part of us that has hedonic goals (we do like to be comfortable), would prefer driving in our airconditioned car to taking public transit.

So help us out. Help us figure out how the texts we read might help us to be environmentally responsible. Tell us stories about reading something that changed your attitudes. What was it about the novel, graphic novel, poem, essay, article, that spoke to you, citizen to citizen? Better yet, tell us a story about how something you read changed your behaviour.

You can tell your stories here, as a comment, or you can email them to me at Kathleen.Wall@uregina.ca

Or you can come talk to us at Profs in the City, Tuesday August 2 at the Neutral Ground Gallery on the west side of the Scarth Street Mall. We'll be talking about our work between 12:15 and 12:45.

Weather and Reading

2011-07-25T22:16:00.002-06:00

When I returned home from St. Peter's Abbey, I came back to some of the hottest, muggiest days Regina has seen this summer. The heat called, I felt, for a good mystery: a book that would relentlessly take my mind off the heavy stifling heat. Fortunately, I found a copy of Peter Robinson's latest Inspector Banks mystery, Bad Boy. Robinson, though a Yorkshireman (and he sets his novels in a satisfyingly rainy and damp Yorkshire: wonderful reading for a hot day), took an English Ph.D. at York University in Toronto and is one of the most literate mystery writers I've read. Sometimes, as in In a Dry Season, with its references to T. S. Eliot, that literariness makes its way into his novels through their awareness of the literary tradition they join. Bad Boy, though, is a study in point of view. It has one of Robinson's less twisting plots; rather the narrative interest comes from our seeing the events from the points of view of different characters, making the novel more human and less of a cold and calculating whodunit. Since the events flow from the various ways a "bad boy" is seen and experienced by a cast of characters ranging from the Chief Inspector Banks to his daughter, a young woman who might have many reasons for finding a bad boy attractive, to a major drug dealer, the focus on point of view was doubly satisfying. The novel kept me suitably distracted until the weather broke.

The milder days left me hungry, I admit, for something more substantial, but also something that wouldn't be (like Proust--I'm well into Volume II) a major investment of time. I decided to re-read John Banville's Booker Prize winner, The Sea. Where reading for the plot was exactly what I wanted for hot lethargic weather, reading carefully for description, language, the repeated motifs that reveal Banville's purpose was perfect for moderate weather. In fact, re-reading The Sea made me realize what a disadvantage the need to read for the plot can be. On the first reading, you are preoccupied by the need to connect three main layers of narrative. At the present moment, Max, a self-described dilettante writing and not writing a book on the painter Bonnard and whose wife has just died, has decided to spend his grieving time in a seaside community he and his parents visited while he was in his early adolescence. During his youthful time by the sea, which comprises a second layer of the narrative, he inveigles his way into the lives of the inaptly named Graces. While he was initially attracted by the voluptuous Mrs. Grace, young Chloe, twin of the mute Myles, soon gets his hormone-primed attention. At the same time, as a man who is grieving, his narrative returns both to his courtship of his wife and of the final year of her life as she slowly dies of cancer. Banville's prose is precise and evocative, leading the first-time reader to assume there's a reason why these three strands of narrative meet here--and of course there is. But the narrative structure is only half the story, as it were. A second, slower reading allows you to be aware of Max's pantheon, particularly the cruel gods of his childhood, gods that in a whole variety of ways conspire to create both a world and a character who are morally a little self-absorbed. (Ironically, that careful wording was an effort not to give away the plot.) We can also see the way Max's interest in Bonnard leads him to some perhaps self-deluding and certainly comforting thoughts about the way various perspectives might have aesthetic (but perhaps not moral) validity.

Narratologists, who have created an incredibly complex and arcane vocabulary (beginning with the term "narratologist"), talk in equally arcane ways about the relationship between the amount of time an event would have taken to occur and the amount of time it's given in the text. Most simply and usefully, this leads them to talk about the distinction between summary (an event that takes three days is summarized in a single sentence) and scene, where a narrator's recall of an event might actually take longer than the original because the narrator spends time recalling, reflecting, considering the implications or possible interpretations of words or actions. Banville is the master of the scene: we see and smell the moments, the film is slowed down enough so that a seemingly casual gesture turns out to be filled with ramifications for characters' lives. He manages to reveal in The Sea the way characters' desires invest seemingly offhand acts with moral weight. He is also willing to let a scene go on for a surprising length of time just so that we can feel that precise camber of experience Max is having. He taught me that sometimes a scene doesn't need to have a narrative purpose, as long as it bring the characters and the readers closer together.

Wild little Sheba seems to love my summer reading. No matter where she is, she hears me getting into bed for my evening reading and arrives immediately. As I slouch down into my pillows, she stretches out between my waist and my throat, often reaching her paws across my shoulder and putting her chin on them to watch me read. She manages to relax every bone and to simply settle with me into this other world. I certainly can't read her mind, but perhaps she can read mine; perhaps this is her way of reading by proxy.

The kinds of perfect days we had later last week leave me feeling inexplicably sad when I'm not overwhelmed by joy. I've never managed to fully explain this to anyone, but let me try once more. The obverse side of their perfection is their transitoriness; the very nature of their perfection is temporary, evanescent. They need, then, the perfect book to create a conversation with them, to measure them out in a way that celebrates their transitoriness. Perhaps the right book, particularly evocative books like The Sea, helps me to be attentive to an experience that might otherwise melt into thin air.

St. Peter's Abbey: A Concert in Marysburg

2011-07-18T11:59:00.000-06:00

Anne Pennylegion, the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild retreat coordinator, takes her job seriously, and in the middle of my second week there, that job meant letting us know that surprisingly enough a small country church held summer concerts. So five of us set off in my car (our purses in the trunk) along a road north of Muenster. When we turned west onto the Marysburg road, however, we found that we were on a high plateau and could see so far into the distance that it turned blue. The sense of spaciousness was remarkable, even for the prairies; you felt, looking at farms and trees and dugouts and hills that lay before you, that you grasped your context, your place in the world for a moment.

Assumption Church in Marysburg, the sign tells us, was originally built in 1920, but this small community has mobilized itself to restore it to its original beauty. While the altarpiece looks rather like wedding cake, the rest of the church has a simplicity of character that has been retained. The Ionic columns, vaulted ceiling, and lovely stained glass windows, each with their donor's name on a brass plaque underneath, all have an architectural cleanness and self-respect. The artistic director of the Marysburg Summer Festival of the Arts Greg Schulte, spoke plainly and eloquently about their festival, particularly about how each member of the audience was a "resonator" and would be a kind of "co-creator" of the music we were to hear. The audience was relatively small, but the magic was this: we had all come together to a small village whose only access is dirt road to spend an evening with music, with the beauty of the building and the beauty of the performance, each of which conversed with one another.

Richard Konrad, who teaches at the Manitoba Conservatory of Music and Arts in Winnipeg, began with a popular theme and variations by Schumann on a tune from his opera Rosamunda. This is not deep music, yet Konrad gave it all his musical attention, making it the perfect bridge between our day's activities and this space apart from them. The Beethoven Sonata, for me at least, was the spine of the concert. Konrad can pound with the best of them--and pound accurately--but I found him most impressive in slow moments when he brought such careful thought to the phrasing, use of rubato, and dynamics. These were the moments when you knew most powerfully how much he cared about what he was playing and about how he conveyed that to his listeners.

Bravely, Konrad began the second half with a suite of pieces by Bartok that were challenging, dissonant, chaotic--speaking of the modern life that was certainly beyond this building where we sat on a summer's night. As if he knew he was simply playing this for our good, and not for our enjoyment (though I enjoyed it very much), he barely paused for applause before moving on to three pieces by Liszt, which he had introduced with helpful comments about Liszt's liturgital music. While I'm aware of two of Liszt's virtues--that he helped many musicians and composers in a wide variety of ways and that his free use of tonality and form eased the birth of twentieth century music, Liszt is one of my least favourite composers. Yet Konrad's choice of music introduced me to a different Liszt, one who could, for example, handily and thoughtfully construct a theme and variations out of a Bach bass line. You could hear Debussey and Ravel anticipated in this music.

Those in charge of the evening cannily did not turn on the lights, except for those that illuminated the musician. The windows of the church are primarily a creamy gold; these allowed a rose sunset to change the light in the church moment by moment. The effect was to create a second layer of beauty, to enclose us in a community of people who had gathered on a beautiful summer's night for music. We lingered on the steps afterwards, talking about the music, about a scent in the moist air we couldn't quite identify, about the sunset. Our evening with music in this dim church had piqued all our senses.

But just before I left the church to enjoy the sunset, I asked one of the gentlemen standing by the door with a proprietary air if he knew who had tuned the piano. It's been a damp summer in Saskatchewan, and churches are by their nature damp places, yet the piano was beautifully tuned. Only a well-tuned piano allows the full beauty of the performance to come through. Yes, he did, it was a friend's son, he told me, and I asked him to pass on my compliment. "We've spent a lot of money on that piano," he told me. "About $2500. We took it all apart and put it back together, like a combine."

St. Peter's Abbey, Week Two. Soul Weather June/July

2011-07-14T13:56:00.000-06:00

This introduction to Chapter Four occurs about a year after Dirk's wife, Dorothy, has left him and moved to B.C. with their two sons.

While Lee was glazing and firing pottery for Bazaart, and trying to winkle her way into people's daily lives, Dirk was mudding the kitchen. In all his years of renovations, he'd left the walls of the houses more or less intact. So when he decided to open the kitchen to the living area, he'd had a lot of destruction to do, and his inexperience made the process not very pretty. He hasn't figured out how he'll fix the hardwood floor where the studs and footing for the walls had been, but perhaps something clever will occur to him while he puts up Gyprock and begins taping and mudding. This last is a process he likes. He tries to do it with as little energy and mess as possible, as if the carefulness of the physical labour gives it more dignity – moves it closer to craftsmanship. But his inexperience has left him with some spectacular holes in the kitchen walls, so he's filling these in slowly, letting them dry, taping a crack or two, and then going back to add another layer of Polyfilla to the pits and furrows in the kitchen plaster before he returns to mud the cracks and the divots lefts by the screws.

Last year at this time, he'd missed spring. In April and May, life completely went missing as he spent early mornings burrowing around in his basement digs with his eyes closed, like a mole, and then came rushing out into the light, dashed into work, and then buried himself completely and sympathetically in his caseload. Because he wasn't noticing the weather, he was almost grateful for the rain that drowned the fields around Melville and Yorkton, and for the women who flooded into Regina to visit sisters and daughters, needing to talk with someone about their men's despair and helpless fury. In the more worrying cases, daughters and sisters encouraged the wives to call Mobile Crisis Services. Sometimes they simply had difficulties understanding their husbands' ranting and railing: surely crop insurance would get sorted out and it would be tight, but they'd be okay for a year. These calls weren't taxing. Being a guy, Dirk could try to explain what it felt like not to have meaningful work. Income wasn't the only issue for men, whereas a farm wife always had work, and that work counted, whether anybody said it or not. A meal on the table or a clean shirt said it. These were also men whose last emotional words might well have been uttered on their wedding days, so getting the farmer to talk about his feelings was probably impossible if not counterproductive. The urban women's magazine strategies wouldn't help her deal with his moods; probing might completely steal his dignity and self-respect. So Dirk, feeling deeply conflicted, had to talk to women about how to ignore men's moods. Make a quilt. Knit an sweater. Start a reading club or a 'Stick 'n bitch' group – something that gives you pleasure. That would get you and your family through. At the end of the day, he dodged unseeing back through the rain, down into his burrow, and did anything he could to get through to tomorrow. He'd watch crummy TV. Sports and sitcoms required no concentration. He sometimes played with his sons' gameboy. Or he played computer games that allowed him to save the universe.

Then he looked up one day, and found the sky blue and the leaves full-sized. He'd never before in his life lost a season. So this year as he works at remaking the ground floor of his house into a space for the group of undergraduates Lee will organize for him, he has all the windows open, which means he's sometimes cold. But the fresh air keeps Ruby's nose busy when she isn't asleep on the floor in the middle of his workspace; right now her attention is riveted by the fellow who rides his unicycle to work. If it's too cool, he simply pulls on the old sweater with its elbows out that's already got its patina of polyfilla and paint. He turns his Bob Dylan or Bruce Cockburn up loud and gets to work. While people continue to complain about the rain, wondering if cold grey springs are going to be the new normal on the prairies, Dirk is even happy with the rain. Well, not happy exactly, but comforted by weather he can inhabit, comforted by a frame of mind that can haunt something besides itself and its distraction.

So he watches every millimetre of change. At first, the trees seemed untrusting, which he understands. Then their buds, snail-like, crept to the ends of branches, where they looked like the round heads of finishing nails. Then he notices that, in the midst of people's soggy whiny complaints, the leaves on trees and shrubs tended to stretch after a couple of days' rain, though whether this showed enthusiasm and gratitude, or whether they're clutching at sunlight, he doesn't know.

The weather doesn't seem to be moving in a straight line, though it never does on the prairies. The weather gods will give you a tiny taste of sun and warmth and then lapse far back into an earlier season. So that now it is a breezy June day, and he can hear the rustle of leaves, but the sound is dry enough that it could be a fall day rather than a prelude to summer.

He wants to know where he is, meteorologically speaking. He doesn't want to look up to be suddenly enveloped in the grief of last fall: the kids buying supplies, going off to school, meeting new friends, all elsewhere. Hungry wretchedness fills you when your wife tells you that your kids are happy with the new life they're living without dad. You stare out the kitchen window while she tells you this. And afterwards every rainy day when leaves lie in sodden golden puddles under bare branches will carry echoes of this conversation. It's as if seasons – their smells, their whispers on your skin, the particular angle of light – have a clock that turns back at will and can plummet you again into that mood. This vision will forever stand for the fact that there's a whole other world you know nothing about. You aren't living here, among the glorious Regina fall days, but in a world where you have no senses, no touch or sight, and your kids report on home runs and new video games matter-of-factly in your weekly phone call, without any engagement in their voices. Is this because they're as grief-stricken as you are, because their mother is standing right there, or because they've forgotten the smell of you?

Cabin Fever at St. Peter's Abbey

2011-07-11T19:16:00.001-06:00

This morning we had standard Saskatchewan weather: rain, harder rain, more rain. But in my endlessly optimistic way I decided this was a good thing. It would encourage what Sherwood Anderson once said was the only reliable source of a writer's inspiration: fastening the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair.

But then this afternoon, luckily after the sun came out, I had an awful case of what Bill calls "the yips." The sound says it all for me; "the yips" is a kind of edginess that creeps into your muscles and your brain. So I went for a walk, to change the focus of my senses. Because it was muddy underfoot, so I was trying to figure out where to walk so I wouldn't skid in the mud, the first thing I noticed was the sound. Along the gravel road that runs east and west at the end of the alley of trees, there's a not very thick but extremely varied woods. The wind in the aspens sounds different from the birches, and these in turn sound different from the ashes and certainly from the pines. Interestingly, it reminded me of the sound of language, something that often gets left behind when you translate words to keystrokes too quickly. I was also reminded of a principle of nature that is also perhaps a principle of society and certainly of art: a richly varied ecosystem is a gift.

Interestingly, the verges are also varied. The edge of the road that goes east is filled with purple vetch and clover. Here the dragonflies were busy. There were large dusty blue pterodacyls that hovered like hummingbirds. Smaller gold striped ones looked like aerial tigers, and the smallest of all were an electric blue with wings so transparent they looked like levitating dashes.

Once I turned south, however, the sound and the roadside changed. Here I listened to the sighing of enormous pines and the wind through tall grass. Huddled in the grass were wild roses in full and fragrant bloom. There were more of the tiger dragonflies, but these were joined by an orange butterfly drawn, perhaps, to the roses.

As writers, we spend a lot of time in our heads. But how crucial it is to change our perspectives: to see things both up close and far away and to be reminded that both views need to speak in our writing.

St. Peter's Abbey, Week One. Soul Weather: June

2011-07-09T15:18:00.000-06:00

St. Peter's Abbey is certainly a great place to be productive. At the very least, the surroundings are so foreign that there's no forgetting you're here for a particular purpose. Here's an except I wrote earlier in the week in which Lee tries to make the difficult leap from being a student to being a professional artist.

Most artists, I suspect, have ways of "doodling" while they keep one part of their mind distracted so that the creative part can do its work. Let me know if Lee's way of doing this seems to trivialize the process.

Cheers!

Lee had been told after the examination of her thesis – both her essay on Empedocles and her exhibition of teapots – that she was quite good at melding theory and practice. But as soon as she could tell that her committee was happy with her defence and that she was going to pass, she began thinking about getting ready for Bazaart, where her thoughts about her practice didn't matter. The people who came to craft shows didn't want essays on Empedocles or teapots with mushroom clouds billowing out of their lids. If they wanted you to come down on one side of the transparent fuzzy line between art and craft, they wanted you on firmly on the craft side. They didn't care whether your bowl or mug had an idea. She suspected they wanted to know if it was attractive, nice to touch and hold, and matched their decor. She has other goals. She wants to make work with self-respect, something no one else has made. All the work she turned on the wheel had the imprint of her hands, but she wants her work to also have the imprint of her imagination.

So a couple of days after her defence in April, after she'd found all the ways she could think of to passively-aggressively rail at her father for fucking her over [He's selling the house and moving to Swift Current, where he wants to become an organic farmer] – she'd tried silence (he didn't seem to notice), she'd tried picking fights (he ignored the bait), she'd even hidden the overnight supply of makeup and shampoo and tampons Chrissie left in her dad's bathroom, taking them out of “her” drawer and putting them under the sink behind the toilet cleaner. – After she got over herself, as her mother would have said, she decided it was time to do something productive. So she hauled out the box in the bottom of her closet to look at the best work she'd done during her degrees.

From each set of her experiments, each time she played with a kind of clay or shape, underglaze or glaze or firing technique, she choose the best piece for what she thought of as her own archive. Others put their highest prices on this work in the student sale they held each term in the Riddell Centre. She'd noticed, though, how careful they were to make everything predictable, workmanlike. Somehow after she knew that she was in love with the feel of clay in her hands, in love with the way it it centred her as she centred it on the wheel and it rose to her bidding, her early decision to keep the best of everything as her own personal record liberated her to play a little more with form or decoration. So she took it all out of its box and set it around her on the floor of her room: the early thick terra cotta bowl simply glazed, the stoneware where she practised a kind of calligraphic underglaze the way Jack Sures did, though instead of using his dancing loops, hers were variations first on the pi sign and later other Greek letters. She played with them, sometimes putting a tiny sprinkling of them at the edge of a plate or a trailing them down a vase, until they morphed into her own expressive vocabulary. Then there's the work that's trying to be art, as she got ready to write her thesis. She'd read that potters needed to think of themselves more as sculptors, so she'd tried stoneware vases in the balanced elegant forms you see in Greek black figure pottery. But she'd thrown them rather thick, and when the were leather hard, she'd started incising them, scraping away part of their beautiful form while she left the classic neck or the rounded bottom half of the body alone. Or she'd carve them, even opening them in places, willing to let the kiln have their way with them. If they chose to slump, so be it.

Sitting on the floor of her room with her work all around her lit by wan April sunlight had been disorienting: she felt gay and sad, elated and sorrowful at the same time. The floor of her room was the only place she could have some privacy and spread her work out so she could see it all. Sitting there, her legs splayed on the faded cotton rug her mother had bought also made her feel like a child again. Her dad's comments at her defence made her see the work before her as a record of a childhood: her sandbox play. This was what the last six years of her life had been about? The memories of classes and conversations and arguments seemed so rich and complex, filled with illumination and questions, epiphanies and befuddledment, some puzzles solved, others still reverberating in her mind. Yet her father's suggestion that she needed to settle down and make workmanlike mugs that people who didn't give a hot damn for pottery would buy was demoralizing. Had he done that on purpose?

Her defense was over, her dad was suggesting she needed to be turned into a worker bee on the spot (what have I been doing for the last four years, Dad, working 15 to 20 hours a week at Roca Jack's to pay for classes and books and clay, leaving you with enough savings to buy a fucking farm?), and he was dismantling her home to go off and pursue his own pipe dream. Literally. She suspected he and Chrissie would find someplace secluded to grow some pot.

On the other hand, what stood before her in the frail sunlight, patterned like lace from the shadows of the branches and the buds on the trees, was the story so far, with its suggestions about where she might go in the future. She could see the learning before her in a kind of wild arc.

More experienced ceramicists had told her that as a newbie she'd need a variety of work. Established potters could make endless plates and bowls in the same design because people knew what to expect of them. Or they could bring nothing but twenty large expensive raku-fired pieces because they had built up a clientele for their work. She'd have to find ways of pulling in people with different tastes. She'd need something edgy for the young and hip, something carefully crafted for the thirty-somethings who wanted to signal their good taste, and something with more of an idea for the collectors – the people she really wanted to cultivate if she didn't want to join the brown mug crowd.

What she needed was a story, her own story. When she was a student with good teachers and a great supervisor, they guided her to the artistic role models she needed to realize her own vision. Now, except for every potter in the universe, she was on her own. She leaned back against her bed, narrowed her eyes to see her work differently, studied her toenail polish – it was badly chipped – stared out the window, willing the sun to work harder, and looked again at her work with narrowed eyes to see it less personally, less in the particular, more in the general. 'Inspire me,' she almost whispered to it, shouted at it, so calm and overwrought was she at the same moment. The glaze on that mug looked a bit like Styrofoam. What did that suggest? It suggested work, the smell of coffee, the stacks of cups she filled hundreds of times in a day. An arc connected several things in her brain. Ah. There it was, her edgy project: she 'd do some miniature take-out coffee cups and design an ironic logo for the lid. People could use them as bud vases or even as boxes for earrings or paper clips. She'd do some larger ones that could be used as mugs, writing orders on them: “soy milk latte with a double shot of hazelnut,” or “non-fat milk cappuccino with a double shot of espresso and a shot of cinnamon.” She always found these order affected, a parody of individuality. Would people know that as a barista in a very unbarista coffee shop she was being ironic? Did it matter? It couldn't matter.

She got up, went into the bathroom for a bottle of nail polish remover and a bottle of nail polish, and sat back down on the rug. She scrubbed away at her toenails, got up again for the clippers, sat down and stared at her work, studying one of the stoneware plates with its inscrutable Greek message on the edge. She put the clippers down, went to her bookshelf and got out a recent book she'd bought on firing. She hadn't gotten far into it, so the photograph she needed (she was sure it was on the left hand page) must be near the beginning. She flipped; she was sure it was this book; she'd taking to reading it while she was preparing for the defence. Firing was the thing she knew least about. Or was it glazes? There it was. The caption read “Anna Stina Naess, translucent porcelain cylinders, electric firing” (Firing 14). It was the plain white translucency she wanted underneath her Greek vocabulary. But not the austere shape. These were handbuilt cylinders decorated with dark scribbles that looked like Kandinsky doodles. She wanted sensuous thrown forms that would take her morphed Greek vocabulary, but planted as spontaneously as Anna Stina Naess had strewn her doodles. She wanted the tension of the formal shape and the arbitrary decoration. It would look cool enough for the thirty-somethings and it would have some self-respect. She hadn't exhausted, by any means, her deconstruction of the Greek pot. That would be her art. Simple glazes—the kind that Lucie Rie used—no decoration, just the carving. Glazes whose colour you couldn't quite name: not quite a mustard, not quite a tan. Soft blue grey green. A teal that shaded off into navy sometimes and nearly into black. These would be the jewels of her table.

St. Peter's Abbey

2011-07-06T09:42:00.001-06:00

I hadn't quite gotten into the spirit of St. Peter's Abbey in Muenster. There's construction going on here, and because the Abbey is a working farm, you hear tractors and other heavy equipment going back and forth during the day. I missed the loons and the deer from Emma Lake--though perhaps not the bears. I missed the profound enveloping peace of the boreal forest.

I did immediately appreciate two elements of being at the Abbey. First, the simplicity of the rooms. These writers' retreats are like playing Thoreau for a week or two, whose motto was "Simplify! Simplify!" Even if you feel that you've brought an awful lot of stuff, once you get it into a room you realize how little you really need. That's liberating,

You can also feel the monastic discipline of years of nuns and writers radiating from the walls of the small nunnery where they house us. The silence on a summer afternoon (it's quiet in the building anyway; outside a truck is backing up) is a constant reminder to focus. Even if that means staring at a paragraph for an hour, fiddling with language, trying to get it to articulate your vision of the human experience and to speak to your hypothetical reader, you are riveted by the sense of purpose and focus that infuses this place and almost breathes here.

Then I was taken to see the garden of Brother James, the Abbey's hermit, who died some years ago. It's overgrown with thistles and purple looststrife, and every kind of grass imaginable, but its bones and its life-force remain intact. Anne Pennylegion, the Colony coordinator told the story of bringing a clematis to put in Brother James's garden, of how he blessed it and of how they drank a glass of Bailey's Irish Cream to celebrate its arrival. I had the sense that this place is full of stories I only half hear. There's also a wonderful, knowledgeable man named Jim Ternier who collects seed from the garden and who can give you the Latin name of most of the plants. I could listen to him for hours; it's as if there's a body of knowledge there that's almost mystical, so connected is it to the earth.

Perhaps that says something of me, of what I find mystical. Religious order doesn't quite do it for me; natural order--or disorder--does. I've also discovered the wonderful resources of BBC Radio Three: like many of us in the city, I'll put in my earphones and block out the sound of trucks backing up. And in the meantime, while every need is taken care of by St. Peter's Staff and Anne, I'll obey the whispering of the walls and concentrate.

You can learn about Jim's seed project at
http://www.prseeds.ca/catalogue/index.php

Soul Weather: May

2011-07-05T09:23:00.000-06:00

While he worked for his CBO, Dirk also bought run-down houses, renovating them cheaply, but without stinting on the craftsmanship. He knew, from his work, all the statistics on homelessness and sub-standard public housing. He knew that it was cheaper to house drug addicts and the mentally ill than to keep them in hospitals when they bottomed out, but for some reason that's not what was done. He thought he was being realistic about what he could do, imagining a family at a time. If, while he was hanging new cabinets and putting tile around the bathtub, he also thought about a parent making a meal or a kid in the bath playing with a rubber duck, he could feel that one house, or two or three, made a difference. Not to the statistics, which were appalling, but to people.
          After he and Dorothy finished cleaning up the kitchen, he'd go off to the house he was working on for a couple of hours. He was always home by nine, in time to watch TV with Dorothy or put their kids to bed. If he couldn't sleep at bedtime, he'd sit at the kitchen table with his plans. He'd commandeered Kevin's large tablet of drawing paper, where he'd sketch out a kitchen or bath with its measurements, compare that to the brochures he got from Home Depot or Rona, write himself some notes about hardware, switch plates, glass for windows, and some cost estimates. He'd learned, after the first house, that to be organized and efficient saved incredible amounts of time, and had hit on the system of using one envelope for receipts and one piece of drawing paper—bath on one side, kitchen on the other. This also made his accountant happy.
          Some weeks, repairs took as much time as renovations. A furnace pilot light went out or a kitchen sink got clogged or a toilet wouldn't flush, or a cupboard door would need to be rehung. The first three he simply thought were normal wear and tear; he never figured out the cupboard door, but the skinny woman who greeted him looked so tired he didn't ask.
          The winter he was working on his fourth house while juggling loans and collecting rents, Dorothy took to sitting with him across the kitchen table while he planned and figured and listed. She sat in her bunchy terry-cloth housecoat and did the day's crossword or paged wearily through nesting magazines. Lately, she'd been buying them often; he'd asked whether she wanted to do some decorating or renovating, but she said no. Later, when the magazines made their way into the bathroom, he'd rifle them for ideas, things he could do on the cheap to make renters feel more at home
          One night, he was called to rescue a rubber whale from a toilet. The call came at about 7:30 from Naomi, a harried mother trying to explain the problem to him while her two kids shrieked and splashed in the bathtub.
"Look, I'll come over. You can explain then.” When he arrived, she was trying to dry the dishes and put them away but was continually interrupted by the kids' demands for a toy thrown out of reach or a towel to wipe water out of their faces. She was an earnest woman who worked at FNUC part time teaching a couple of classes. It was barely enough to live on, he knew, but it kept her home when the kids needed her. He always got to know his tenants a little, finding it made things simpler, less confrontational when there were problems or when the rent was late.
           “I haven't gotten them out of the tub yet. It's one way for me to get some time to myself in the evening.”
          If this was time for herself, he didn't know what distraction was. He went over to the kitchen sink and started washing dishes while she kept drying. "So what's the problem?"
          “I think Kyle stuffed Sheldon's favourite bath toy in the toilet. That's what Sheldon said, anyway, and we can't find it anywhere. I was afraid to flush the toilet in case it made things worse.”
          “You've got two boys?” he asked, scrubbing at a large frying pan that had potatoes burned to the bottom.
          “Yeah. They're good, but a handful.
          “I can imagine. Listen, I'll just go on in and see if I can find out what happened. You can have a little more peace to yourself. Pour yourself that last cup of coffee,” he nodded his head toward the coffee pot, “and take a breath.”
           “Hey,” he said, going into the bathroom and grabbing a towel to dry the face of the younger boy who'd just had water poured over his head. “I hear something's missing. Know where it is?”
          “Yeah!” Sheldon said, standing up out of the bath for emphasis. “It's my purple whale. Kyle put it in the toilet. He said he did. I can't find it anywhere. It usually lives there”--he pointed to an ice cream pail of bath toys under the sink--”so it doesn't drown. It'll drown in the toilet.
          Dirk opened the toilet lid to find the water pale yellow, one turd floating around the edge of the bowl. He had thick rubber gloves in his tool kit. He put them on and reached down into the throat and found something was indeed down there. He turned his hand this way and that to see if he could get a grip, and finally pulled up the whale
          “Yeah! I want it.”
          “It needs its own bath first,” Dirk said, putting it in the bathroom sink. Where there are whales, might there be whale food? He reached back in and brought out a Transformer.
          “That's mine!" Kyle yelled. "It was riding the whale down the tunnel!"
          "He needs a bath too." Dirk got some dish soap from the kitchen, filled the bathroom sink, and gave the toys a good scrubbing before he threw them in the bath tub.
          "You guys clean yet?" He had meant to start cleaning out the next house, but this seemed more important right now. He put down the sodden bath mat and helped them one at a time out of the bath tub. "Do you know how they dry off in the Navy? My dad taught me this." He pulled one towel taut and gyrated it back and forth along Sheldon's skinny shoulders, back, and bum. "There. You can finish. Now you," he said, nodding at Kyle, who giggled as he let Dirk almost knock him off his feet. “Pyjamas? Whose are these?”
          Ten minutes later he had their teeth brushed and the boys were ready for bed. Naomi looked like she was nearly asleep.
          “That was so nice. So nice to get a break. Not to fight to get them out of the tub.”
          Dirk went to the kitchen sink to give his hands a good scrubbing. Even though he used his gloves for the uglier side of plumbing, they still left his hands feeling grungy.
          “I was here. Seemed the thing to do. Have a nice night,” he said as he let himself out.
          At home, he found Dorothy already in her bath robe watching CSI New York. He settled in beside her, putting his arm around her shoulders. She sniffed the air. “You always smell different when you come back from your rescue missions. Like someone else's cooking or different hand soap. It's confusing sometimes.”

Soul Weather: April

2011-07-02T09:24:00.001-06:00

A swift and early spring had been promised, and in the coffee shop where she worked early mornings, Lee diligently watched it open like a reluctant door on people's moods, revealing their better, more cheerful and sociable selves. Suddenly there were questions and observations where before there had been sleepy, sullen walls. They admired the cherry red streak in her spiky black hair. They asked about her artwork, though most didn't know she was a potter. Two years ago, when she was taking her undergrad print-making class, her boss had let her hang some of her etchings on the walls of the shop in between the sleek reproductions that fetishized lattes and cappucinos that promised sophistication, modernity, and clarity. The etchings stayed up for a long time; people liked them because they were neither offensive nor jarring like “a lot of the stuff you kids make,” but they were unwilling to pay for them or live with them. They looked antique from a distance, as etchings do, but they showed gameboys and cell phones and blackberries, morphed slightly so they looked like a continent where one might write “Here be monsters” or “The doldrums of connected boredom.” These were ringed round by ornamental earbuds and tangled cords like the scrolled decorations on old maps. So she'd finally taken them home, though “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” was a pick-up line she hadn't yet had occasion to use.

      In turn, she told the friendlier regulars a little about her thesis project and show. “Teapots? A Japanese teapots with an atomic bomb exploding out of the lid?” There wasn't time between the noisy steaming of milk, making of espresso, and pouring of coffee to explain her ideas about teapots. She would have liked to; she'd have liked trying to explain it to one person who wasn't an artist or a student in fine arts, to see whether her ideas were clear, to see whether they had a strong spine—never mind the subtle detours only for her supervisor.

     The other vantage for watching spring unfold had been the pottery studio in the Riddell Centre at U of R. The enormous space with its wall of windows onto the Academic Green was probably the accomplishment of Jack Sures and the long tradition of fine clay work in the university that grew up in the sixties when everyone wanted to be anti-establishment: a peacenik, a vegetarian and a potter. As she made teapots, she watched each trace and tincture of green spread daily like watercolour on damp paper. Some trees, she realized that spring, seem to put out spurts of seeds before they grew leaves. She jealously thought of them as the optimists of the tree world.

     Pacing is crucial for a potter, particularly for a potter with a deadline. The pot should grow out of the clay and one's hands with enough “vigour and certainty,” thought British potter Bernard Leach (one of Lee's gods), “to give vitality to the rhythms of a pot.” But speed stopped there. You had to wait for the work to be leather hard before you could trim it and shape the foot; this took several days in the damp room. Then it had to be slipped, bisque fired in the kiln, glazed, and fired again. The success of each phase depended on the craftsmanship of the previous one; a little clumsiness or carelessness early on made bigger problems later. So Lee had made her work schedule carefully, added ten days to it, counted backwards, and watched the early spring unfurl with reservations. It was a crap shoot, predicting an early spring. She didn't ever trust the odds


     One evening, she’d taken Tara’s late shift; Lee needed the money, as always, and Tara needed—there was a bit of euphemism here—a date. Tara had warned her to take a book or some homework; the last half hour, at least, was dead. Roca Jack’s did most of its business in the morning, with people walking to work, or in the afternoon when the guys from CMHA camped out front, sometimes even in the winter, to feel the sun on their faces, contemplate the southern sky, and try to create a little space of sanity with their careful conversation.

     Tara was right; Lee had brought her laptop since she was still struggling with her artist’s statement. Maybe a different time and space would help her make a leap she was struggling to express. She sat facing the doorway so she could see anyone coming in and snap back into her role as barista. She read what she’d written, a sorry first paragraph, and then stared out onto Thirteenth Ave in the dark:

"The pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, attempting to explain the creation of the world around him, theorized that it consisted of four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. According to his theory, the form these elements take is determined by whether the world at that moment was dominated by the forces of Strife or Love. Earth, water, air, and fire are also the elements necessary for the making of pottery, a practice that, because it goes back nearly 30,000 years, might be said to represent the nexus of the basic human need to carry water and cook food and the perhaps equally basic need to create beauty. Given the similar sources in Empedocles’ cosmogony and the creation of pottery, it seemed intriguing to...."

This last sentence won’t do; it’s not enough to be intrigued, but that’s what she was and is. Empedocles. How does she even say his name? How does she explain that she’s only read fragments of Empedocles, because that’s all we’ve got, plus some commentary on his ideas in Aristotle and Plato. She was just curious about what Empedocles, with his theories about the very elements that are crucial to what she loves to do might say about what she makes out of clay, about a bowl one wants rest in the curve of one’s hands or a plate one wants to throw through a window. It turns out that he says quite a lot. You can explain a lot of human nature by thinking about the poles of strife and love. Sex? Yeah, even sex sometimes. She still can’t justify the connection she wants to make between her teapots and Empedocles, except to say she was curious. Her supervisor won’t be happy.

     She stood up and went to look out the doorway just as a young man riding a bicycle with a potted orchid in the curve of his arm turned left off Albert and pedaled by Roca Jack’s. She smiled. Strife or love, she wondered, as she turned back to her computer

Soul Weather is, in some ways, my love song to Regina, so I've left place names and the names of people intact for now. Does anyone know how I do this when I come to publish the novel? Do I have to go to the owner to Roca Jack's and ask permission, or should I change the name and simply let the details point the reader's way? Any other advice? Do readers need more information on things like bisque firing?

Soul Weather

2011-06-28T15:39:00.000-06:00

In my book on Virginia Woolf, I'm going to do an entire chapter on readers. Woolf wrote many essays on readers, two volumes of literary essays for "the common reader," and had a well-developed theory about how readers and writers work together. She thought that though they might never speak to the writer, a reader and her or his opinions aided the development of art in some ineffable way. Through studying these essays, I've come to one of my own most important conclusions about a work of art--that vexed object. Analytic philosophers have tried and tried--at least since the time of Aristotle--to define the work of art but have failed. Yet interestingly, there's a fair amount of agreement, though it's by no means complete. For me, that's the beauty of it. When we disasgree we have to talk. And when we talk about these things, something important happens.

Blogging has meant many things to me, but perhaps the most important is the conversation it sometimes establishes between readers and writers. I was more or less told by Brindle & Glass that to market a novel in the 21st century one needed to have an online presence, so at their instructions, I've been blogging. Because I try to write a post a week, I look at my world and think a bit more carefully. But now I have a chance to really get the conversation going. B&G has given me permission to post fragments from the novel I'm working on, Soul Weather.

It's difficult to describe the impetus for a novel--perhaps particularly for a book like Blue Duets that simply grew--and needed quite a lot of deliberate shaping as a result. When the wonderful creative writing teacher and author Keith Maillard (you seriously want to read his Difficulty in the Beginning novels) came to visit my gender studies class he told one of my students, who had herded him from our classroom to the lounge across the hall, that you don't write a novel by simply beginning to write. You need to begin shaping and questioning and thinking even before you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. He explained all the difficulties I'd had with Blue Duets. So I'd resolved never to do that again.

Soul Weather was born, so to speak, when two events collided in my imagination. I use the verb "collided" purposefully; something out of physics, not biology, happened. First, my wonderful colleague Michael Trussler once told me that Heidegger says that mood is our primary interface with the world; and indeed, when I read Being and Time last winter there it was.

But what influences our moods more than the weather? And what happens to our relationship with the world when the weather has changed enough, as it has in Regina over the last three or four cold rainy springs and early summers and this last cloudy winter, that we no longer feel at home?

Here's what Heidegger collided with: one beautiful summer night when Bill and I were out walking, we noticed a group of young people out on the porch roof of a house in our neighbourhood. I think we suspected this was being used by students, but their cheery waves to us (cheered by what, exactly? There are rumours....) confirmed it. I thought a novel about a group of twenty-somethings, some in university, some beginning new jobs, would be interesting. I have this sense that we're not inviting this generation into their adult lives very well; unemployment and underemployment among them remain high.

So this collision produced a question: what does it mean to be at home? What does it mean to be at home on the planet, in your skin, in your future, in your culture's ideas and technology?

This novel will not be a peroration, a rant, a sermon. But it remains connected nevertheless with my own concern about climate change and the way it's going to change everyone's daily lives. I don't think we pay enough attention to this relationship to nature as we go through our days wired for sound or for connectivity, attached to our iPods and cell phones rather than to the world around us. Yet weather gets under our skin, even if we're not particularly paying attention.

So I wanted one of my main characters to represent this connection in some profound and interesting way. Lee has just finished her MFA in ceramics--which explains my frustrated attempts to work on a potter's wheel. Artists, like English majors, don't find their ways naturally into day jobs, so she can stand in for this generation's struggle to be at home in their adult lives. Lee's mother died when she was twelve, and on the night her MFA exhibition opens, her dad announces he's moving to Swift Current to become an organic gardener with his new girlfriend. Would Lee please sell the house? How could she be less "at home"?

I'm not sure where Dirk came from. But here's his backstory: he works for a cbo in Regina, but in his spare time he buys up small houses and renovates them as rental properties. He knows the facts about homelessness, about how reassuring it is to have a stable place to live, and he's doing something in his small way to address that problem in Regina. One evening when he comes back from fixing the plumbing at one of his houses, his wife tells him he always smells different when he comes home from other people's houses--like someone else's cooking or soap. A couple of weeks later, she packs up the kids for an Easter visit to her sister in B.C., and doesn't come home again.

So Dirk wants to turn his family home into another kind of home, and wants Lee to help him do this. He thinks Lee's dad is being a kind of shit for leaving her with so much responsibility and uncertainty, so he offers Lee this arrangement. She can help him paint the house and collect some students to live in it in exchange for free rent. That means she won't have to work quite so hard to support herself and can find her way as an artist.

That's the opening scenario of Soul Weather. Why am I telling you this? I'm on sabbatical, as I think I've told you many, many times, and while I work on my book on Virginia Woolf's aesthetics, I'm also going to work on my novel. In fact, Friday I'm leaving for two weeks at St. Peter's Abbey. In September, I'm going to the Banff Centre for the Arts for a couple of weeks.

So I'd like to start a conversation with you about this novel by putting up sections of it now and then. I'd like your reactions, positive and negative. I'd also like to share the creative process. So here's the deal. I'll give you teasers and you tell me what you think.

Robert Kroetsch

2011-06-27T21:01:00.000-06:00

I made many mistakes in Blue Duets, but the one I rue most is not mentioning Robert Kroetsch in my acknowledgements. (I forgot to include Lisa Moore too--another regret.) In my defense, I should say that the final draft of Blue Duets came years after I attended Robert's novel colloquium at Sage Hill. Maybe it's always this way, but the last draft of the novel felt like a long uphill push made entirely alone. So I seemed to forget the people who weren't right in front of me at the time.

Robert allowed me into the colloquium in spite of the fact that I had only half a dozen chapters written. Perhaps he cut me a little slack because I'd written about What the Crow Said (on a dare), and the essay--which he said was like having his mind read--was published in Canadian Literature. Or perhaps he let me in because the two of us danced the twist on one of the Winnipeg River boats at a graduate student party. Really, each of these snippets of memory comes to the same central fact about Bob: his generosity. (I mean, really, the twist, in 1976?)

We all know about the creative writing teachers who want you to write like them--to become little clones that are one more sign of their success. I suppose in some ways, no one but Bob could have been Bob, so there wasn't much chance that anyone could successfully imitate his unique vision or his ability to play with language and ideas. But it seemed to me more than this: Bob had the gift for getting inside a manuscript and inside the author's vision, and helping the author to suss that out. It was Bob who realized that Rob, my miscreant professor, deserved to have his say in Blue Duets; giving Rob voice allowed me to create the novel I wanted, one without a privileged perspective. It was also a bloody good writing exercise. Try it: give your story to an unsympathetic character and see what you learn about language, rhythm, perspective.

We also know about creative writing teachers who say "no." No, don't do it that way. No, I'd never do that. No it's not going to work. Robert said "yes." Yes to the universe and yes to the word used with creativity, care, and compassion. I'll admit that, because I have to give my creative students grades, I think those grades should mean something, and that sometimes I have to say "no, that's really, seriously not working." But Bob believed in larger forces of language and literature, forces that didn't need him to say no. Forces that said "celebrate with a yes."

The world is smaller; it's contracted in a very Kroetsch-like way that hurts somewhere beneath your ribs, where you breathe. But I'm sure that those of us who have been touched by his generosity will continue to respond to the work of others in that open and eager way Robert had. Probably the best way for us to recognize him as a community is to be less worried about boundaries, less inclined to say no, more generous and open about the wonderful and various ways literature and creativity are practiced.

See also Gerry Hill's moving tribute at
http://poetshoes.blogspot.com/2011/06/robert-kroetsch.html

Creativity on the street

2011-06-20T20:43:00.000-06:00

Spring in Regina is a time for thinking about creativity, about art and craft. In spite of unfriendly, wet, changeable and challenging weather, Thirteenth Avenue filled up in May with curious, cheerful, friendly people who promenaded and bought everything from dog biscuits to handmade soap, from remarkable inventive jewelery to ceramics that asked questions about what pots are really for. What are we looking at? And what are we looking for? (These are two different things.) In part, we're looking at a community, at a particular kind of community, one that works very hard all year to mount the Festival, and we're implicitly sharing and applauding those values. And as we troll the streets, nodding to one another and petting one another's dogs or admiring children's painted faces, we're creating community; we're coming out of those claustrophobic houses that kept us warm but gave us cabin fever to celebrate and admire what other people made during our brutal, cloudy winter.

Making things: jewellery and dog biscuits, baked goods and the pots to we serve them on, knitted sweaters and ironmongery for gardens. There have been times in my life when making things got me through. Deeply depressed, I could nevertheless promise myself to knit five rows in a simple sweater, to end up knitting ten and feeling that I was quite a bit more competent and in this world than I had thought I was. What is it about making that disciplines us all winter and brings us out on a rainy street in the spring? In part, it's the self-respect that comes with craftsmanship, that hunger to do something well--no matter how simple--that I spoke of in my post on Craftsmanship (December 5, 2010). Let me quote Bill Reid again, because his words are so central to this idea: "One basic quality unites all the works of mankind that speak to us in human, recognizable voices across the barriers of time, culture, and space: the simple quality of being well-made." There's an implicit self-respect and self-reliance in making something and feeling that you've made it as well as you can, given where you are in the journey toward becoming a craftsman.

We think about creativity again in later June at Bazaart, but here the dynamic is a bit different because this is a juried event. No dog biscuits. Some of the artisans query that fine permeable line between art and craft. And as I people-watched for a while, I noticed that there's a curiosity here that is different from that you see on Thirteenth Avenue, where people seem to be wandering in a colourful, playful market. At Bazaart, people can't quite decide whether they've walked into a gallery or a shop. I think it's an ambiguity that's quite good for us, that challenges our preconceptions. It must be hard for the artisans, though, to be told their work is wonderful, only to have a sympathetic and potential buyer simply drift away. For many of them--certainly for the young ceramicists in the MFA program here--Bazaart is their bread and butter.

Because one of the main characters in the novel I'm working on, Soul Weather, is a potter who's just graduated from U of R with an MFA, I've been talking to ceramicists and even taking classes. I'm hopeless at a pottery wheel, but at least it gives me a sense of how challenging throwing something as simple as a mug (never mind a teapot) can be. As a result, I found myself this fall on Jenn Mapplebeck's thesis committee, which taught me a great deal about the creative process. In my earlier blog on Craftsmanship, I suggested that one of the tidy but problematic distinctions between art and craft was that we use craft in our daily lives, but that art seems to stand apart. Another distinction I could make is that craft emphasizes the making and the tradition of craftsmanship behind each work. Art, while it still needs to be well crafted (an assertion some curators would find problematic and only reflects my own taste) also needs to have a new idea. In the language that is often used now, particularly about traditional crafts like ceramics, a piece needs to "interrogate" the very foundations it's predicated on. Thus Jenn's teapot at the top of my blog is long past pouring tea; rather, it gestures towards the still life paintings and the compositions in those paintings called vanitas, and reminds us that even things have lives and that these lives take surprising turns. Other works, like the teapot and stand on the left, teem with life.

You can see one of Jenn's interesting "interrogations" in the work above. On the bottom shelf, you see an example of traditional lattice-work as it finds its way into ceramics. The planter and lattice on the right bottom shelf looks perfectly conventional. You put a plant in the cup beneath and it twines up the lattice. On the left of the top shelf, you see a latticed box: though it might not hold small things, it doesn't surprise. Yet look at the vases and teapots behind. While we recognize their forms, their use has been challenged. Apparently the question Jenn most frequently gets asked is "What is it for?" Because of course, craft has to be useful. They're satisfied, though, if she simply says "For looking at."

And here we come to one of the most important qualities I think a work of art should have--as well as an answer to why we put up with crazy wind out on the front lawn of the MacKenzie Art Gallery or dodge the rain at the Cathedral Village Arts Festival. I think art asks questions and forces us to engage in a conversation--even in the minimal conversation about what Jenn's lattice teapot is for. And the moment we start asking questions and having conversations, we've created the community we need at the end of a long, isolating winter.

If you want to contact Jenn about her work, you can reach her at Jenn.Mapplebeck@hotmail.com

In the meantime, you might want to read this interesting article in Britain's Daily Mail on how good quilting is for us. It exercises everything from our visual aesthetic sense to our math and problem-solving skills.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2002862/Why-quilting-uniquely-good-us.html

I'm planning another post soon on "Creativity on the Street," but then I want to talk about gardeners and the outside-the-box creative things being done at Regina's Food Bank.

Literature and the Environment 2: Writing about animals

2011-06-09T14:39:00.000-06:00

I grew up with dogs. (That's a whole other story.) But when my first husband and I were living in married housing at Boston University in the early seventies and I needed companionship badly, we thought a cat would be safer than a dog who would bark and give itself away. The cat gave herself away too, by scurrying down the old hallway painted landlord green with her short tail aloft; the super, charmed, didn't care. But now we had a small black cat that we'd rescued from a cat shelter in Brookline; Bugs, as we came to call her, had come in a box of kittens left that very morning on the shelter's doorstep.

Cats were a mystery to me, though of course I bought books before I undertook adoption. Seven cats later, I think of myself as "cat mother," and am frequently consulted about all things feline. But cats remain a mystery to me; indeed, my definition of "cat" is "that cozy creature who curls up next to your left hip every night purring loudly and whose every sound and gesture you understand, but who remains a mystery."

I have of course written about cats. I suspect that most writers with pets come to write about them at some point; they're so good at conveying the human and the limits of the human. The title of my first book of poetry, Without Benefit of Words came from a poem ironically entitled "Dumb Animals." The speaker of the poem, one who has read far too much Lacan, watches the gestures of two cats who are cuddling her down to sleep:

As they settle me down for sleep
I wonder how much discourse goes on in my house
without benefit of words.

. . . .

Without words you nearly outwit Lacan
who stills reality with his claim to language.
My cats unfreeze joy's indeterminacy
with wordless purr of pleased longing
qualified by infinite inflections of tail.

We let Bugs have kittens and kept two of the three. Her daughter, Niagara, is one of my most mysterious cats. One day I came home with a long heavy box filled with a bookshelf I needed to put together. The door caught the end of the box, which came down suddenly--on Niagara's head as it turned out. I had dislocated her jaw and broken her mandible cleanly in two. You'll be relieved to know that I discovered this quite quickly because she always greeted me at the door. Seeing no sign of her, I went looking and found her under the bed. Yet two days later she laid, curled up in my lap, purring. The purr is both the simplest and the most complicated of the mysteries. She may have been purring to heal or comfort herself, or because my lap was the right place to be. Why she forgave me is a bigger mystery. How she seemed so calm in the face of her injury and the surgery that followed is the biggest mystery yet.

I have a theory, though. Or you could say that Niagara taught me something. Or you could say that I'm trying to salvage something philosophical from the experience of injuring a creature who purred me to sleep every night of her life. Take your pick.

I'm not sure many animals think about the future. I think the instincts of wild animals tell them to eat as much as they can, when they can, because they don't know when they'll find their next meal, but I'm not sure this is thought. Unlike the human relationship with pain which asks "How long am I going to have to bear this?" Niagara thought about whether it was bearable now. Even while I know that this conclusion is probably my invention, there have been many times in my life--like when I broke my own leg--that this feline wisdom helped me.

Animals grieve. Barbara Gowdy wrote about this brilliantly in The White Bone; I have seen it in cats who lose a sibling. Research also indicates that animals frequently express empathy. When Niagara, at the age of twenty, was slowly dying of kidney failure, Ariel and Nutmeg, two young males I'd rescued, would know when she didn't feel well, would follow her around the house and curl up with her when she settled down. Ariel often curled up behind her and put his front "arm" around her. Moreover, they teach us to be empathetic because we are forced to carefully observe and interpret their gestures and vocalizations. As I learned when I suspected Nutmeg was not well (though two different vets could find nothing wrong) they can't tell us what hurts, what is in this case killing them. Thus they take us out of ourselves, force us to occupy another mindset altogether.

Sheba shouldn't be a mystery. If she wants me to play with her, she'll drop a toy on my book or at my feet. If she's going to do something she shouldn't, like jump up on the kitchen counter to grab a blueberry from the colander or a string bean from the cutting board (two of her favourite foods), she will meow in a particular way that I recognize and swish her tail wildly back and forth. Yet if I'm having a sleepless night, what prompts her to get out of bed with me and follow me wherever I go? A sense of duty? Empathy? Human warmth?

Twig is a mystery. He was enthusiastically "adopted" by Nutmeg and Ariel, both of whom died too soon, Ariel of cancer and Nutmeg of congestive heart failure. Twig grieved and then quite easily accepted Sheba, in spite of the fact that she's clearly the alpha cat around here. Why does he bathe her with such care, often snipping off her white eyebrows? (In the photograph above he's got his paw on the top of her head while he gives her a bath). Why does she put up with these baths? Why does she so often curl up with him? In the wintertime, her big dilemma is deciding whether she'll sleep with Twig, who is behind Bill's knees, or at my hip, her usual spot. She'll stand on the bed in indecision: you can almost hear her thinking about it.

There is, of course, an ecocritical discourse around writing about animals. It involves the ethics of acknowledging that some of us use them for food, that they often live (if you can call it that) in appalling conditions and die in even worse ones. You might like to know that if you want to reduce your carbon footprint you can eat less meat: meat production not only inefficiently uses a lot of the grain that could be used to feed people, but it produces about a quarter of the world's greenhouse gases. Ecocriticism also takes up the issue of hunting, as Trevor Herriot did in Grass, Sky, Song. It asks why a culture of hunting is such an important part of the representation of masculinity.

But ecocriticism also takes up the question I've been circling around here. I had come to feel that I had appropriated my cats' voices in the four poems I wrote about them in Without Benefit of Words. But apparently this feeling is both exactly right and quite ethical. The animals on our planet remain an "other" that we will never thoroughly understand. It's useful, for all kinds of ethical reasons, to experience and acknowledge that fact. Among other things, it takes the human and human knowledge out of the centre of the universe for a few minutes. Also, if we use our imaginations to understand the dog or cat who lives with us, that imagination might, because it's getting some exercise, grow stronger. You know that person who makes you crazy--bordering on intolerant--because he/she does things you don't understand? As your cat will tell you, there's always another story and another way to understand it.

Reading like a writer 2: The Winter Vault

2011-06-06T22:11:00.000-06:00

Sunday afternoon, after I'd accrued enough cheer from piecing three quite different blocks from Barbara Brackman's Civil War quilt as an antidote to yet another cloudy day, I sat down to finish Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault. But not before wondering whether it's an oxymoron to find cheer in making quilt blocks commemorating a horrific and unending war--because in the deep South, racism and bigotry and anti-intellectualism are alive and well. Perhaps that last word in the list seems out of place, but that strain in the Southern worldview says "For goodness' sake, don't think about your attitudes, where they come from, what they do to others, who the others might be in their daily lives." Perhaps all this is the point of the exercise Brackman has set us: commemorating a war, but doing it creatively, doing it with an obsession with colour. Because if you don't get colour right, no matter how good your craftsmanship is, a quilt won't work. And while we are concentrating on matching up all the points of the triangles, errant thoughts are likely to visit us.

I had said in my post on "Literature and the Environment" that the jury was still out with respect to the structure of this novel. Yet something compelled me to re-read it. I was certainly drawn to Michaels' prose, which is very much the prose of a poet: dense, subtle, inflected, infused with thought and observation which capture the complexity of being human. We cannot quibble with her when she ascribes this observation to Jean: "The villages along the St. Lawrence were enlivened by both the railway and the river. This created a vigour that Jean could not quite explain, though she recognized it somehow; two stories meeting in the middle" (42). Passages like this abound. I flip through my copy to look for underlining and find this passage that foreshadows the novel's conclusion:

"In every childhood there is a door that closes, Marina [Avery's mother, the Polish/Canadian artist] had said. And: only real love waits while we journey through our grief. That is the real trustworthiness between people. In all the epics, in all the stories that have lasted through many life-times, it is always the same truth: love must wait for wounds to heal. It is this waiting we must do for each other, not with a sense of mercy, or in judgment, but as if forgiveness were a rendezvous" (93-4).

Michaels' thematic structure is no less impressive. Through the lives of three major characters, the novel considers moments of destruction with very different textures and significance. Avery and Jean meet while the landscape is being flooded to create the St. Lawrence Seaway. This is perhaps the most benign instance of destruction, yet Michaels includes that moving description of an old woman's loss of her husband's grave I mentioned in my previous blog post. After Jean and Avery marry, Avery undertakes to move the temple Abu Simbel out of the way of the Nile's flooding. In the voices of a peripheral character, we are given intimate views of the Nubian communities who are losing a world that has been part of their art and their world view and their cultural and individual identity for centuries. Here, the sacred in history and landscape is inundated, though Jean later tells Avery that moving the temple wasn't the desecration; flooding the Nile was.

Lucjan, a Polish Jew living in Toronto who becomes Jean's lover while she heals after a stillbirth, tells us about the spiritual, physical, and historical destruction of Warsaw during the Second World War and about its surreal reconstruction. Lucjan's story is perhaps the most complex and horrific, insofar as it involves the destruction of a people, particularly insofar as his mother "disappears" when he's looking away from her for a minute, and his stepfather abandons him. At the same time, this is the point where we begin cross-referencing, in an interrogatory way, these three narratives. What is to distinguish between the genocide of the Jews and the Egyptians' movement of an entire people off the land they had occupied since time out of mind? And how does that differ from moving people from places where their loved ones are buried so that they can never revisit them again? The distinctions seem both massive and miniscule at the same time, a matter of degree only. These examples are on a kind of continuum of destruction and dispossession.

It is also in Michaels' description of Warsaw that we get the beginning of a thread that twines around the influence of the built environment--practical and psychological--on city dwellers. Lucjan will always wonder whether the papier-mache figures he poised at the edges of building rooftops inspired a suicide; similarly he never quite knows the impact his graffiti has on those criss-crossing Toronto's streets and neighbourhoods. Jean engages in guerilla planting, hoping to spark a memory, a treasured moment. Here is another ecocritical moment: Michaels' clearly imagines that plants, their colour, their fragrance, even the shapes of their leaves, might hold memories, might be nodes in a narrative we are constructing for ourselves. If the plants aren't there, our memories are impoverished. Upon his return from Egypt, Avery studies architecture, hoping to create spaces that allow us to live fully realized lives. But perhaps most poignantly, Lucjan talks of the hopeful and uncanny reconstruction of the centre of Warsaw, much of it made out of architectural details saved by young people like himself during the bombing and the Soviet occupation. The newly-created Warsaw both is and is not the place it replaces.

But if I have to answer the question, "Is it a novel?" I must hedge. Either the novel as a genre has become very, very capacious, or Michaels has written something else. I'm inclined to say both these hypotheses are right. I find my dis-ease about the novel's structure has nothing to do with the interrogatory play of themes and motifs, all of which are handled deftly and very intelligently. My difficulties come at the level of the scene. The Winter Vault seems best described as a meditation or even a series of meditations on these thematic strands. Conversations are rare: rather, we overhear articulate monologues about engineering, plants, Nubian culture, surviving in the Warsaw ghetto.

Perhaps this observation is tied somewhat to the fact that I include The Winter Vault among what I call "unsmiling novels." So far this category includes The Winter Vault, Catherine Bush's Rules of Engagement and to some degree The Sentimentalists. In these books, all of them about war, there are no moments that prompt us to pause and smile. Each is brilliantly crafted, but each lives within a world where there is little joy. The world-view of Michaels' novel is built around loss: parents die too soon, babies are stillborn, mothers disappear in bombing raids, fathers lose custody of their children, whole landscapes are flooded or destroyed. This is the world where Marina, another Jew who survived the Holocaust, can say "For better or for worse...love is a catastrophe" (98), or where Lucjan can tell Jean, who has lost her own child in a still birth--carrying it long after it has died--that she doesn't understand anything about his loss of his daughter (310). Standing in London, Jean and Avery survey places "drenched with sorrow" (107), suddenly aware of the violence of war, the violence of domestic life and of accidents. While there is no joy, there is consolation. Avery's father says nothing proves the future like a question (122), while Jean suggests that grafting one plant to another might be a metaphor for healing: "For five thousand years, humans have been grafting one variety of plant to another--the division, the pressing together, the conductive cells that seal the wound" (313).

If form and content are to be tightly wed--Denis Donoghue calls form "achieved content," then in a violent, transient world where love is a catastrophe and no one can understand your particular loss, perhaps all that can happen is that we tell our stories, perform our monologues. If that were the case, I could simply be comfortable calling this a novel shaped more by its aesthetics than its plot or its world. But the narrator doesn't quite believe this. In one of the few moments where we cannot attribute a floating paragraph to a character (hence I assume these are the narrator's words), Michaels writes "Everything we are can be contained in a voice, passing forever into silence. And if there is no one to listen, the parts of us that are only born of such listening never enter this world, not even in a dream. moonlight cast its white breath on the Nile. Outside the snow continued to fall" (318). Characters talk at length while around them other characters maintain respectful silence and attempt to reach out. Whether that reach is successful depends less on the generosity of the reacher and more on the self-imposed isolation of the teller. Each of us has the chance, if only we take it, to open the door of the winter vault.

Yet cutting all these tiny triangles and thinking about those Civil War quilts made by women out of the scraps of their lives in patterns that commemorated the war or showed escaped slaves the route of the Underground Railroad, I cannot help questioning Michaels' somber view of humanity. What does it mean to hang colourful quilts on your clothes line as a way of helping people to freedom? It means that not even strangers are alone and that something as pedestrian as a quilt can be beautifully, meaningfully joyful.

Literature and the environment

2011-05-31T17:10:00.000-06:00

I've given myself permission to start this sabbatical differently from every other, and differently from the ways I usually start my summers. I'm simply reading for the first two months. I have much to learn about some of the issues and motifs my next novel, Soul Weather, is going to explore, so I'm reading biographies of Simone Weil as well as her work, reading about climate change, learning how animals communicate. But that's in the off hours, so to speak. I have two scholarly tasks for the next two months. One is to finish reading Woolf's essays (I'm about half way through volume 5--one more to go). The other is to read ecocriticism so that Katherine Arbuthnott and I can more effectively apply for a SSHRCC grant to do research on the qualities or kinds of texts that might convince people to change behaviours that have a negative impact on our environment. While I'm reading ecocriticism, I'm also thinking about a class I'd like to teach when I return from sabbatical. This is crazy: I'm not even technically on sabbatical yet. Yet ironically, just reading has made the first month very productive. My ideas are free of the censorship that comes of trying to pack them tightly and too soon into well-shaped and well-argued paragraphs, and I feel my thinking has been liberated by this freedom.

A couple of things I've learned so far from the ecocritics seem to be resonating with the fiction I'm reading. First, nature isn't an objective thing that's just "out there" somehow; rather, we project an idea, even a philosophy onto it. I realized this when I began to think about whether I'd just do ecocriticism and Canadian Literature or ecocriticism and American, Canadian, and British literature. How differently the Americans, particularly during the settlement of "the west" looked at nature: it was something to be tamed, exploited--some of the language used by nineteenth-century settlers even evokes images of rape. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nature in Canada was something to be survived; we experience an element of awe that's not prominent in American readings of the natural world. British and other European countries see the sublime in nature; it continues to evoke something beyond their comprehension. Might Kant explain why the Germans are so far ahead of us in developing and harnessing alternate energy sources?

Ecocriticism has its political wing, of course, that argues about the most politically correct way to depict the natural world in a literary text. I'm not very interested in that particular argument; rather I'd say that ecocriticism, like most theory, has two primary uses. First, it foregrounds or emphasizes things we might normally not notice. Second, it reminds us that many of our preconceptions are...preconceptions--not necessarily a disinterested reflection of the way things are.

For example, I'm re-reading Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault, a book I both admired and thought ineffectively constructed the first time I read it. (The jury is still out on that one; I`ll keep you posted.) In my earlier reading, I could certainly see a kind of uneasy triangulation taking place between the flooding of the Nile (which, my internet research told me then was an ecological disaster); Avery`s uneasiness about moving the ancient temple, Abu Simbel; and Jean`s loss of her baby. This time, ecocriticism has made me much more aware of Jean`s relationship with plants. She and Avery, husband and wife for most of the novel, met when he was working on the engineering for the flooding of the St. Lawrence Seaway. He saw her in the distance stooping, standing up right, and putting something into a canvas bag on her back, only to repeat the bending, straightening, and stowing away. Touched by her gestures, he catches up to her to ask what she`s doing. She`s "keeping a record" she tells him, of the plants alive on the shoreline. She'll plant them elsewhere, though of course they'll never grow and reproduce the way they would have undisturbed. Changing the landscape, no matter what our motives, is never a neutral act. While perhaps something positive is built--like the St. Lawrence Seaway--it is dishonest not to admit that an act of destruction preceded it.

Eventually these plants make their way to the home of Avery's mother, Marina, an avid gardener and illustrator who is particularly alive to the significance of the natural world. She tells Jean about the way the Nazis tried to ensure the ethic purity of gardens with "strict landscape rules enforced in all the occupied territories, especially in Poland" which necessitated a "botanical purge" against a tiny forest flower, impatiens parviflora (93). Hence, Marina puts a small blossom in everything she paints. Even well after the war, there is talk in Germany, Marina tells Jean, of ripping out rhododendrons and forsythia because they're not native German plants. If nature isn't an idea, if it isn't part of our cultural identity, why would authorities even consider such time-consuming and futile gestures?

As readers, we don't miss the large issues. One representative old Ontario woman is allowed to give voice to the sense of loss of place when her home--and with it her husband's grave--is flooded. You can't simply move a house, however carefully it's done, (one woman puts a tea cup on the edge of the table to see if her house is moved as carefully as they promise--and it is) and still feel at home in a familiar landscape. The light hits corners of the room and the reading chair differently; the shadows of an elm tree don't fall quite the way they used to on the floor of your bedroom at dawn; the skyline is different. We have roots in place that you can't simply pull up. Similarly, we're aware from Avery's growing uneasiness about moving Abu Simbel that something false is being done here. The better he does his job--the more the reconstructed version looks like the original--the more dishonest he feels. When the temple was built, there was a sense that a certain place or landscape was significant or even sacred. Now all that matters is Abdul Nassar's egotistical desire to effect some monumental change to the landscape--a change that not only necessitates the heart-wrenching wholesale moving of villages, the cutting of family ties to a landscape and its history, but that immerses and erases thousands of years of the Nile's history and agricultural riches.

But once ecocriticism has articulated the way a particular time and culture can assign meaning to the natural world, we can see the disturbing connection between the flooding of the St. Lawrence Seaway, of the Nile, of the moving of Ontario and Nubian villages and households and the Nazis absurd purge of a small wild flower in the name of cultural purity. When we transform the landscape, we aren't simply building a new, more modern history; rather the old connections to the past and to place are being destroyed. If nature has cultural significance, what's being changed isn't merely physical. It's historical and sentimental.

Timothy Clark, in The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment points out the small-l liberalism has been associated with numerous rights movements, with civil rights for African-Americans, with women's rights. At the same time, though, liberalism seems to be failing the ecology movement precisely because of its emphasis on individual rights. It would seem that, in North American at least, we have an inalienable right to do things that are destructive, like keep our SUV idling while we wait in the block-long line-up for drive-in coffee at Tim Hortons rather than getting out of our car--which would certainly be quicker. Those of us who are worried about the planet and about the well-being of people whose homes and lives have been destroyed by an extreme tornado season in the States, or whose livelihoods and homes are threatened by various levels of flooding across the prairies, in Quebec, and on the Mississippi Delta, realize that we're going to have to give up our individual rights to protect the natural world.

Giving up our individual rights takes its most controversial and fraught manifestation in the issue of population control. By definition, efforts to think about population control conflate the public and the private in a way most people find disturbing. While some of us might, theoretically, approve China's "one child" policy, the more imaginative among us would realize the way in which this policy infiltrates a couple's most intimate moments. In Franzen's Freedom, Walter Berglund argues that to protect the planet we're going to have to think in terms of population control. If you've got twenty minutes, listen to David Attenborough's compelling message about this contentious issue. You'll find it at
http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/vision-videos/sir-david-attenborough

This afternoon, the wind rocked my car as I waited at the intersection of Albert and College. Yet minutes later, when I took these photographs, the ornamental fruit trees still clung to their fragile petals. What force of nature allows them to do that?

When Katherine and I have our grant application revised, we're going to start collecting stories about people's lives being changed by something they read. So in the next couple of months, cast about in your memory for that moment when reading a novel or an essay or a poem profoundly changed the way you view the world and your place in it.

Evening Reading: Combray

2011-05-25T21:42:00.002-06:00

When I first moved to Regina 21 years ago this coming July, I was a single mother who found herself in a curious, lonely and wonderful situation. Beginning in the summer of 1990, Veronica spent six weeks each summer with her dad in Winnipeg. How does a mother describe, honestly and without guilt, what it is like to be temporarily childless? I'm not sure I can capture the delicate balance between loss and freedom. I can only describe how I answered the loneliness with reading. Because my house is high above College Avenue and because I have two enormous evergreens in my front yard, in the summer my bedroom seems like a refuge up in the trees. From my bed, I can watch the slight changes in the sky and the light, feel the breezes from two directions hovering above the sheets, listen as the human and animal world prepares for the slight silence of sleep. And read. When my eyes and mind are tired, I simply stop reading (though I always have my notebook with me) and let my mind drift around in the problems a poem or a scene is giving me.

While fall and winter might have found me for a passive hour in front of the TV that would be an antidote to the day's busyness, watching TV in the summer seems almost heretical, as if I'm spurning one of the world's great lonely pleasures, though of course I'm only alone now until Bill comes to bed to read aloud to me, which seems to put a buffer between the mind-busy day world and the world of sleep that is sometimes so illusive for me.

Reading Combray, the first volume of my sabbatical reading, In Search of Lost Things, seemed like a doubled--even mirrored--pleasure. I suspect this first book functions as an introduction to the other eleven, so preoccupied is the ageless yet aging Marcel toward the end about his future as an artist. His childhood memories are replete with sensual experience that might make passages of "fine writing," but he cannot imagine the point of view, the world view, the philosophy that will give shape to the sensuous beauty of his material. In another way, this chapter is a single synecdotal night that is infused with loss. It begins with a sleepless night and the grief he feels--and even anticipates--because his mother will not leave their dinner guests to kiss him and tuck him in for the night. It ends with an equally sleepless night during which he recreates for himself his bedroom at Combray, only to find at the first glimmers of light that nothing is in his right place and that he's left that magic, if grief-filled, time.

Until the taste of the madeleine, this seems to be his single memory of childhood; the tea-infused baking bring back a plethora of free-floating memories that tell us much about the values held by his family and his childhood historical moment, about gardens, about religious observances, about illness and death. Much of Combray is narrated in what the narratologists call the iterative: that is, Marcel narrates one time what has happened many times, over and over, conflating individual occasions, as if Easter services or a particular walk or the habits of his Aunt Leonie and her visitors have become almost ritualized. Among these memories are scattered a handful of scenes, like seeing Mademoiselle Gilberte Swan or glimpsing the Duchesse de Guermantes or overhearing Mlle Venteuil berate her father in a scene that will resonate throughout his life. These thread their way through the two paths of his family's country walks, the Guermantes Way or the Meseglise Way, which seem to stand for ways of being, approaches to living, placing emphasis on sunshine or rain, on the choices one makes to accept the rhythms of weather, on formal gardens or on riverside meadows. So this extraordinarily, floating, almost-narrative--a narrative line as insubstantial and impressionistic as a large Monet water lily--is of course tightly and purposefully organized.

But at its centre lies the contemplation of the pleasure of open windows between spring and fall, the pleasure of sleeplessness on summer nights, the pleasure of ritualized walks, of reading indoors during the heat of the day, the sound-world just outside the window. Marcel's pleasurably-evoked yet grief-filled night left me feeling as if I were looking into the strange ornate mirror of my own past sleepless summers.

Those turtles are layered

2011-05-18T16:30:00.000-06:00

In Blue Duets, Rob's first line is "Julia Child taught me to cook." I was trying, you see, to make him not completely unlikeable, and since he's about my age, like me he's a first-generation Mastering the Art of French Cooking cook. When Veronica and I watched "Julie and Julia" several months ago, I got the books back out of that place where superannuated cookbooks go to live--where they become history.

So when Veronica had a birthday while we were in New York City (for which we shopped on Fifth Avenue, but don't be jealous. Fifth Avenue is where strange, unwearable clothing goes to be auctioned off to the highest bidder), we talked about menus. She wanted coq au vin and crepes with frangipane. When I cook coq au vin, something tugs at my history rib. I'm very aware that this dish is a long-standing French classic with a definite purpose: cook that useless old wiry rooster in so much wine--along with the right herbs and vegetables--and for so long that he'll be succulent and delicious. Yet I have no way of knowing whether the skinless chicken breasts I'm using came from a cock or a hen, and making coq au vin with skinless chicken breasts is probably heretical anyway. Nevertheless, the mingling smells in my kitchen of the bacon fat I'll brown the breasts in, of sauteing mushrooms, of wine and chicken stock, of bay and thyme, seem to connect me to a long line of French women and their American art-of-French-cooking sisters.

Making frangipane I similarly meet the layers of my own history. First, I should say I bought both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the early seventies, shortly after they were published. In the following decade I made Veal Prince Orloff--probably the most complicated thing I've ever cooked--Bavarian creams, croissants from scratch. (You can't imagine how good they are, though if you work at them all day, folding and rolling out the buttered layers, you can eat them for afternoon tea.) When I found myself a single mother of a vegetarian child in the mid-eighties, Julia Child went to the back of the shelf of cookbooks, except for the recipe for frangipane. Frangipane is a fairly thick pastry cream (mostly eggs, milk, flour and sugar) to which you add ground almonds, almond extract, and a generous splash of Amaretto. Although it's essentially a fairly thick pudding, it tastes like something from another world altogether.

If you've used Mastering the Art of French Cooking, you know that one of Childs' gifts lies in her ability to write the most precise instructions; these, if followed religiously, will lead to frangipane that is like silk. First, you slowly, slowly, slowly whisk the sugar into the eggs until, when you lift the whisk, the mixture "forms a ribbon." For some reason, this patient transformation leads the thick mixture of eggs and sugar to fall off your whisk not in blobs but in elegant ribbons. Once you've whisked it to that point, there, it's unmistakable. Then you beat in the flour that you've measured in quite a particular way that's illustrated, a pencil note in my cookbook tells me, on page 17, though I don't have to revisit it any more. You put your measuring cup under your sifter and sift the flour carefully into the cup and then level it with a knife, ensuring that there are absolutely no lumps in your flour and that nothing's been packed down as you spoon it into the measuring cup. Once you've added the flour, you need to add boiling milk, and here's where I part ways with dear Julia. Right below my note telling me exactly how to sift the flour is another notation: "3 minutes in microwave. " Boiling milk only makes the most unspeakable mess of your pan, and you have to watch it. French cooking takes lots of time to begin with--whisking eggs and sugar until they form the ribbon--I don't have time to watch milk boil. I am back on track when I add the milk to the sugar, eggs, and flour drop by drop, and I've also been conscientious about buying the kind of enamelled cast iron pans that spread the heat so evenly you don't need to use a double boiler.

Oddly enough, my Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a kind of synecdoche for our knowledge of history: it's seldom unmediated and often our own experience, or those of our forenbears, provides the mediation. While I've got the "original text," it's been layered over, first by smudges from the bottom of my pan as I put it right on the cookbook to read the instructions while following them, then by the experience of never remembering from time to time how to properly sift flour, and finally by finding an improved, efficient way for boiling my milk. I'm absolutely true to some of the recipe's instructions, like getting the egg and sugar to form the ribbon. Veronica, in turn, knows the text mediated by years of watching me make frangipane and by the memories she has of her mother's cooking.

Quilt historian Barbara Brackman is celebrating the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War by offering quilt makers a quilt block a week named after events and personages in the civil war. The one I'm working on right now is called "Fort Sumter" after an important naval battle outside Charleston, South Carolina. Brackman has created a wonderful display: photographs and newspaper articles from the time, along with selections from the diary of Mary Chestnut, whose husband was at Fort Sumter. So Brackman has been careful to give us lots of primary texts in this post, as in her others. Yet there's no escaping the fact that the block itself was first found in the Chicago Tribune quilting column written by a fictional Nancy Cabot in 1932. Brackman goes on to suggest the symbolism of the colours used in the block, but we can't help feeling that our genuine 2011 Civil War quilt which we're making a complicated block of every week, using only bona fide reproduction fabrics, is somehow faked. Or is it?

Once an object comes into the historical record, whether it's a cookbook, a quilt block, or a package of letters, it is already implicated in its culture and in all that society values. It doesn't come to us without the assumptions we always already make about its meaning. Through these objects, we don't really know "how it was." We'd like to assure ourselves that we're finding the meaning of the past, and that meaning comes down to us through an unbroken, unsullied chain. But, as Hans Kellner argues in "Language and historical representation," there is no narrative there, waiting for us to discover it. Rather, the historical narratives we create are exercises in self-understanding. Through telling our stories, we create ourselves. I take pleasure, it seems, in creating--and being--a self that's tied to the pleasures of the past, regardless of how illusory it might be. I like the sensual and intellectual anachronism that happens when past and present meet. I'm taking Barbara Brackman's narratives and instructions, which she couldn't really give to us without the genre of the blog, straight from my netbook to my sewing machine.

You can find Barbara Brackman's wonderful blog here:
http://civilwarquilts.blogspot.com

Tender Buttons and the Metropolitan Museum of Art

2011-05-09T18:40:00.000-06:00

We began the day at Tender Buttons, a tiny shop, perhaps 3 metres wide, just off Lexington. Improbably, there are four people who work here, one tiny sixty-something blonde dynamo with her hair in an elegant French twist; another women in her sixties with chin-length curly gray hair; an older man who I suspect drinks too much but who does up your parcel in a most intriguing way, folding the top of the tiny paper bag like origami so the buttons don‘t fall out; and a young Asian man wearing one of the brightest things in the shop: a turquoise T-shirt. When the courier came in to drop off the weekend delivery, he greeted each of them by name and wished the chap in the T-shirt a happy mother’s day.

You can see from the photographs that there are more buttons here than you’ve seen everywhere else. One woman was there to buy antique buttons and dropped nearly $300 for them. Another couple was in, he with a shirt and she with a brocade jacket, looking for something that would match (in his case) or replace (in hers) buttons that had been lost. In sped-up weekend New York, people take time here. You have no choice. We found what we were looking for: buttons for sweaters that Veronica, her friend Jenny, and I are making. I wonder what it would have said about us if we hadn’t found the perfect button.

We spent the next nearly seven hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where we did not see Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein (which ordinarily lives, I think, at MoMA). That bit of serendipity might have been a bit too much to ask, even of New York City. In spite of the fact that they closed late on Saturday, so we had until nearly 9 p.m., we had to make fairly rigorous choices. I can’t really summarize the art for you, can perhaps barely describe its effect on me. We looked at contemporary American and European art, standing stunned by the reality of Georgia O’Keefe’s too-well-reproduced canvases. Her is a woman who paints flowers, but there is nothing polite or cute or pretty about them; they are strong statements about her and about the world she lives in. We saw Picasso in all his incarnations: it’s amazing that he had so many entirely different styles, and yet that they claim your attention all the way across the room. We sat stunned by Mark Rothko’s ability to get colour and all its subtlety to speak to a part of us we have no idea we can lay claim to. We went to a special exhibition documenting the progress and genre of Cezanne’s “Card Players.” I didn't know that card-playing was so well represented in art, usually underlining and critiquing the rowdy immoral side of playing cards. Cezanne, well beyond morals, liked the men he depicted, studying each of them over a number of years before painting the two canvases that are his full appreciation, in Meyer Shapiro’s words of “Four men playing collective solitaire.” They reflect back to us the thought we put into them; in this frozen moment they are provocatively opaque.

Of course we spent hours among the Met’s enormous Impressionist collection. I particularly love Monet, who depicts a world of water and light (even when he’s painting the Houses of Parliament or haystacks in snow) that shows how easily the world before us might dissolve and become something entirely different; he reminds us that the substance of the world is mysterious. Veronica loves Cezanne (as do I) who has the opposite effect. If you could take his fruit off the canvas, they would have heft in your hand. An exhibition of small nineteenth-century paintings examined the genre of the open window that sometimes spoke of dreamy possibilities, sometimes was the only light in a painter’s studio. Rembrandt catches the mystery of the human face’s ability to accrue and express experience. Vermeer’s everydayness is completely comforting, though the maps that are often pinned to the wall behind the young woman with a lute remind the viewer of the colonial project that this serenity depends on--though I have no idea if he saw it that way. An exhibition of night photography completely transformed the urban world.

Late afternoon our feet needed a rest and we needed caffeine and sugar to be able to go another three hours, so we took ourselves to the little café in the American wing. It was full of people hunched and leaning into deep conversation. No one was noisy; everyone--speakers and listeners alike--was fervent, passionate. Perhaps they weren’t even talking about the art, but their conversations nevertheleess spoke of its ability to remind us of the depth and engagement we should have in our own lives. Denis Donoghue in his book Speaking of Beauty argues that there is no single definition of beauty that any of us would find completely convincing, so the result is that we must speak about what we find beautiful and in so doing speaking about what is important to us. Art, I believe, works the same way, prompting the kinds of conversations that go to the core of our lives and beliefs.

Sunday in Central Park

2011-05-09T09:05:00.000-06:00

In spite of the forecast for grey, rainy weather, we've had days of sun and temperatures around 20 degrees. It was to be particularly beautiful on Sunday--none of the wind that has been blowing hair in our face. Central Park demanded our attention.

I want to describe Central Park as a work of art. Of course, there is Frederick Law Olmstead's vision of nature in the centre of the busy city. There are the most remarkable outcrops of rock that people feel compelled to climb. They lay in the sun above the city streets or simply stare off into space like an urbanized adventurer in Capsar David Friederich's famous painting of the man staring down the Alps. I don't know whether the landscape of the whole city was like this or whether the outcrops determined where the park should go. Unlike the city itself, which is more or less a triscuit (except in areas like Greenwich Village), the paths here wander; it's very easy to become disoriented and to find yourself fetching up for advice at the Chess House where the Conservancy has volunteers to sort you out and where a mother and son spread their chess pieces out under the wysteria on tables that have chessboards marked right into the stone.

But when I say Central Park is a work of art, I'm referring to a kind of urban theatre that happens here. A young man offers jokes for $1 and promises laughter. Judging by the women collected about him, he's delivered. A Chinese dance troupe (sorry: no pictures of this one: it was too crowded) tells an ancient story just across from Lincoln Centre.

The skateboarders strut their stuff in a small ampitheatre. You can find any kind of music you want: a lone saxophonist wailing the popular mellow love songs of the fifties and sixties, a small band playing (one guesses) popular Mexican music that almost prompts people to dance in the streets, a small jazz band playing Gershwin.

My favourite, though, was a young woman on roller skates (not roller blades) dancing to her own music. She--and other skateboarders and skaters--had found this central place along the wide arborial Mall. On one side of her we could hear the saxophonist wailing; on the other side the band played Gershwin. But she was listening to her own song, occasionally belting out the music and words which belonged to her alone, but which she danced into the air around her.

A day of art galleries

2011-05-08T08:40:00.001-06:00

Today was a gallery day. We began at the International Center for Photography, where four exhibitions illustrated the range of what photography can do. On the main floor there were contact strips and photographs taken by a group of photographers documenting the Spanish Civil War, Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim. While much of their photojournalism appeared in German, British, French, and American magazines and newspapers, it has long been believed that there was an archive of all their photographs that had been stored in a suitcase. This archive surfaced in Mexico in 2007, not in a suitcase but in cardboard boxes that had been handed from person to person for safekeeping. The International Centre printed some of the more startling photographs, but put most of the archive on their walls in contact sheets, offering viewers utterly inadequate large plastic magnifiers to deal with the small sizes of the images. Unfortunately, these wouldn’t rotate the images 90%, so the challenge was often to study a small photograph sideways to your line of sight. Despite these frustrations, this was a remarkable exhibition. First, it demonstrates the enormous range of photojournalism. This loosely-knit group took pictures of textile workers and peasants at a land reform meeting; an outdoor mass on the Basque front, the necessities for a mass sitting on a broken cane chair; civilians leaving Tereul in the cold, many of them old and struggling to make their way through the snow; Republican soldiers moving art in Madrid to protect it from Franco’s forces; a woman selling cabbages and eggs; children finding a way to play in the war‘s rubble. The viewer is made aware of how much framing matters: close-ups capture the individual in pain or attempting with a cigarette and something to drink to create a calm, almost domestic moment. Longer shots instead speak of the collective experience of marchers in a demonstration or bodies on a battlefield. Many of these images are aesthetically striking compositions, balances of high-lights and low-lights, posing the question of what happens when we aesthetisize horror. But if the aesthetics of the image cause us to look more closely at subjects we might ordinarily ignore, perhaps the result is that our sense of the range of human experiences is expanded.

I wish I’d have had an archive like this for my Britain in the Sixties class this winter term because the variety of photographs representing the factories, the streets, the battlefields, the emptying art galleries makes it clear how many places history unfolds.

The second exhibition of post-Mao photographs by Chinese photographer Wang Quingsong were very carefully staged on a movie set to represent elements of Chinese culture and mythology “updated” by the cultural revolution. These are developed on a huge scale (3 feet high and perhaps 10 feet long), many of which have cultural allusions that are largely “in” jokes. They remind us of photography’s ability to reach for a monumental scale both in terms of the size of the photograph in in terms of the image’s ability to bear symbolic weight. Yet probably because of my cultural ignorance, I found this the least successful exhibition.

Alonzo Jordan was the community photographer in Jasper Texas, a small African-American town. He photographed high school graduates, prom queens posed on the hoods of the huge cars of the fifties and sixties, weddings, a neighbour mowing the lawn, family reunions. I very much doubt Jordan would have expected his well-composed images to reach a New York City museum, but they’re undoubtedly a valuable and evocative record of what his community chose to celebrate.

The final exhibition was of postcards of enormous baptisms in rivers, streams, lakes. The didactic panel pointed out that photographs could be developed onto a card stock whose obverse identified it as a postcard and provided space for a message and an address. This information helps me to make sense of some of the photographs in my mother’s box of family memorabilia. Baptisms provided an intriguing spectacle--who knew there was such a genre of photograph/postcard?--to be both celebrated and, in the event of African-American communities, to mock for their enthusiasm. Racist postcards of baptisms? What won’t we do with images?

We took a break in Bryant Park, watching young men play ping pong, noting the shelves of books left out for anyone to borrow and the signs giving times for yoga classes, laughing at children on the merry-go-round, feeding the sparrows. We didn’t arrive until well after 1 p.m., but there were very few free seats. Sitting in one of the tippy slatted chairs, you’re aware of being in the midst of theatre, but you’re not quite certain whether you’re a member of the audience or an inadvertent actor. You catch fragments of conversations as people pass you by. One friend tells another that she has a short attention….and then the wind takes her words. A thirty-something man is talking rather loudly, one suspects, to his wife: “Oh, that’s right. Then I’ll come home. No, I’m totally okay with that.” Then he takes his story out of range.

MoMA filled the second half of our day. I’m dismayed that I simply don’t know how to read some contemporary art, so I didn’t really understand the “language” until we came to an entire and large exhibition of Picasso guitars. You can see Picasso using this familiar instrument to work out the language of cubism and abstraction, but no one answered my rather basic question: why the guitar? Was it primarily a Spanish folk instrument that could be played by anyone with a little training? He probes the very terms of representation: what does it mean to paint on your canvas a slice of, of something--you‘re not quite sure how it contributes to our sense of what‘s being represented--and make it look like fake wood? Why does a representation need only two planes? How many lines do we really need to recognize an icon like the guitar? Can we add a few more lines that will provoke us to see that this is a conflation of several images? This was an intriguing exhibit.

The fifth floor might be loosely titled “Impressionism and After.” I’ll admit that as a little old lady I was beginning to feel rather frustrated with MoMA’s failure to provide any benches in the galleries. There is neither any space for us to rest our weary backs and feet nor to simply contemplate a sequence of paintings--of guitars, say--to consider their relationship to one another. Or to sit staring at three serene Seurat landscapes (though I understand why there’s no bench in front of the very popular version of “Starry Night”). There is no time for reflection; yet what are art galleries for? Nevertheless, this was like coming home to old friends who spoke at least one of your languages--the surrealists, de Chirico’s nightmare landscapes, Rousseau’s calmly curious lion. But for me--and judging by the benches that were entirely full, for others as well--one of the magical rooms held a Monet Water Lily painting that he worked on for the 12 years between 1914 and 1926. Three enormous canvases, each about four metres long, cover an entirely wall. Cezanne, I believe, said Monet was only an eye--but what an eye! These are about the miracle of vision, a feast for our eyes. While we sat there just remembering what the magic of seeing was like, allowing our eyes to simply play over the enormous canvases, several people performed what I called “the Monet shuffle.” They’d use their cell phone camera to phone one segment, shuffle down the room to keep their camera the same distance from the floor, take another picture, shuffle some more and take a third, then a fourth. This made me sad: here were these enormous inflected, textured, subtle canvases of deep water and translucent light, and people were looking at them primarily through their cell phone cameras.

In spite of not entirely understanding some of the work in a display of printing making in South America, I can see that modern art--maybe all art--wants to do a number of things. There is the art of witness--of posters calling the violence of apartheid into question. And there is the art of Matisse, Bonnard, and Monet that is visionary in its own way, reminding us of the power of beauty to assuage and to envision a frame of mind that is peaceful in its own moment. And there is art that engages with the ideas of the time and takes them further, always probing, never settling--just as we should never settle. We need all of these.

The photograph at the top of the post was taken by Veronica Geminder; reflections of the New York skyline are captured in the glass of MoMA.

Holidays and Curiosity

2011-05-07T09:06:00.001-06:00

One of the gifts of holidays is that one's curiosity is on full throttle. You notice the smell of the subway and of the spirea blooming in Union Square. You shamelessly eavesdrop as two fervent young men in yarmulkes talk about abortion and penalties for killing pregnant women as they carry a long table down Fifth Avenue toward Washington Square. "It all depends on what you mean by...." one of them says, as they realize that ethics almost always come down to definitions. It is noon on a blustery sunny New York spring day and two different bands gust music through the park. A man with sandwich boards on a jerry-rigged cart dances to the beat of one of the bands until he is in the circumferance of the second, when he must force his hips and knees and feet into another rhythm. In a quieter corner of Washington Square, a man in fatigues teaches a couple how to play chess.

Greenwich Village is full of colour and stories. Beautiful Tibet has shawls in every gradation of every colour, making me want to go home and make an Amish quilt. At Mood, three floors of fabric, we are greeted first by a young man who calls me "young lady" and wants me to check my parcels. Then the store's black and white boston terrier snuffles at my feet. Every colour is celebrated in silk georgette, in shantung silk, in jersey, brocade and tulle. There is a quieter palette in men's suitings. The store bustles with people's visions as twenty-somethings with fat design notebooks and either tattoos or very creatively coloured hair and a playful sense of style troll the aisles of industrial shelving looking for inspiration. A grandmother buys lime-green netting for her granddaughter's dance recital tutu. A young man with an understated shirt of black Egyptian hieroglyphs on a cream background and one turquoise earring explains to a svelte young woman whose lining he's cutting "I love to sew. It's so satisfying."

McNulty's tea, established in 1895, has a smell of tea and coffee so thick I can almost chew it. Hundreds of glass jars can be opened and inhaled. When I have made my choice, an elderly Chinese man (who knew intuitively or by long experience that the customer ahead of me wanted his coffee ground coarsely for a coffee press) finds the right rubber stamp to label my small but heavy white bag before he weighed out my choices. His partner, also an elderly oriental man (named Mc Nulty?) charged me very little for the hundreds of cups of tea I was carrying away.

In spite of its bustle and crowds, New York City takes time to delight.