Holidays and Curiosity

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.

Reading as a Writer: literature and history

One of the few reviews of Blue Duets was written by Roger Brunyate for the MostlyFiction web site.  It's a kind and generous review, but he comments in his paragraph of misgivings (he still gave BD 4 out of 5 stars) that "There seems no reason for the 2002 date other than to get in a few spurious references to Bush and Iraq."   Actually, the date is quite purposeful:  Rob's big scene (no spoiler alert) comes at an anti-Bush, anti-war demonstration, so 2002 is integral to the character's development.  Also, I actually checked the weather for 2002 and the length of days in Montreal, mostly to provide me with a suggestive background to paint my characters' lives on.  So when, toward the end, Lila watches the days get shorter from her mother's room in a palliative care home, I'm being quite accurate.   

But there's also a philosophical and aesthetic reason why each of the chapters is dated.  Most simply, it gives the reader a sense of the novel's pace and allows them to see that I'm not giving my characters much time to reflect before they tell their part of the story.  But on a larger scale, the dates come out of my sense that literature is always already embedded in a historical moment.  When I teach almost any class, I appropriate a story Thomas King tells in his Massey Lecture, "'You'll Never Believe What Happened' Is Always a Great Way to Start."  He opens this lecture by telling the First Nations story about how the earth "floats in space on the back of the turtle."  After some play with an audience that knows this story and is enjoying his particular way of telling it, King admits "It's turtles all the way down."  For me, it's history all the way down.  Perhaps what Brunyate caught was that I haven't thoroughly learned how to do this yet.

So in the reading I'm doing this summer before I sit down to pick up the threads of the next novel, Soul Weather,  I'm watching to see how writers accomplish this marriage of fiction and history.  In Franzen's Freedom, the larger structure of the novel, its concern with the damage we're causing to the environment, ties it to the last part of the previous century and the early part of this one.  But Franzen is also good at name-dropping, mostly of pop/rock musical groups and artists and songs.  Like Nick Hornby, he realizes how resonant popular music is, how  the mention of a  song or a group (particularly the music from our own youths) can evoke a particular time and space.  Unfortunately, this isn't a trick I can pull off, being blissfully unaware of trends in popular music.  Franzen is also quite good at recognizing how child-rearing styles change; he can plant you in a particular moment by referring to a parent's beliefs or practices.  I thought this was an uncanny bit of social history; if even child-rearing can be historicized, you know it's turtles all the way down.

I've just finished re-reading Carol Shield's Larry's Party.  I still remember Carol mentioning in a CBC interview that she wrote her draft, had a bevy of men read it, and then revised with fine-grained sandpaper, ensuring that she didn't leave any sharp, harsh unsympathetic corners on her depiction of Larry's character.  Her chapters are dated and titled; a close reader will see repetitions of background that point to the fact that this is almost a collection of short stories.  Carol throws in a ton of detail to contextualize the lives of Larry, Dorrie, Ryan, and Beth:  what they eat and what they drink, what they wear, how they shave, whether beards are in or out, where one goes on trips, the styles in furniture and particularly kitchen furnishings, styles in gardening, the names of maze styles and the names of the shrubs you can successfully build a maze out of.  Sometimes this detail seems like a surfeit, as if there's too much there and the reader can't sort out what's important and what's not.  And then we come across a moment when a single detail blooms into the illumination of character, a revelation about the human condition that Shields wouldn't have arrived at without the particular object Larry holds in his hand or in his mind's eye.  At the outset of the novel, Larry picks up the wrong Harris Tweed jacket in his favourite coffee shop--a better jacket:  "The fabric swayed around him, shifting and reshifting on his shoulders with every step he took.  It seemed like something alive.  Inside him, and outside him too.  It was like an apartment.  He could move into this jacket and live there.  Take up residence, get himself a new phone number and a set of cereal bowls."  This is what we love Shields for:  her detailed, meticulous, nuanced ability to get inside our minds and our bodies, in this case to illuminate (that word again!) how it feels physically and psychologically to occupy a piece of clothing that suggests there's an incipient new you waiting around the corner.

The other characteristic of this novel, a notable stylistic strength or quirk (depending on your viewpoint)  is its tendency to let the big events, like deaths or marriages or farewells to your husband or wife, happen off stage.  In many ways, though, this is linked to all that detail.  If there's a philosophy inherent in the style of Larry's Party, it's a celebration of the daily, the sense that it's through our daily lives and through our contact with ordinary objects and  routines that we take the opportunity to reflect or meditate on our lives and make our own personal meaning out of an otherwise arbitrary sequence of events.  This is the other reason we love Carol Shields. 

On an entirely different note, Veronica and I are leaving tomorrow morning for an apparently cloudy New York City.  I'll be blogging, of course, but Veronica suggested that we pair her photographs with my postcard stories or poems.  Look for those here in the days to come.


You can read all of Roger Brunyate's review of Blue Duets at http://bookreview.mostlyfiction.com/2010/blue-duets-by-kathleen-wall/

Common Reading

Virginia Woolf believed in readers.  Her two books of essays, The Common Reader I and II,  are invitations to read widely and idiosyncratically; implicitly her own responses to books suggest how many ways there are to engage with what you read and make it part of the furniture of your own mind.  When she learned that her local library's copy of The Common Reader had its pages splattered with food, she was delighted:  it meant the book was being used as it should be, consulted as people prepared or ate their meals. It meant reading was part of their daily lives.  In her various essays on reading, she created the portrait of the young reader with his or her list of classics; she thought readers were important forces in the creation of the new forms of fiction appearing in Britain in the twenties and thirties: theirs was the important task of helping writers understand what worked and what didn't.  Reading for oneself stood for intellectual liberty.  In "How Should One Read a Book" she wrote "To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.  Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions--there we have none."

She was, of course, known for her miraculous and luminous novels, yet the sixth thick volume of her essays has just been published.  My (used) hardcover copy is apparently in the mail, but  I'm still working away at volume 5 and have just finished reading her essay "Phases of Fiction," an essay written between Orlando and The Waves, in which she provides a complex and intriguing classification system for novels.  Yet what is inspiring about this essay is her wide and suggestive reading,   She makes me, at the beginning of a sabbatical, want to create one of those lists of systematic reading she believed was the provenance of the young.  But being in one's sixties, particularly on a sabbatical, is to return in some way to one's youth.

So here are my sabbatical goals.  I realize that, the spring publishing cycle not completely under way, it's dominated by historical examples.  So please, please make your own suggestions.

Proust's In Search of Lost Time--yes, all six volumes.
War and Peace.  I haven't read it since the early 70s.
Doctor Zhivago
Carol Shields, particularly Larry's Party and The Stone Diaries.   
Aphra Behn's Orinoko.  Woolf says Behn did something quite important when, as a middle-class woman, she began to write to provide for her family.  She made the woman writer into a professional.
Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus
Joan Thomas's Reading by Lightning
Kathleen Winter's Annabelle
Something by Geraldine Jewsbury, a friend of Jane Carlyle and apparently a novelist, Woolf says, who understood her time.  Sometimes I think it's the B-list authors that tell us the most about an historical moment.
Jan Zwicky and Tim Lilburn.  Any suggestions?
Lorna Crozier's selected poems, The Blue Hour of the Day
Quite a spate of books on climate change (research for the next novel), including Tim Flannery's latest, Here on Earth:  A Natural History of the Planet.
Mark Abley's The Prodigal Tongue
Anne Simpson's Is.  I loved the title poem, published in Prairie Fire along with a beautiful essay on poetry and community.
Jorie Graham.  I'll start with Sea Change.

If every one who visits leaves one suggestion, I'll have a remarkable year of "common reading."  Thanks in advance.

Spring Smoke

Snow under the tunnel of elms.  Froth on water tumbling down Wascana Creek.  Fuzz on tree branches sleep-singing of spring.  Air feathered with birdsong:  the sharp clear call of red-wing blackbirds, their throaty trills; the sonata of robins; the time-keeping dee dee dee of chickadees; the chittering of bohemian waxwings.  Conversations with strangers about the weather.  Frost on windshields.  Rants with friends about the weather.  Clusters of cat noseprints on glass; a winter of watching birds at the feeder.   Flutter of  shucked millet.  Early morning fog on the birder's binoculars.  Foggy breath of dogs chasing frisbees.  Cat pawprints on tree bark; the upward flurry of birds.  Beads of stars and ice strung on time.  The air under a bicycle's tire as it launches off the curb.  Snow mould like mohair.  Silent thunderheads at four, as the winter's snow flies into cloud.  Birdseed turning to translucent eggshells. The sluice and rustle of rising water.


This is a photograph I took last night during my first spring-time walk along the banks of Wascana Creek.  You can see the normal shore in the rushes at the bottom of the picture.

Looking for a Voice

Last Sunday at our house was full of minor disasters.  We woke up to find the basement full of water (again).  Bill decided he'd move the huge pile of snow at the back that had built up around the walkway and that appeared to be melting straight into the house.  Trying to be helpful, I suggested a wheelbarrow might be more effective than carrying every shovel-ful to the back of the garden.  Since ours died last autumn after twenty years of faithful service, I began my day heading out to Canadian Tire, which promised me on the phone they had wheelbarrows.  My driving was complicated by the fact that on Saturday night bored teenagers (one makes assumptions) walked down College Avenue knocking driver's side view mirrors off vehicles. [Cost:  $500.  The little buggers probably did around $3,000 damage that night.]  But on to Canadian Tire where they couldn't find the wheelbarrows because the store is being renovated and much of the gardening equipment is still in the basement.  Half an hour later I had a wheelbarrow that would have to be put together.  Home to find that Bill had moved most of the snow.  I got out my snow shovel and dug in.  Elated at our morning's work, we went out for brunch and a quick stop to Home Depot.  Back home, we found the basement inundated, in spite of our morning's work.  Back out to Peavey Mart, who has useful things like submersible pumps and the young men who can teach you how to use them.  Home again: the pump didn't seem to work until I experimented with it in the kitchen sink, remembered the physics of liquids, and coaxed a column of water up the hose and then down again.  You know how to syphon gas:  you need to get the bloody liquid running, and then it just follows itself.

None of this is major, of course.  My house has been taking in water over the spring for the last twenty years, though never quite so enthusiastically.  Yes, I've had work done on the foundation, but it only improved the spring run-off for about four years.  This is not the tsunami that hit Japan; there's no nuclear energy plant breathing radiation into the atmosphere.  It's spring after heavy snow.

All the same, it's wearing.  So last night, tired down to the toes of my hand-knit socks, the waters having given up for the day, I stood at my bookshelf looking for the right voice.

It wouldn't be the voice of Ian McEwan, whose Solar I can barely continue reading.  I have never understood cynicism as a way of being in the world, nor do I quite understand the appeal of satire.  So the world's well and truly   ****ed and people can be monstrously self-centred.  Tell me something I don't know.  This is background, merely, to much more interesting observations about life, the universe, and everything.  McEwan clearly hates his character, the bald, fat, Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Michael Beard, who has no control over his appetites for food or sex.  Why else would McEwan spend nine pages in detail when said physicist needs to pee in the middle of a snowmobile trek toward the arctic circle, after which he believes that his frozen penis has fallen off and is rattling around coldly in the legs of his snowmobile suit.  (It's his chapstick.)

Nor would it be the voice of Laura Wilson whose excellent mystery, An Empty Death was to be my end-of-term treat to spell me off when Schiller and Francis Hutchison (an eighteenth-century British philosopher who did aesthetics before we called it aesthetics) are threatening to put me to sleep.  Wilson would have provided a reality check:  I'm not living through London during the Blitz.  At the same time, every other chapter is told from the point of view of the killer, and his was not quite the voice I was looking for either.

What do we mean when we stand at our bookshelves mumbling under our breaths that we're looking for the right book, the right voice?  We know there are many fine books there:  after all, we've bought them. They attracted our attention at one point or another, though any avid reader is probably embarrassed at the number of books she or he has bought that have moved from bag to not quite the right spot on the shelves where they languished, since they have never been quite the right book.  The review (or the cover or title) attracted our attention, but the book has never found quite the right way of entering our lives.

"A voice" means so many things.  I can tell you how to create a voice by attending to word choice and sentence structure, but that's not what exactly I'm talking about.  A voice, in part, is a world view:  a way of seeing the world, and the diction and syntax simply serve that view.  This is why, though Solar has been well-reviewed, I can't go back to reading it.  McEwan's "I'm better than my character, and I know it" voice grates.  That's what we all say about our friends and family in our worst, least sympathetic and humane moments, and it's of no use to me right now.  I'm looking for a modicum of good humour, something that might be encapsulated in William James's notion that "a sense of humour is common sense, dancing."  Because unless I see some everyday good humour in the hours I've spent sucking water up in my wet basement, I'm going to do something you don't want to know about.

And because this weekend has been so full of seemingly futile work when I'd much rather have been thinking about life, the universe, and everything, I wanted a reflective voice, a voice that, at its very core, would tell me that reflection is one of the good, human things about the world.  The ability to reflect is part of what makes us human.  I also wanted a voice that reminded me of the wonder that went along with throwing very heavy wet snow:  the sound of a flock of  Bohemian Waxwings chittering nearby, the song of a robin.  How is it that I forget, every year, that spring means a different kind of music,  a music of water and song.  (Actually I didn't completely forget.  When Bill and I went to see the excellent production of Shakespeare's Will, which begins with a thunderstorm, I leaned over toward Bill and said "That's what I want:  weather that makes sounds rather than muffling them.)  A voice is also music:  we feel that the writer's craft shapes the sentences, chooses words as much for their sound as for their rich particularity, so that the rhythm and camber of the sentences echo and reinforce their sense. 

Turning to that shelf where I keep the orphaned books that haven't yet found their homes in my imagination, I found Patrick Friesen's Interim:  Essays & Meditations.  Because the later essays were written more recently, I began at the end and found this:

"For me, language was a way of finding out about myself as a human spirit and body in a material world.  It was a way of finding out about that physical world, about the possibility of spirit within the physical.  Somewhere Joseph Brodsky said something about poetry being revelatory, not mimetic.  Poetry does not imitate, it reveals.  It opens up, lifts the leaf.  It doesn't pronounce.  It moves always, occasionally pausing on an image or a sound, an almost frozen moment, then moves on.  As the world does, as thinking does" (134).

The voice I needed.  The reflection, the magic, the music, the sense of life's full wonder.


The photographs above are by Veronica Geminder.  The first is of remnants of posters on a telephone pole in the Cathedral area.  The second is titled "NO Graffiti".  Her work can be found here.

Transitions

 

Yesterday was my last day of teaching until September of 2012.  My feelings about that are complex enough to rattle me; I feel as if I should be simply and straightforwardly delighted, but that's not what I'm experiencing.  

On the one hand, I will miss my students terribly, particularly the crew in my English 251:  Expository and Persuasive Writing.  They were a thoughtful, hard-working bunch, and reading their penultimate essays was thrilling because most of the time there were none of those pesky little mechanical and grammatical errors that stood between me and the worlds, experiences, and ideas on the page.  In our conversations in the hallways, my colleagues and I can bemoan the reading and writing skills of the current generation of students, but this group showed me that this is only half the story.  I found that by keeping my focus on their development of credible, powerful voices--which meant getting their commas in the right place as well as articulating fresh ideas in the most concrete language that belonged to them--that I could get them to work very hard on their writing.  Class discussions, which I admit sometimes ranged too widely, were very much an exploration of the ideas and experiences that saturate the early twenty-first century.  I loved spending time with them.

My students do me a wonderful service by keeping me from becoming an old fart--something I dread.  They talk freely and critically about their own age and time:  how they often feel more disconnected than ever despite the "social media"; what the next Canadian government would look like if their age group voted en masse, but how apathetic their generation is, in spite of sites like Vote Compass Canada which asks you questions about your beliefs and then tells you which party to vote for; how their age group is more interested in knowing than in learning, and how that "knowledge" is often seedy and vulgar.  They want to know all the gory, trite, and salacious details around the latest shocking You Tube video, but they don't think about the consequences for the individual of being represented that way (and probably for a digital eternity) online.  One student spoke of his pride at setting his mother straight about some little online factoid she didn't know, only to be embarrassed  a moment later when he realized how rude he was and acknowledged that his mother at least knew how to learn.  I will miss my students and the window they give me on the present historical moment, a window I'd never have otherwise.

On the other hand, I'm delighted to be able to follow Thoreau's advice and "simplify! simplify!"  My daily lists only contain four or five things, and I feel a sense of focus that I don't have when I'm involved in teaching and administration.  No meetings.  No late essays to remember not to lose and to mark.  No dashing off to the library to put material on hold because of a change in copyright laws.  Last weekend, when the demands of teaching were winding down, I found myself delighted to begin reading Schiller's On the Aesthetic Education of Man in preparation for my book on Virginia Woolf's Aesthetic of Engagement.  I do so want to write about the way philosophers have shifted the aesthetic question away from an attempt to define art to a consideration of beauty and of the role is plays in our everyday lives.  Beauty is undefinable, they have concluded, and because of that we need to talk about it, thus bringing to our lives conversations about some of the things that matter most.  Each person's sense of beauty is completely individual, and may even provide some insight into who we are.  Thus, Woolf's use of beautiful forms for her novels urges us to explore and talk about their meaning,  a meaning that is never fixed and absolute. After quite a number of years, this project is coming into focus, and I'm excited about being able to finish it.

I'm also excited about my next novel, Soul Weather, which explores how we make ourselves at home in the world.  More, it begins with Heidegger's observation that our moods radically colour our views of the world.  For a prairie person (which I now am), what influences mood more than weather?  How we all kvetched this winter, not over the cold so much as over the lack of sunlight!  So what's going to happen to our experience of the world once we've screwed up the weather so thoroughly that it's entirely unfamiliar, unhomelike?  This will not, of course, be a rant about global warning as much as it is an exploration of the various ways we wrap home around us like a cape or huddle in it like a cave that protects us from the world.  

But all this freedom to play with words and ideas is also frightening.  What if I can't make the best use of it?  What if the book on Woolf doesn't hold together or doesn't give us a new view of her work?  What if my characters are boring, unbelievable, or predictable; what if I can't fashion an original, surprising plot that is both gripping and a metaphor for my ideas?  Ideas are delightful when they're broad, abstract strokes.  The devil is always in the details.  So I'm also experiencing some transition anxiety.  In April, I'm going to try to ease myself into these projects while I also hang on to the do-able, everyday tasks of being an academic.  I'll finish my marking.  I'll get a new issue of Wascana Review online.  But I'll also be reading madly.

Sheba's made the transition beautifully.  My wild little girl settles down right next to my netbook and rests her chin on the back of my left hand.  Admittedly it's a little hard to type, but slows me down and gives me a moment to think about my words before my fingers spew them onto the screen.  An animal's affection is just exactly one of those daily beauties one wants to spend a moment thinking about.

The photograph of the railway/walking bridge in Saskatoon was taken by Veronica Geminder.  You can find more of her work at http://www.flickr.com/photos/veronica-g

Freedom

I've just finished Jonathan Franzen's novel, Freedom.  Described by Time Magazine as the new "great American novelist," Franzen lives up to the rep he was given even before Freedom came out. This is indeed the exploration of a quintessentially American idea, and connects Franzen with other writers who have explored one of America's founding principles, writers that include Jefferson, Lincoln, Emerson, Thoreau, Hemingway, Martin Luther King.  But Franzen takes an approach to the idea of freedom that would perhaps surprise his antecedents.  In his novel, it is not freedom that allows people to bloom and thrive; it is responsibility. Freedom allows his characters to drift; it makes some of them depressed while it turns others misanthropic.

In an essay I make my students read for their Historical Methods course, Stephen Greenblatt argues that while culture can be thought of as all the effluvia--ideas, events, arts, politics, cellphones and HD TV, ballet flats and Nike runners--that swirls in the world around us, that concept is uselessly broad for insightful analysis.  He suggests instead that culture gestures both toward the mobility it affords us and toward the constraints it imposes.  The constraints are expressed in a society's rules, its system of punishment, but also in its material culture.  Mobility, without which constraint is meaningless, is often found in subversive art, in the ways we improvise our way around the constraints.  We find a way to get back at our control-freak boss that eludes detection (or we dream about it); we get slightly drunk at family Thanksgiving so we can have an excuse to tell tight-assed Aunt Milly what we really think of her knee-jerk ideology that frees her from the responsibility of independent thought.  Then, of course, we wink; don't take us seriously--we're a bit drunk.

At the current moment, technology seems to offer us mobility:  we can surf the net from anywhere; we can negotiate business deals while choosing the right kind of canned tomatoes at the grocery store; our vehicles--particularly the trucks and four-wheel-drives--can take us anywhere.  But Greenblatt might observe that this technology also represents a constraint.  What does it mean that your boss can reach you anywhere, any time?  What price do you pay for the vehicle that will go anywhere--and figure that both in dollars and in damage to the environment.

Greenblatt also suggests that some cultures attempt to achieve as much constraint as possible, while others quest for perfect mobility. We can see, for example, that China's one child policy imposes constraints.  Consider its effects on a couple's intimate life or on a woman's relationship to her body when she is encouraged to abort a female fetus.  America surges toward as much mobility as possible, as might be articulated in its gun laws or in its promise that "anyone can be president."

It's almost as if Franzen had read Greenblatt's essay, for he has a gift of seeing the constraint in the mobility.  Take Patty, for example, the young gifted basketball player who settles down with Walter Berglund in the 70s, in an old house that the two of them renovate in an effort to create the perfect life that gestures toward tradition as well as toward modern outlooks.  Walter makes enough money that Patty doesn't need to work, so she stays home with the kids well after they've entered school.  After all, she likes the freedom.  But that freedom comes with some fairly possessive parenting that backfires big time, some debilitating depression, some damaging desires.  (Spoiler alert!)  Only once Walter has kicked Patty out and she rediscovers the joy of working with young children and of shaping young athletes is Patty, in that almost quintessentially American expression, happy. This is true of other characters as well:  responsibility and connection to others create fruitful, satisfying lives.  Endless desires that can never be sated do not.

We read, I tell my creative writers, for the experience, not for the message.  That could be said of the way we relate to any work of art.  It's the experience of Rothko's enormous, sombre, nuanced paintings that make the Rothko room at Britain's Tate Modern one of the quietest rooms in an otherwise exuberant gallery.  It's the experience of a piece of music that raises the hair on your arms.  Similarly, it's the experience of Franzen's characters, and the ease with which we identify with them that precedes, even in a novel with a portentous title like Freedom, our analysis of Franzen's ideas.

But I also have a bad habit as a reader--or a good one, perhaps.  I can't help reading like a writer.  Franzen evokes this habit in me when he allows his characters to talk about environmental issues like habitat preservation or population growth without it seeming like the author is preaching at me, and getting between me and my experience of the characters and the narrative.  How'd he do that, I asked myself at the end of a scene where Walter tries to convince his old friend Katz to join him in his plans to motivate young people to think about these issues.  The answer is twofold.  First, Walter has a rather odd, sometimes naive (though always well-informed) take on these issues; we easily recognize the moments when he's on the wrong tangent; we see what's human about Walter's enthusiasms, and how the human gets in the way of idealism.  Second, we hear the conversation from Richard Katz's much more cynical point of view, so there's an added layer of critique and commentary.   

Franzen is a ventriloquist when it comes to dialogue.  That's part of the experience of the novel:  the opportunity to eavesdrop on conversations that sound believable, spontaneous, and human.  My favourite here is a conversation late in the novel that occurs when Walter Berglund, whose family cottage has been overtaken by the suburbs, tries to convince a Christian fundamentalist mother to keep her cat in the house so it won't kill the birds.  Walter's up on his data; he knows that roughly half a million birds are killed every years by loose housecats.  But armed with fervour and facts, he fails to use tact.  Meanwhile, the mother is up on her Christianity and knows that cats are here for our use, as are the trees and land and birds.  She knows her cat, who is a member of the family, likes to go outside, in spite of the fact that it never talks to her.  So it's her godgiven right to put out the cat to kill the godgiven birds.  This scene is a brilliant evocation of world views in collision.

I cannot say, however, that this is a well-shaped novel.  I struggled to understand why some events deserved rather long and tedious scenes (like Joey's South American trip with the physically beautiful but hideously self-centred Jenna) while others (like daughter Jessica's insight into Patty's need for a job that meant something and her observation that Patty clearly liked young kids so...) got summarized in an off-handed way.  In fact, Jessica generally gets short shrift, while self-centred Joey gets tedious in his inability to be satisfied by anything.  We get family history at the most unpredictable moments, as if just then Franzen has discovered the background to a new facet of his characters.  So the novel seems somewhat provisional--not a bad thing, perhaps, for a meditation on freedom.  I'm grateful to Franzen for his exuberance, his ability with a couple of gestures to evoke an historical moment, his understanding of the human even as we strive to transcend it.

From my pre-retirement point of view, Walden Pond, and Thoreau's exhortation to "simplify!  Simplify!" exemplifies freedom.

The photograph of trees at Walden Pond is by Veronica Geminder, whose work can be found here.

Turning Sixty-one

 I turned sixty-one on St. Patrick's Day with the same sense of relief and liberty I felt when I turned sixty.  A year ago I remember telling Bill and Veronica that it's as if I'm finally the age I'm meant to be, and I continue to feel that.  Sometimes.  Other times I have to remind myself that I'm an adult, not a teen or twenty-something.  I wonder what that means?

At sixty, I decided to drop out of the fray, where a lot of self-dramatizing heat is generated but not much light.  Perhaps it's that I have enough history behind me that I realize that the newest crisis (is some diligent administrator wondering, again, what the English Department is up to?) is just business as usual.  I wonder, for example, how many earthquakes and tropical storms have occurred in my lifetime?  So the "mini-disasters" that loom on the professional horizon are gradually projected against the context of real wars, against the loss of homes and lives and stability.  Perhaps having history behind me is also humbling:  I'm not the centre of the universe, thank goodness.  When others feel threatened, as if disaster's about to strike, it's my job, first, to be very still and to listen carefully.  Then I try to bring some perspective to bear without mocking anyone else's take on things.

We'll have to see what my students think this term, but I also think that being sixty-one is changing my teaching.  Last year at this time, I was trying to throw pots to do research for Soul Weather, my next novel, which has a young ceramicist as a main character.  I'm a terrible potter, but that doesn't mean I didn't learn anything.  I learned that you can work very hard at something and still not be very good, so our students need their dignity to be left in tact when they don't do well in English classes.  I also learned that it's very hard, on a beautiful spring afternoon, to go into a windowless pottery studio and practice something you have absolutely no feel for.  In fact, it's very hard to practice anything you're not particularly good at.

I also feel less compelled to diagnose and figure out how to "fix" the "weaknesses" of the current generation of students because I'm not going to be teaching them much longer.  Instead, I opt for curiosity.  Find out where they are and take them farther.  There's no point berating them for where they are, and it isn't something any individual can fix; it's the product of a very complex society, culture, and education system, of things like the internet, which has probably created the most enormous change human beings have ever experienced.  It's not something I'm going to "fix," though I can perhaps urge them to be self-reflective about the forces awash around them.  Curiosity continues to be a good friend.  Much better than making judgements.

In fact, except when it comes to the environment, I want to "fix" things less.  About a year ago, Veronica offered me a wonderful motto to go along with "just be curious":  you can't fix all the idiots.  But please, can't we have some leadership so that I don't have to go around in the dead of night putting "the power of my car is in inverse ratio to the size of my penis" bumpers stickers on SUVs and Hummers?" 

I can now admit that I'm not very good at multi-tasking; my senior brain finds it a stretch.  Maybe this allows me to be a reality check for those in my life, particularly my students, who are multi-tasking their way to wherever the opposite of being in the present moment is.  In fact, I'm feeling a certain adolescent rebellion (is being a senior essentially a third adolescence--the first one being the terrible twos?) against a society that demands I live my life at a certain speed and a certain level of instantaneous connection.  Right now, zany Sheba is purring and bathing while she's leaned against my left thigh.  That's important.  So are the birds outside my kitchen window and the music of our second language learners' voices in the University of Regina hallways.

Because I'm finding it harder to multi-task, I have a wonderful crew of imaginary friends (particularly in the kitchen after a complicated day) that I can talk to.  At least that's what I tell Bill, who wonders if I'm talking to him.

I've spend most of my professional career feeling as if I'm a fake who's just about to be discovered.  Feeling like you're a fake continues to dog women and academics (because you can never know enough).  Something complicated has happened here.  First, I feel much less like a fake.  I think, again, it's having history at my back, having years and years of experience and thought behind me.  I'm not a brilliant scholar, but I love stories, words, and ideas--a love I can pass on to the young, whom I merely guide to finding their own ways of understanding them.  But second, it doesn't really matter because most of us are just doing our best, joyfully making it up as we go along.

A day inside poetry

"For every poet it is always morning in the world.  History a forgotten, insomniac night.  History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of history." 
                           Derek Walcott's 1992 Nobel Prize acceptance speech



I took a "mental health day" on Friday:  it's the first time since Mother died that there wasn't something I had to do, reinforcing my sense that we spend too much time doing and not enough time being ("Time and Being," January 14).  My original plans were to drive to Moose Jaw, to The Quilt Patch and Quilter's Haven, to look for fabric that would let me finish up some quilts, but the white-out on the No. 1 between here and Moose Jaw intervened.  Looking back, I see how serendipitous the weather was, that it forced me to do exactly what was best for me:  stay put for a change.  So I began the day with a cat on my lap and a large cup of hot coffee, reading Karen Solie's Griffin Poetry Prize-winning book, Pigeon.  I read these lines, and immediately behaved like an undergraduate:

                                              Circling,
a red-tailed hawk pinpoints the moving detail
of his meal in the big picture.

Karen's poems are deeply committed to the environment.  Even if poems like "Four Factories" don't seem to be on topics we casually (but wrongly) think poetry "naturally" covers, her work represents nature as it is and nature as we have made it.  The hawk in "The World of Plants" isn't a sentimentalized hawk--what hungry hawk can be?  Once on a grid road around the Cypress Hills, Bill and I startled a hawk with a small rabbit who took off with his prey, wiping blood and shit across the hood of the car and the windshield, so I don't think I'd trust a sentimentalized hawk.  Yet I immediately appropriated Karen's lines for what seemed my own purpose that day:  for thinking about and inside poetry, for considering its paradoxes.

Derek Walcott's quotation, which has been taped to my office door for several weeks, certainly conveys one of the paradoxes of poetry:  it both eludes and is implicated in history.  The fountainhead of the lyric poem is the moment when one rediscovers one's love of morning, of the day, of the day's light--whether bitter or reluctant or golden;  consequently, the poem's epicentre, the place where the pebble has been dropped in the Walden Pond of experience, is the intensity of the present moment. The poets I most enjoy, however, explore the way this moment ripples out into other moments--into history, into cosmic time.

Karen's image of the hawk, springing from its context where it denotes something quite different, seemed to me to capture another of poetry's paradoxical qualities.  Like poetry, the hawk's eyes are on the "moving detail" of a meal, but the only way it can maintain that kind of focus is to keep the big picture well in view.  Similarly, the lyric poem homes on a particular node or knot, an image, a gesture, or a tone of voice, yet it tries to ripple out to touch the edges of the rest of the world .  Poetry is both in close and far away;  it's implicated in history and yet preoccupied with the present moment.

When you're living inside poems, in the words of other writers or in your own struggle for language, you notice everything:  Sometimes I think this is one of poetry's gifts:  the invitation to notice everything, to feel as if everything has meaning, or to struggle with the world's refusal to mean.  You try to interpret the graffiti in the back lane.  You notice the way the snow acts like sand to make whirlpools in the street and consider the paradoxical similarity between snow and sand when they are the wind's playthings:  they way they pirouette and ride the wind into scalloped or striated arpeggios of rifts.  You notice the paleness of everything once the sun reluctantly comes out.  In the tentative light you see the world through freshly-squeezed lemonade.

So because the weather was hopeless and miserable, there was nothing for it but to start the poems about my mother.  I've got a cadence and a few images.  Nothing I want to show anyone yet.  But I'm past that awful moment when you must leap the Grand Canyon that lies between your conception and what you can actually get language to do.

The image of the quilt at the top of this post has nothing to do with the post at all, except that I didn't feel like having my picture appear, again, in the Facebook thumbnail.  Part of being "orphaned into my mortality," as my friend Deborah Morrison described me, has been to finish projects.  The blocks for that quilt had been sitting around for quite a long time and when I last tried to put them together, I hit a snag.  There's a half-inch arc that must be exactly half an inch, or the seams don't line up.  Somehow, I had the patience Saturday night and Sunday morning to pick out some stitches and re-sew the seams that were making it hard to join the blocks.  It's the first of my quilts that I've named; called "All colours," it includes every single colour there is.  You can't see the red, because Twig is settled on it.  Sheba's on the small patch of orange.

Quilt magazines occasionally publish articles on how to take good photographs of your quilts.  I've broken every one of their rules.  Really, you should photograph your quilts hanging vertically, preferably not with someone standing behind it holding it gingerly at the corners, their feet visible at the bottom.  You shouldn't climb up on a stepstool to see what the quilt looks like when you can see more of it at once.  And of course, while I climbed up onto the stool that usually holds my bedtime reading, both Twig and Sheba leapt onto the top to check it out.  I don't know what it is about cats and quilts, but arrange a few blocks on the bed to see how they look together, and you'll find you have a cat. 

The other project I've finished is the Frozen Leaves shawl I wrote about in my Woolgathering post, where I talked about the fact that knitting complicated lace takes just enough concentration that it stills my insomniac "grasshopper mind."  I had to do the edging three times to get it right, but it was worth it.  And yes, I've started a new lace shawl, which has been good company on several sleepless nights. 

Do you know why I'm suddenly motivated to finish projects that have been languishing, sometimes, for several years?  It's not simply that I'm afraid I'm going to die tomorrow.  So why is it?

Talking Fresh 9

This is the ninth year in a row that Luther College, inspired and led by Gerry Hill, has teamed up with the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild to bring writers in the province a bit of spring inspiration.  This year it was called the "Saskatchewan Poetry Summit," and included a panel, readings, and presentations by Brenda Schmidt, Karen Solie, Dan Tysdal, and Michael Trussler.  The first event was a panel moderated by poet Katherine Lawrence, on the subject of Saskatchewan poetry.  Can one identify something one can name, with any confidence, "Saskatchewan poetry"?

Brenda Schmidt began by talking about coming to Saskatchewan and finding on one of those rotating wire bookracks in a cafe in Outlook Barbara Klar's book of poems, Blue Field.  Klar's acknowledgements--to organizations like the SWG and to poets who had inspired her, became Schmidt's first "map" of Saskatchewan poetry.  Schmidt also quoted Anne Szumigalski's sense that in Saskatchewan (perhaps anywhere?) the physical landscape becomes an internal one.  Brenda went on to create some elegant metaphors; if "Saskatchewan" meant "swift-flowing river," perhaps "Saskatchewan" referred to a swiftly flowing river of poetry.  If Saskatchewan's watersheds are inter-connected, so are its poets.  The bedrock of Saskatchewan poetry includes writers like Anne Szumigalski, Andy Suknaski, Tim Lilburn.

Michael Trussler called his brief paper "Dream Song for Eli Mandel."  Michael worked with Mandel when he lived in Toronto; the "Dream Song" of the title refers to the poems of John Berryman.  Michael chose to shift the conversation away from place toward time.  If a human being is, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, "a gathering around a complexity," then one of poetry's strategies might be to create moments of temporal simultaneity that articulate existential and ethical entanglements between people who are temporally 'other.'  These days, Michael is preoccupied by wondering who he's writing to;  because space is non-discursive, you can't write to it.   Michael's paper ended with a mind experiment that encouraged us to imagine Proust and Mandel sharing the same compartment on a train at opposite ends of the twentieth century.

In a less scripted mode, Karen Solie spoke of reading Frank O'Hara's poetry and finding it captured New York City, although O'Hara moved there after growing up in Baltimore and Massachussetts and studying at Harvard and the University of Michigan.  O'Hara's poetry is full of detail that evokes NY; for Karen, it's that detail that matters, not some pure description of place.  Putting one detail next to another allows them to resonate to create the effect poetry has that is almost beyond or even outside  its words.

For Dan Tysdal, Saskatchewan speaks of poetry's openness to invention.  It's a place where forces collide.  In his memory, these forces include stealing Wolfman toys (and being startled by his mother's response) and making hollow point bullets (and being startled by what they do to a bird you shoot).   It's the rocky terrain of local culture coming up against its larger context and setting up conflict and resonance.  Later when the discussion ranged more widely, Dan observed that moving to Toronto for graduate school took him off guard.  Although he'd gone there specifically to write poems, observing Toronto and Torontonians made Dan want to write fiction, not poetry.  So there's a hint, a suggestion that different places get under our skin in different ways, setting up or evoking a different view of the world, a different way of observing and seeing that plays itself out in our choice of genre.

For me, there are two qualities of the Saskatchewan landscape that are almost synonymous with poetry:  its spaciousness (which sometimes seems generous to me and sometimes seem like the landscape of a Beckett play to Michael) and its light.  For what else does poetry do but to try to create, in its readers, the light with which to see something new, startling, and unfamiliar, and the space to create, to play, to muse, to wonder?

Dear panelists:  if I've misrepresented you in any way, email and set me straight.  I'll revise the blog straightaway.  I'll also admit that my student days of taking coherent notes are far behind me!