Hearing Voices: Chantal Hebert and the Vertigo Reading Series

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

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

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

 
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

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

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

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

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

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

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.