I admit, I moved this up in my tbr pile based on John's strong recommendation. And then fortuitously, it was right there in my local library, so I grabbed it before a cross-country trip with a lot of flying time. So I managed to read it over a week -- a bit better than my current average for longish books. (I used to read 100-200 pages a day, but that was when I had fewer responsibilities...) I have not watched the movie version, but I may some day, though to be honest, it strikes me that there are far too many parallels to Sideways for my liking. And some of the changes made to the film (that I've read about) seem pretty crazy, particularly Izzy being around to interfere in the murder inquest, which definitely didn't happen in the book.
I have mixed feelings about the book. There were quite a number of funny passages, but on the whole, I really wasn't enamoured of the way Richler manipulated the reader's feelings/emotions to try to make us feel sorry for (and perhaps even like) this fairly unpleasant man. I do have one "impossible" friend on the fringes of my life, but for the most part, I really don't see what is so charming about Barney. He never seems to really interact with the kids when they were small, and was drunk most of the time when he was finally home from work and hanging around them, so why they would have any real interest in him as they became adults is beyond me. I guess I've never really overcome my Puritanical streak in the sense that I just don't like art that glamourizes drunkards and/or drug-users. They are never as amusing as they think they are, esp. those that indulge in mean-spirited pranks as Barney does constantly.
It certainly does strike me that Barney is a stand-in for Richler himself, who was often described as a bit of a boor, particularly on the subject of French-Canadian relations with the rest of Canada. I know it is such a cop out, but it just strikes me that if someone is so unhappy about being an Anglophile surrounded by Francophiles, then it behooves that person to relocate from Montreal to Toronto. That's the more reasonable course of action, rather than fighting a pointless rear-guard action of insulting the Quebecois and trying to snub them by only printing signs in English or what have you. It is all very childish on both sides of course (Quebec's language laws), but again, I just don't have much time for, interest in or sympathy for quixotic characters. Life does strike me as too short.
SPOILERS AHEAD
One thing that didn't work that well for me was how Duddy Kravitz got dropped into the novel, as someone who gives some advice to Barney. I just thought it was an unnecessary detail in a book that was already a bit too long.
What I did find interesting was Barney being a fairly unreliable narrator, both because he was too wrapped up in himself to even pretend to care about how others viewed these situations and because it became evident from maybe 1/4 of the way into the book that he was losing his memory. I found the footnotes added by his son drily amusing, with some being unbelievably pedantic, and one or two of them seeming to include inaccuracies. (I assume that was intentional on Richler's part.)
I thought it was reasonably effective how brusquely the book ended once Barney was shipped off to an assisted living facility. While this would have been really drawn out and painful for the family, the son kind of wraps it up and only gives a few glimpses into what happened. While they still seem to venerate Barney far more than he deserves, the son is the "hero" of his own story and doesn't have a hundred more pages to dedicate to Barney's declining years. There is a lot of insight in the way this transition was handled.
I found the passages covering the years in Paris to be interesting and a bit of a nice change in focusing on very second-rate artists who were doing their slumming in Paris. I can see how Richler loads a huge guilt trip onto Barney's shoulders with respect to his first wife, and I can see how some of Barney's actions afterwards are tied up with this terrible guilt. I probably do take a harder line than Richler in not excusing Barney for being such an all-around jerk. A lot of people have had bad things happen to them, or feel guilt for things that weren't entirely their fault (or even at all their fault) but that doesn't give them license to act like overgrown adolescents for the rest of their lives.
All in all, this is an interesting book about a person who I would not have allowed to come into my life.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Sunday, February 24, 2013
6th Canadian challenge - 14th review (New again)
As I mentioned in a previous blog, YVR by W.H. New won the 2012 Mayor of Vancouver cultural award. This poetry collection covers Vancouver's past and present, focusing on New's interaction with the city and his memories of growing up here. I think I mentioned that he never actually writes any poems about traveling to and from the YVR airport in this collection.
The book opens with "Lines" where New mentions how often he has said goodbye to Vancouver.
"But here I am," drawn home again.
New immediately tackles Vancouver's defining characteristic (its weather): "We're born with gills, we say to strangers."
If it isn't raining, people spend all their time on the beach, it seems. (He does occasionally mention the mountains which are certainly another defining characteristic of the city, but water seems more central to his vision of Vancouver.)
"Subduction Zone" references the seismic activity in the region, often downplayed to outsiders:
faultlines beside us, the Juan de Fuca plate / offshore, seismologists warning: / The Big One, / still to come ... not The Best Place on Earth, no / for all the ads and lotos-eaters; / a city of spring and fall, about to bloom, on the edge of decay; / tremors, / underground."
He definitely seems more resistant than many residents to fall in line with the city boosters, who definitely do pitch Vancouver as Nirvana on earth. Perhaps that comes from having grown up in the city, unlike most current residents. And perhaps his vision takes in the darker aspects of Vancouver, like the refusal to clean up the Downtown East Side.
He then has a few poems about his early childhood during war time. Given he was born in 1938, it's hard to believe he would recall much of anything about W.W. II, but perhaps he is lumping that together with the Korean War conflict. At any rate, these aren't as interesting to me.
The first "Main Street" poem goes back to Vancouver's founding and considers how some streets were named:
From the beginning, margin matters,
city fathers drawing a line on the earth:
they call it False Creek Road, join Hastings town
to plank and privateer, eyes on the loggers' camp
at the edges of the slough, the rough sawmill
where fortunes rise and fall...
New continues peering back to Vancouver's early days in "Speculation" when South Vancouver was a separate city and briefly voted itself dry to the dismay of many. Still, there was "never any problem buying beer, / no border guards on the streetcar."
The PNE (Pacific National Exposition) was running even when he was a child, and he loved the rides, especially Shoot-the-Chute and being able to climb up and pretend to run train engine 374. I expect this train still was in semi-active service back then, but it is now basically out of service and stored at the Roundhouse in Yaletown.
In "Disposed," New airs more of Vancouver's dirty laundry: "Surveyors build 'Champlain Heights' / on top of the old city dump— / what's in a name—golf greens sitting now / where bedsteads used to mound, / ashcans / pots, / broken bones ..."
In the second "Main Street" poem, New has moved to Pender & Main, just outside Chinatown and he sees a lion dance, presumably around Chinese New Year. Perhaps inevitably given the massive change in Vancouver's demographics, lion dances are no longer confined to Chinatown and have spread to shopping districts in South Vancouver, Richmond, Burnaby and presumably Surrey.
In "Outside In," New returns to the theme of water: "downpour, drizzle, / thunder along the mountains, the grammar / of cloud and timing: / my favourite forecast: / scattered showers, / changing during the day / to occasional rain— / the hundred words for dampness ../"
Engaging in a bit of gallows humour, I guess.
New seems thoroughly in the present when he visits Granville Island in "And Yet": "try standing rigid on Granville Island—im- / possible, activity dis- / rupts, engages: coffee / corrugates the air."
In the third "Main Street" New has moved even further north to the heart of Vancouver's dark side.
Where Main crosses Hastings used to be
the centre of town, columns and cupola:
now it's the edge—poverty, trafficking,
lines of powder, tales of abuse ...
He starts south but heads north in the next "Main Street" poem:
I used to take the #7 streetcar the other
way: north into town, up Fraser past
Govier's, Houghland's, the Imperial Bank,
McBain's and Buckerfield's, Cunningham's, Macphail's,
past Hilton's Dairy and the five and dime, past
Mountain View (angels, pebbles,
David's star), past all the mission halls
and the fundamentals:
screech left at Kingsway (the monocled
Aristocrat doffed his top hat
and twirled his neon cane), then
rattle down Main past the old hotels,
already seedy before I knew
what seediness implied:
(I think this is my favourite of the Main St. poems -- it certainly has the most landmarks mentioned. Mountain View is a local cemetery, by the way.)
The next "Main Street" actually "cheats" a bit in that Main St. doesn't quite touch False Creek or the False Creek flats, but it does "get close" as New writes. From this starting point, New discusses how most of the False Creek is built on landfill and then pivots to a discussion of the changes nearby: "Yaletown's all condos now, Strathcona gentrified, / a seawall separates the flats from the sea"
New continues to present his bona fides, like his connection to the oldtimers "eulogizing Woodward's ... Tuesday, once-a month, / My mother useta buy everythin' there."
But he doesn't completely ignore that new blood also brings some benefits; Vancouver is certainly not a city preserved in amber: "Walk, Broadway to King Ed, read / the signs: new life along the strip, / baby shops, sushi, yams, cassava, / vegan, organic, hundred-mile green, / the latest embraces among the young."
However, the very next poem ("Intersections") he is back in full nostalgia mode.
Driving Kingsway: where it crosses Victoria, the old
Colonial Motel's renamed—a sense of Empire's still strong
though, fast food chains on all the corners. Burgers. Donuts.
Coffee.
Used to be a carriage road through bush and woodlot, Gassy
Jack's Gastown to New West, the Royal City ...
A few corner stores persist, pails of daffodils in front,
dollar-ninety-nine for five stems, bread and cigarettes
the staples. Used to be Sweet Caps in the window, Crush in
the cooler, Malkin's Best or Singapore's on crowded shelves,
jar of all-day suckers on the counter, ice cream a dime.
In the next "Main Street" contends he did grow up in an immigrant neighbourhood, though at the time, the Irish (and to a lesser extent the Scots) were the newcomers/outsiders. New offers up praise for a system that can integrate all these cultures, even if somewhat uneasily. He envisions this mostly happening through the public schools, "where cultures mix to become now, / the lion dance as everyday as / Robbie Burns and Hallowe'en."
In another "Main Street" he investigates how his old hood is host to a different group of immigrants:
At 49th, nearing my old neighbourhood,
is it myself I'm looking for? the grey false fronts
have gone, the ramshackle stores:
the land agent sports a chain realty marquee,
the drug store's plus-sized: Punjabi
Market's open, dancing to bhangra rhythms,
feasting on barfi, seasoning the air with
coriander, garam masala: I am only
close to home ground:
... a college sprawls where I used to
practise what I once called golfing, on the
bush edge of a clipped Langara green:
what do I reinvent now, reaching here:
how do I change, having left to return:
...
I listen for the earth to move: a thousand
sari shops spill dazzle onto the sidewalk,
the flash of spring azaleas:
In some ways, I feel the most connected to this particular poem in YVR, as I have only known Vancouver such a short time. Langara was well-established by the time I arrived. And just down the street incidentally. (I have even taken a few evening courses there.)
In general, YVR is a bit of a jumble (not unlike this review!), organized loosely as New stumbles across something interesting in the present and then either stays focused on the present (and he is usually good-natured but somewhat dismissive of the youth-oriented nature of contemporary Vancouver) or delves into nostalgia (this occurs slightly more often and in nearly all the Main Street poems). His rambles along Main St. are the closest to any true organizing principle for the collection.
I'm not sure he does subscribe to any overarching theory, but he seems to consider being open to new experiences as a good in itself. I'll close with some lines from the moving poem "Moments": "Stumbling into random beauty / takes the breath away ... / Places in this world stop us, / hold us in contemplation ... / we are custodians of such places— / call them moments: / they do not last, / unless we notice them."
The book opens with "Lines" where New mentions how often he has said goodbye to Vancouver.
"But here I am," drawn home again.
New immediately tackles Vancouver's defining characteristic (its weather): "We're born with gills, we say to strangers."
If it isn't raining, people spend all their time on the beach, it seems. (He does occasionally mention the mountains which are certainly another defining characteristic of the city, but water seems more central to his vision of Vancouver.)
"Subduction Zone" references the seismic activity in the region, often downplayed to outsiders:
faultlines beside us, the Juan de Fuca plate / offshore, seismologists warning: / The Big One, / still to come ... not The Best Place on Earth, no / for all the ads and lotos-eaters; / a city of spring and fall, about to bloom, on the edge of decay; / tremors, / underground."
He definitely seems more resistant than many residents to fall in line with the city boosters, who definitely do pitch Vancouver as Nirvana on earth. Perhaps that comes from having grown up in the city, unlike most current residents. And perhaps his vision takes in the darker aspects of Vancouver, like the refusal to clean up the Downtown East Side.
He then has a few poems about his early childhood during war time. Given he was born in 1938, it's hard to believe he would recall much of anything about W.W. II, but perhaps he is lumping that together with the Korean War conflict. At any rate, these aren't as interesting to me.
The first "Main Street" poem goes back to Vancouver's founding and considers how some streets were named:
From the beginning, margin matters,
city fathers drawing a line on the earth:
they call it False Creek Road, join Hastings town
to plank and privateer, eyes on the loggers' camp
at the edges of the slough, the rough sawmill
where fortunes rise and fall...
New continues peering back to Vancouver's early days in "Speculation" when South Vancouver was a separate city and briefly voted itself dry to the dismay of many. Still, there was "never any problem buying beer, / no border guards on the streetcar."
The PNE (Pacific National Exposition) was running even when he was a child, and he loved the rides, especially Shoot-the-Chute and being able to climb up and pretend to run train engine 374. I expect this train still was in semi-active service back then, but it is now basically out of service and stored at the Roundhouse in Yaletown.
In "Disposed," New airs more of Vancouver's dirty laundry: "Surveyors build 'Champlain Heights' / on top of the old city dump— / what's in a name—golf greens sitting now / where bedsteads used to mound, / ashcans / pots, / broken bones ..."
In the second "Main Street" poem, New has moved to Pender & Main, just outside Chinatown and he sees a lion dance, presumably around Chinese New Year. Perhaps inevitably given the massive change in Vancouver's demographics, lion dances are no longer confined to Chinatown and have spread to shopping districts in South Vancouver, Richmond, Burnaby and presumably Surrey.
In "Outside In," New returns to the theme of water: "downpour, drizzle, / thunder along the mountains, the grammar / of cloud and timing: / my favourite forecast: / scattered showers, / changing during the day / to occasional rain— / the hundred words for dampness ../"
Engaging in a bit of gallows humour, I guess.
New seems thoroughly in the present when he visits Granville Island in "And Yet": "try standing rigid on Granville Island—im- / possible, activity dis- / rupts, engages: coffee / corrugates the air."
In the third "Main Street" New has moved even further north to the heart of Vancouver's dark side.
Where Main crosses Hastings used to be
the centre of town, columns and cupola:
now it's the edge—poverty, trafficking,
lines of powder, tales of abuse ...
He starts south but heads north in the next "Main Street" poem:
I used to take the #7 streetcar the other
way: north into town, up Fraser past
Govier's, Houghland's, the Imperial Bank,
McBain's and Buckerfield's, Cunningham's, Macphail's,
past Hilton's Dairy and the five and dime, past
Mountain View (angels, pebbles,
David's star), past all the mission halls
and the fundamentals:
screech left at Kingsway (the monocled
Aristocrat doffed his top hat
and twirled his neon cane), then
rattle down Main past the old hotels,
already seedy before I knew
what seediness implied:
(I think this is my favourite of the Main St. poems -- it certainly has the most landmarks mentioned. Mountain View is a local cemetery, by the way.)
The next "Main Street" actually "cheats" a bit in that Main St. doesn't quite touch False Creek or the False Creek flats, but it does "get close" as New writes. From this starting point, New discusses how most of the False Creek is built on landfill and then pivots to a discussion of the changes nearby: "Yaletown's all condos now, Strathcona gentrified, / a seawall separates the flats from the sea"
New continues to present his bona fides, like his connection to the oldtimers "eulogizing Woodward's ... Tuesday, once-a month, / My mother useta buy everythin' there."
But he doesn't completely ignore that new blood also brings some benefits; Vancouver is certainly not a city preserved in amber: "Walk, Broadway to King Ed, read / the signs: new life along the strip, / baby shops, sushi, yams, cassava, / vegan, organic, hundred-mile green, / the latest embraces among the young."
However, the very next poem ("Intersections") he is back in full nostalgia mode.
Driving Kingsway: where it crosses Victoria, the old
Colonial Motel's renamed—a sense of Empire's still strong
though, fast food chains on all the corners. Burgers. Donuts.
Coffee.
Used to be a carriage road through bush and woodlot, Gassy
Jack's Gastown to New West, the Royal City ...
A few corner stores persist, pails of daffodils in front,
dollar-ninety-nine for five stems, bread and cigarettes
the staples. Used to be Sweet Caps in the window, Crush in
the cooler, Malkin's Best or Singapore's on crowded shelves,
jar of all-day suckers on the counter, ice cream a dime.
In the next "Main Street" contends he did grow up in an immigrant neighbourhood, though at the time, the Irish (and to a lesser extent the Scots) were the newcomers/outsiders. New offers up praise for a system that can integrate all these cultures, even if somewhat uneasily. He envisions this mostly happening through the public schools, "where cultures mix to become now, / the lion dance as everyday as / Robbie Burns and Hallowe'en."
In another "Main Street" he investigates how his old hood is host to a different group of immigrants:
At 49th, nearing my old neighbourhood,
is it myself I'm looking for? the grey false fronts
have gone, the ramshackle stores:
the land agent sports a chain realty marquee,
the drug store's plus-sized: Punjabi
Market's open, dancing to bhangra rhythms,
feasting on barfi, seasoning the air with
coriander, garam masala: I am only
close to home ground:
... a college sprawls where I used to
practise what I once called golfing, on the
bush edge of a clipped Langara green:
what do I reinvent now, reaching here:
how do I change, having left to return:
...
I listen for the earth to move: a thousand
sari shops spill dazzle onto the sidewalk,
the flash of spring azaleas:
In some ways, I feel the most connected to this particular poem in YVR, as I have only known Vancouver such a short time. Langara was well-established by the time I arrived. And just down the street incidentally. (I have even taken a few evening courses there.)
In general, YVR is a bit of a jumble (not unlike this review!), organized loosely as New stumbles across something interesting in the present and then either stays focused on the present (and he is usually good-natured but somewhat dismissive of the youth-oriented nature of contemporary Vancouver) or delves into nostalgia (this occurs slightly more often and in nearly all the Main Street poems). His rambles along Main St. are the closest to any true organizing principle for the collection.
I'm not sure he does subscribe to any overarching theory, but he seems to consider being open to new experiences as a good in itself. I'll close with some lines from the moving poem "Moments": "Stumbling into random beauty / takes the breath away ... / Places in this world stop us, / hold us in contemplation ... / we are custodians of such places— / call them moments: / they do not last, / unless we notice them."
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Sadness/tristesse
This post is loosely inspired by the French artist Sophie Calle and her project Douleur exquise (Exquisite pain). 12 or so panels were on display at the Seattle Art Museum. They were poster-sized panels below photos with the left side being a photo of a red phone on a hotel bed and the right side a series of other photos. Beneath the photos were the alternating black and white panels. On the left, Ms. Calle related the story of how her lover had broken up with her via this exact phone. On the right, she had asked a number of acquaintances what had caused them the most suffering and here she related their tales -- often of break-ups, but also deaths, a miscarriage and going blind.
The texts (in French) appeared to have been embroidered, though I have since learned there were approximately 90 double panels. While I suppose she might have undertaken these all by herself, it seems more likely that she found an industrial solution. What was more apparent from the book but not in the panels on display (in Seattle) was that the left hand stories got shorter as the pain dulled and the color of the text darkened and finally went black (the background was also black). In the next to last two panels, the text is essentially not legible in the book; in the final panel, it is completely black. It would be interesting to know if the embroidered text could be read in person but not in reproduction (which incidentally was the effect that Ad Reinhardt was going for).
I guess the entire thing was staged in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and occasionally elsewhere. At least once it was done in conjunction with a Gehry-designed space, though I think that actually detracts a bit from the work.
Most people that encounter this work will run across it in book format -- either the original French or a translation into English. The book supplements the second half (the doubled up suffering) with some photos of her journey to Japan and eventual travel to India, where she was supposed to reunite with her lover (which is why she was in a hotel room when they talked on the phone and he broke things off with her). I am fairly convinced that the texts will work better in French (and I did read the handful on display in Seattle). There is definitely something French about some of the suffering, particularly love affairs that sort of end for no good reason.
To order the book is just slightly more than I want to spend on just a whim, so I am trying to convince myself that I should order it and then compare the two versions (I have the English version out from the library). That's a fairly weak rationalization though, since I don't expect I will ever truly regain my fluency in French. I guess one never knows though, and I will probably practice French a lot more in Ontario than I would in B.C.
But it still might make a good totem/touchstone when I think about the continuum of unhappiness. I certainly spend a lot of time in the disgruntled/dissatisfied region, but I suppose I am not truly sad all that often, and I have done relatively little true suffering, except when my mother passed away. Ms. Calle certain thinks that she brought this particular suffering upon herself, since her lover warned her that their relationship wouldn't survive a 3 month separation, but she went to Japan anyway. 3 months is certainly a long time, but context matters a lot. I actually was more upset over a 6 week separation from my family than a 3-month separation that had happened earlier. Perhaps reminding myself how ridiculous people seem when they get operatically sad might be useful. Or maybe not. The same with keeping a clear head when analyzing whether and how one might have brought some unhappiness upon oneself through one's own actions. Almost no decisions in life lead to unqualified success/happiness or conversely failure/unhappiness.
I think my daughter tends to be a sad a lot, though she recovers fairly quickly. Here is her drawing of how sad she was at school when her best friend was out and she didn't have anyone to play with at lunch. She is all of the girls in the chain, indicating just how sad she felt. (I think the flower might even be crying.)
I guess I am a little sad that she seems to have inherited some of the more negative aspects of my personality... I suppose it is too early to tell for sure, but I would hope she would be spared some of the things that afflict and burden me.
I've decided to return to add to the original post. On the one hand, it is actually fairly interesting to see the slightly different variations Calle runs through as she slowly gets over the break-up and the pain dulls. However, given that the exhibit and panels weren't created until 15 years after the break-up, it is more of a recreation of a mourning process (unless she took really good notes at the time, which she may have done). She kind of explores different facets of the earlier stages of the relationship, reliving it; other times, she focuses more on the cause of the break-up and even tries to convince herself that the relationship was an impossible, inappropriate one that would have ended anyway. I remember going through this obsessive recounting phase in the early 90s and burned out a couple of friends, since most people don't need to hear the same thing told 90 different ways! But I do recognize that she truly was mourning in her own way, and I think the fade to black is fairly clever, even if not ground-breaking. Rituals can be very helpful in going through trauma of various types. After my mom passed away I wore black exclusively for 6 months (probably even my tennis shoes but I am not certain) and then gradually added greys and dark blues for the next 6 months. At least, that is how I recall it. It certainly was a long period of time, and I guess it was fortunate that I was a grad student and it wasn't viewed as completely eccentric or indeed out of the norm for TAs to show up primarily dressed in black.
Where I do find fault with Ms. Calle is that she seems to not have benefited from her 3 month stay in Japan. Maybe the experience entered her art in other ways and for other projects, but really she seems to consider the whole thing this huge drag that ended her love affair. Why did she bother leaving Paris in the first place? Her art seems to be either very personalized (a slightly more sophisticated and polished version of Tracey Emin) or is about watching people interact in public spaces, such as hotels, and always with a bit of Gallic flair. Why anyone thought her leaving Paris was a good idea is beyond me.
It is only when you look beyond Exquisite Pain, esp. Appointment with Sigmund Freud, that you find that she really does gravitate to irresponsible lovers and unreliable friends. In short, she does not seem to be someone who chooses wisely. I suspect she is a thrill-seeker, and it is always easier to maintain thrills in one's life if one's relationships are always on edge, ready to crumble at a moment's notice. She also seems to let chance dictate a great deal of her decisions, including at least once whether she would start sleeping with a near-stranger (she did). It probably sounds like I am judging her harshly. I wouldn't put it like that, since I don't feel I am moralizing, but I do think she is more responsible for her own actions and occasional suffering than she acknowledges. I am not surprised that she eventually collaborated with Paul Auster, who has written a fair bit about chance and fate.
One last comment, which is more specifically directed to the Seattle art show (Elles) than to Ms. Calle's work, is that it is kind of depressing when you go to an show filled with female artists and so many of the pieces are simply about their relationships with men. It's almost like there is this double or triple bind and these artists have still given far too much power to the men in their lives. Even when they dance around naked (in virtually all the video pieces), they still can't really reclaim their bodies away from the male gaze. I can't express it well without a very long and boring exposition, but it just feels like something out of Foucault's writings on power and hegemony.
The texts (in French) appeared to have been embroidered, though I have since learned there were approximately 90 double panels. While I suppose she might have undertaken these all by herself, it seems more likely that she found an industrial solution. What was more apparent from the book but not in the panels on display (in Seattle) was that the left hand stories got shorter as the pain dulled and the color of the text darkened and finally went black (the background was also black). In the next to last two panels, the text is essentially not legible in the book; in the final panel, it is completely black. It would be interesting to know if the embroidered text could be read in person but not in reproduction (which incidentally was the effect that Ad Reinhardt was going for).
I guess the entire thing was staged in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and occasionally elsewhere. At least once it was done in conjunction with a Gehry-designed space, though I think that actually detracts a bit from the work.
To order the book is just slightly more than I want to spend on just a whim, so I am trying to convince myself that I should order it and then compare the two versions (I have the English version out from the library). That's a fairly weak rationalization though, since I don't expect I will ever truly regain my fluency in French. I guess one never knows though, and I will probably practice French a lot more in Ontario than I would in B.C.
But it still might make a good totem/touchstone when I think about the continuum of unhappiness. I certainly spend a lot of time in the disgruntled/dissatisfied region, but I suppose I am not truly sad all that often, and I have done relatively little true suffering, except when my mother passed away. Ms. Calle certain thinks that she brought this particular suffering upon herself, since her lover warned her that their relationship wouldn't survive a 3 month separation, but she went to Japan anyway. 3 months is certainly a long time, but context matters a lot. I actually was more upset over a 6 week separation from my family than a 3-month separation that had happened earlier. Perhaps reminding myself how ridiculous people seem when they get operatically sad might be useful. Or maybe not. The same with keeping a clear head when analyzing whether and how one might have brought some unhappiness upon oneself through one's own actions. Almost no decisions in life lead to unqualified success/happiness or conversely failure/unhappiness.
I think my daughter tends to be a sad a lot, though she recovers fairly quickly. Here is her drawing of how sad she was at school when her best friend was out and she didn't have anyone to play with at lunch. She is all of the girls in the chain, indicating just how sad she felt. (I think the flower might even be crying.)
I guess I am a little sad that she seems to have inherited some of the more negative aspects of my personality... I suppose it is too early to tell for sure, but I would hope she would be spared some of the things that afflict and burden me.
I've decided to return to add to the original post. On the one hand, it is actually fairly interesting to see the slightly different variations Calle runs through as she slowly gets over the break-up and the pain dulls. However, given that the exhibit and panels weren't created until 15 years after the break-up, it is more of a recreation of a mourning process (unless she took really good notes at the time, which she may have done). She kind of explores different facets of the earlier stages of the relationship, reliving it; other times, she focuses more on the cause of the break-up and even tries to convince herself that the relationship was an impossible, inappropriate one that would have ended anyway. I remember going through this obsessive recounting phase in the early 90s and burned out a couple of friends, since most people don't need to hear the same thing told 90 different ways! But I do recognize that she truly was mourning in her own way, and I think the fade to black is fairly clever, even if not ground-breaking. Rituals can be very helpful in going through trauma of various types. After my mom passed away I wore black exclusively for 6 months (probably even my tennis shoes but I am not certain) and then gradually added greys and dark blues for the next 6 months. At least, that is how I recall it. It certainly was a long period of time, and I guess it was fortunate that I was a grad student and it wasn't viewed as completely eccentric or indeed out of the norm for TAs to show up primarily dressed in black.
Where I do find fault with Ms. Calle is that she seems to not have benefited from her 3 month stay in Japan. Maybe the experience entered her art in other ways and for other projects, but really she seems to consider the whole thing this huge drag that ended her love affair. Why did she bother leaving Paris in the first place? Her art seems to be either very personalized (a slightly more sophisticated and polished version of Tracey Emin) or is about watching people interact in public spaces, such as hotels, and always with a bit of Gallic flair. Why anyone thought her leaving Paris was a good idea is beyond me.
It is only when you look beyond Exquisite Pain, esp. Appointment with Sigmund Freud, that you find that she really does gravitate to irresponsible lovers and unreliable friends. In short, she does not seem to be someone who chooses wisely. I suspect she is a thrill-seeker, and it is always easier to maintain thrills in one's life if one's relationships are always on edge, ready to crumble at a moment's notice. She also seems to let chance dictate a great deal of her decisions, including at least once whether she would start sleeping with a near-stranger (she did). It probably sounds like I am judging her harshly. I wouldn't put it like that, since I don't feel I am moralizing, but I do think she is more responsible for her own actions and occasional suffering than she acknowledges. I am not surprised that she eventually collaborated with Paul Auster, who has written a fair bit about chance and fate.
One last comment, which is more specifically directed to the Seattle art show (Elles) than to Ms. Calle's work, is that it is kind of depressing when you go to an show filled with female artists and so many of the pieces are simply about their relationships with men. It's almost like there is this double or triple bind and these artists have still given far too much power to the men in their lives. Even when they dance around naked (in virtually all the video pieces), they still can't really reclaim their bodies away from the male gaze. I can't express it well without a very long and boring exposition, but it just feels like something out of Foucault's writings on power and hegemony.
Friday, January 25, 2013
6th Canadian challenge - 13th review
The reviews are sort of out of order at the moment, but I should be catching up soon.
I'm just going to start off with
SPOILERS AHEAD
before I get into the review of Underwater Welder by Jeff Lemire. This is a graphic novel (actually the second I've reviewed). There is no way to escape the fact that this was structured like a Twilight Zone episode, and the introduction by Damon Lindelof drives home the point even more forcefully. However, it is a crappy TZ episode, maybe from season 3 or 4. Most of the Amazon reviewers are positive, but I am going to side with the lone negative reviewer who feels it is too drawn out, we don't care about the characters at all, and the art is scraggly and ugly.
The plot is paper-thin. This man has returned to Nova Scotia where his father died in a diving accident. He is now a diver himself and surprise, surprise, comes across a watch that triggers all these flashbacks to his childhood. Then, temporarily abandoning his very pregnant wife, he sneaks back to dive again and he actually grabs the watch. This forces him into a parallel universe where he is the only one alive. He even drives round and round and can't leave Tigg's Bay (talk about ripping off TZ!). Finally, he sees that he is becoming his father, then he has a conversation with the ghost of his father. And then he is saved by another diver and re-enters the real world (still holding the watch) and soon goes home to gaze peacefully at his new-born baby.
I'm not even sure what the point is, other than perhaps you should make peace with your family (even if they are basically no-good drunks who abandon you at the hockey rink) or you won't have the peace of mind to start your own family. I mean really -- forgiveness for everyone? I'm with Prudie (over at Slate.com), that I am not for forgiveness/acceptance in all circumstances, as some Christians would urge. I'm glad I've cut certain people out of my life. And related to that, there are some things that people have done to me that I will never forgive. I'd guess this took less than an hour for me to read, but I still would kind of like that time back. Oh well.
I'm just going to start off with
SPOILERS AHEAD
before I get into the review of Underwater Welder by Jeff Lemire. This is a graphic novel (actually the second I've reviewed). There is no way to escape the fact that this was structured like a Twilight Zone episode, and the introduction by Damon Lindelof drives home the point even more forcefully. However, it is a crappy TZ episode, maybe from season 3 or 4. Most of the Amazon reviewers are positive, but I am going to side with the lone negative reviewer who feels it is too drawn out, we don't care about the characters at all, and the art is scraggly and ugly.
The plot is paper-thin. This man has returned to Nova Scotia where his father died in a diving accident. He is now a diver himself and surprise, surprise, comes across a watch that triggers all these flashbacks to his childhood. Then, temporarily abandoning his very pregnant wife, he sneaks back to dive again and he actually grabs the watch. This forces him into a parallel universe where he is the only one alive. He even drives round and round and can't leave Tigg's Bay (talk about ripping off TZ!). Finally, he sees that he is becoming his father, then he has a conversation with the ghost of his father. And then he is saved by another diver and re-enters the real world (still holding the watch) and soon goes home to gaze peacefully at his new-born baby.
I'm not even sure what the point is, other than perhaps you should make peace with your family (even if they are basically no-good drunks who abandon you at the hockey rink) or you won't have the peace of mind to start your own family. I mean really -- forgiveness for everyone? I'm with Prudie (over at Slate.com), that I am not for forgiveness/acceptance in all circumstances, as some Christians would urge. I'm glad I've cut certain people out of my life. And related to that, there are some things that people have done to me that I will never forgive. I'd guess this took less than an hour for me to read, but I still would kind of like that time back. Oh well.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
6th Canadian challenge - 12th review (New)
This will be a joint review of W.H. New's Stone | Rain and the last section of Riverbook & Ocean. It has finally been fixed up.
Stone | Rain (2001) is composed of three sections. The first has some poems about New's memories of Vancouver, and the third heavily features bicycles in China (most likely New had visited but perhaps it is part of an imagined journey). I can't even recall what the second section was about (probably nature of some sort), which is never a good sign... I would have been interested in the bicycle poems for a variety of reasons, but I came across them as I was wrapping up my proposed transportation anthology and found them filling a gap (there are so few good poems about riding a bicycle). I'll spend a bit of time on these in a moment, but want to start with historic Vancouver.
Stone | Rain was the first but not last time New decided to write about Vancouver. Riverbook and Ocean (2002) ends with a section on Biblical characters transported to Vancouver (the other sections weren't nearly as interesting to me). Underwood Log (2004) is a curious, somewhat closed-off collection where New titles all his poems by the longitude and latitude of the place he is writing about. This might have been an interesting experiment on a blog where you could hyper-link to the place names, but it ends up being annoying and off-putting to the casual reader who is looking at a printed book (frankly too hermeneutic for my taste, both the poems and the overarching concept). Still, it is clear that some of the locations in Underwood Log are in Vancouver, often the Kitsilano neighbourhood. Finally, YVR is a book-length meditation on living in Vancouver in the present while recalling its past. I have this sort of the memory overlay for Chicago but I haven't lived other places long enough to be haunted by the past (perhaps one advantage of always being on the move...). YVR, however, will have its own stand-alone review.
Early on in the Vancouver section of Stone | Rain, New addresses the transitory nature of the urban landscape in the poem "Timing":
Something changed when they moved Birks’ Corner,
took away the clock: they just
shifted it a few blocks north,
but that removed the meeting place
and no-one stops there any more—
Funny, how you take things for granted:
Woodward’s, Scott’s, the Honey Dew,
they all disappear—and even Birks
got sold...
Certainly a number of poets have commented on the transience of "life," though not nearly enough urban poets have commented on the ever-changing nature of the urban landscape, particularly at the local scale. Perhaps this is more notable in places like New York, Chicago, Toronto and Vancouver than smaller cities (despite its size, the pace of change in Vancouver is on a level with these other cities). But this is where most urban poets are, so it is odd how little we read about this never-ending change. I do think Alan Dugan touched on it, and surely some that I am forgetting. It is the kind of thing that Frank O'Hara or Ted Berrigan might have picked up on had they lived longer (they were in New York when it was at the bottom of its reinvestment cycle and largely seen as a dying city with its best days behind it).
He casts back into his memory for times he felt worth commemorating. This vision of community in "Pieces of Eight" probably ironically references Normal Rockwell:
Saturday night at 6:30—it’s a Rockwell cover
at the White Spot on Broadway, the whole city’s
eating, two cops in the first booth
drinking tea, getting a leg up
on overdue reports, so’s not to stay late;
the math teacher and two of her friends, dividing
the bill by 3, minus GST, adding
the tip outside the brackets;
the waitress
knows them all ...
Slightly later in the poem, New mentions a somewhat discordant note: a Punjabi child trying to fit in by singing Christmas carols. In this way, New references the major demographic shifts that Vancouver went through since his early adulthood. Rockwell indeed would have made much of the stranger's face trying to get a look in at the "White Spot." Vancouver today is a very multi-cultural place, in some ways more influenced by Asian culture than Toronto and gradually orienting itself towards Asia more than "back East."
In the poem "You know" summarily dismisses the Yuppies who are transforming Vancouver (he is probably half a generation older than the core of the Yuppie crowd). Not that he is as cruel as some who attack gentrification, but their interests (jazzercising, espresso and arugula) and his do not seem to coincide. Surprisingly, he doesn't mention yoga, as I have never been in a city so yoga-crazy, but perhaps that is more of a Gen Y/Millennial preoccupation. I do like the last stanza where he is a bit knowing about how each generation does move in and kind of rubbishes what came before:
Anyway, the Y Generation's
already moving into unfinished suites
in some place different, what else is new,
finding space for the cds, and clearing away
the hula hoops from the basement corner.
I'll return to the bicycle poems in Stone | Rain shortly.
I find it somewhat droll that YVR does not appear to have a single poem about the airport (that I recall anyway), but Riverbook & Ocean has the poem "Carousel":
On the Arrivals Level
a disembodied voice blurs its welcome
FLIGHTS 112 224 CANADIAN DELTA
mix in static the fairground chute
the trolley rides the kiddiecar conveyor belt
a tired diorama
Signs everywhere warn
KEEP HANDS CLEAR CHECK YOUR LABELS
BAGGAGE MAY LOOK THE SAME Port
to port the flotsam follows Sydney
Seattle Tokyo Rome sisal
passengers with package tape & string
matched plastic & leather trim
...
Beyond the turnstile calico observers
smile & smile holding names
& brass rings waving & waving
as though to generate the world
Not sure if New was familiar with the final scene of Tati's Playtime with the amusing scene of a huge mass of cars proceeding through a roundabout, much like a carousel*, and Tati of course plays it up in the soundtrack. There is also a scene of cars at the airport at the end of Mon Oncle, when the put-upon father/industrialist finally manages to ship Tati off. If one combined the two, it might congeal into the kind of scene that New is describing. I don't think the airport carousels were as widely used in the early 70s or Tati would have had quite a field day with them!
The interesting section of Riverbook & Ocean is where New reimagines Biblical characters and places them in various Vancouver settings. In some cases, it is pretty much a direct transfer (Hosea and Gideon). In others, he is setting their stories in a more contemporary way (Samson and Goliath). And in a few cases, he is trying to imagine how the religious impulse that animated these figures would find itself expressed in the contemporary world (Joseph, Jonah and Daniel). A few figures no longer seem nearly as religious, but they still have some of their identifying characteristics.
For instance, Job is now a successful real-estate developer, but he finds there is "never a day without problems: con- /tractors, taxes, breaks in the power line, /permits delayed, plumbers on strike, dry-/ wallers working roofers’ time, rain..."
Yes, there is definitely rain. I still see loads of construction going on in the rain since if you completely stopped for rain, you would never build anything. And yet, I think it must mean that the quality is low, since the foundations out here never dry/cure properly. While the houses do strike me as built better than those in England, that isn't saying much. I have a hunch that the quality is lower than those in the Prairies and Ontario, but I would no longer automatically grant that they are worse than the construction in Quebec after these recent revelations on how mobbed up the industry is out there. Canadian mobsters, who knew!
Ishmael, like his Biblical namesake, is in exile, though it isn't clear from where (though probably across the ocean) or for what reason or even if the exile was self-imposed:
Hundreds on a summer day skate
or stroll the seawall to Second Beach...
Ishmael’s one of them
now, having somewhere along the line
come to stilted terms with exile— now
the sand feels like home, the sea an accident
of youth ...
New does a lot of (place) name-dropping in these poems: Jericho Beach, Extension Beach, Wreck Beach, University Beach, Iona Beach, the Stevenson Dunes (hmm, a bit of a theme here?). But in many of the poems, this starts to come off as nothing more than a gimmick. I mean there is no real reason for all these characters to be located here, and New's attempts to draw parallels between the figures from the Bible and contemporary folks that one would encounter in Vancouver just don't often hold up.
Perhaps the most successful of them all is "Jonah":
Jonah likes weekdays best at Stanley
Park—smaller crowds—& fewer swimmers
... {visit}
... the old aquarium.
Jonah cleans there
now, wipes fingerprints off the glass
partitions three, four times a day, more
if school's in, & sweeps lunch litter
through the back doorway, out of sight,
newspapers, candy wrappers, bus
transfers, life.
When he's tired, he stops
by the orca pool, leans on the push broom,
& watches the animals ...
weren't you the one, he hears,
weren't you the one, his ears ringing with echoes
he learned at sea, before the nightmares started ...
I do have a minor quibble in that of all the whales, orcas would seem to be the very least likely to swallow a man and then regurgitate him, but the rest of the poem has a real down-to-earth nature that I like. I can certainly imagine that a person who went through some traumatic experience would want to avoid the limelight, even though the whole point of the journey through the whale's belly was to force him to go out as a preacher. Perhaps New is imagining a point after Jonah had discharged this duty and was left alone and more or less forgotten by the Lord.
Ok, let me (finally) close out this post by dropping in a few of the bicycle poems from the final section of Stone | Rain. These were among my favourites.
2.
At 7 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, forty-
four people go by in less
than a minute, cycling to work and school,
their faces as impassive as Yang
figurines moulded in clay: scholar,
fortune-teller, cobbler, baker,
in Nikes and blue uniform.
One young lover pedals
dreamily, his eyes inward. Perched
side-saddle behind him, his girlfriend,
legs crossed, polishes her nails.
14.
At night the bicycles disappear
into a waterhiss of wheels
turning, lightless, in the dark.
...
Voices carry. No-one speaks:
leaf and path alive with riders,
bus and bench alive with lovers.
Toads croak. Shadow bends.
The scent of jasmine hides the moon.
15.
The women who ride bicycles rise
early, leave by 6 for the hour’s
trip to where they work: bank,
bar, computer factory. Some
jobs are uniformed: the women
who sell silk and lipstick live
all day in gloss and blue apron;
the tellers count kuà i in brown.
Behind doors and walls, some
are uniformed, steaming rice,
mending cotton, rising by six.
21.
Abandoned bicycles gather in the outer
court of Confucius Temple. Across
the bridge of the pan pool, marble
carving itself, all is silent.
Taxi horns recede. ...
22.
Down streets, lanes, alleys
every sidewalk market sports
a bicycle repairman. All men,
some arranging brake shoes, locks
and handlebars, most content with pump
and patches, a waterbowl nearby
to test for air. The elegant woman
whose tire bursts outside the Workers’
Museum spurns them all; the garnet
silk’s deceptive: she fixes her own,
inflating, calm, on platform soles.
Looking these over, it is obvious that New loves lists, building a poem from somewhat disparate parts, trying to triangulate the world.
* I mistakenly thought the carousel scene was in Trafic not Playtime (and just fixed that after watching Playtime again). I was going to link to Trafic (and possibly Playtime), but Trafic seems to have gone OOP already. There often seem to be rights issues with Tati's films, so I'm glad I got it when I did! It is generally easier to pick up Tati in Region 2 DVDs from BFI, though Trafic is the only Tati film not available from BFI.
Edit (12/17/15) With some things, particularly movies and books, if you wait long enough it will come round again, and there is an impressive DVD or Blu-Ray Tati set out now from Criterion that I ended up springing for, even though I had most of the material already.
On the other hand, to tie back to the ever-changing urban landscape, once department stores go, they do not come back. I remember going into Woolworth's in Ann Arbor (there was one quite close to campus) and then six or seven years later to the one in Evanston, where it was clear the chain was on its last legs. I assume Woodward's (mentioned above in one of New's poems) was a similar kind of store. While Rodney Graham is trading on nostalgia in his photographic work The Avid Reader, 1949, I am not quite sure what the message is supposed to be. Is he saying that even at its height (and Woolworth's would have been thriving in 1949), that one should have considered the eventual decline of this commercial empire? That the temporary closure of a store (for remodelling?) is a stand-in for the chain going out of business in 1997? What's kind of interesting is how things evolved at a corporate level (the core holding corporation that once ran Woolworth's now focuses on Foot Locker) and in the urban landscape the role that Woolworth's once played is now largely filled by the down-market chains like Dollarama and Dollar General.
What is more depressing to me is that the middle range department store seems to be on its last legs in the U.S. and particularly in Canada. Sears is struggling, and I expect it to completely close up in Canada within 5 more years. Eaton's is gone. I am personally turned off by The Bay, though I guess it is doing ok in Canada. J.C. Penney seems to have retrenched a bit but still exists, though not in Canada either. Of course, Target, while not a true department store, filled many of the same roles, had such a poor reception in Canada that it lasted only 2 years, actually less time than I lived in Vancouver. Given that nothing has really replaced Target (which itself was supposed to replace Zellers) it really does feel like there is a fairly sizable hole left in the urban fabric. Same thing with the general decline of bookstores and DVD rental places. I guess we're all waiting for the next big thing...
Stone | Rain (2001) is composed of three sections. The first has some poems about New's memories of Vancouver, and the third heavily features bicycles in China (most likely New had visited but perhaps it is part of an imagined journey). I can't even recall what the second section was about (probably nature of some sort), which is never a good sign... I would have been interested in the bicycle poems for a variety of reasons, but I came across them as I was wrapping up my proposed transportation anthology and found them filling a gap (there are so few good poems about riding a bicycle). I'll spend a bit of time on these in a moment, but want to start with historic Vancouver.
Stone | Rain was the first but not last time New decided to write about Vancouver. Riverbook and Ocean (2002) ends with a section on Biblical characters transported to Vancouver (the other sections weren't nearly as interesting to me). Underwood Log (2004) is a curious, somewhat closed-off collection where New titles all his poems by the longitude and latitude of the place he is writing about. This might have been an interesting experiment on a blog where you could hyper-link to the place names, but it ends up being annoying and off-putting to the casual reader who is looking at a printed book (frankly too hermeneutic for my taste, both the poems and the overarching concept). Still, it is clear that some of the locations in Underwood Log are in Vancouver, often the Kitsilano neighbourhood. Finally, YVR is a book-length meditation on living in Vancouver in the present while recalling its past. I have this sort of the memory overlay for Chicago but I haven't lived other places long enough to be haunted by the past (perhaps one advantage of always being on the move...). YVR, however, will have its own stand-alone review.
Early on in the Vancouver section of Stone | Rain, New addresses the transitory nature of the urban landscape in the poem "Timing":
Something changed when they moved Birks’ Corner,
took away the clock: they just
shifted it a few blocks north,
but that removed the meeting place
and no-one stops there any more—
Funny, how you take things for granted:
Woodward’s, Scott’s, the Honey Dew,
they all disappear—and even Birks
got sold...
Certainly a number of poets have commented on the transience of "life," though not nearly enough urban poets have commented on the ever-changing nature of the urban landscape, particularly at the local scale. Perhaps this is more notable in places like New York, Chicago, Toronto and Vancouver than smaller cities (despite its size, the pace of change in Vancouver is on a level with these other cities). But this is where most urban poets are, so it is odd how little we read about this never-ending change. I do think Alan Dugan touched on it, and surely some that I am forgetting. It is the kind of thing that Frank O'Hara or Ted Berrigan might have picked up on had they lived longer (they were in New York when it was at the bottom of its reinvestment cycle and largely seen as a dying city with its best days behind it).
He casts back into his memory for times he felt worth commemorating. This vision of community in "Pieces of Eight" probably ironically references Normal Rockwell:
Saturday night at 6:30—it’s a Rockwell cover
at the White Spot on Broadway, the whole city’s
eating, two cops in the first booth
drinking tea, getting a leg up
on overdue reports, so’s not to stay late;
the math teacher and two of her friends, dividing
the bill by 3, minus GST, adding
the tip outside the brackets;
the waitress
knows them all ...
Slightly later in the poem, New mentions a somewhat discordant note: a Punjabi child trying to fit in by singing Christmas carols. In this way, New references the major demographic shifts that Vancouver went through since his early adulthood. Rockwell indeed would have made much of the stranger's face trying to get a look in at the "White Spot." Vancouver today is a very multi-cultural place, in some ways more influenced by Asian culture than Toronto and gradually orienting itself towards Asia more than "back East."
In the poem "You know" summarily dismisses the Yuppies who are transforming Vancouver (he is probably half a generation older than the core of the Yuppie crowd). Not that he is as cruel as some who attack gentrification, but their interests (jazzercising, espresso and arugula) and his do not seem to coincide. Surprisingly, he doesn't mention yoga, as I have never been in a city so yoga-crazy, but perhaps that is more of a Gen Y/Millennial preoccupation. I do like the last stanza where he is a bit knowing about how each generation does move in and kind of rubbishes what came before:
Anyway, the Y Generation's
already moving into unfinished suites
in some place different, what else is new,
finding space for the cds, and clearing away
the hula hoops from the basement corner.
I'll return to the bicycle poems in Stone | Rain shortly.
I find it somewhat droll that YVR does not appear to have a single poem about the airport (that I recall anyway), but Riverbook & Ocean has the poem "Carousel":
On the Arrivals Level
a disembodied voice blurs its welcome
FLIGHTS 112 224 CANADIAN DELTA
mix in static the fairground chute
the trolley rides the kiddiecar conveyor belt
a tired diorama
Signs everywhere warn
KEEP HANDS CLEAR CHECK YOUR LABELS
BAGGAGE MAY LOOK THE SAME Port
to port the flotsam follows Sydney
Seattle Tokyo Rome sisal
passengers with package tape & string
matched plastic & leather trim
...
Beyond the turnstile calico observers
smile & smile holding names
& brass rings waving & waving
as though to generate the world
Not sure if New was familiar with the final scene of Tati's Playtime with the amusing scene of a huge mass of cars proceeding through a roundabout, much like a carousel*, and Tati of course plays it up in the soundtrack. There is also a scene of cars at the airport at the end of Mon Oncle, when the put-upon father/industrialist finally manages to ship Tati off. If one combined the two, it might congeal into the kind of scene that New is describing. I don't think the airport carousels were as widely used in the early 70s or Tati would have had quite a field day with them!
The interesting section of Riverbook & Ocean is where New reimagines Biblical characters and places them in various Vancouver settings. In some cases, it is pretty much a direct transfer (Hosea and Gideon). In others, he is setting their stories in a more contemporary way (Samson and Goliath). And in a few cases, he is trying to imagine how the religious impulse that animated these figures would find itself expressed in the contemporary world (Joseph, Jonah and Daniel). A few figures no longer seem nearly as religious, but they still have some of their identifying characteristics.
For instance, Job is now a successful real-estate developer, but he finds there is "never a day without problems: con- /tractors, taxes, breaks in the power line, /permits delayed, plumbers on strike, dry-/ wallers working roofers’ time, rain..."
Yes, there is definitely rain. I still see loads of construction going on in the rain since if you completely stopped for rain, you would never build anything. And yet, I think it must mean that the quality is low, since the foundations out here never dry/cure properly. While the houses do strike me as built better than those in England, that isn't saying much. I have a hunch that the quality is lower than those in the Prairies and Ontario, but I would no longer automatically grant that they are worse than the construction in Quebec after these recent revelations on how mobbed up the industry is out there. Canadian mobsters, who knew!
Ishmael, like his Biblical namesake, is in exile, though it isn't clear from where (though probably across the ocean) or for what reason or even if the exile was self-imposed:
Hundreds on a summer day skate
or stroll the seawall to Second Beach...
Ishmael’s one of them
now, having somewhere along the line
come to stilted terms with exile— now
the sand feels like home, the sea an accident
of youth ...
New does a lot of (place) name-dropping in these poems: Jericho Beach, Extension Beach, Wreck Beach, University Beach, Iona Beach, the Stevenson Dunes (hmm, a bit of a theme here?). But in many of the poems, this starts to come off as nothing more than a gimmick. I mean there is no real reason for all these characters to be located here, and New's attempts to draw parallels between the figures from the Bible and contemporary folks that one would encounter in Vancouver just don't often hold up.
Perhaps the most successful of them all is "Jonah":
Jonah likes weekdays best at Stanley
Park—smaller crowds—& fewer swimmers
... {visit}
... the old aquarium.
Jonah cleans there
now, wipes fingerprints off the glass
partitions three, four times a day, more
if school's in, & sweeps lunch litter
through the back doorway, out of sight,
newspapers, candy wrappers, bus
transfers, life.
When he's tired, he stops
by the orca pool, leans on the push broom,
& watches the animals ...
weren't you the one, he hears,
weren't you the one, his ears ringing with echoes
he learned at sea, before the nightmares started ...
I do have a minor quibble in that of all the whales, orcas would seem to be the very least likely to swallow a man and then regurgitate him, but the rest of the poem has a real down-to-earth nature that I like. I can certainly imagine that a person who went through some traumatic experience would want to avoid the limelight, even though the whole point of the journey through the whale's belly was to force him to go out as a preacher. Perhaps New is imagining a point after Jonah had discharged this duty and was left alone and more or less forgotten by the Lord.
Ok, let me (finally) close out this post by dropping in a few of the bicycle poems from the final section of Stone | Rain. These were among my favourites.
2.
At 7 a.m. on a Wednesday morning, forty-
four people go by in less
than a minute, cycling to work and school,
their faces as impassive as Yang
figurines moulded in clay: scholar,
fortune-teller, cobbler, baker,
in Nikes and blue uniform.
One young lover pedals
dreamily, his eyes inward. Perched
side-saddle behind him, his girlfriend,
legs crossed, polishes her nails.
14.
At night the bicycles disappear
into a waterhiss of wheels
turning, lightless, in the dark.
...
Voices carry. No-one speaks:
leaf and path alive with riders,
bus and bench alive with lovers.
Toads croak. Shadow bends.
The scent of jasmine hides the moon.
15.
The women who ride bicycles rise
early, leave by 6 for the hour’s
trip to where they work: bank,
bar, computer factory. Some
jobs are uniformed: the women
who sell silk and lipstick live
all day in gloss and blue apron;
the tellers count kuà i in brown.
Behind doors and walls, some
are uniformed, steaming rice,
mending cotton, rising by six.
21.
Abandoned bicycles gather in the outer
court of Confucius Temple. Across
the bridge of the pan pool, marble
carving itself, all is silent.
Taxi horns recede. ...
22.
Down streets, lanes, alleys
every sidewalk market sports
a bicycle repairman. All men,
some arranging brake shoes, locks
and handlebars, most content with pump
and patches, a waterbowl nearby
to test for air. The elegant woman
whose tire bursts outside the Workers’
Museum spurns them all; the garnet
silk’s deceptive: she fixes her own,
inflating, calm, on platform soles.
Looking these over, it is obvious that New loves lists, building a poem from somewhat disparate parts, trying to triangulate the world.
* I mistakenly thought the carousel scene was in Trafic not Playtime (and just fixed that after watching Playtime again). I was going to link to Trafic (and possibly Playtime), but Trafic seems to have gone OOP already. There often seem to be rights issues with Tati's films, so I'm glad I got it when I did! It is generally easier to pick up Tati in Region 2 DVDs from BFI, though Trafic is the only Tati film not available from BFI.
Edit (12/17/15) With some things, particularly movies and books, if you wait long enough it will come round again, and there is an impressive DVD or Blu-Ray Tati set out now from Criterion that I ended up springing for, even though I had most of the material already.
On the other hand, to tie back to the ever-changing urban landscape, once department stores go, they do not come back. I remember going into Woolworth's in Ann Arbor (there was one quite close to campus) and then six or seven years later to the one in Evanston, where it was clear the chain was on its last legs. I assume Woodward's (mentioned above in one of New's poems) was a similar kind of store. While Rodney Graham is trading on nostalgia in his photographic work The Avid Reader, 1949, I am not quite sure what the message is supposed to be. Is he saying that even at its height (and Woolworth's would have been thriving in 1949), that one should have considered the eventual decline of this commercial empire? That the temporary closure of a store (for remodelling?) is a stand-in for the chain going out of business in 1997? What's kind of interesting is how things evolved at a corporate level (the core holding corporation that once ran Woolworth's now focuses on Foot Locker) and in the urban landscape the role that Woolworth's once played is now largely filled by the down-market chains like Dollarama and Dollar General.
What is more depressing to me is that the middle range department store seems to be on its last legs in the U.S. and particularly in Canada. Sears is struggling, and I expect it to completely close up in Canada within 5 more years. Eaton's is gone. I am personally turned off by The Bay, though I guess it is doing ok in Canada. J.C. Penney seems to have retrenched a bit but still exists, though not in Canada either. Of course, Target, while not a true department store, filled many of the same roles, had such a poor reception in Canada that it lasted only 2 years, actually less time than I lived in Vancouver. Given that nothing has really replaced Target (which itself was supposed to replace Zellers) it really does feel like there is a fairly sizable hole left in the urban fabric. Same thing with the general decline of bookstores and DVD rental places. I guess we're all waiting for the next big thing...
Monday, December 31, 2012
6th Canadian challenge - 11th review
I decided that my review of Sue Sinclair's Mortal Arguments didn't seem to adequately convey the strengths of the collection. I will add a bit here, before moving on to review her follow-up collection Breaker.
The "Ways of Leaving" section starts off with "At the Platform, Newcastle." I particularly like the lines: "there was none of the pain / you'd expect until the train pulled / out and the piece of us / that is time / ripped apart."
The rupture between family or friends separated by a journey, esp. a long and perhaps permanent one, can be quite challenging. I actually have fairly weak ties to most people, but still, it does seem preferable in terms of emotional impact to be the one who leaves (since one usually has something to look forward to at the end of a journey). Certainly, in general I've lived up to my vow to be the leaver and not the leavee. Probably my favourite set of paintings on this theme are at the MoMA -- they are called States of Mind by Umberto Boccioni.
These images could have been appended to the post on mobility/rootlessness, but that was pretty long as it was. And they do seem to fit the poem in the sense that the journey is a train journey.
Perhaps even more central (than struggling with religion) to the final section of Mortal Arguments ("Patience") is wrangling with death and/or oblivion. Indeed, the poet declares in "St. Phillip's": "No one really / believes in death or dying, / its unwilled oblivion."
However, the voice is less convinced in "Dusk": "Under the surgical gaze of the stars / we bare ourselves, wait to see what can be done."
And in "Forever" death is imagined almost as a parlor trick (on the unwitting): "you can't imagine / that time might turn itself inside out, showing / that what you thought was the infinite / was only its lining." After death, friends and family members "will pull a square of bright silk ... / then let it go, watch it drift away." This is certainly one of the more melancholy poems of the collection. Though the conclusions drawn may be a bit different, it does have interesting parallels with my poem, "My Tailor."
Turning to Breaker, the poems that explore religion and/or the sublime are not as fresh or seem a bit cruder than in Mortal Arguments. But I think Sinclair still rises to the occasion with slightly off-center language and metaphor. Though in terms of the percentage of poems where this stands out may be slightly lower (and more poems come across as a bit more straight-forward and perhaps not as carefully constructed with thought-provoking metaphors).
I like the first stanza of "Sunburst," but am not as interested where the poem goes afterwards:
"Objects in their endless sleep,
hearts beating once, maybe
twice an hour. The clouds drifting
just under the skin of the visible."
In "St. Philip's, Rain," the relationship with the divine seems very fraught: "the rest of us sick with longing for a god / we no longer believe in, our faces / like spoons, plain and hungry." While not everyone feels this need to believe, Sinclair expresses this longing well.
"Metropolis" contains interesting metaphors: "The city is a piano, its pedals sunk / deep underground." Then "We [commuters or city dwellers in general] become paper shredders for obsolete decades." I don't even know precisely what this means, though it may well be discussing the idea that cities (which are dominated by gesellschaft relations) are part of the project of modernity and that the past is routinely churned up and discarded. Sinclair continues with this thought: "History might disappear entirely if we work hard enough."
Sinclair has a few other urban poems -- often looking what happens when "routine" city life is disrupted or interrupted. In "Blackout," people "prowl the streets, greet everyone / as the intimate strangers we've become / ... soon a line of bicycles glides past, following / the glow of a single headlight as though / chasing a butterfly."
In addition to the shout-out to bicycles, Sinclair sneaks in a few poems on transportation into Breaker, and these are generally the ones I like most. "Driving North" focuses on night-time driving, ferries turn up in "Sixth View of Bell Island" and both "Delay" and "View from the Train" are about train rides. In "Delay" the train never arrives. "All of us thinking about home and how / we're not there and will or won't be missed, / how the surface of our life goes on elsewhere / even as we stand here."
Yet Sinclair suggests it isn't such a great thing to be on the train after all in "View from the Train": "The air in the car is sour with the breath / of strangers ... / The train pushes steadily on, / repeating the same clicks and clacks, chugging along as if / it will never stop."
To return to the Boccioni paintings, Sinclair definitely seems to be suggesting that the difference between the two phases of staying and going are not nearly as clear cut as they seem at first, or more centrally that one's personal satisfaction is probably not going to be altered that much by being on a moving train or being left on the platform. I'm not at all sure I would agree with her, esp. if one is stuck on a platform but expected to be on the train, but there is certainly something to the notion that people make all kinds of changes in their situation (like going on journeys) and then end up no happier than before they set out.
Breaker is definitely another thought-provoking collection with a number of poems I enjoyed, though I do rank Mortal Arguments somewhat higher.
The "Ways of Leaving" section starts off with "At the Platform, Newcastle." I particularly like the lines: "there was none of the pain / you'd expect until the train pulled / out and the piece of us / that is time / ripped apart."
The rupture between family or friends separated by a journey, esp. a long and perhaps permanent one, can be quite challenging. I actually have fairly weak ties to most people, but still, it does seem preferable in terms of emotional impact to be the one who leaves (since one usually has something to look forward to at the end of a journey). Certainly, in general I've lived up to my vow to be the leaver and not the leavee. Probably my favourite set of paintings on this theme are at the MoMA -- they are called States of Mind by Umberto Boccioni.
 |
| The Farewells |
 |
| Those Who Depart |
 |
| Those Who Stay |
These images could have been appended to the post on mobility/rootlessness, but that was pretty long as it was. And they do seem to fit the poem in the sense that the journey is a train journey.
Perhaps even more central (than struggling with religion) to the final section of Mortal Arguments ("Patience") is wrangling with death and/or oblivion. Indeed, the poet declares in "St. Phillip's": "No one really / believes in death or dying, / its unwilled oblivion."
However, the voice is less convinced in "Dusk": "Under the surgical gaze of the stars / we bare ourselves, wait to see what can be done."
And in "Forever" death is imagined almost as a parlor trick (on the unwitting): "you can't imagine / that time might turn itself inside out, showing / that what you thought was the infinite / was only its lining." After death, friends and family members "will pull a square of bright silk ... / then let it go, watch it drift away." This is certainly one of the more melancholy poems of the collection. Though the conclusions drawn may be a bit different, it does have interesting parallels with my poem, "My Tailor."
Turning to Breaker, the poems that explore religion and/or the sublime are not as fresh or seem a bit cruder than in Mortal Arguments. But I think Sinclair still rises to the occasion with slightly off-center language and metaphor. Though in terms of the percentage of poems where this stands out may be slightly lower (and more poems come across as a bit more straight-forward and perhaps not as carefully constructed with thought-provoking metaphors).
I like the first stanza of "Sunburst," but am not as interested where the poem goes afterwards:
"Objects in their endless sleep,
hearts beating once, maybe
twice an hour. The clouds drifting
just under the skin of the visible."
In "St. Philip's, Rain," the relationship with the divine seems very fraught: "the rest of us sick with longing for a god / we no longer believe in, our faces / like spoons, plain and hungry." While not everyone feels this need to believe, Sinclair expresses this longing well.
"Metropolis" contains interesting metaphors: "The city is a piano, its pedals sunk / deep underground." Then "We [commuters or city dwellers in general] become paper shredders for obsolete decades." I don't even know precisely what this means, though it may well be discussing the idea that cities (which are dominated by gesellschaft relations) are part of the project of modernity and that the past is routinely churned up and discarded. Sinclair continues with this thought: "History might disappear entirely if we work hard enough."
Sinclair has a few other urban poems -- often looking what happens when "routine" city life is disrupted or interrupted. In "Blackout," people "prowl the streets, greet everyone / as the intimate strangers we've become / ... soon a line of bicycles glides past, following / the glow of a single headlight as though / chasing a butterfly."
In addition to the shout-out to bicycles, Sinclair sneaks in a few poems on transportation into Breaker, and these are generally the ones I like most. "Driving North" focuses on night-time driving, ferries turn up in "Sixth View of Bell Island" and both "Delay" and "View from the Train" are about train rides. In "Delay" the train never arrives. "All of us thinking about home and how / we're not there and will or won't be missed, / how the surface of our life goes on elsewhere / even as we stand here."
Yet Sinclair suggests it isn't such a great thing to be on the train after all in "View from the Train": "The air in the car is sour with the breath / of strangers ... / The train pushes steadily on, / repeating the same clicks and clacks, chugging along as if / it will never stop."
To return to the Boccioni paintings, Sinclair definitely seems to be suggesting that the difference between the two phases of staying and going are not nearly as clear cut as they seem at first, or more centrally that one's personal satisfaction is probably not going to be altered that much by being on a moving train or being left on the platform. I'm not at all sure I would agree with her, esp. if one is stuck on a platform but expected to be on the train, but there is certainly something to the notion that people make all kinds of changes in their situation (like going on journeys) and then end up no happier than before they set out.
Breaker is definitely another thought-provoking collection with a number of poems I enjoyed, though I do rank Mortal Arguments somewhat higher.
Wednesday, December 26, 2012
6th Canadian challenge - 10th review
As might be surmised from my recent posts, I have been kind of submerged in my old poetry, trying to get the best of it up on the blog. This will probably continue through Feb., and I won't have nearly as much time for reviewing. Also, at the moment I am reading more books on the theme of "the road trip," and naturally more of these books are by Americans. In general, I've kind of gorged myself on others' poetry over the past 6 months and am kind of tired of it. I think I have 1 more collection by W.H. New and 3.5 books by Sharon Olds to go, and, after that, I think I will be done with poetry for quite a while.
In any event, I did want to get to this review before the end of the year. Mortal Arguments by Sue Sinclair is one of the best collections I've come across in the last couple of years. The collection kind of grew on me slowly. The collection is divided into five sections: Abundance, Private Lives in Public Places, Heed, Ways of Leaving and Patience.
On rereading the collection there are fewer poems than I remembered that seem to be about transcendence and the difficulty of putting words to sublime (typically religious) phenomena. In fact, sublime itself is an overused word; I prefer ineffable. There are a few of these, primarily in the third section Heed.
"Sympathy" may be the most "explicit" about the paucity of language, and indeed human experience: "The blindness of perception, what we seek / never quite available, reflections skimmed / off the surface. / ... the abundance of the hidden."
"Witness II" has some lines along the same lines: "the elocution of the stars,/ unpronouncable, perfect syllables. God encrypted / in the world."
Other poems consider other aspects of reconciling a personal deity with the infinite universe that science has revealed to us ("Bounty" and "Prayer II"). I found the same kind of general tension in Mary Oliver's earlier collections (sometimes the tension was more between faith and wanting to live in the modern world), though her later work has taken Oliver down an uninteresting path leading to (more or less) unquestioning faith. And certainly I do think that Breaker (Sinclair's next collection) is less interesting than this one for various reasons. But as I said, there is less overt religiosity in these two overall collections than in those of Oliver.
If the religious tension had been the only thing going for the poems, I wouldn't have been that interested, but I find her use of metaphor quite interesting and challenging. She doesn't always go for the obvious one, which leads one to ponder what she had in mind longer. Having to work a bit harder (but not too hard) is a feature of the better Metaphysical poems and some of the earlier work of the Modernist poets (T.S. Eliot in particular but not Pound by the time of The Cantos).
Here are some, more or less selected at random:
"Vacation": "The ocean roams / like a stray dog"
"Dreamlife of Houses": "Your sheets like the skin of another animal"
"Days in Between I": "The day is a cruise ship"
"Calgary": "The city, a glass bottle left / upright in the middle of the prairie."
"Prairie": "the sun has parked its car / in front of your door / and refuses to move."
"Night Fare": "Taxis float like water lilies / on the slick tarmac."
"Night Fare" is probably my favourite in the collection, though I also like the streetcar poem "From Spadina Station." In both cases, the modes of transport are anthropomorphized to some extent and they are eagerly awaiting passengers.
In "Night Fare," the poet proclaims "they [the taxis] know too much about you, / the shine of each door a warning. / You won't give them the satisfaction." And the reader walks home. In some ways the tone (and certainly the use of the imperative) reminds me a bit of my own A Gradual Slipping Out of Circle.
In "From Spadina Station" the poet stays home, trying to sleep, while it is the streetcar pushing on through the night that is her surrogate. Her dreams then take the form of a cat pacing in her apartment. In some ways, there may be just a bit too much going on in this poem, though I did appreciate that it wasn't a straight-forward "dream poem," as those are pretty boring in general.
In general these poems reward second and third readings, since they are just slightly askew and the obvious choice in language and/or metaphor is rarely taken.
In any event, I did want to get to this review before the end of the year. Mortal Arguments by Sue Sinclair is one of the best collections I've come across in the last couple of years. The collection kind of grew on me slowly. The collection is divided into five sections: Abundance, Private Lives in Public Places, Heed, Ways of Leaving and Patience.
On rereading the collection there are fewer poems than I remembered that seem to be about transcendence and the difficulty of putting words to sublime (typically religious) phenomena. In fact, sublime itself is an overused word; I prefer ineffable. There are a few of these, primarily in the third section Heed.
"Sympathy" may be the most "explicit" about the paucity of language, and indeed human experience: "The blindness of perception, what we seek / never quite available, reflections skimmed / off the surface. / ... the abundance of the hidden."
"Witness II" has some lines along the same lines: "the elocution of the stars,/ unpronouncable, perfect syllables. God encrypted / in the world."
Other poems consider other aspects of reconciling a personal deity with the infinite universe that science has revealed to us ("Bounty" and "Prayer II"). I found the same kind of general tension in Mary Oliver's earlier collections (sometimes the tension was more between faith and wanting to live in the modern world), though her later work has taken Oliver down an uninteresting path leading to (more or less) unquestioning faith. And certainly I do think that Breaker (Sinclair's next collection) is less interesting than this one for various reasons. But as I said, there is less overt religiosity in these two overall collections than in those of Oliver.
If the religious tension had been the only thing going for the poems, I wouldn't have been that interested, but I find her use of metaphor quite interesting and challenging. She doesn't always go for the obvious one, which leads one to ponder what she had in mind longer. Having to work a bit harder (but not too hard) is a feature of the better Metaphysical poems and some of the earlier work of the Modernist poets (T.S. Eliot in particular but not Pound by the time of The Cantos).
Here are some, more or less selected at random:
"Vacation": "The ocean roams / like a stray dog"
"Dreamlife of Houses": "Your sheets like the skin of another animal"
"Days in Between I": "The day is a cruise ship"
"Calgary": "The city, a glass bottle left / upright in the middle of the prairie."
"Prairie": "the sun has parked its car / in front of your door / and refuses to move."
"Night Fare": "Taxis float like water lilies / on the slick tarmac."
"Night Fare" is probably my favourite in the collection, though I also like the streetcar poem "From Spadina Station." In both cases, the modes of transport are anthropomorphized to some extent and they are eagerly awaiting passengers.
In "Night Fare," the poet proclaims "they [the taxis] know too much about you, / the shine of each door a warning. / You won't give them the satisfaction." And the reader walks home. In some ways the tone (and certainly the use of the imperative) reminds me a bit of my own A Gradual Slipping Out of Circle.
In "From Spadina Station" the poet stays home, trying to sleep, while it is the streetcar pushing on through the night that is her surrogate. Her dreams then take the form of a cat pacing in her apartment. In some ways, there may be just a bit too much going on in this poem, though I did appreciate that it wasn't a straight-forward "dream poem," as those are pretty boring in general.
In general these poems reward second and third readings, since they are just slightly askew and the obvious choice in language and/or metaphor is rarely taken.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)