I had an interesting experience today, which was a bit of a flashback to my elementary school days where I was "the spoiler." Generally, I ran my mouth a bit faster than I should have. Anyway, I was on the train home with a couple of people from work on the train back and just heard her saying something about how relatively easy it was to not find out about the World Series. Sadly, I missed the first part of the conversation where she must have been saying how she was trying to avoid the news. I said I found that incredible since it was all over, and she was like "Dude." Now I obviously wish I hadn't said anything, since I hardly care about sports at all and would have easily moved onto another topic.
However, it is completely unrealistic to expect that certain sporting events can be put on hold for 24 hours (ok, 20 hours) while you do other things (and then to try to shame people who tip you off accidentally!). A typical game or a tv show, fine, but the outcome of the World Series, the Superbowl or especially the Stanley Cup? What kind of a bubble are you living in? It pretty much means no internet at all and absolutely no email, since even the subject line of messages from friends will most likely contain spoilers. What I dislike the most about people who insist on a spoiler-free existence is that it squelches the water-cooler conversations that make up an important part of office life. In a way it is actually quite selfish to try to maintain this bubble, particularly for really key events that are meant to be discussed openly, such as the World Series. Now I don't want to go too far in condemning the anti-spoiler squad, but it does strike me as one more example of the extreme atomization of society that we are facing that people think that can insist on time-shifting events to suit their own needs and getting everyone else to play along and humour them.
That said, I wouldn't have said anything (and I really said next to nothing about the game) had I known that she really didn't want to know. And of course, I will continue to put up spoiler warnings here for the plots of books and obscure movies, given that it is fairly unlikely everyone (anyone?) will have already experienced them. But I am not going to tiptoe around discussing the outcomes of sporting events if it is actually relevant to the topic under discussion.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
7th Challenge - 4th review - Vermeer's Light
This book turned up in the mail much sooner than I expected, so I might as well review George Bowering's Vermeer's Light. This is a very generous collection for a stand-alone collection, i.e. not a "best of" or collected poems. There are well over 100 poems in the book, which comes in at 170 pages of poems, along with an essay. The poems were written between 1996 and 2006, with one major exception "Grandfather," which I will return to in a bit. As Bowering relates in the Preface, these poems were written during a time of great upheaval in his life. His wife passed away, after a fairly long (3 year) struggle with cancer on top of the multiple sclerosis she had been dealing with. Then in 2001 he retired (he was on the faculty of SFU) and shortly thereafter he was named Poet Laureat of Canada, so he traveled quite a bit and gave readings and led workshops and wrote. Then he moved to Ontario for a couple of years and took up with a new sweetheart (the one he married midway through the writing of My Darling Nellie Grey). He convinced her to move back with him to Vancouver in 2004. Quite a few of the poems reflect these events, though not all are autobiographical.
There are 6 poetry sequences: Sitting in Vancouver; A, You're Adorable; Fragment, Trieste, Dec. 1981; Imaginary Poems for AMB; Six Little Poems in Alphabetical Order; and West Side Haiku, as well as a couple of multi-part poems: "The PGI Golf Tourney..." and "Lost in the Library". The rest of the poems are essentially stand-alone poems, though "Q & A" reads like a series of very, very short poems. For the most part, these longer poems and sequences are the more interesting to me, and that's what I will focus on in this review.
I liked the idea of Sitting in Vancouver a bit more than the execution. Bowering lists various places he has been, many of them related to his late wife's condition -- the multiple sclerosis clinic, Vancouver Hospital, UBC Hospital and YVR. These are basically observational poems. He makes comments about the other people in these places and curiously enough generally does not dwell on why he is at all these hospitals (classic avoidance of course). So there is a morbid air to them, even though illness and death are generally not addressed head on. I think of the bunch, the most interesting is the one where he is sitting in the SFU Cafeteria. Now I haven't been there, but I have been at the SFU library and student centre, and they are bleak places that feel stuck in the middle of nowhere. I'm pretty sure the SFU Cafeteria is no different, and that seems to put Bowering in a bad mood: "Can't believe all the fat boys, / fat girls / lined up for burgers / fries and Coke." He compares his lot to other more famous poets and seems to feel that they wouldn't be stuck out at SFU like he is: "Allen wouldn't be here, Atwood / she wouldn't be here." Maybe there is just a touch of pride that he will put up with this situation, but in general, he seems pretty discontent. On the whole this series of poems comes across as a bit of downer.
The next long sequence, however, is my favourite of the bunch: A, You're Adorable. This was published in 1998, and Bowering claims that the publisher didn't know for a while that he was the author (he used the pen name Ellen Field). I admire Bowering for submitting work under different names, and I think he had to up his game. I half wonder if he stopped around 2006, since I thought a lot of his work in Teeth was subpar and probably only was published because it carried his name. Anyway, this is a series of poems, each starting with a different letter of the alphabet and being very playful about it. Often the letter is repeated and must be read on multiple lines to make the following words make sense, like "almost Defenceless, nearly / footloose, loving every De- / tail since." or "Enuff of questions, / how about if 'E gives us (you and me) / nothing but answers from now / on / paper, or something."
These are really quite different from many of his other poems, though the occasional repetition of words is something he consciously did in some of the sequences in My Darling Nellie Grey. These poems are short and often a lot of fun. I think they benefit from being read out loud, and I'll do more of that over the next week or so. While he didn't explicitly say so, I think he probably was dedicating them to A(ngela) his wife, who was struggling with various illnesses by that point.
Imaginary Poems for AMB were written shortly after the death of his wife, Angela. They are suffused with grief and other emotions. The one that stuck out the most for me began: "I wonder if you send me / my dreams of you--- / Did I do something that day / to deserve your visit---" and later he wonders "If I write poems for your ear / am I talking to myself---". Even the most fervent agnostic ponders these questions in the face of the death of close ones, though the hard core atheists recognize this for that wishful thinking that is the root of so many religions.
For me, the collection is front-loaded with the best work coming in these three sequences, though A, You're Adorable is worth the price of admission, as they say. "Q & A" and "Ask a Stupid Question" are the precursors to the "Shall I Compare Thee" section of My Darling Nellie Grey. "Ask a Stupid Question" adopts the voice of a cynical (NYC?) cab driver who answers poetic questions such as "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind" with the sardonic retort "I'd guess about three months." The poem ends appropriately enough: "Jesus, Lady, don't you know anything?"
As I mentioned, the collection ends with the essay "Rewriting My Grandfather" where Bowering explains the genesis of the poem "Grandfather," then reworks it 8 or so times. This is really an interesting exercise in watching a poet at work, at least one who is into Oulipian games. Some of the reworked poems are better than others, as one might imagine. It was a nice bonus to a solid poetry collection, and I was glad I was able to pick Vermeer's Light up relatively inexpensively.
There are 6 poetry sequences: Sitting in Vancouver; A, You're Adorable; Fragment, Trieste, Dec. 1981; Imaginary Poems for AMB; Six Little Poems in Alphabetical Order; and West Side Haiku, as well as a couple of multi-part poems: "The PGI Golf Tourney..." and "Lost in the Library". The rest of the poems are essentially stand-alone poems, though "Q & A" reads like a series of very, very short poems. For the most part, these longer poems and sequences are the more interesting to me, and that's what I will focus on in this review.
I liked the idea of Sitting in Vancouver a bit more than the execution. Bowering lists various places he has been, many of them related to his late wife's condition -- the multiple sclerosis clinic, Vancouver Hospital, UBC Hospital and YVR. These are basically observational poems. He makes comments about the other people in these places and curiously enough generally does not dwell on why he is at all these hospitals (classic avoidance of course). So there is a morbid air to them, even though illness and death are generally not addressed head on. I think of the bunch, the most interesting is the one where he is sitting in the SFU Cafeteria. Now I haven't been there, but I have been at the SFU library and student centre, and they are bleak places that feel stuck in the middle of nowhere. I'm pretty sure the SFU Cafeteria is no different, and that seems to put Bowering in a bad mood: "Can't believe all the fat boys, / fat girls / lined up for burgers / fries and Coke." He compares his lot to other more famous poets and seems to feel that they wouldn't be stuck out at SFU like he is: "Allen wouldn't be here, Atwood / she wouldn't be here." Maybe there is just a touch of pride that he will put up with this situation, but in general, he seems pretty discontent. On the whole this series of poems comes across as a bit of downer.
The next long sequence, however, is my favourite of the bunch: A, You're Adorable. This was published in 1998, and Bowering claims that the publisher didn't know for a while that he was the author (he used the pen name Ellen Field). I admire Bowering for submitting work under different names, and I think he had to up his game. I half wonder if he stopped around 2006, since I thought a lot of his work in Teeth was subpar and probably only was published because it carried his name. Anyway, this is a series of poems, each starting with a different letter of the alphabet and being very playful about it. Often the letter is repeated and must be read on multiple lines to make the following words make sense, like "almost Defenceless, nearly / footloose, loving every De- / tail since." or "Enuff of questions, / how about if 'E gives us (you and me) / nothing but answers from now / on / paper, or something."
These are really quite different from many of his other poems, though the occasional repetition of words is something he consciously did in some of the sequences in My Darling Nellie Grey. These poems are short and often a lot of fun. I think they benefit from being read out loud, and I'll do more of that over the next week or so. While he didn't explicitly say so, I think he probably was dedicating them to A(ngela) his wife, who was struggling with various illnesses by that point.
Imaginary Poems for AMB were written shortly after the death of his wife, Angela. They are suffused with grief and other emotions. The one that stuck out the most for me began: "I wonder if you send me / my dreams of you--- / Did I do something that day / to deserve your visit---" and later he wonders "If I write poems for your ear / am I talking to myself---". Even the most fervent agnostic ponders these questions in the face of the death of close ones, though the hard core atheists recognize this for that wishful thinking that is the root of so many religions.
For me, the collection is front-loaded with the best work coming in these three sequences, though A, You're Adorable is worth the price of admission, as they say. "Q & A" and "Ask a Stupid Question" are the precursors to the "Shall I Compare Thee" section of My Darling Nellie Grey. "Ask a Stupid Question" adopts the voice of a cynical (NYC?) cab driver who answers poetic questions such as "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind" with the sardonic retort "I'd guess about three months." The poem ends appropriately enough: "Jesus, Lady, don't you know anything?"
As I mentioned, the collection ends with the essay "Rewriting My Grandfather" where Bowering explains the genesis of the poem "Grandfather," then reworks it 8 or so times. This is really an interesting exercise in watching a poet at work, at least one who is into Oulipian games. Some of the reworked poems are better than others, as one might imagine. It was a nice bonus to a solid poetry collection, and I was glad I was able to pick Vermeer's Light up relatively inexpensively.
Rob Ford - Busted
I do try to steer away from the really political stuff, but I am so glad that the police have busted Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, i.e. they have recovered the alleged video showing him smoking crack, along with a long surveillance trail of him contacting the alleged drug dealer Alexander Lisi. I'm sure there will be lots of updates, but the breaking news is found here and here and here. Sadly they cannot actually charge him with a crime for what appears to occur on the video, though of course there might be obstruction of justices charges or the like. And Toronto has no recall mechanism, and possibly no way for the City Council to actually force Ford to step aside. But I think even the most thick-skinned politician, such as Ford, will realize there is simply no way he can remain in power after these revelations. Anyway, what a way to start the day!
So he has admitted to taking crack cocaine, even before the infamous video airs! But he is still hanging tough and won't resign, and possibly still planning on running again next fall. And he and his brother are basically digging in and bashing the police chief of all things! (And it is so so sad how tribal politics have become that many of his supporters will go along with this pirouette.) But I suspect that in the end, he will find the fall-out from when the video actually airs will be so damaging that he will step aside. Maybe that is just wishful thinking...
So he has admitted to taking crack cocaine, even before the infamous video airs! But he is still hanging tough and won't resign, and possibly still planning on running again next fall. And he and his brother are basically digging in and bashing the police chief of all things! (And it is so so sad how tribal politics have become that many of his supporters will go along with this pirouette.) But I suspect that in the end, he will find the fall-out from when the video actually airs will be so damaging that he will step aside. Maybe that is just wishful thinking...
Poetic influences
My mind has been segueing all over the place. Let me see if I can get the main thread(s) down. Over the past couple of months, I have been reading a fair number of young and occasionally not-so-young poets who were clearly influenced by Frank O'Hara, most notably Denise Duhamel and now Artie Gold (an Anglophone poet based in Montreal who seemed equally influenced by O'Hara and Jack Spicer). George Bowering writes in the introduction to the Collected Books of Artie Gold that when he first encountered (and taught!) Gold, O'Hara was barely being read by Canadian lit. majors or poets, though the situation has certainly changed with time. (I wonder if those that followed O'Hara early in his career all became poets themselves, much like the thousand or so people who bought the first Velvet Underground record -- all of whom supposedly went on to form their own bands... RIP Lou Reed.)
O'Hara came to my attention in my second year of undergrad when I got into a poetry writing course with a professor who had known a lot of the key figures from the New York school. At least that is how I remember being introduced to O'Hara's works, though of all the figures the professor brought to my attention, I suspect I would have encountered O'Hara through Donald Allen's New American Poetry anthology or somewhere else, since over time, O'Hara has become so influential. Still, I might have not paid nearly as much attention had my attention not been focused. Other poets that the professor promoted included Ted Berrigan, Faye Kicknosway, John Sinclair, Jim Harrison, Jim Gustafson and I believe Ed Sanders. Some of whom remain very obscure. The following summer, at NELP, I was introduced to the work of Jane Kenyon, though unfortunately she was too ill to actually meet the class, which would have been quite memorable, I am sure. I think all of the other poets that I have read, I mostly found out about them by reading widely and then following the poets that these poets looked up to. More recently I have occasionally followed leads generated by listserv discussions or even Amazon suggestions. To circle back very briefly to Bowering, I definitely see lots of flashes of humor and playfulness in his work, which could certainly be found in O'Hara or Ted Berrigan for that matter. However, unless I am totally misremembering what Bowering wrote in an essay, he was more inspired by some of the Beats, particularly Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Olson and some of the others in the Black Mountain School. I'm not really sure I see that (the Olson influence), but to be fair, I have not cracked Olson's Maximus Poems (something to start if I ever finish Pound's Cantos I guess).
I'll try to wrap this up quickly as I still have a review (of Bowering's Vermeer's Light incidentally) to get to. While there are a lot of very disparate poets that I like quite a bit, and even some where I share a somewhat similar poetic sensibility, I just am not sure I would consider myself that influenced by any particular poet. But perhaps someone else would feel differently. Anyway, I will list my top 10 favorite poets (in alphabetical order) and then another group of 15 that I rate very highly.
Paul Blackburn (my favorite Black Mountain poet*)
T.S. Eliot
Faye Kicknosway
Philip Levine
Audre Lorde
Frank O'Hara
Sharon Olds (but stopping at The Father!)
Adrienne Rich
Anne Sexton
Charles Simic
John Berryman
Robert Creeley
Emily Dickinson
Alan Dugan
Jane Kenyon
Galway Kinnell
August Kleinzahler
W.S. Merwin
Marge Piercy
Charles Reznikoff
Harvey Shapiro
Gary Snyder
Gary Soto
Wallace Stevens
W.B. Yeats
A few thoughts. Had I drawn this list up 10 years ago, I probably would have included some Beat poets such as Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti; however, my tastes have changed and Beat poetry in general hasn't held up that well in my view. I probably would also have put Yeats in the higher category and possibly included Dylan Thomas in the second category. I might have included W.C. Williams, but I don't find I read him for pleasure, so while I respect him and his work, he doesn't really belong here. That might change some day if I really delve into his work (as I once did with Wallace Stevens). Langston Hughes and E.E. Cummings are sort of just off the edge of the list, partly because they wrote so much, and yet only a relatively few poems speak to me. (One could say the same about Blackburn or O'Hara, whose poetic output was high but the quality was highly variable to say the least, but even their weaker poems spoke to me more.)
For better or worse, the list does not include any poetry in translation. It is much harder to justify how U.S.-centric it is (to say nothing of the fact that nearly all of these are 20th Century poets with only a small handful still publishing in the 21st Century), but these generally are the poets that write within a space/context that makes sense to me, and certainly it is not a fluke that most of them are urban poets. I am still sort of feeling my way into the Canadian canon, but I would say that Robert Kroetsch is probably my favourite Canadian poet, followed by George Bowering, then Louis Dudek and Al Purdy. W. H. New is in there somewhere as well.
I'll close with a relatively short list of poets whom I respect in the abstract but haven't read enough of their work to truly know them. It is possible that after I did that I would rate them higher and put them on one of these lists some day. Perhaps time will tell...
W.H. Auden
John Betjeman
Basil Bunting
Randall Jarrell
Maxine Kumin
Denise Levertov
Howard Nemerov
Kenneth Rexroth
Theodore Roethke
Muriel Rukeyser
Delmore Schwartz
W.C. Williams
* Honestly, I would not characterize Blackburn as a Black Mountain poet -- he is much closer, in my mind, to the New York School (O'Hara in particular) -- but that's where he is generally placed, so whatcha gonna do?
O'Hara came to my attention in my second year of undergrad when I got into a poetry writing course with a professor who had known a lot of the key figures from the New York school. At least that is how I remember being introduced to O'Hara's works, though of all the figures the professor brought to my attention, I suspect I would have encountered O'Hara through Donald Allen's New American Poetry anthology or somewhere else, since over time, O'Hara has become so influential. Still, I might have not paid nearly as much attention had my attention not been focused. Other poets that the professor promoted included Ted Berrigan, Faye Kicknosway, John Sinclair, Jim Harrison, Jim Gustafson and I believe Ed Sanders. Some of whom remain very obscure. The following summer, at NELP, I was introduced to the work of Jane Kenyon, though unfortunately she was too ill to actually meet the class, which would have been quite memorable, I am sure. I think all of the other poets that I have read, I mostly found out about them by reading widely and then following the poets that these poets looked up to. More recently I have occasionally followed leads generated by listserv discussions or even Amazon suggestions. To circle back very briefly to Bowering, I definitely see lots of flashes of humor and playfulness in his work, which could certainly be found in O'Hara or Ted Berrigan for that matter. However, unless I am totally misremembering what Bowering wrote in an essay, he was more inspired by some of the Beats, particularly Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Olson and some of the others in the Black Mountain School. I'm not really sure I see that (the Olson influence), but to be fair, I have not cracked Olson's Maximus Poems (something to start if I ever finish Pound's Cantos I guess).
I'll try to wrap this up quickly as I still have a review (of Bowering's Vermeer's Light incidentally) to get to. While there are a lot of very disparate poets that I like quite a bit, and even some where I share a somewhat similar poetic sensibility, I just am not sure I would consider myself that influenced by any particular poet. But perhaps someone else would feel differently. Anyway, I will list my top 10 favorite poets (in alphabetical order) and then another group of 15 that I rate very highly.
Paul Blackburn (my favorite Black Mountain poet*)
T.S. Eliot
Faye Kicknosway
Philip Levine
Audre Lorde
Frank O'Hara
Sharon Olds (but stopping at The Father!)
Adrienne Rich
Anne Sexton
Charles Simic
John Berryman
Robert Creeley
Emily Dickinson
Alan Dugan
Jane Kenyon
Galway Kinnell
August Kleinzahler
W.S. Merwin
Marge Piercy
Charles Reznikoff
Harvey Shapiro
Gary Snyder
Gary Soto
Wallace Stevens
W.B. Yeats
A few thoughts. Had I drawn this list up 10 years ago, I probably would have included some Beat poets such as Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti; however, my tastes have changed and Beat poetry in general hasn't held up that well in my view. I probably would also have put Yeats in the higher category and possibly included Dylan Thomas in the second category. I might have included W.C. Williams, but I don't find I read him for pleasure, so while I respect him and his work, he doesn't really belong here. That might change some day if I really delve into his work (as I once did with Wallace Stevens). Langston Hughes and E.E. Cummings are sort of just off the edge of the list, partly because they wrote so much, and yet only a relatively few poems speak to me. (One could say the same about Blackburn or O'Hara, whose poetic output was high but the quality was highly variable to say the least, but even their weaker poems spoke to me more.)
For better or worse, the list does not include any poetry in translation. It is much harder to justify how U.S.-centric it is (to say nothing of the fact that nearly all of these are 20th Century poets with only a small handful still publishing in the 21st Century), but these generally are the poets that write within a space/context that makes sense to me, and certainly it is not a fluke that most of them are urban poets. I am still sort of feeling my way into the Canadian canon, but I would say that Robert Kroetsch is probably my favourite Canadian poet, followed by George Bowering, then Louis Dudek and Al Purdy. W. H. New is in there somewhere as well.
I'll close with a relatively short list of poets whom I respect in the abstract but haven't read enough of their work to truly know them. It is possible that after I did that I would rate them higher and put them on one of these lists some day. Perhaps time will tell...
W.H. Auden
John Betjeman
Basil Bunting
Randall Jarrell
Maxine Kumin
Denise Levertov
Howard Nemerov
Kenneth Rexroth
Theodore Roethke
Muriel Rukeyser
Delmore Schwartz
W.C. Williams
* Honestly, I would not characterize Blackburn as a Black Mountain poet -- he is much closer, in my mind, to the New York School (O'Hara in particular) -- but that's where he is generally placed, so whatcha gonna do?
Monday, October 28, 2013
Rough weekend
This ended up being a particularly frustrating weekend, since the elements for having a good weekend were in place, but things either didn't quite gel or ended up being pretty negative all the way around. It doesn't help that the way I am "built" I always glom onto the negative aspect of things and that ends up overwhelming the positive aspect(s). So the difficulties in getting home from the hockey game on Friday will loom larger than the experience of being at the game (and even the fact that my son was so thrilled to go*). Why can't I let this go? After all, we managed to get home, even though I had to pay for a cab. But I really can't let it go when events or people in particular let me down, and Car2Go and the TransLink bus system really did let me down, leaving me feel completely stranded and upset. Probably I just hate the feeling of helplessness of being forced to rely on the bus system so much that when it lets me down (as it has so many, many times over the past 2 years) that it just magnifies the negative feelings I have about Vancouver.
My wife has not gotten over some cold, and I keep worrying I will catch it from her. I found myself pretty exhausted all weekend, so when things did go wrong that just magnified them that much more. Anyway, while the weather wasn't great, I did take the kids to a local Halloween party on Sat. And that wasn't too far away, so we were back within about 90 minutes. Then I cooked some slightly odd butternut & potato pie (probably would have been better with white flour but I used whole wheat flour, making it even heavier). But I just felt kind of drained.
Sunday the weather was much better, so I planned to go early to Stanley Park for the Halloween Ghost Train. It takes freaking forever to get there from our place. My daughter started complaining that she was starving while we were waiting for the second bus. I told her she was just going to have to wait until we got to the park, and we were maybe 1/3 of the way there when she threw up on the bus. This is starting to become an on-going thing with her (barely making it out of cab to the airport (and throwing up in the airport itself), then once throwing up on a plane). It's so upsetting because you feel helpless and a bit guilty for not listening (not that I thought this would happen) but then ultimately so frustrated because I can't tell if this is related to motion-sickness or an over sensitivity to gas fumes or just boredom and her way of getting us to listen to her. (But at the same time, she just won't tell us -- clearly -- that she thinks she is going to throw up and give me any warning.) Would this still have happened had she had lunch first? Quite possibly, and that would have been even worse, but maybe not, and that doubt makes me doubt myself as a parent. Mostly it makes me feel completely trapped. I cannot take her anyplace that involves being in a bus (and probably a car) for over 45 minutes. That means the trip to Seattle is out-of-bounds and definitely Portland is off (again, totally undermining any point of being in the Pacific Northwest). Maybe a train ride would be possible, but not even sure I want to risk that (to say nothing of the fact that the schedule for trains leaving from Vancouver is so sucky). It just reinforces so dramatically that living in Vancouver without a car (where virtually every bus trip takes over 45 minutes vs. 20 minutes in a car) is not working for us. I really have come to hate this place now (and am so disenchanted with the Vancouver planners & politicians who want to drive car drivers out of town). I would definitely have gotten a car by this point (and maybe been able to make some of these local trips that I have now ruled out) except that we won't be here all that much longer. But I can't wait until this particular phase of hers is over -- will it be another year or two? There was some science fiction story about a boy that kept pressing this button to skip over the tough parts of life -- and then found he has grown old and has given up most of his life. However, I would be willing to skip over two years of my daughter's childhood if it meant being past the vomiting and other body control issues.
Anyway, after this happened, I had to take them off the bus and clean her up and then find some kind of bar for her eat. At least, they were just in regular clothes so her Halloween costume wasn't ruined... I was so frustrated and flustered that I decided we were not going on to Stanley Park. I found a place to eat close to the Central Library and then after she claimed she was better, we went to the library and got a few more books and CDs. (It turned out that the big library Book Sale wrapped up on Sat., so even that didn't work out for me. Just one more damn thing...) Anyway, we got home fairly uneventfully, though I decided we would do the Canada Line rather than take the local bus, which shaved 15 or so minutes of travel time off the journey. (I don't think I will risk her being on a TransLink bus that takes more than 30 minutes from here on out, but just in general I am going to cut down on the times that I take her anyplace.) This experience really drained me and I didn't get a number of things done the rest of the day.
In an effort to be a bit more positive, I should not forget that, even though she spends a lot of time shunning me in favour of her mother, my daughter still wants to play a lot of games together in the evening (and she has a pretty good imagination.) Also, Sat. was not such a bad day, and I should try to hold onto it more -- and to look forward to trick-or-treating with the kids on Thurs (and hope that the rain does hold off). It looks like I should manage to get through Swann's Way before November begins. Apparently, November is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Swann's Way (and Proust had to pay to publish it -- how fitting for today's economy where self-publishing is again on the rise). I will also be able to finish Munro's The Dance of the Happy Shades and presumably review it this week. The first few stories seemed totally unfamiliar, but I did recognize (very vaguely) 3 of the middle stories, so I assume that I did in fact read this for a CanLit class at UToronto.
Anyway, I have decided that in the month of November, I am going to focus more on writing, probably writing on the bus, since I have quite a bit of time to kill and a relatively compact notebook that should work well for this task. I'll start off working on the sestinas and then work on this play (basically a reworking of Lear) and see how it goes. Obviously, this means I will read less, but I think that is an acceptable tradeoff.
I decided I would start off with the grocery list mentioned in this post, but I went back to the original, dropping coffee in favour of ice. This is the first stanza, and I'll see how much further I can get tonight:
In many ways, I seem a child of snow and ice,
receiving no warmth from my mother's milk --
and later rejecting the heart-warming properties of beer
or other libations. As for the comforts of bacon,
those too have been forsaken, leaving (buttered) bread,
cookies and cake as my main vices, which, under my frigid layers, smoulder and smoke.
Signing off for now...
* My son said several times it was one of the best times of his life, and I when I probed (asking didn't he say that delivering the mail to the neighbours was one of the best times of his life!) he said that he could think of 100 "greatest moments" out of millions of moments that he had been alive. What a great attitude, but not one that I've ever been able to adopt (I think he is more like my parents in having a fairly sunny attitude). This isn't precisely the same as counting one's blessings, but not that far off. There is an interesting character in Rajiv Joseph's play Animals Out of Paper who fills notebooks with his "blessings," including some things that are quite painful, but he reckons that even painful events are part of the "blessing" of being alive. I would certainly be happier if I could adopt such an attitude, but I know it is beyond me.
My wife has not gotten over some cold, and I keep worrying I will catch it from her. I found myself pretty exhausted all weekend, so when things did go wrong that just magnified them that much more. Anyway, while the weather wasn't great, I did take the kids to a local Halloween party on Sat. And that wasn't too far away, so we were back within about 90 minutes. Then I cooked some slightly odd butternut & potato pie (probably would have been better with white flour but I used whole wheat flour, making it even heavier). But I just felt kind of drained.
Sunday the weather was much better, so I planned to go early to Stanley Park for the Halloween Ghost Train. It takes freaking forever to get there from our place. My daughter started complaining that she was starving while we were waiting for the second bus. I told her she was just going to have to wait until we got to the park, and we were maybe 1/3 of the way there when she threw up on the bus. This is starting to become an on-going thing with her (barely making it out of cab to the airport (and throwing up in the airport itself), then once throwing up on a plane). It's so upsetting because you feel helpless and a bit guilty for not listening (not that I thought this would happen) but then ultimately so frustrated because I can't tell if this is related to motion-sickness or an over sensitivity to gas fumes or just boredom and her way of getting us to listen to her. (But at the same time, she just won't tell us -- clearly -- that she thinks she is going to throw up and give me any warning.) Would this still have happened had she had lunch first? Quite possibly, and that would have been even worse, but maybe not, and that doubt makes me doubt myself as a parent. Mostly it makes me feel completely trapped. I cannot take her anyplace that involves being in a bus (and probably a car) for over 45 minutes. That means the trip to Seattle is out-of-bounds and definitely Portland is off (again, totally undermining any point of being in the Pacific Northwest). Maybe a train ride would be possible, but not even sure I want to risk that (to say nothing of the fact that the schedule for trains leaving from Vancouver is so sucky). It just reinforces so dramatically that living in Vancouver without a car (where virtually every bus trip takes over 45 minutes vs. 20 minutes in a car) is not working for us. I really have come to hate this place now (and am so disenchanted with the Vancouver planners & politicians who want to drive car drivers out of town). I would definitely have gotten a car by this point (and maybe been able to make some of these local trips that I have now ruled out) except that we won't be here all that much longer. But I can't wait until this particular phase of hers is over -- will it be another year or two? There was some science fiction story about a boy that kept pressing this button to skip over the tough parts of life -- and then found he has grown old and has given up most of his life. However, I would be willing to skip over two years of my daughter's childhood if it meant being past the vomiting and other body control issues.
Anyway, after this happened, I had to take them off the bus and clean her up and then find some kind of bar for her eat. At least, they were just in regular clothes so her Halloween costume wasn't ruined... I was so frustrated and flustered that I decided we were not going on to Stanley Park. I found a place to eat close to the Central Library and then after she claimed she was better, we went to the library and got a few more books and CDs. (It turned out that the big library Book Sale wrapped up on Sat., so even that didn't work out for me. Just one more damn thing...) Anyway, we got home fairly uneventfully, though I decided we would do the Canada Line rather than take the local bus, which shaved 15 or so minutes of travel time off the journey. (I don't think I will risk her being on a TransLink bus that takes more than 30 minutes from here on out, but just in general I am going to cut down on the times that I take her anyplace.) This experience really drained me and I didn't get a number of things done the rest of the day.
In an effort to be a bit more positive, I should not forget that, even though she spends a lot of time shunning me in favour of her mother, my daughter still wants to play a lot of games together in the evening (and she has a pretty good imagination.) Also, Sat. was not such a bad day, and I should try to hold onto it more -- and to look forward to trick-or-treating with the kids on Thurs (and hope that the rain does hold off). It looks like I should manage to get through Swann's Way before November begins. Apparently, November is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Swann's Way (and Proust had to pay to publish it -- how fitting for today's economy where self-publishing is again on the rise). I will also be able to finish Munro's The Dance of the Happy Shades and presumably review it this week. The first few stories seemed totally unfamiliar, but I did recognize (very vaguely) 3 of the middle stories, so I assume that I did in fact read this for a CanLit class at UToronto.
Anyway, I have decided that in the month of November, I am going to focus more on writing, probably writing on the bus, since I have quite a bit of time to kill and a relatively compact notebook that should work well for this task. I'll start off working on the sestinas and then work on this play (basically a reworking of Lear) and see how it goes. Obviously, this means I will read less, but I think that is an acceptable tradeoff.
I decided I would start off with the grocery list mentioned in this post, but I went back to the original, dropping coffee in favour of ice. This is the first stanza, and I'll see how much further I can get tonight:
In many ways, I seem a child of snow and ice,
receiving no warmth from my mother's milk --
and later rejecting the heart-warming properties of beer
or other libations. As for the comforts of bacon,
those too have been forsaken, leaving (buttered) bread,
cookies and cake as my main vices, which, under my frigid layers, smoulder and smoke.
Signing off for now...
* My son said several times it was one of the best times of his life, and I when I probed (asking didn't he say that delivering the mail to the neighbours was one of the best times of his life!) he said that he could think of 100 "greatest moments" out of millions of moments that he had been alive. What a great attitude, but not one that I've ever been able to adopt (I think he is more like my parents in having a fairly sunny attitude). This isn't precisely the same as counting one's blessings, but not that far off. There is an interesting character in Rajiv Joseph's play Animals Out of Paper who fills notebooks with his "blessings," including some things that are quite painful, but he reckons that even painful events are part of the "blessing" of being alive. I would certainly be happier if I could adopt such an attitude, but I know it is beyond me.
Saturday, October 26, 2013
Progress through Proust
Can I paste a widget? (Sorry -- apologies to Marvin Gaye)
I know there has to be a more elegant way of doing this -- I really wanted something like a large thermometer where I could customize each tick with the book title and page count, but I'll just settle for something that works... Still not sure I will get all the way through this opus, but this is where I shall track my progress to date.*
X Swann's Way
Pages: 462
Read: 462
(Note: have finally completed Swann in Love!)
X Within a Budding Grove
Pages: 556
Read: 556
(Note: am done with Madame Swann at Home.)
X The Guermantes Way
Pages: 620
Read: 620
X Cities of the Plain (Sodom and Gomorrah)
Pages: 549
Read: 549
X The Captive
Pages: 422
Read: 422
X The Fugitive
Pages: 284
Read: 284
(Albertine's gone. Ohh nooo.)
X Time Regained
Pages: 401
Read: 401
Done at last, done at last! Can hardly believe I am done at last!
(Ok, very inappropriate, I know. But I do feel freed from having this burden lifted. Now the sensible thing to do would be to take even a quarter of this effort and use it to become a "real" writer, the same way the Narrator does in the last 50 pages or so of Time Regained.)
* It's kind of fascinating that 90% or so of the pages discussing these progress meters are all tied back to NaNoWriMo (National (November) Novel Writing Month). I guess I could take that as a Sign (or at least a sign that November is nearly upon us), but I am not going to tackle a novel (in a month!) this year and probably not next year either. Just too many other tasks I am too far behind on. Still I will set some manageable goals of writing more (and surfing the web less), probably starting with resurrecting my broken sestina series.
I know there has to be a more elegant way of doing this -- I really wanted something like a large thermometer where I could customize each tick with the book title and page count, but I'll just settle for something that works... Still not sure I will get all the way through this opus, but this is where I shall track my progress to date.*
X Swann's Way
Pages: 462
Read: 462
100%
X Within a Budding Grove
Pages: 556
Read: 556
100%
X The Guermantes Way
Pages: 620
Read: 620
100%
X Cities of the Plain (Sodom and Gomorrah)
Pages: 549
Read: 549
100%
X The Captive
Pages: 422
Read: 422
100%
X The Fugitive
Pages: 284
Read: 284
100%
X Time Regained
Pages: 401
Read: 401
100%
Done at last, done at last! Can hardly believe I am done at last!
(Ok, very inappropriate, I know. But I do feel freed from having this burden lifted. Now the sensible thing to do would be to take even a quarter of this effort and use it to become a "real" writer, the same way the Narrator does in the last 50 pages or so of Time Regained.)
* It's kind of fascinating that 90% or so of the pages discussing these progress meters are all tied back to NaNoWriMo (National (November) Novel Writing Month). I guess I could take that as a Sign (or at least a sign that November is nearly upon us), but I am not going to tackle a novel (in a month!) this year and probably not next year either. Just too many other tasks I am too far behind on. Still I will set some manageable goals of writing more (and surfing the web less), probably starting with resurrecting my broken sestina series.
Friday, October 25, 2013
Swann - Romantic fool
It is just not getting any easier going through Swann's Way. There are occasional flashes of insight, but really nothing much more profound than "familiarity breeds contempt" or "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of" (Pascal). And the length is just killing me. Plus the fact that page after page is just a solid wall of text with no dialogue breaks. I am not enjoying this much at all, and I don't see it getting any better. Rationally, I know I should just cut my losses and move on, but it has just about moved into that category of an endurance test -- and I do hate to fail one of those. I guarantee you if I do manage to finish Proust, I will never ever be tempted to crack its pages again; this is a one-time performance. Furthermore, if I do stop, I will not finish; it is a make-or-break decision, which I don't take lightly. What's vaguely amusing is that while I was quite daunted by Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy and put off starting it for a year, it wasn't so bad once I actually cracked Palace Walk and I finished the whole thing in 2-3 weeks (I really should put my thoughts on that down soon). Even things that should be of some interest in Swann's Way -- Swann finding himself desperately in love with Odette who grew bored of him after he was "hooked" -- are written in a way that drains them of any dramatic interest. Frankly, it is an old, old story that generally is only of interest when you put in the fights, verbal or physical. Here it is a one-sided account of an amour fou, with the man keeping as much inside as possible, yet still coming across as querulous to Odette and even some of his friends.
Well, I have been there in my early 20s, getting into an impossible desire situation -- and then boring my friends with it, even losing one or two in the process. But even I don't want to read this going on in Proust, especially since it has even less surface drama than my buttoned-down escapades. (Still, definitely something to watch for in that still-gestating novel -- I plan to keep the "frustrated love" storyline to only about 1/3 of the novel before moving into slightly more manic adventures in Toronto.)
I am particularly struggling to find Swann to be an interesting character to begin with. The Narrator really seemed to build him up as someone who was a bit of a straight-shooter (though as far as I can tell the extent of it was that he refused to hedge his opinions with socially acceptable phrases*). Perhaps this is actually supposed to be more layered (and ironic) that I am reading into it, and we see just how low Swann can fall -- and really how boorish he is in some of the things he says to Odette. It is kind of hard to see why he was so esteemed in some of the circles he moved in, apparently having easy access to the nobility (when was Swann in Love supposedly set anyway? -- it reads more like the Russian nobility than one finds in Tolstoy than what one would expect in post-Napoleonic France -- perhaps it is supposed to be in the 1860s when Napoleon III resurrected the French empire). Once he is finally stung by Cupid, he spends an inordinate amount of time setting up situations where he may run into her (once he is finally forbidden to turn up at the Verdurins' evening salons). This does exasperate his friends (and the Narrator's grandfather simply refuses to get involved in this pursuit or any of Swann's previous less fraught entanglements), but doesn't seem to lead to a break with any of them. Still, he shows a shocking lack of self-awareness and loses the ironic view on life that apparently had made him such an amusing companion. While that is partly the point of this part of the book (that love makes one lose one's head), whenever you actually hear Swann's actual words, he comes across as a self-serious bore; it is hard to believe he was such an interesting fellow prior to falling for Odette.
I would hope that I never lose at least a bit of self-awareness and ironic detachment, no matter the situation. Or at least in anything I commit to paper...
So I will close with a link to an interesting (but very long by internet standards) essay by Richard Katrovas, talking about, among many other things, the worst restaurant in Prague and perhaps the Free World. I stumbled across this while trying to learn more about Katrovas' poetry collection Prague Winter. I'm often intrigued by poets writing about Prague. (For instance, Ken Norris's poems on Prague in Limbo Road are among the best in that collection.) I suspect that I won't actually like the poems in Prague Winter that much, as Katrovas largely writes formal (and even rhyming) poetry, which I actually find fairly off-putting, particularly if it was written in the past 25 years. But he seems like a pretty good prose writer.
Anyway, this essay talks quite a bit about the Prague Summer (Writing) Program** run out of Western Michigan University, since Katrovas is the Director of the program and his ex-wife also is involved. But Katrovas is a lot more knowing and ironic in describing how he navigates the shoals of dealing with (indeed working with) someone with whom you were once romantically engaged than Swann is in Swann's Way. What is curious about this essay (an extract from Katrovas's Raising Girls in Bohemia) is that it is plastered on the Prague Summer Program website, which may be just a bit too much sharing than I would be comfortable with (do the students really need to know quite so much about what his ex-wife thinks about difficult writers?). However, one could also take comfort that Katrovas says that with few exceptions, he hasn't brought any difficult writers on board -- it is those other writers not affiliated with PSP that are so hard to deal with, not you... In any event, it appears that his ex-wife has moved on (since the writing of that essay), and it is his oldest daughter who has taken her place as Program Coordinator. Perhaps in the end it was too hard for him to work with an ex-wife, ironic outlook notwithstanding.
* Really the equivalent of the Pointy-Haired Boss (from Dilbert) accepting any insult, as long as it was preceded by "With all due respect." Swann, however, refuses to start off by saying "With all due respect" and that annoys his more bourgeois hosts. To me, this hardly makes him a hero or a paragon of virtue, though it seems to be something that the Narrator admired.
** This actually looks like a lot of fun, if a bit of a cash-cow from WMU's perspective. And some of the associated faculty, including Stuart Dybek and Patricia Hampl, are quite respectable figures. But it's something I should have done 20 or more years ago (not that I would have had the money readily available). And indeed, I did something along similar lines (the New England Literature Program through U Michigan), though that focused on reading/exploring literature and not nearly as much on writing. I guess I'll just have to time it so that I have a novel or book of memoirs come out once the kids are grown, so I can go off on these junkets as an invited writer and not as a paying guest.
Thinking about these kind of programs triggered the memory of a play I had seen in Chicago. After a bit of digging I pulled out the title: Some Americans Abroad by Richard Nelson. It does a good job of telling the story of the various overseas programs that so many universities run now, but from the perspective of the (fairly cynical and/or careerist) professors and staff who run them, not from the perspective of the dewy-eyed naifs who pay to soak in European culture (and be a bit pampered) on these programs.
Well, I have been there in my early 20s, getting into an impossible desire situation -- and then boring my friends with it, even losing one or two in the process. But even I don't want to read this going on in Proust, especially since it has even less surface drama than my buttoned-down escapades. (Still, definitely something to watch for in that still-gestating novel -- I plan to keep the "frustrated love" storyline to only about 1/3 of the novel before moving into slightly more manic adventures in Toronto.)
I am particularly struggling to find Swann to be an interesting character to begin with. The Narrator really seemed to build him up as someone who was a bit of a straight-shooter (though as far as I can tell the extent of it was that he refused to hedge his opinions with socially acceptable phrases*). Perhaps this is actually supposed to be more layered (and ironic) that I am reading into it, and we see just how low Swann can fall -- and really how boorish he is in some of the things he says to Odette. It is kind of hard to see why he was so esteemed in some of the circles he moved in, apparently having easy access to the nobility (when was Swann in Love supposedly set anyway? -- it reads more like the Russian nobility than one finds in Tolstoy than what one would expect in post-Napoleonic France -- perhaps it is supposed to be in the 1860s when Napoleon III resurrected the French empire). Once he is finally stung by Cupid, he spends an inordinate amount of time setting up situations where he may run into her (once he is finally forbidden to turn up at the Verdurins' evening salons). This does exasperate his friends (and the Narrator's grandfather simply refuses to get involved in this pursuit or any of Swann's previous less fraught entanglements), but doesn't seem to lead to a break with any of them. Still, he shows a shocking lack of self-awareness and loses the ironic view on life that apparently had made him such an amusing companion. While that is partly the point of this part of the book (that love makes one lose one's head), whenever you actually hear Swann's actual words, he comes across as a self-serious bore; it is hard to believe he was such an interesting fellow prior to falling for Odette.
I would hope that I never lose at least a bit of self-awareness and ironic detachment, no matter the situation. Or at least in anything I commit to paper...
So I will close with a link to an interesting (but very long by internet standards) essay by Richard Katrovas, talking about, among many other things, the worst restaurant in Prague and perhaps the Free World. I stumbled across this while trying to learn more about Katrovas' poetry collection Prague Winter. I'm often intrigued by poets writing about Prague. (For instance, Ken Norris's poems on Prague in Limbo Road are among the best in that collection.) I suspect that I won't actually like the poems in Prague Winter that much, as Katrovas largely writes formal (and even rhyming) poetry, which I actually find fairly off-putting, particularly if it was written in the past 25 years. But he seems like a pretty good prose writer.
Anyway, this essay talks quite a bit about the Prague Summer (Writing) Program** run out of Western Michigan University, since Katrovas is the Director of the program and his ex-wife also is involved. But Katrovas is a lot more knowing and ironic in describing how he navigates the shoals of dealing with (indeed working with) someone with whom you were once romantically engaged than Swann is in Swann's Way. What is curious about this essay (an extract from Katrovas's Raising Girls in Bohemia) is that it is plastered on the Prague Summer Program website, which may be just a bit too much sharing than I would be comfortable with (do the students really need to know quite so much about what his ex-wife thinks about difficult writers?). However, one could also take comfort that Katrovas says that with few exceptions, he hasn't brought any difficult writers on board -- it is those other writers not affiliated with PSP that are so hard to deal with, not you... In any event, it appears that his ex-wife has moved on (since the writing of that essay), and it is his oldest daughter who has taken her place as Program Coordinator. Perhaps in the end it was too hard for him to work with an ex-wife, ironic outlook notwithstanding.
* Really the equivalent of the Pointy-Haired Boss (from Dilbert) accepting any insult, as long as it was preceded by "With all due respect." Swann, however, refuses to start off by saying "With all due respect" and that annoys his more bourgeois hosts. To me, this hardly makes him a hero or a paragon of virtue, though it seems to be something that the Narrator admired.
** This actually looks like a lot of fun, if a bit of a cash-cow from WMU's perspective. And some of the associated faculty, including Stuart Dybek and Patricia Hampl, are quite respectable figures. But it's something I should have done 20 or more years ago (not that I would have had the money readily available). And indeed, I did something along similar lines (the New England Literature Program through U Michigan), though that focused on reading/exploring literature and not nearly as much on writing. I guess I'll just have to time it so that I have a novel or book of memoirs come out once the kids are grown, so I can go off on these junkets as an invited writer and not as a paying guest.
Thinking about these kind of programs triggered the memory of a play I had seen in Chicago. After a bit of digging I pulled out the title: Some Americans Abroad by Richard Nelson. It does a good job of telling the story of the various overseas programs that so many universities run now, but from the perspective of the (fairly cynical and/or careerist) professors and staff who run them, not from the perspective of the dewy-eyed naifs who pay to soak in European culture (and be a bit pampered) on these programs.
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