The kindred smile on our lips

Rainer Maria Rilke and Louise Andreas-Salomé shared a love story, or something like it.

My day also wishes me to tell you: it is poor because you are not near it; it is rich because your goodness spreads light over all its things. I talk to you often and speak of you with all that is mine. Live, sad to say, among people who interrupt my dreams with their loudness, and know, of course, not a single one of them. They are people who talk about trips, rainy days, and raising children, who bow deeply to each other, smiling and rubbing their hands, and greet each other with "Good Morning" ten times a day in loud, disagreeable voices." And so I associate only with Stauffer-Bern, who, though unpleasant in many respects, still seems an interesting and remarkable man. I look forward to telling you about this strange Bernbeurger, who is a mixture of daring and cowardice, of quiet, pellucid feeling and brutal, callous assertion, and who seems to express these inner contradictions (always magnifying them awkwardly) whenever he is in the presence of a woman. But the real tragedy of Stauffer's life lies not in the self-doubt that again and again subjects his hope to bitterness and leads him away from one branch of art off toward some other, before he can ever really flourish in any one: but rather in the fact that neither he nor Frau Escher recognized early enough (or wished to recognize?) what really attracted them to each other; and that then, when such recognition did belatedly arrive, in the sacred day of their having at last found each other, such violent storms erupted that all the young sprouting seeds could not but be destroyed. It is not enough for two people to find each other, it is also very important that they find each other at the right moment and hold deep, quiet festivals in which their desires merge so that they can fight as one against storms. How many people have parted ways because they did not find the time slowly to grow close to each other? Before two people can experience unhappiness together, they have to have been blissful together and possess a sacred memory of that time, which evokes a kindred smile on their lips and a kindred longing in their souls. They become like children who have lived through the festivities of a Christmas night together; when they find a few minutes to catch their breath during the pale, drawn-out days, they will sit down together and tell each other with glowing cheeks about that pin-tree-scented nighttime full of sparkling lights . . .

Such people will weather all storms together.

— Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé, September 5, 1897, from Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters.

This is a remarkable book. I've read it slowly, very slowly, over months, which I think is the only way, really. It's been my summer book, from first flush to cool comfort. This summer has been bracketed — set off from the rest of my life — between its covers.

And it is a love story, or so the subtitle claims. The love is difficult to disentangle sometimes from the writer's block, the writer's despair, the treatises on art, the plans, the endless plans for visits, travels, studies, work, plans many of which never came to fruition.

They are each of them in love with their work, but their love for each other remains something of a mystery.

The first of the letters is from Rilke, following their first meeting, an afternoon tea with a mutual friend, in 1897. They became lovers shortly thereafter, and spent a good part of the next couple years together, though this I learn from the notes, the exact nature of their relationship being rather difficult to discern from the letters themselves.

Their correspondence continued until Rilke's death in 1926.

Rilke's letters are at times effusive and nostalgic for the the time they spent together. Above all, they are poetic. Even while he despairs of not being able to produce anything worthwhile of his own, he grasps for life — passionately — in the work of Rodin and Baudelaire. He is excited to discover, and share, Proust and Rabindranath Tagore. Later, he is a fervent admirer of, and feels a deep affinity for, the poetry of Paul Valéry and throws himself into the task of its translation.

One of the most interesting letters, one which excites discussion throughout the ensuing exchanges, concerns Rilke's impressions of Rodin — both the sculptor-artist and the person. Rodin is clearly not just an artist, but a craftsman, as well as being of a disposition that includes the focus and discipline that his art-craft demands; these are characteristics Rilke strives for (virtually to the end of his days), but it's apparent that his chosen medium — words — doesn't allow for the same tangibility of effect.

Nothing he chooses to sculpt has for him even the slightest hint of vagueness: it is a region where thousands of tiny surface elements have been fitted into space, and his task, when he creates an artwork after it, is to fit the thing even more tightly, even more passionately, a thousand times more adroitly than before, into the breadth of space around it — so that it wouldn't move even if one shook it. The thing is definite; the art-thing must be more definite; removed from all accident, torn away from every uncertainty, lifted out of time and given to space, it has become enduring, capable of eternity. The model seems, the art-thing is. Thus the latter is that inexpressible advance over the former, the calm and mounting realization for the desire to be that emanates from everything in nature. By this is banished that error which would view art as the vainest and most capricious of vocations; art is the humblest service and founded absolutely on law. But all artists and all the arts are infected by this error, and so a very powerful man had to rise up against it; and he had to be someone whose pronouncements are deeds, someone who doesn't talk and incessantly creates things. From the beginning art for Rodin was realization (and such the very opposite of music, which transforms the seeming realities of the everyday world, and de-realized them even further by absorbing them into the easy glissando of appearances. Which is why this opposite of the art-work, this vague act of non-condensing, this temptation toward diffuseness, has so many friends and advocates and addicts, so many who are unfree, who are chained to pleasure, who have no inner powers of intensification and must be enraptured from without. . . .).

As entrancing as the words and ideas are, let us not forget that Rilke writes all this to one woman in particular (though it is easy to forget — a great portion of Andreas-Salomé's letters did not survive).

The big question: Who is this woman who could so engage the bright minds of Europe? It's rumored Nietzsche proposed to her (though biographers dispute this). Though married, she seemed to have enjoyed intense correspondences and relationships with many intellectuals, Freud also among them.

Her writing is cold and clinical. She offers encouragement to Rilke by way of analyzing, explicating, his letters to her and the state of his mind behind them, highlighting his artistic and emotional progress. It is only in the later years that she herself shows any glimmer of real feeling:

And I am looking forward more than words can say to my rooms and woods; to the wanderings and exploratory side-trips one undertakes so deep within oneself while trees, tiny animals, clouds, mountaintops look on in silent sympathy. It is almost divinely beautiful that life knows and can embrace this alternation from the outside to the inside and vice versa. Often, often, often I am with you in all my thoughts and discover there again and again such fullness, which I ever so gradually relive, since in the actual moment of our being together there was not nearly enough time to experience it.

— Lou Andreas-Salomé to Rainer Maria Rilke, October 28, 1913, from Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters.

(I'm struck also by how correspondence has changed. I write dozens of emails a day, for work, but some personal, too; they are instantaneous, and then they vanish. They are sometimes just a sentence, or even a word. Some are wordless — a punctuation mark, or an emoticon, will do. Yet these are full conversations, relationships. It seems to me, however, that we lack the time, and indeed often the interest, to explore an idea with any vigour of more than a soundbite. There is an irony, too, that with those people with whom I communicate more sporadically I also enjoy perhaps a richer exchange, full of stories, analysis, progress, reflection. Meanwhile, those relationships of my everyday lack this communicative depth; we are in a position to "observe" each other living and feel (wrongly) that explication is no longer deemed required; exchange is spread thin, made superficial, stretched into the fabric of banality. Ah, for a proper letter!)

See also:
July 25, 1903
October 19, 1904
September 9, 1914

Détente

Not quite 3 weeks into kindergarten, and I hear what's sure to become a familiar drone for years to come. "I'm tired. I don't want to go to school today."

We make some final wardrobe adjustments, and Helena's attitude relaxes a little before she puts on another.

But they'll probably have a détente she tells me, as she stretches out on her rumpled bed, assuming a pose of repose.

"Une détente! C'est plus cool qu'une sieste."

Oh, really? Why's that?

She raises a cocky little eyebrow. "Mais, oui! C'est pas la garderie; I'm in school now."

Something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful

Or maybe that even the mere possibility of expressing any of this childish heartbreak to someone else seemed impossible except in the context of the mystery of true marriage, meaning not just a ceremony and financial merger but a true communion of souls, and Schmidt now lately felt he was coming to understand why the Church all through his childhood catechism and pre-Con referred to it as the Holy Sacrament of Marriage, for it seemed every bit as miraculous and transrational and remote from the possibilities of actual lived life as the crucifixion and resurrection and transubstantiation did, which is to say it appeared not as a goal to expect ever to really reach or achieve but as a kind of navigational star, as in in the sky, something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful in the sort of distant way that reminded you always of how ordinary and unbeautiful and incapable of miracles you your own self were, which was another reason why Schmidt had stopped looking at the sky or going out at night or even usually ever opening the lightproof curtains of his condominium's picture window when he got home at night [...]

— from "Mister Squishy," in Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace.

So. I managed only to read a mere fraction of that brick he wrote, kind of hating it while admiring it, resenting it for not quite getting it, but had (still have) every intention of reading the whole damn thing before the year is out, chalking up my relationship with that book as a matter of wrong time, wrong place, and choosing to reserve judgement for after a better time and place could be had with it, and it sits uncomfortably with me to pay attention to the man's work just because he's gone and died, but I loved (loved!) that commencement address of his, and I pressed it upon tens of people who didn't know who the hell he was (and most of them were in agreement with me in finding it a pretty beautiful thing), and that lobster essay was pretty interesting too, so I found it unsettling but serendipitous that on my lunch break yesterday, on a quick jaunt over to the bookstore across the street, I should find Oblivion in the bargain stacks, so I bought it, even while I wanted to chastise the checkout clerk (on whose face there was no sign of recognition of the book, or the author's name, no sign that the material substance of our transaction had registered in any way other than that of the electronic scanning of barcode and resulting financial exchange), or the management, that this was somehow wrong, wanted to wake them up, "Don't you know he just killed himself? And you put him in the bargain stacks?" just as similarly, but different, when I found Doris Lessing on that same table I wondered, "Don't you know she was just awarded the Nobel prize?" but hey, the guy's dead, and the book was cheap, why not read it now? I managed to read a story (at random, from the middle) while waiting in line and found it, well, devastating.

From A to Z

"I spy, with my little eye, something that starts with the letter A," Helena challenges me while we lunch.

None of the usual possibilities are in evidence. She's been trying new things lately, but I draw a blank.

Finally I ask an all-important question: "Starts with A... In English or in French?"

"English. En français, ça commence avec Z." She's quite clear on this. English, A; français, Z.

I need a hint. "Everybody has two of them." Arms? No. "They can be blue, or green, or..." I throw out random silly answers: feet, parents, eyes, cars.

She smiles as if I've hit on something. "A-, aaa-, a-, eyes." Oh.

But the French doesn't fit? "Z-, zzz-, z-, zyeux. Lay zyeux. Les yeux."

It's clear we have a way to go in our spelling skills. In both languages.

The nameless human doom

[O]ne lacks the innocence to be with Nature; her influence, her quiet insistent presence, is outweighed from the start by one's awareness of the nameless human doom that is grinding on day and night, unstoppably.

— Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé, September 9, 1914, from Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters.

How quickly it turns

I'd been in an unreasonably good mood as the week started, but very suddenly it turned.

1. I think I may have killed Slimey. Too much water. I cleaned out his jar, leaving him there to dry out, but when I told J-F I thought he might be dead, J-F at once removed the jar from the house. I think now I'm more upset at the prospect of not knowing whether he lives or dies than by his potential death in itself. I was holding out hope that Slimey would right himself — surely he's simply tired from having gone to school with Helena.

(It turns out, J-F had upturned the jar's contents (Slimey) into an outdoor potted plant. Hours later I saw Slimey fully extended, eyeball stalks atwitch, and plotting an escape route.)

2. I've been anticipating review copies of a couple books this week and still I haven't received them. Grr.

3. I did not manage to attend the cello Master's Recital yesterday evening as I'd planned. I've been thinking of it for weeks, but felt guilty and selfish for already having spent an evening out early in the week and with another commitment another day soon, and resentful that I must cook supper and bathe the child and see said child to bed and spend time at home. This, entirely irrational. Of course, I could've gone, and we fought, and suddenly it was easy to go, there was time for this, for that, and for me too, and I almost went, but in the end I chose not to. There will be more recitals in weeks to come, and I will plan better.

It's taken very little to set things right again.

1. I drop Helena off at school in the morning. I've developed an interest in befriending one of the other mothers — this based solely on the fact that she wears exquisite shoes.

2. Helena is thrilled to find that her playmate from the park attends the same school. She has a little crush on Lazaro. (One recent evening she confided her worry in me, that they wouldn't be able to talk to each other — we'd heard him speak Spanish with his mother. We confirmed that he spoke French and found out his name on a subsequent park visit.)

3. I've started learning tai chi. It makes my fingers hurt. I don't think this is normal, but I like to think this is what it must feel like when negative energy leaves my body.

In which the highlights of my fabulous weekend with the kid are itemized

Friday night
1. Suggested the kid have ice cream for supper. It was hot. (She opted for something more sensible. Popsicles for dessert though.)

2. Swung on a swing at the park.

3. Pierogi for supper! (How selfish I am!: I hide them in the freezer till he's away for the weekend so I don't have to share.)

Saturday
4. Made crêpes. With the kid. Lots of them. (Lots of crêpes, just the one kid.) We will have no breakfast worries for weeks to come!

5. Ate crêpes. (Not all of them.)

6. Fed the ducks at the park. (The other park — took the métro.) Instigated some kind of duck riot.

7. Got caught in the rain. Got soaked. Jumped in puddle.

8. Had a big glass of buttermilk. (The kid is not so much into this, but I think it's delicious.)

Sunday
9. Stayed in our pyjamas all day long.

10. Played board games.

11. Made significant headway in the book I'm reading — have been reading all summer (Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters).

12. Found massive snail in the soil of a recently acquired houseplant in the course of tending to it. Presumed it dead, but was mistaken. Spent hours, off and on, watching said snail slime about a water glass, extend and retract. Set about to construct it a proper home: old jar nested with dirt and leaves. (Has anyone ever kept a snail for a pet? Tips?)

13. Watched some favourite Doctor Who episodes. Helena has seen them numerous times, but she asks more sophisticated questions about them now.

14. Wrote, some.

15. Did I mention? Stayed in our pyjamas all day long.

This is love too

There's something joyous about Adverbs, by Daniel Handler. It's not the what; it's the how. It's executed playfully and brashly, if sometimes wistfully.

I'm not sure what qualifies it as a novel, why it proclaims itself to be one. It reads like a series of interconnected short stories, with some characters recurring and some incidents in common.

But it's all about love.

Each of the stories takes for its title an adverb — briefly, symbolically, particularly — the manner of love explored within it.

I am trying to figure out the difference between this book and the other collection of short stories I recently read. The stories in One More Year (Sana Krasikov) were also about love, various kinds, but all imbued with loneliness and desperation. Adverbs, on the other hand, while it doesn't shy away from the odd or hopeless, glories in all love's messiness. These 2 books — only the words are different.

Am I in a better mood this week? I have been busier and am more tired. Does this make me more or less in the world? Does that put me more fully, better, into the experience of reading? The joy — does it come from me or the book?

Here's a question Handler poses that I'm stuck on: When do you know when something is becoming something that changes you? That would be pretty much everything, all the time, if you're open to it.

When do you learn that the world, like any diner worth its salt, is open twenty-four hours a day?

Because it is, you know. I learned this some time ago, but it's important to be reminded.

(Summer was open 24 hours a day, and it changed me!)

I've been reading this book mostly in the metro, a diversion from the general misery of the commute(rs).

They abandon the clearing for the rest of the story to walk together. This is how it is in life and love. In life and love we are with people for a while, and then we join other people, people we have not met, and we walk with them, and we leave behind all the things where we used to be. Sometimes we leave people behind too. Sometimes we walk away from the forest and abandon a person there and never see them again. This happens every day. Every day this happens and scarcely anybody cares.

Handler tells us on virtually every page what love is, how this is part of it, and this too, and this thing also is a kind of love, and he's right, really, everything — all of it — is love.

It's weird and sad, but this is life. Grab it by the balls. Be in it. Love!

Stupidly. Fiercely. Better.

The transparent storyboard

Wired pulls back the curtain on creating a feature (and on Charlie Kaufman, it so happens), blogging the entire process: Storyboard.

The few posts to date are background on the concept and logistics, but it promises to catch up to real time any day now and lay bare the rough drafts, internal emails, production hiccups...

The editor in me thinks this is one of the very coolest concept blogs ever!

(Via Boing Boing.)

Devour your desperation

And he traveled, from one side to the other
of dreams,
just like an earthworm,
dragging his desperation,
devouring it.

— from "The Worm," in Romantic Dogs, by Roberto Bolaño.

(Coming soon.)

Girlfriend

I started writing this post about a year ago. Mostly, it was about Helena coming into her own as a person, being her own little girl, and about some of the resulting turmoil I'd been experiencing as her mother.

In a year, little has changed — she's still coming into her own as a person (does it ever stop?), and I still feel turmoil about it — and everything has changed.

I don't write about her here as much as I'd like. I say this is because I think she deserves her privacy, but this is also a convenient excuse. The truth is it's hard to write about her: Mind you, I feel that I don't write about her per se; I write about the experience of motherhood (which happens to pertain to her). (Just as, generally, I don't write about books; I write about how they affect me.) And that is extremely personal, which makes it difficult to articulate — to myself, let alone others.

So. This post I started writing a year ago... much of it existed only in my head; what few words I'd written, I've essentially deleted. So, why do I even bother to revisit it now? Because I think my daughter is amazingly cool, and I want to remember, now and for always.

What I wanted to say then...

Helena bought her first CD. I don't know how it came about, but Helena loves Avril Lavigne. (Loved? This phase may already be over...) I think particularly the pink in her hair. After seeing repeated promos for a concert to be broadcast on TV last summer, we had to watch. Weeks went by, and Helena kept singing her songs and asking for a CD. Maybe I'm wrong, but Avril to me embodies a better kind of girl power than do many of her contemporaries — besides which she's musically more my style. So it came to pass.

(Do you remember the first record you bought? How old were you? I was 12, and ashamed to say that first album was Asia.)

I bought Helena a Barbie. A year later this seems like no news at all. I'd never been much of a Barbie girl myself, and generally I feel as conflicted about Barbie corporation as I do about Disney, even while this brand name consumption is de rigueur among her peers. Helena wanted a Barbie — begged for one. I thought long and hard. Ultimately, I thought, better to head off the influences of others I may not approve of and introduce her to the world of Barbie myself. I'm proud that, with just the tiniest bit of nudging, she turned away from all the sparkly sluttiness and chose for herself something altogether more wholesome, Barbie in jeans and with a pony, seeming to me the right formula for realistic fantasy play. Helena has of course received more Barbies since, but I'm glad the first one came from me.

Then there was Julie, a new educatrice at the daycare. Helena was enamored of her. "You know, Mom, I love Julie more than you. She smells sssoooo good." I haven't heard of Julie in months; she hadn't worked there long. Funny about smell, though — so primal and Proustian, smell; I was jealous of Julie. But most days when I tuck Helena in, she tells me I smell good, and my heart soars.

(My mother wore perfume, still wears it, and it triggers a migraine. When I'm around, I've asked her not to. But still she does. She puts so little, she says. But I still have to breathe away from her, can't breathe her in. She had a scarf, however, that smelled like her, like her beneath the cologne, and some years ago I asked to have it. Even after repeated washings, I smell her in it, faint, but there, around my neck.)

What I want to say now...

Helena asks to have her radio on when I tuck her in. We went through a phase of this, a year ago, and sometime before that, and she'd listen to classical music to fall asleep. Now she asks to change the station and settles on "classic rock," so she's falling asleep to 54-40, Led Zeppelin, and U2. I check in on her the other night; she's still awake, and I ask if I should turn the radio off. "No. I'm not dancing, Mom. I'm listening to it quietly, like this. I like listening to music, especially cool music. Rock and roll is cool." And then she plays a couple bars of air guitar along to Heart.

Last week she was singing Foo Fighters in the bathtub.

Helena started school last week. Kindergarten.

Look at me
Look at me
Just called to say that it's good to be
ALIVE
In such a small world...

Day 2 her father dropped her off. When her teacher came out to corral the kids, Helena simply turned around and said, "Bye, Dad."

*****

"You're my best friend, Momma. We'll always be best friends, won't we, Momma?" For a little while longer, at least.

Submerged in that flood tide of raw, dense, motley, and tumultuous life

Her mother was a shopkeeper who had an open-air stall selling Catalan notions and textiles in the market plaza. The market plaza: a great quadrangular space, bounded by decrepit and tumbledown old houses with porticoes, which in the morning hours filled with the village throngs in a vast bubbling of colors, smells, and noises of the most violent and blatant kind; all manner of carmines, vermilions, veronese greens, and yellows of the fruits and vegetables; scarlets, cadmiums, indigos, and purples of the peasant skirts, capes, and parasols; the balsamic aroma of the mountain grasses, the cloying odor of the pimento, afuegaelpito and pata de mulo cheeses, scent of damp earth, stink of corral and stable; cock crows, duck quacks, lamb bleats, mongrel barks; sound of hurdy-gurdy and of bagpipes, laughs, agreements and curses, the barber's oratory, and psalmody of the little storyteller, the grumbling of the blind man, reciter of tales of crimes and shipwrecks. In the early afternoon, the plaza faded out and fell into a pallid and deep quietude, without any sign of life. In the still air there wafted the bell of the neighboring church of San Isidoro, pealing Animas.

There Micaela spent the years of her infancy, adolescence, and youth. Her education might have been even worse than that of the streets, as is the education of the market, were it not that Micaela had not been born to allow herself to be shaped by the surrounding reality or to be carried along by the flux of life, but rather to correct and channel the reality at hand and the flow of life that had fallen to her lot, within herself and about herself. Primordial character trait: the absence of sensuality. Her senses did not dominate her. She almost, almost, did not have senses, since she did not use them to surrender herself to the world or to delight in its beautiful spectacle, but as spies and witnesses for the prosecution, which brought news and information from outside to the internal tribunal of her intelligence, which almost always handed down condemnatory judgments. In the center of the market, submerged in that flood tide of raw, dense, motley, and tumultuous life, Micaela sat abstracted from the sensations at hand; the colors did not dazzle her, not the smells stimulate her, not the music soften her. Her skin was lemon colored and as if cured, nerveless — an insulator — skin, on the other hand, matte, firm, knitted, and very beautiful. And, not judging with her senses but with her mind, the market, which was the sunlit sky of her world, seemed to her like a shapeless and repugnant jumble of greed, lust, ignorance, deceit, hatred, and misery. And the nighttime sky, the evening and empty plaza, like an unending tedium, a premonition of death.

— from Honeymoon, Bittermoon, by Ramón Pérez de Ayala.

Micaela early realizes that men are digusting pigs, and when she has a son she decides to raise him to be the man she would be. So Urbano's youth is sheltered and his education censored. Micaela thinks this a success, until Urbano's wedding night, when it becomes clear that the newlyweds are lacking in some essential information.

The children are "pure" but the adults are hypocrites; all of them are fools.

I picked up this book years ago for a couple bucks, but not till the other day did I grab it on my way out of the house. I'm about halfway through, and it's very funny, while still touching, wise, and poetic.

One more

One More Year, by Sana Krasikov, is a collection of 8 short stories covering the contemporary immigrant experience of Eastern Europeans. (But they're not even a little bit like Bezmozgis, if you're wondering, if that's all you know about Eastern European immigrant stories; he's much funnier. Yet I mention it.)

The stories are all rather depressing, with themes of dislocation, of disconnectedness between people's hopes and their reality. Krasikov says they're love stories, and they are, but of a tragic kind, more about loneliness, a yearning for a proper love story.

Every review I come across offers up a different favourite story, which is the nice thing about a collection, and about reading people's opinions on them — to see how the different expressions of these themes relate to varied readers.

I'm not a big fan of short stories in general, and I'm not entirely sure why, but they can — and these do — offer poignant and sharp observations. The last story, the longest of the lot, was dissatisfying only in that the cast of characters was so interesting, I'd've liked to know them in novel length.

Review: "Most of the women in these stories are lonely and needy and allow themselves to be betrayed and neglected by men they cling to because they fear being alone."

Article.
Discussion.
Interview.

Stories available online
"Companion" — my favourite, and winner of an O Henry Award.
"The Repatriates."

Excerpts
"Maia in Yonkers."
"Debt."
"There Will Be No Fourth Rome."

It's Austerrific! Kind of.

If anyone cares and doesn't already know, Paul Auster has a new book out: Man in the Dark.

I care a little bit, but the truth is, I've fallen out of love with Paul Auster. I'm not really sure how it happened, and it surprises me more than anyone, but there you go.

This morning I listened to an interview on NPR, and then I listened to the much more interesting conversation on The Bat Segundo Show.

I'll get aorund to reading this book someday, but I'm in no hurry.

Coincidentally, I just this week read Travels in the Scriptorium. It was a quick and engaging enough read, but dissatisfying. I can't really see someone not already familiar with the bulk of Auster's novel getting much out of this one. And those who do have that familiarity would prefer something new, or something more.

You can find Paul Auster news here.

Clouds

I've spent a lot of time this summer looking up, with my head in the clouds some might say.

We play the cloud game on long drives. Mostly, they just look like clouds to me. Fake clouds. If you saw them in a painting you would laugh, decry them as phoney.

We turn the bend and suddenly there a dolphin frolics in the sky between the trees. Around the next bend, swathed in robes a Bedouin spurs on his camel. Then hordes of Mongols wielding cutlasses storm across the sky.

These fascinating clouds. By turns dark portents, angelic snows, childish whimsy, cotton-candy circus safety nets, demonic phantasmagoria, hellfires in white.

So I wonder, from a painterly perspective, how can you represent them credibly?

What I did on my summer vacation? I spent untold hours trying to pin a cloud to paper.

This is my cloud:



This photo is dark and doesn't do it justice, doesn't capture the light, the texture, the thickness, the slabs of colour. (Oil pastel crayons were always my medium of choice.) (Note: I have no formal art training whatsoever.) What you can't see is that this is layers of white and yellow and white and white and blue and white and grey and white and more white, on a 9 × 12 sheet of drawing paper.

(Perhaps I will get around to scanning the picture, to see if it shows depth.)

It's a cloud that looks like a cloud, because to draw a cloud that looks like a stampeding elephant would invite ridicule. I will save that for a future endeavour.

Poète impeccable, parfait magicien

Who in hell is Théophile Gautier?

"Posterity will judge Gautier to be one of the masters of writing, not only in France but also in Europe," attested Charles Baudelaire. So how come I've never heard of him?

Then one day not so long ago, his name crops up three times over the space of a few hours.

1. I've been wandering through Baudelaire this summer. I find that he dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to Gautier and that he regarded him as a great influence.

2. I pick up some brochures for the upcoming orchestral season, to bookmark those events that might be of interest to me. I notice that Les Nuits d'été are Gautier's love poems set to music by Berlioz. (Perhaps I will go.)

3. I receive an email informing me that NYRB Classics is releasing Gautier's My Fantoms.

The review copy I requested showed up shortly thereafter.

[In another instance of serendipity, while catching up on my blog reading I find that Imani has encountered Gautier: the lyrics, with music, and about the cycle.]

My Fantoms is a collection of 7 stories spanning Gautier's career. They are supernatural in their subject matter and vaguely erotic in their telling.

My favourite of the lot, from which I offer two excerpts, is "The Painter," for how it renders the artist's disposition, the artistic experience.

But as well as this, Onuphrius was a poet. There was no way in which he could ever escape his self-knowledge, and what contributed more than a little to his continual state of acute nervous excitement, which even Jacintha could not always control, was his obsessional reading. He read nothing but tales of legendary marvels, ancient chivalric romances, mystical poetry, treatises of the Cabal, German ballads, and volumes on demonology and witchcraft. In the midst of the bustling world of reality around him, he created from these books an inner world of visionary and ecstatic experience, which it was given to very few others to penetrate. From his ingrained habit of seeking the supernatural aspect, he had the ability to make the most ordinary, down to earth circumstance give rise to something weird and fantastic. You could have put him into a square, white-washed room, blank from floor to ceiling and with windows of opaque glass, and he would have been able to spot some uncanny apparition quite as easily as if he had been in a Rembrandt interior, flickering with uncertain light and awash with sinister shadows; such was the power of his mental vision acting on his physical eyesight to distort the straightest line and complicate the simplest object, like those curved or multi-faced mirrors which falsify everything placed in front of them, transforming them into grotesque or terrible presences.

The prose is dense in description, verging on florid, but real, and aspiring to surreal. There is poetry in every detail, a lust for life as Gautier's characters brush up against death.

Later in this story, the devil slices off the top of his skull:

This unexpected lobotomy did not seem to do him the least harm, expect that after a few minutes he heard a peculiar kind of buzzing above his head, and looking up he saw that all of his thoughts, no longer contained by the top of his skull, were pouring out in a chaotic stream like budgerigars fluttering from an open bird-cage door. All the ideal women that he had ever imagined to himself soared out of his head with their individual dresses, mannerisms, and modes of speech (though it ought to be said, in Onuphrius's defence, that they all looked like Jacintha's twin-sister); with them went the heroines of all the novels he had ever planned to write. Each of these women drew after them a cortège of lovers, some wearing heraldic tunics of the Middle Ages and others the top-hats and suits of eighteen thirty-two. After these came all the majestic, farcical, or monstrous human types he had ever dreamt up; then all his sketches for future paintings, set in every historical period and geographical location; then all his philosophical ideas, floating in the form of soap-bubbles; and finally, everything he remembered from his years of adolescent reading. All these continued to stream out into the air for well over an hour, until the whole studio was full, and the men and women walked up and down the room without the least hint of embarrassment, chatting, laughing, and arguing together and obviously feeling quite at home. Dumb-struck, Onuphrius could not think what to do with himself, and finally decided the best thing was simply to leave them at it, and go out of the studio.

The collection as a whole reminds me a great deal of Alexandre Dumas's Les Mille et un fantômes, or what I know of it. I'm delighted to learn that Dumas and Gautier travelled in the same circles — namely Le Petit Cénacle, a group of artists known for its extravagance and eccentricity — and I like to imagine they told each other ghost stories late into the night.

Théophile Gautier: Impeccable? Perfect? I don't know. But entertaining, sensuous, witty — yes. The man knows how to turn a phrase.

In which I rationalize my questionable parenting stance of allowing the 5-year-old to play GTA

I have mixed feelings about it. Truthfully, I hated the idea at first. But this battle I lost early on, and I never found ground to retake.

There are moments I cringe, like when the character wanders through a strip club; none of the nudity or behaviour seems to register with Helena, though — at least, it doesn't faze her — so I've restrained myself from reacting in case I create an issue where there isn't one.

I'm relaxing about it a bit. Evidence shows that she's a pretty good kid, and the game may be a means to, or at least an expression of, some positive ends.

1. She stops at all the red lights.
2. When riding a motorcycle, she always puts on a helmet.
3. She's a better driver than I am.
4. She prefers riding public transit over stealing cars.
5. She follows mission instructions to the best of her ability and as promptly as possible, without being sidetracked.
6. When she's lost, she stops and asks (her father) for directions.
7. She finds, and explores, every ladder, staircase, secret passageway, helipad, etc imaginable, and then some.
8. She spends her money on cab fare and on tasteful wardrobe improvements.
9. She lets herself be arrested by the police — they're only doing their job, she says, and it's because she did something wrong.
10. She spends "quality" time with her father.

Some things I rationalize. Some days I wish I were stronger.

Hébert's secrets

In the introduction to my collection of Anne Hébert's later novels, Mavis Gallant writes:

The French author Marguerie Yourcenar believed it was impossible to write anything about women, because their lives were so full of secrets. A woman's life, she said, was like one of those old-fashioned sewing machines with a multitude of small drawers meant to hold thread and buttons and miniature scissors. Every drawer contains a different secret. Yourcenar said nothing about men and secrets or about artists in general or writer in particular of the profound split between life imagined and lives lived.

This seemed to me an odd way to introduce this book, until it dawned on me that Gallant did not mean to comment on or critique Hébert's characters; rather she was relating what she knew of the character of Hébert herself. Indeed, there is a dearth of information about Hébert on the internets, even while she is one of Canada's, and Quebec's in particular, most acclaimed writers.

I persist in wondering how this idea of secrets might apply to Hébert's characters. Broadly, her female characters fall into two categories: domesticated and wild. Occasionally sliding along the spectrum. These women may be complicated, but they seem to me ultimately knowable. I wonder if this is a talent of Hébert's that she writes them this way, or the virtue of being a woman that allows me to read them this way.

The men (or boys), on the other hand, primarily driven by these women, for good or ill, remain unfathomably opaque to me. There must be more to their motivation than women (whether as objects of desire, forces to escape, mothers or wives)? Is this a weakness in Hébert's ability to draw male characters, a deliberate comment on how she perceives them, or a failing in my reading?

And I am severely disappointed that Gallant did not address this difference in the treatment of the secrets of and the problem of truly knowing male and female characters, as well as the extent to which the characters are able to truly know each other, in her prefatory remarks.

I did make an effort to read one of Hébert's novellas ("Est-ce que je te dérange?") in French. It was tough going, and I ended up reading it almost side by side with its English translation. As with the other works I've read, the story in English reads with deceptive simplicity. The poetry of the mood, the rhythm of the language, calls for a precision of vocabulary, tense, syntax that is more challenging than I expected (this is true also of the English versions, on closer inspection).

That makes 4 novellas in this collection plus an earlier one that I've read. By far my favourite is The Burden of Dreams, which I mentioned previously. I may yet venture to read more some day.

Mood is everything, with a languorous intensity.

Through the eyes of a child

She tells me, "You have to try to see it through the eyes of a child." I argue that the child already sees everything through the eyes of a child. It's the adults who demand the aids, the lavish hooks to drag out their long-buried imaginations. My mother-in-law and I have been at odds regarding Disneyworld for years. I simply don't see the point.

The child sees. The real trick, I think, is for adults to do the same — to see the mundane from a 3-foot-high, naive perspective. For this there is no help from — and no need for — Disney, only a child's lead into one's own soul.

It's with a melancholy accompanied by a certain level of discomfort that I realize the most poetic, most "romantic" moments I've experienced in recent years are those shared with my child: strolls through the neighbourhood, ice cream, playing in the park.

She tells me she loves me 100 times a day, that I'm beautiful, that I smell good.

The act of poetry, I think, is entwined in vision and creation. Through Helena's eyes I see things differently, and better. We see grand kingdoms in the clouds and in spider webs. We draw, we make music, we make up words.

This child is a natural stream of consciousness, a surrealist extraordinaire for whom the world is her own cadavre exquis.

One weekend we frolic, in my mother-in-law's backyard pool overlooking the river. My daughter's father stands metres off, feeding his own soul, fishing off the dock.

She wants to swim. It is I who watches over her, plays with her, teaches her, consoles her. My soul is left to feed off her throwaway gestures and words.

Against the background of chlorinated water in a tiled basin. Her eyes are pool blue, we tell her. No, she laughs: "The pool is an eye. Swim in my eye." The pool watching us fathom its own depths.

The burden of books

I've been antsy this week, for numerous reasons, and having trouble settling on something to read.

I've been reading Rilke this summer — his correspondence with Louis Andreas-Salomé — but the intensity of the emotion and poetry therein I am unable to support for more than a dozen or so pages at a time. I am taking time to digest it, and I fear the time to articulate what it is fomenting within me will be longer still.

But I needed something to read in the métro yesterday, and given the week I've been having, Rilke would not make an easy companion. In addition, I needed to find reading material for our upcoming stay at the cottage.

It is almost unfortunate that I pulled Anne Hébert ("Collected Later Novels") from the stack. I was immediately drawn in and finished the first of the collection, The Burden of Dreams, by far the longest of the lot, a solid third of the book, before we've even left town.

It's last year's visit to Kamouraska that inspired me to look up Anne Hébert in the first place. I haven't made it to that novel yet (Kamouraska), but I sense almost any of her work would be a fitting read on our impending journey from the big city through small-town Quebec and into the wilderness.

This morning I resorted to rereading Héloïse, the only work of hers I'd ever read and years ago, in the métro (and what better place! Summary: Bernard glimpses Héloïse, a kind of other-wordly anachronism, in the métro, becomes obsessed with her, yet marries the woman he no longer loves), so as not to deplete my vacation reading material, and to inform my current reading in light of that haunting story.

At lunch I went to the library to pick out an Anne Hébert novel in French. The simplicity of the language in English translation leads me to believe that the original French may lie within my grasp.

The writing style reminds me of Michael Ondaatje. The poetry of the language, to paint a mood, spare but precise. The way the story skips through time.

The protagonists in Héloïse and The Burden of Dreams, Bernard and Julien respectively, are both poets, romantics, their very being swept up in an idea. Julien in particular loses himself in music (I'm listening to Mozart and Schubert today on Hébert's suggestion. How is it that she should write of them in the same breath, while I should have in my possession a CD featuring works by just the two of them?) and literature.

He reads poems and novels. He is transported to a world without limits, one where strange sensations and astonishing characters abound. A second existence doubles the little life he leads as ideal employee and well-behaved lover.

Julien crosses the ocean: "Following in Baudelaire's footsteps he tastes the spleen of Paris..." (Baudelaire has shadowed my own summer in various ways...)

She insisted on paying for her ticket and now she has taken a seat next to him, on the threadbare velvet bench. Their two profiles stand out, somewhat solemn and overlapping slightly, like royal profiles on a postage stamp. He keeps brushing against her with his knee and shoulder. The music absorbs them and exempts them from any movement, any word. Their deepest complicity comes from their twofold living warmth, perceived through their garments that touch each other in the muggy darkness of the concert hall.

Her hand, burning hot, somewhat limp and relaxed among the folds of her skirt, the smooth cold ring on the fourth finger. Julien has brushed against that hand, has felt the hard ring under his fingers. From that moment on, he became less attentive to the concert, as if irritated by a sudden dissonance, shocked by a false note that reverberates and echoes all through the hall.

Several times she has looked at her watch and now, barely seated across the table from him on the terrace of a café, she announces that friends are expecting her, that she promised them long ago . . .

Julien says:

"That ring you're wearing?"

But the ring is no longer on her finger, for she dropped it into her bag as soon as the concert was over. Her hands are perfectly bare now, long and smooth. She shrugs.

"I wore it for the concert, that's all. Afterwards it's too much trouble, I have no need of jewellery, since I'm sober and austere by nature — and divorced into the bargain."

She speaks quickly. Seems anxious to provide whatever information he may request.

"What are your friends like?"

"Young, happy, a little crazy. I have lots of fun with them."

"And with me?"

"With you? It's rather the opposite. Aside from your eccentricities, which intrigue me, I wonder what it is about you I find amusing. Unless your dear bewildered face secretly makes me swoon?"

Everything she says is murmured very softly, in a sweet voice filled with laughter and tender irony.

He has only a little time to be with her. At any moment she may disappear, taken up by her hidden life. And then Julien's loneliness in Paris risks becoming very great. He questions her like a judge who persists in trying to compromise someone who is slipping away. How long has she been divorced? Does she play a musical instrument?

"I play the piano sometimes."

She become impatient, leans across the table towards him.

"You spoil everything with your questions. I am the way I am, just as you see me here, across from you, only passing through, with no past or future."

She rises, both hands pressed against the table.

"My name is Camille Jouve. I'm thirty years old. My double life is none of your business. Imagine whatever you want."

For the moment I think Hébert is wrong to invest this emotional complexity in such youthful characters. Young love may be tragic, but her stories are marked by an awareness of tragedy, altogether more tragic, that her characters do not see, that can be seen only in retrospect and maturity. That is, these young people are not wholly genuine; they are clearly stamped with a future that looks back on them. Or maybe it's only age that allows me to read it this way.

The burden of books, the problem with losing yourself in books, as Hébert's protagonists have done, as I have done, is that eventually the poetry of books spills out into real life, can no longer be contained.

Ocean

"Can we go down to the ocean, Mommy?"

What, right now? Is she not enjoying our cottage weekend? Does she mean on a subsequent vacation? I grapple with subtext, while Helena lifts her arm, points through the trees. Ah.

"You mean the lake..."

"What's the difference between ocean and lake?"

I stumble over some distinguishing characteristics: size, location, flora and fauna. I listen to myself ramble about saltwater and freshwater, and realize interestedly that to me, for some reason, this is the feature that demarcates the difference. I don't think Helena is paying attention anymore...

"Once when I was crying really, really hard my tears fell into my mouth and it was salty but it tasted good so I licked them up. Is that like the ocean?"

[Last weekend we went to the cottage. We leave tomorrow morning for a repeat performance.]

Full fathom five

A couple weeks ago we made an evening of Shakespeare in the park.

I understood nothing. I still have pretty much no idea what The Tempest is about.



The set was kind of beautiful in a minimalist kind of way: shades of sand. The acting, in my humble opinion, was fairly weak. In part this was brought into relief by the setting, not the usual crates-for-a-stage on a flat piece of land, but a steel and concrete amphitheatre on a man-made lake — voices simply don't carry well.

On top of this, most of the actors are bilingual, with noticeable accents. And the accents are varied, giving the play an uneven texture. I wonder if some of the cast doesn't perform more strongly in French.

These drawbacks impeded my understanding of the play. The fullest impression I have about The Tempest is what I picked up from John: the idea of God as castaway. Through this filter I managed to make some sense of the language and dynamics, to create in my own head a narrative that had some meaning for me.

The thing about an event is that the circumstances, context, and sideshows add so much colour to the main attraction. In that respect, it was a wonderful evening. We watched the ducks in the lake. We eavesdropped on, and even participated in, spontaneous conversations among strangers in line. A young man got off his bike and climbed a tree to swing from a high branch by his knees and monkey around a bit before getting back on his bike and riding off. We heard a Latin jazz band playing on the other side of the park.

Then the play started. (I was scolded by park personnel for taking pictures. As fate would have have it, the resulting pictures are blurry and unremarkable.)

We had popcorn.

We talked about how Lost might've sprang from a Tempest concept.

Everything Helena knows about Shakespeare she knows from Doctor Who. She recognized Sycorax.

During intermission, the cast popped out to beg for donations. Caliban pranced around Helena a bit — she played at being terrorized, but was thrilled. Not many theatre-goers have been tickled by Caliban.

So, for Shakespeare in the park, Helena stayed up late; she wanted to stay to the end. We did, and we loved it.

Strength and conscience

Dear Lou,

This morning in a moment of great brightness it became clear to me. I have been living for years in bad conscience and shallow strength: whatever drifts into me rides on my current for a short while, sails along, but then suddenly hits bottom with a shriek and is stuck there.

If my life is to improve, I must concentrate above all on these two things: strength and conscience.

My strength (as a blood analysis has shown) is insufficient. A stay in Skodsberg or a Lahmann's could improve this. After that, life lived simply and according to nature.

But what about conscience? I see that I can't keep going on with my work this way; That I must open up new tributaries to it; not becuse the sreams that flow into it from event and existence are too meager, — rather: because I can't order or unite them. I must learn to grasp and hold; I must learn to work. I have been telling myself this for years and yet go bungling on. Hence my guilty conscience; all the guiltier when others have confidence in me.

— Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé, October 19, 1904, from Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters.

(See also July 25, 1903.)

The bottomless ocean

I've been meaning to read Solaris forever.

I saw the Tarkovsky film adaptation at a rep cinema half a lifetime ago. I fell asleep. I insist that this was no comment on the film per se; I was studying hard, and working strange hours. Yet the film made an impression on me, some visuals burned on my retina.

Then there was the remake. Which I had to see, because the premise is brilliant, the idea of a remake intrigued me, and because George Clooney is hot. But I fell asleep.

This year I read Stanislaw Lem for the first time. It blew me away.

And I arrive at Solaris by chance. I didn't plan on it, not yet. I'd meant to wait awhile, acquaint myself with some other of Lem's work. Find a French edition, from which the English was translated; a Polish edition, by which to judge and improve the English result.

As fate would have it, I found Solaris at the end of a shelf of English-language young adult fiction, just off the music listening stations, in the children's section of the Bibliothèque Nationale, where Helena and I spend an evening every three weeks or so, no doubt misshelved on account of its cover (shown). It was waiting for me.

"You poor innocent!"

I looked up with a start. But Snow was not making fun of me. It seemed to me that I was seeing him now for the first time. His face was grey, and the deep lines between cheek and nose were evidence of an unutterable exhaustion: he looked a sick man.

Curiously awed, I asked him:

"Why did you say that?"

"Because it's a tragic story." Seeing that I was upset, he added, hastily: "No, no you still don't understand. Of course it's a terrible burden to carry around, and you must feel like a murderer, but . . . there are worse things."

"Oh, really?"

"Yes, really. And I'm almost glad that you refuse to believe me. Certain events, which have actually happened, are horrible, but what is more horrible still is what hasn't happened, what has never existed."

"What are you saying? I asked, my voice faltering.

He shook his head from side to side.

"A normal man," he said. "What is a normal man? A man who has never committed a disgraceful act? Maybe, but has he never had uncontrollable thoughts? Perhaps he hasn't. But perhaps something, a phantasm, rose up from somewhere within him, ten or thirty years ago, something which he suppressed and then forgot about, which he doesn't fear since he knows he will never allow it to develop and so lead to any action on his part. And now, suddenly, in broad daylight, he comes across this thing . . . this thought, embodied, riveted to him, indestructible. He wonders where he is . . . Do you know where he is?"

"Where?"

"Here," whispered Snow, "on Solaris."

Having now read two of Lem's novels, I can already clearly identify two central themes to his work:

1. The problem of alien-ness, and the ill-reasoned human tendency to anthropomorphize that alien-ness.

2. The problem of human-ness: how can we hope to know anything alien if we do not truly know ourselves?

(What we see is a reflection of what we ourselves project.)

The book is not as philosophical as His Master's Voice, but still very thoughtful. It has a plot. It's short, but it bogs down a bit in the middle, for just a few pages, in describing the physical nature, the geological formations, the molecular structure, of the planet Solaris, which is essentially a sentient ocean, tapping into explorers' consciousnesses to confront them with their own memories, performing its own brand of experiment on the scientists.

The burning question Solaris poses to this reader is one of psychological horror: What dark, suppressed shame of mine would Solaris find to test me with?

**********

Gallery of book covers (select Solaris in the sidebar), from which all movie tie-ins are tastefully omitted.

Plethora of Solaris-related tidbits.

Solaris throws into question my safe-phrase, my mantra, the knowledge that keeps me sane when all else is chaos: "There is water at the bottom of the ocean."

The possibility of Bruni

Carla Bruni sings Michel Houellebecq.

I heard Carla Bruni's new album playing in some shop or other last week, instantly recognizable, as it sounded so much like her first album. I almost bought it there and then anyway, cuz she always sounds, well, nice, in a mellow, sexy kind of way, but I didn't. However, when I heard she'd put to music a poem of Michel Houellebecq's, I had to give it a closer listen.

I'm still intrigued by what it is other people, particularly smart, self-assured women, might see of worth in Houellebecq, in hopes that it holds a clue to my own fascination with him.

The song is La Possibilité d'une île, the poem being one featured in Houellebecq's novel of the same name.

Ma vie ma vie ma très ancienne
Mon premier voeu mal refermé
Mon premier amour infirmé,
Il a fallu que tu reviennes.

Il a fallu que je connaisse
Ce que la vie a de meilleur,
Quand deux corps jouent de leur bonheur
Et sans fin, s'unissent et renaissent.

Entrée en dépendance entière,
Je sais le tremblement de l'être
L'hésitation à disparaître,
Le soleil qui frappe en lisière

Et l'amour où tout est facile,
Où tout est donné dans l'instant;
Il existe au milieu du temps
La possibilité d'une île.

Sadly, it is, I think the weakest song on this CD. (I don't think it's a particularly remarkable poem either; I post here as an oddity.) The song has been described as having a Twin Peaks kind of vibe, which it does — and suddenly I see similarities between Julee Cruise and Carla Bruni... that breathy, whispery style — only, the mood of it just doesn't sit well on Bruni.

Review, in which it is argued these songs "treat life as a fatal game. The lyrics regard the blood sports of love and possession with the focused detachment of someone who has retired from the field only long enough to jot down the score." In spirit, this plays as a suitable, quiet accompaniment to my own current midlife crisis.

Now, it just happens that, the last few days, even before buying this new CD, I was feeling compelled to be listening to a lot of Bruni. This is maybe a mistake, actually, because it's been making me cry!!! and I can't stop myself!

There's no denying Bruni has a poetic sensibility.

Bruni's second album I don't care for so much, musically, but its ambition is admirable, and through it I've come to know and appreciate poems that I might otherwise have discounted. (Do you know this one, by Christina Rossetti?)

And here we are: third album. Kind of crappy, but the more I listen to it, the more it dissolves into inoffensive background music.

So. What affinity exists between Bruni and Houellebecq? The dream of an ideal of free love? Or the dream of outgrowing that desire?

And love, where all is easy,
Where all is given in the instant;
There exists in the midst of time
The possibility of an island.

Uncle, again

Uncle Cleans Up, by JP Martin and illustrated by Quentin Blake, is the follow-up to Uncle (both now published in The New York Review Children's Collection). Uncle is a fabulously rich elephant who reigns over a motley crew inhabiting the grounds of his castle-kingdom. Things are upside down and backwards, odd and chaotic — rather subversive, really.

For much of the book, Uncle's little band is planning and provisioning for day-trip excursions to the far reaches of Uncle's domain.

At the first stop, which was called Rhino Halt, a thin but very happy-looking man came running to the side of the train.

"Got my museum money at last, Ninety!" he said joyfully.

"Sorry, Needler," said Ninety. "We can't take you today. Full up."

Needler burst into loud sobbing.

"After all I've done to save up! Done without lunch for nineteen days, and all to get into the museum!"

"Let him in," said Uncle; "we'll make room."

Needler's no-lunch habit had made him so thin that he slipped into a very small corner of Uncle's carriage.

Little Liz put out her tongue at him, but Uncle saw her and said sternly:

"If you do that again you will be put off at the next station!"

"I'm sorry," said Little Liz very quickly.

"Also, Needler," said Uncle, "I will pay your fare."

He handed sixpence to Ninety.

Needler burst into tears of joy. It really seemed unnatural for a man to cry so much. His tears overflowed his handkerchief and fell on to the floor in a stream.

"Thank you abundantly, sir," he said. "I never thought I would see this day. The cost of living keeps going up so much. But now what joy I've got in front of me! A long lovely walk through all the museum room, tea — they do you well at the tea-room for a halfpenny — and then I'll buy some picture postcards and take the rest of the money home, and live like a prince for a week!"

"I'm only glad you've cheered up," said Uncle, who hates crying of any sort.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first in this series, and I hope there is more to come. For the time being, the books are more suited to my sense of humour and reading sensibility than to my child's, but she is of an age where that may soon change.

Tales from Homeward: Uncle is still alive and well, and maintaining a blog.

Such stuff as dreams are made on

It was Laurie Anderson I became acquainted with first. "Those are pearls that were his eyes."

Years later, I learned a few things from Peter Greenaway.

This summer, Repercussion Theatre presents Shakespeare's The Tempest.

In Montreal's parks, July 22 through August 17 (choose your language). See you there.

Days

Days go by.

There are days I spend my lunch hour wandering across McGill campus, a school I once intended to attend but never did. Did you know?: Students still smoke pot and listen to Neil Young.

Some days are hot. The heat of wide open spaces, on mountaintops or on riverbanks, differs vastly from the dirty heat of the city, the bare skin of strangers grazing yours in the metro.

I've read Days: A Tangier Diary, by Paul Bowles.

I know little of Paul Bowles (yet I am vaguely fascinated by him), having read only a few samples of his work. (I remember reading the heat of The Sheltering Sky, while travelling through the heat of Tunisia.)

There are a few mentions regarding issues of rights and translations, as well as movie rights. On their own these journal entries are fairly meaningless, but they might have more value taken in the context of the writer's work.

Days — it's like reading the boring diary of someone you don't know. I think Bowles would've made a poor blogger.

He notes in the preface, "I suppose the point of publishing such a document is to demonstrate the way in which the hours of a day can as satisfactorily be filled with trivia as with important events." I'm not sure that is the point.

One of the more interesting entries:

I could think only of how fortunate it was that the weather was fine. Even a few drops of rain would have ruined a hundred evening dresses. It didn't seem an ideal manner of welcoming guests, to force them to stand in the street for a half-hour waiting to get to the bottleneck just outside the gate. There we exhibited our invitations, had our names checked on lists, and were admitted one at a time. The line continued through the courtyard, until we were given maps of the terrain and assigned to our tents. I counted nine of these objects, once I had passed through the receiving area, where our host stood grinning, flanked by his sons, and with Elizabeth Taylor seated by his side. "Wait till you see how fat she's grown!" people had warned me. To me she didn't look fat; she looked solid and luscious. She must have been tired; it's not easy to be introduced to nine hundred people one after the other. I refused the champagne and set out in search of the tent I'd been assigned to, pushing my way through the crowd until I'd found it. There were no placecards. I sat down at an empty table until a waiter asked me to choose another, also empty. No one seemed to be in a hurry to eat. My table did eventually fill up — with, among others, the governor, the chief of police, and a military man decked with medals. At the next table sat Malcolm Forbes and his family. Miss Taylor was on his left, her back to me. The crown prince sat on his right. For three hours as I ate I watched their table. The French woman next to me made repeated comments in a whisper about Elizabeth Taylor's shoulders and the crown prince's face, which she characterized as "frightening" and "almost Japanese." All I could reply was that he never altered his poker-face expression and spoke very little. I myself thought he was unutterably bored; if that is so, it was understandable.

Days keep going by.

More possibility

Michel Houellebecq has produced his own film adaptation of his book, The Possibility of an Island.

Here's a comment with at least a summary of the novel better than I could manage (once, twice):

A trailer aired on the website for the film does look quite spectacular, but then French sci-fi has always tended to look flashy, "le cinéma du look", as it's called, without caring too much about the details of plot or plausibility.

But it could work out. La possibilité d'une île, described in the TLS as "a bracing mix of visionary Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh at his cruellest, and ranting John Osborne", is about cloning as a way of cheating death, and is audacious in the way that it seeks to modify the author's extraordinary misanthropy by linking itself, apparently unironically, with a loopy cult who recall, but for legal reasons are not to be identified with, the Raëlians.

I, for one, can't wait.

More tightly knit

It is as if whatever I truly receive falls too deeply into me, falls, falls for years and in the end I lack the strength to lift it out of me and I walk about fearfully with my heavily laden depths and never reach them. Yes, I know that impatience warps all those processes and transformations that take their course in darkness as in heart-chambers, and I know that in patience lies everything: humility, strength, measure. But life moves on and is like a day, and whoever wished to be patient would need a thousand such days, though perhaps not even one is given him. Life moves on, and it strides past many in the distance, and around those waiting it makes a detour. And thus my wish to be someone working rather than waiting, someone standing at the center of his work's workshop far into every day's dawn. And yet I cannot be, because almost nothing in me has reached fruition, or else I am not aware of it and let my faraway harvests grow old and outlive their time. There is still nothing but confusion in me; what I experience is like pain and what I truly perceive hurts. I don't seize the image: it presses into my hand with its pointed tips and sharp edges, presses deep ino my hand and almost against my will: and whatever else I would grasp slides off me, is like water and flows elsewhere once it has mirrored me absent-mindedly. What should he do, Lou, who grasps so little about life, who must let it happen to him and comes to realize that his own willing is always slighter than another great will into whose current he oftentimes chances like a thing drifting downstream? What should he do, Lou, for whom the books in which he wants to read only draw open like heavy doors which the next wind will slam shut again? What should he do for whom people are just as difficult as books, just as superfluous and strange, because he cannot derive from them what he needs, because he cannot select from them and thus takes from them what is crucial and incidental and burdens himself with both? What should such a person do, Lou? Should he remain utterly alone and accustom himself to a life lived among things, which are more like him and place no burden on him?

Yes, Lou, I too believe that the experiences of the past few years have been good for me, that whatever came to me pressed me more firmly into myself and no longer scattered me as so often before; I am now more tightly knit, and there are fewer pores in me, fewer interstices that fill up and swell when things not my own penetrate.

— Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé, July 25, 1903, from Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters.

When possibilities collide

I finished the Houellebecq novel the other week — The Possibility of an Island, on which I commented previously. It was difficult, in an unpleasant, morally challenging kind of way.

The primary narrator, Daniel1, is not very likable. Yet, he is strangely compelling and in the final pages almost sympathetic. And this, I think, is because of my age.

I am at that age... I've never been one to worry about my age, or expected "accomplishments" (marriage, children, promotion) by a certain age. But I've reached that age where people, for example, tell me I look good for my age (back-handed compliment?) or ask if I worry about it.

It doesn't exactly make me feel old; it makes me feel, however, as if I ought to, as if it's my duty to fret and regret.

And as much as I believe that, finally, I am in my skin, I have grown into myself, there is a tiny, tiny, tiny part (whether innate or manufactured by society and beauty industry, I can no longer tell) that thinks my attractiveness has decreased and hence my worth is a little diminished.

So, Houellebecq, sexist pig with double standards though he may be, still manages to make a point.

The weather was changing quickly, it wasn't long before the heat settled on the south of Spain; naked young girls began to tan themselves, especially at weekends, on the beach near the residence, and I began to feel the return, albeit weak and flaccid, of something that wasn't really even desire — for the word would seem to me, despite everything, to imply a minimum belief in the possibility of its fulfilment — but the memory, the phantom of what could have been desire. I could now make out clearly the cosa mentale, the ultimate torment, and at that moment I could say at last that I had understood. Sexual pleasure was not only superior, in refinement and violence, to all the other pleasures life had to offer; it was not only the one pleasure with which there is no collateral damage to the organism, but which on the contrary contributes to maintaining it at its highest level of vitality and strength; it was in truth the sole pleasure, the sole objective of human existence, and all other pleasures — whether associated with rich food, tobacco, alcohol or drugs — were only derisory and desperate compensations, mini-suicides that did not have the courage to speak their name, attempts to speed up the destruction of a body that no longer had access to the one real pleasure.

There's something highly distasteful in the ideas Houellebecq offers, but they're made all the more so for that tiny kernel of something I recognize as maybe a little bit true.

Youth was the time for happiness, its only season; young people, leading lazy, carefree life, partially occupied by scarcely absorbing studies, were able to devote themselves unlimitedly to the liberated exultation of their bodies. They could play, dance, love and multiply their pleasure. They could leave a party, in the early hours of the morning, in the company of sexual partners they had chosen, and contemplate the dreary line of employees going to work. They were the salt of the earth, and everything was given to them, everything was permitted for them, everything was possible. Later on, having started a family, having entered the adult world, they would be introduced to worry, work, responsibility and the difficulties of existence; they would have to pay taxes, submit themselves to administrative formalities whilst ceaselessly bearing witness — powerless and shamefilled — to the irreversible degradation of their own bodies, which would be slow at first, then increasingly rapid; above all, they would have to look after children, mortal enemies, in their own homes, they would have to pamper them, feed them, worry about their illnesses, provide the means for their education and their pleasure, and unlike in the world of animals, this would last not just for a season, they would remain slaves of their offspring always, the time of joy was well and truly over for them, they would have to continue to suffer until the end, in pain and with increasing health problems, until they were no longer good for anything and were definitively thrown onto the rubbish heap, cumbersome and useless. In return, their children would not be at all grateful, on the contrary their efforts, however strenuous, would never be considered enough, they would, until the bitter end, be considered guilty because of the simple fact of being parents. From this sad life, marked by shame, all joy would be pitilessly banished. When they wanted to draw near to young people's bodies, they would be chased away, rejected, ridiculed, insulted and, more and more often nowadays, imprisoned. The physical bodies of young people, the only desirable possession the world has ever produced, were reserved for the exclusive use of the young, and the fate of the old was to work and to suffer. This was the true meaning of solidarity between generations; it was a pure and simple holocaust of each generation in favour of the one that replaced it, a cruel, prolonged holocaust that brought with it no consolation, no comfort, nor any material or emotional compensation.

It's all the uglier as a reader, to have been that youth and now to be "later on." A bit extreme, the way he puts it, but nevertheless a bit true. Let me assure you: I do not see my child as a mortal enemy, and she is year's away from being ungrateful; there is no regret, but I admit to occasional resentment, not against her exactly, but against the order of things, that it should be so.

Some interesting thoughts related to Houellebecq: here.

Why any of this is connected to Nietzsche in my head is a tricky business. Beyond my reading him concurrently, Houellebecq mentions him quite a bit, along with Schopenhauer, but I'm ill equipped to discern if he does so as homage or in criticism, and in either case whether he does so justly — does he fairly represent them or skew their ideas to suit his purpose?

(I find Houellebecq very frustrating, like a guy you meet at one those parties, who turns out to be a jerk; you see eye to eye on all manner of postulates but manage to draw exactly opposite conclusions.)

Here Nietzsche expounds on a version of the maxim, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Daniel ought to take heed.

Only great suffering; that great suffering, under which we seem to be over a fire of greenwood, the suffering that takes its time — forces us philosophers to descend into our nethermost depths, and to let go down, all mildness, all mediocrity, — on which doubt whether such suffering improve a man; but I know that it makes him deeper. . . . Supposing we learn to set our pride, our scorn, out strength of will against it, and thus resemble the Indian who, however cruelly he may be tortured, considers himself revenged on his tormentor by the bitterness of his own tongue. Supposing we withdraw from pain into nonentity, into the deaf, dumb, and rigid sphere of self-surrender, self-forgetfulness, self-effacement: one is another person when one leaves these protracted and dangerous exercises in the art of self-mastery; one has one note of interrogation the more, and above all one has the will henceforward to ask more, deeper, sterner, harder, more wicked, and more silent questions, than anyone has ever asked on earth before. . . . Trust in life has vanished; life itself has become a problem. — But let no one think that one has therefore become a spirit of gloom or a blind owl! Even love of life is still possible, — but it is a different kind of love. . . . It is the love for a woman whom we doubt. . . .

("More silent questions"!!!)

Right. Life's a problem — on this point Nietzsche and Houellebecq seem to agree — but we can get past that.

Houellebecq develops the idea of a cult of indifference. I think there's something of this in Nietzsche, too, when he criticizes Wagner's bombast as pulp for the masses. Our gluttony, our mass consumption, of goods, but of ideas and experience too, has numbed us to their true effects, disabled our capacity to recognize the genuine article.

It is age — the accumulation of experience — that jades us, then dulls us.

I'm not interested in recapturing youth, per se. I'm not interested in attending that party to leave in the early hours of the morning. But I'd love, for example, to experience a first kiss again, or see Paris as if for the first time.

How do you lift the veil of indifference that's fallen over our eyes, blurring our contact with, our appreciation of the everyday?

The joy of txt

David Crystal defends text messaging, showing how many of its same techniques have been used historically and citing research that shows it to improve literacy.

It's an evolution of language: it's fun and it has great creative potential.

Here's one example of a text-poem, by Ben Ziman-Bright, which I particularly like:

The wet rustle of rain
can dampen today. Your text
buoys me above oil-rainbow puddles
like a paper boat, so that even
soaked to the skin
I am grinning.

The length constraint in text-poetry fosters economy of expression in much the same way as other tightly constrained forms of poetry do, such as the haiku or the Welsh englyn. To say a poem must be written within 160 characters at first seems just as pointless as to say that a poem must be written in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables. But put such a discipline into the hands of a master, and the result can be poetic magic. Of course, SMS poetry has some way to go before it can match the haiku tradition; but then, haikus have had a head-start of several hundred years.

There is something about the genre which has no parallel elsewhere. This is nothing to do with the use of texting abbreviations. It is more to do with the way the short lines have an individual force. Reading a text poem, wrote Peter Sansom, who co-judged a Guardian competition in 2002, is "an urgent business ... with a text poem you stay focused as it were in the now of each arriving line."

Yesterday I saw a scruffy young man set up on a street corner downtown, sitting at a rickety table with an old typewriter, selling instant poetry. I wonder if he has a phone.

The booted cat

It's perhaps a bit odd, being that I love cats and that I love boots, that I'm not more familiar with Charles Perrault's tale of Puss in Boots.

I'm inspired to take a fresh look at it.

This week we enjoyed an early evening outing and were transported to a place where a witch casts curses, trees sing, colours burst, and a particularly stylish, well-shod cat rules.

Le Chat Botté is presented by La Roulotte, a roaming theatre troupe that will be bringing this classic fairy tale to 38 parks over the next 2 months.

« Comment nous assurer du renouvellement de nos publics si nous cessons d'offrir aux familles et aux enfants réunis dans tous nos parcs l'expérience de l'illusion théâtrale ? Plus que jamais La Roulotte est nécessaire. Trop longtemps hypnotisés par les écrans durant le long hiver, les yeux de nos enfants et souvent de leurs parents doivent retrouver la présence des corps et des voix réelles qui inventeront pour eux seuls, ce jour là un temps réinventé. Vive la maison sur roue ! », a déclaré monsieur Raymond Cloutier, directeur du Conservatoire d'art dramatique de Montréal.

The crowd — and there was one — was enthusiastic. The show is lively and music-filled, and runs about an hour, or about 5 minutes too long for one particular 5-year-old I know.

Summer! Parks! Theatre!