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!

To Chelm and back

Thursday night, some friends and I headed to the theatre, for fun, but also to check out what one of our coworkers has been up to — she's been claiming intensive rehearsal schedules and late hours, so now we would see what she had to show for it.

The Wise Men of Chelm is a very funny Yiddish musical:

It is said that after God made the world, he filled it with people. He sent off an angel with two sacks, one full of wisdom and one full of foolishness. The second sack was much heavier and, after getting caught on a mountaintop, all the foolishness spilled out and fell into Chelm.

The news release gives some further background.

It's been years since I've attended theatre of any kind (oh! except for in the park), but the quality of this production — the singing, the acting, the music, the set design — far surpassed the amateur community theatre endeavours I've seen in the past.

The show runs until July 3. See it if you can!

Chelm is a city in eastern Poland; the idea of Chelm as a city of fools is longstanding in Jewish folklore:

There are a lot of popular stories about their "smart" conduct. For example: One Jewish Chelm resident bought a fish on Friday in order to cook it for sabbath. He put the live fish underneath his coat and the fish slapped his face with his tail. He went to the Chelm court to submit a charge and the court sentenced the fish to death by drowning.

Isaac Bashevis Singer has told similar stories about the residents of Chelm. I'll be looking into them.

At the beach

This is a picture of me and Helena at the beach; although, I can't recall that we've actually ever been to a real beach. Watch out for giant crabs!

Against Wagner

I never really got Wagner. Mind you, all I know about Wagner I learned from Bugs Bunny. But I never really understood him, or liked him much. Thanks to Nietzsche, I probably never fully will.

I've only just finished reading the first of two aphorisms published together, The Case of Wagner: A Musician's Problem, which is followed up with Nietzsche contra Wagner: The Brief of a Psychologist.

Wagner's music is big — bombast. Nietzsche explains it this way:

Taste is no longer necessary, nor even is a good voice. Wagner is sung only with ruined voices: this has a more "dramatic" effect. Even talent is out of the question. Expressiveness at all costs, which is what the Wagnerian ideal — the ideal of decadence — demands, is hardly compatible with talent. All that is required for this is virtue — that is to say, training, automatism, "self-denial." Neither taste, voices, nor gifts; Wagner's stage requires but one thing: Germans! . . . The definition of a German: an obedient man with long legs. . . . There is a deep significance in the fact that the rise of Wagner should have coincided with the rise of the "Empire": both phenomena are a proof of one and the same thing — obedience and long legs. — Never have people been more obedient, never have they been so well ordered about. The conductors of Wagnerian orchestras, more particularly, are worthy of an age, which posterity will one day call, with timid awe, the classical age of war. Wagner understood how to command; in this respect, too, he was a great teacher. He commanded as a man who had exercised an inexorable will over himself — as one who had practised lifelong discipline: Wagner was, perhaps,the greatest example of self-violence in the whole of the history of art [...].

There is great irony in that the embrace of decadence is an act of self-negation. This actually makes some sense to me. We see something like it in the rockstar lifestyle. I'm not saying Wagner was a rockstar of his day — simply that artistic or spiritual acts might be analogous to this kind of self-destructive behaviour vis a vis our physical being in the world.

Years ago, in Krakow for the summer, I took a course in 20th century Polish literature. For context, it was vital to know on what footing the the 20th century started — culturally and spiritually, which is nigh inseparable from politically and socially — from what ashes it was arisen. And it was here that I learned about Secessionism and decadence. The switch over from one century to the next often takes hold of people, inspiring a (completely irrational) sense of great significance. It feeds end-of-the-world hysteria, the sense that all reason and structure is spiralling out of control. Anything goes, but this is counterbalanced by the need to rein it in or describe a new order.

Anyway, thanks to Nietzsche, I can hear in Wagner the birth of decadence.

For all I know about Wagner, I know just about as much regarding Nietzsche. This is my first foray into his writing — his name seems to be popping up everywhere lately — but I'm finding he makes a great deal of sense. Nietzsche gives three altruistic requisitions:

That the stage should not become master of the arts.
That the actor should not become the corrupter of the genuine.
That music should not become an art of lying.

So, Herr Nietzsche: Tell me, how do you know when music is lying and when it is true?

Petite allure

Petite Anglaise, by Catherine Sanderson, is available in stores today.

I've been reading Petite's blog for years (even commenting a couple times regarding the oddities of raising a bilingual child) — I'm familiar with the meat of the story that comprises this book, and I'm thrilled to have a review copy. (In Canada it's the US edition you'll find.)

I've always felt an affinity for Petite, seeing a number of parallels in our lives: shacking up with some French guy, adopting a "foreign" city in which to make one's home, feeling a bit trapped by motherhood, in many ways parenting singly and knowing the irony of living in a chosen place but deprived of the ability to experience it fully. And of course, blogging.

This book is not a printout of her posts. While still charming and frank, it lacks the breeze — the apparent spontaneity — of the blog. But in recompense, we're treated to behind-the-scenes glimpses of how those anecdotes are inspired and then crafted into a blog.

We learn how unspontaneous much of the writing is. Most interesting to me is the exploration of the online blog persona — an almost fictional character, scripted and edited to perfection, or, at least, to purpose. Doesn't every blogger consider the problem of persona at some time?: How genuine is a post and its writer when they clamor for effect, playing to their audience? Writers write themselves: more confident or more sympathetic or wiser or more curmudgeonly often than real life allows. Chosen facets played up, improved, and others ignored. It may be honest, even brutally so, but selective.

I'd venture to say that Petite, as alterego, is a better writer than Catherine, but this memoir still provides a vital counterpoint to her blog.

"Mummy's got a bad, bad headache," I mumble feebly, turning onto my side and burying my feverish face into the cool pillow instead.

But there is no pain, at least not in a physical sense. I am, quite simply, stricken with horror; aghast at the thought of the upheaval I am poised to inflict on our little family. Terrified that what I am contemplating can somehow be read in my face: a scarlet letter freshly branded on my forehead.

And yet, at the same time, every cell in my body vibrates at a higher frequency. I feel the blood thundering through my veins; the hair on my arms standing on end. My fear — fear of hurling myself headlong into the unknown — is shot through with giddy exhilaration. Never have I felt so guilty, nor so intoxicatingly alive.

Fuller excerpt here.

Petite Anglaise is an engrossing, quick read, and a sharp reminder that some things, on blogs as in life, can't be unwritten.

Possibility

So I found a book in the bargain stacks the other week and immediately snapped it up, without, unusually for me, giving it a second thought.

I've been reading Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island on my daily commute, and it makes me feel a bit conspicuous — a bit dirty actually. What do others make of the woman so flagrantly reading Houellebecq on public transportation?

Michel Houellebecq is widely considered to be a racist and a misogynist, and it's disputed whether his work has any literary merit. According to Wikipedia, "a recurrent theme in Houellebecq's novels is the intrusion of free-market economics into human relationships and sexuality."

So what am I doing reading this book?

Well, for starters, it's about clones. Who doesn't love a book about clones?!

The book cover beseeches readers to consider, "Who, among you, deserves eternal life?" (Do I?)

Another reason: I read Elementary Particles and I liked it. Evidently I don't hold to the same standards as the New York Times ("a deeply repugnant read"), because I found something appreciable in it. It was — that cop-out of all adjectives — interesting, on many levels, not least because it tested my own limits and sensibilities.

It's the problem of utopia (that book and this one), to which I'm compelled to return over and over and over again, ever since I discovered that there was such a word, that others also dreamed an ideal and tried to design a foolproof blueprint. Now, in Houellebecq's case that ideal seems to be based in sexual freedom and sexual liberation. The problem of utopia lies somewhere in the disconnect between theory and practice. The problem with a sexual utopia is that that disconnect is (for me) felt much more strongly, emotionally.

I'm reading this book openly on the metro, and the vulgarities make me cringe, whether they're directed at Arabs, Jews, or women. Do other commuters know what's inside these covers and judge me? As open-minded as I may be and always eager to hear all sides, this just feels wrong.

Women are valued for sex, and only so long as they are sexually desirable, often traded in for younger models. As if to validate the narrator's (author's?) attitude, the women are fully complicit, knowing their worth to be exactly that and doing everything in their power to increase and preserve it (thus powering the beauty industry).

So why am I reading this book? I guess it's a kind of test. There are some valid points. (Where exactly are my limits?) And it's interesting besides. (And there seems to be a cultish religious angle developing.)

It's boiling down to this: Is the human experience necessarily a sexual one? How do relationships work? How do men really think? (Who didn't try to figure this all out as a teenager, at the first whiff of romance, and why am I bent on trying all over again to figure it out?)

And on this last point, I'd love to know: Is Houellebecq at all representative of the male population? Outlier or straight shooter?

The story? Thus far: Daniel1, from whom the other narrators were generated, is a stand-up comedian, who dabbles in film-making. The world is cultivating indifference, sounding the death knell for morality.

Beyond the hackneyed subject of paedophilia, this film strove to be a vigorous plea against friendship, and more generally against all non-sexual relationships. What in fact could two men talk about, beyond a certain age? What reason could two men find for being together, except, of course, in the case of a conflict of interests, or of some common project (overthrowing a government, building a motorway, writing a script for a cartoon, exterminating the Jews)? After a certain age (I am talking about men of a certain level of intelligence, not aged brutes), it's quite obvious that everything has been said and done. How could a project as intrinsically empty as boredom, annoyance and, at the end of the day, outright hostility? Whilst between a man and woman there still remained, despite everything, something: a little bit of attraction, a little bit of hope, a little bit of a dream. Speech, which was basically designed for controversy and disagreement, was still scarred by its warlike origins. Speech destroys, separates, and when it is all that remains between a man and a woman then you can consider the relationship over. When, however, it is accompanied, softened and some way sanctified by caresses, speech itself can take on a completely different meaning, one that is less dramatic but more profound, that of a detached intellectual counterpoint, free and uninvolved in immediate issues.

Hmmm.

They say (you know, "they") that when sex is gone, at least there is conversation. At the end of the day you want to come home and have someone to talk to. Or just to be with? Are they different things?

What happens when there is nothing left to talk about? Do we repeat ourselves, smile and nod. And what of the notion of a shared, companionable silence — is this, then, as mythical as postcoital cuddling? An empty commentary on a nonexistent main event.

I don't know the answers to any of these and many related questions, and the fact is they're very relevant, as currently I feel (experiencing inside) and see (standing outside) both myself and my relationship aging. I can't wait to figure out where Houellebecq stands.

The thing is: it's really hard to critically dismiss a book when it has me thinking so many intense things when I'm only on page 75 (of 345).

Schooldays

A few weeks back, Helena's school-to-be had an open house to which all prospective students, as well as the community at large, were invited.

We'd visited the school previously, of course: information session, guided tour, Q&A. We visit the schoolyard regularly to play hopscotch. We've been to the gym to cast our votes. But this visit was decidedly more festive (read: chaotic free-for-all).

If I were the sort of mother who shopped around for a school, this is exactly the sort of school I might opt for. As fate would have it, I strongly support the principle of a public school system and that my child should attend whatever school lies in our district; lucky for us we moved into a condo just down the street from a school renowned for its literature program. (Fate also has it that my child may not be so literarily inclined, but that's something I'll cope with later...)

So there we were, in the gym, tables upon tables of books, used and new, to raise some funds for the school, and present for 2 book launches by local authors. We bought a handful of bookmarks and a copy of one of those freshly launched books.

I just think it's cool that this is the sort of school my daughter will be attending in a few more months.

The book we brought home that day was L'ombre de paon, by Lise Monette. I haven't entirely figured out the story — it took me half an hour to figure out how to pronounce "paon" in such a way that Helena finally knew what I was talking about and could teach me how to actually pronounce "paon" — but the illustrations are gorgeous. Something about the eyes of a peacock's tail transfixing, and threatening to wholly engulf, a little girl in a colourless dress.

Another recent addition to the child's library is The Alphabet From A to Y With Bonus Letter Z!, by Steve Martin and Roz Chast. (Listen to them talk about it here.) This was a review copy. Steve Martin is a wild and crazy guy, and I consider him to be a fine writer. Could he write an alphabet book? It's a bit weird, but yes.

I don't recommend this book to everyone, and whether it's appropriate I think is a matter of the child's disposition more so than of age.

Starting with the title. It took a few minutes for Helena to figure it out (as well as asking what exactly "bonus" means), but once she did she thought it was insanely funny. And she still thinks so.

It's appeal lies in the fact that it's unconventional. Most of it doesn't make much sense, but the pictures are busy (keeping pace with the 5-year-old mind and maybe a step ahead, as Helena discovers something new every time), and the words are interesting. It's more for playing than for reading.

The C page has cacti, chair, center, for which occasionally cranky mommy must explain how one little letter can possibly make so many sounds (of course that's a good thing). L has lowlife, demanding a different kind of explanation.

One of Helena's favourite elements is the endpapers, which features letters not found in English.

The more it goes, the more the bedtime story seems counterproductive — there's just too much to talk about.

Perspective

See Ed.

A brief discussion on why I love them

They are Roberto Bolaño and Patrick Hamilton, and they more so than any other author have been the objects of my obsession, or something like it.

There are writers whom I've admired, followed. It's only natural, I think, if you like a book to look to other books by that same author, and so I have done. In this way, various authors over the years have been curiosities, projects, familiar territory, intellectual challenges, bad habits, and, yes, guilty pleasures.

But: obsession!

Only Bolaño and Hamilton fit this category. A kind of deep-down necessity, like air. It produces something in my head that is undeniably addictive. And I'm not sure it's altogether good for me.

I've just finished reading Bolaño's Amulet (all quotations here are taken from this novella):

I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.

Perhaps it's a function of age. Why is it that suddenly, on the eve of my 38th year I should encounter literary obsession, something profoundly visceral, the likes of which I've never known? It's a midlife literary awakening. Perhaps I'd brushed up against obsession when I was younger and didn't recognize it for what it was, let alone let myself react to it.

And when I heard the news it left me shrunken and shivering, but also amazed, because although it was bad news, without a doubt, the worst, it was also, in a way, exhilarating, as if reality were whispering in your ear: I can still do great things; I can still take you by surprise, you silly girl, you and everyone else; I can still move heaven and earth for love.

I've been trying to determine what these two have in common. (Help? Anyone?) The best I can come up with is, in a word, the breathlessness. These gorgeous sentences that swim circles round my heart and plummet to melancholy depths, leaving me gasping.

Saramago shares this quality of breathlessness to a degree, but his is intellectual, a matter of syntax, a hypnotic rhythm of a thought process. What Bolaño and Hamilton have, that Saramago does not (at least not in his fiction), are passion and desperation, Hamilton's fuelled by alcohol, Bolaño's by poetry.

To look for commonalities of theme? I don't think I can do that. Love, of a sort, yes. A romantic vision of something that doesn't quite exist, not quite. And the question of art; Hamilton consorted with London's theatre people, Bolaño with Mexico's poets. But truly, their greatest connection is the effect they have on me. Both dead, and soon I will run out of books of theirs to read for the first time.

And then I saw myself and I saw the soldier who was staring entranced at his image in the mirror, our two faces embedded in a black rhombus or sunk in a lake, and a shiver ran down my spin, alas, because I knew that for the moment the laws of mathematics were protecting me, I knew that the tyrannical laws of the cosmos, which are opposed to the laws of poetry, were protecting me and that the soldier would stare entranced at his image in the mirror and I, in the singularity of my stall, would hear and imagine him, entranced in turn, and that our singularities, from that moment on, would be joined like the two faces of a terrible, fatal coin.

This is not news, of course, that the cosmos and poetry are one and the same.

Where does this leave me? Finding the universe in a grain of sand. At last.

Dust and literature

And they used to say to me, with that distinctive Spanish accent which they never lost, that prickly little music, as if they were circling the zs and ss, which made the ss seem lonelier and more sensuous, Auxilio, they'd say, that's enough bustling around, Auxilio, leave those papers alone, woman, dust and literature have always gone together. And I would look at them and think, How right they are, dust and literature, from the beginning, and since at the time I was avid for detail, I conjured up wonderful and melancholy scenes, I imagined books sitting quietly on shelves and the dust of the world creeping into libraries, slowly, persistently, unstoppably, and then I came to understand that books are easy prey for dust (I understood this but refused to accept it), I saw whirlwinds, clouds of dust gathering over a plain somewhere deep in my memory, and the clouds advanced until they reached Mexico City, the clouds that had come from my own private plain, which belonged to everyone although many refused to admit it, and those clouds covered everything with dust, the books I had read and those I was planning to read, covered them irrevocably, there was nothing to be done: however heroic my efforts with broom and rag, the dust was never going to go away, since it was an integral part of the books, their way of living or of mimicking something like life.

[...]

The dark night of the soul advances through the streets of Mexico City sweeping all before it. And now it is rare to hear singing, where once everything was a song. The dust cloud reduces everything to dust. First the poets, then love, then, when it seems to be sated and about to disperse, the cloud returns to hang high over your city or your mind, with a mysterious air that means it has no intention of moving.

— from Amulet, by Roberto Bolaño.

Have I mentioned lately how utterly amazing Bolaño is?

I have plenty of things to say about Bolaño. I will try to save them, sort them. There are things for me to learn from Bolaño, whether about reading, writing, or life. This cannot be rushed.

That ellipsis, for the record, represents about 8 pages. Should I have made it 2 separate quotations? But they're connected. Looking at it here, out of context, it's not even so stunning a quote as I thought. It's the fact that it pulls itself together after meandering for 8 pages that takes my breath away.

It's all connected, and it leaves me breathless and wanting to gulp down the universe.

All the mornings of the world

My mornings — my days, my head — are filled with the Sonnerie de Ste-Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris (by Marin Marais). (Because. I don't know why. Because! Because it's beautiful!)

Listen!

Or watch this less refined, somewhat annoying version.

I too shall play.

Luthier

I used to dream of being a violin-maker.

As a teenager, romantic in my aspirations, I searched out books on the subject at the local library. There were two of them, both of them smelling funny and seemingly written a hundred years ago. One was filled with blueprints and instructions for cutting wood, a skill I didn't have. The other was filled with chemical formulations I didn't understand. Neither of them had the romance I associated with the trade, apart from their general mustiness.

Later I came to acquire a copy of Violin-Making: As It Was, and Is, by Ed. Heron-Allen (first published in 1884). It often reads more like a poetic manifesto than a practical manual.

Never let the maple be spotted in any way; for the sake of both appearance and sound the wood should be of a uniform silvery cream colour under the planing-iron. The pine should be quite white and brilliant like silk when split open, avoiding anything like a reddish tinge, which indicates a most unhealthy growth. The grain must not be too close or too wide, and must be disposed evenly and straight from top to bottom of the belly. The grain of the back should also run from top to bottom of the instrument. One is often asked, why the belly should not have the grain setting crossways, and it is often argued that the best makers have sometimes cut their backs so that the grain ran across them. In the first case experiment has proved to us that the vibrations are transmitted along the fibres of wood quickest in this position and under these circumstances, and in the second it will be remarked that the tone of the Cremonese masterpieces is always most brilliant when this perpendicular setting of the grain has been adhered to.

(I would never have thought to place the English — I mean, historically, as a class; Nigel Kennedy is excepted, of course — among the world's finest violinists or, by association, violin-makers, and I suspect there is a much richer literature on the subject to be found in other European languages, but I have not seen it.)

When I went to university, my calculus textbook had a picture of a violin on the cover. I took this as a sign intended especially for me. A marriage of mathematics and music over which I might officiate.

I took pictures when I travelled, peering into luthiers' workshops in Paris, Prague, and over all of Poland. No clear image was ever returned to me by my camera, just a blur of my half-dreamed otherworld.

It was before I read Antonietta (John Hersey), before I saw The Red Violin, that I imagined it, to pore over the wood, carefully mix resins, and polish and polish and polish. I knew that crafting a violin required a piece of its maker's soul.

I was born into the wrong circumstances, in the wrong part of the world (and of the wrong gender) to pursue this trade. My blurred photos were a sign to me that this secret world was closed to me.

Then my violin needed repair.

I'd been in various shops, of course, even some associated with workshops, but those were simple transactions: new strings, resin, sheet music.

This was the first time I crossed a luthier's threshold, for more substantial matters. I chose the ramshackle shop with the woodshavings on the floor over the one with the modern storefront on a major intersection.

He was bearded and grey, dust settled in the creases of his face. The smell told me he hadn't bathed in days. His eyes twinkled, and he talked, and talked, and talked. About learning to play, about gypsies, about nuances in shape, about customizing the violin to its player's style, about the difference between American strings and German strings, etc. I was captive for close to an hour. Several customers stopped by during that time, one to pick up his bow, others to check on progress and estimates of repair work. This luthier was a character — everything I expected a luthier to be — and he had my trust.

I'd procrastinated, wary of the expense and not sufficiently motivated in spirit to set my violin in order. The necessary fix, it turns out, was a relatively minor outlay of time and money. Recent events have led me to this place, where I'm turning with an almost desperate need to music to help my soul sing again, and I see this gnome of luthier as a catalyst in tuning my instrument to play for me the way I'm meant to play it. Perhaps he's a trickster, more savvy businessman than appearances let on, but still I trust him.

My pegs now turn the way they're supposed to. Ten years ago I knew the bridge was severely warped and needed replacing. So now I have a new one:

It must not be imagined that the design thus fixed upon by the greatest fiddle-maker the world has seen [Amati] was merely his idea of what was most pretty, though to this day there are a great many violinists who are firmly under the impression that the ornamental cutting of the bridge is merely a matter of taste. Very far from it; for countless experiments have been made with a view to altering the accepted design, any deviation from which has proved injuriously to affect the tone of any instrument to which it is applied. It is difficult to imagine the reason of this; how it is that a little piece of maple, which merely serves to keep the strings off the finger-board, should have such a powerful effect on the tone of the instrument to which it is not fastened in any way, being merely kept in its place by the pressure of the four strings. The first explanation of this influence must be sought for in the fact that it is the principal channel by which the vibrations of the strings pass, to the belly by way of the bass bar, and to the back by way (in a lesser degree) of the sound post. In consequence of these its important functions, its proportions, and position on the belly must be very nicely adjusted to the quality of the violin to which it is affixed. For instance, if it be too thick, the vibrations of the strings will not pass with sufficient rapidity of the belly. Its height must also be most carefully adjusted to the quality of the instrument, for if it is too high, the tone will be dull and sluggish, and if it is too low, a harsh, piercing tone will be the result.

While I don't claim to sound anything like ever I did at my "peak" (say, that time at which I practiced regularly and followed lessons), I am amazed by the physical memory that's resurfaced. How easy to keep the elbow under the instrument, not because it's a natural position or a particularly comfortable one, but because my body knows that's where it goes, where it's always gone. My fingers remember their distances. My hand shifts position almost effortlessly (and almost accurately); I am learning minor adjustments after having the neck planed, rounded.

It is much louder than I remember. My soul is singing louder than it has in a long time.

"Heaven reward the man who first hit upon the very original notion of sawing the inside of a cat with the tail of a horse."