Story after story

For someone who claims not to be a big fan of short stories, I sure have read a lot of them lately. These collections since mid-August:

Carlos Fuentes: Happy Families
David Foster Wallace: Oblivion
Daniel Handler: Adverbs
Sana Krasikov: One More Year
Théophile Gautier: My Fantoms

I have found that short stories make for excellent reading:
— while waiting for my morning coffee
— in the bathroom
— on the morning métro commute
— at lunch
— whenever I need a break from my workday
— on the evening métro commute
— while watching the stove
— while the girl splashes in her bath
— while pretending to watch hockey
— at bedtime

Short stories provide a kind of instant gratification that I seem to be craving lately. Certainly I needed these bursts to balance some of my other long and slow reading. They're easy enough to start — and finish! — in the interstices of plodding days.

Currently, I'm midway through Dumas's The Last Cavalier, but earlier this week, reading in an overcrowded train about plots to assassinate Napoleon, I suddenly felt both lost and under siege. So I set it aside, to wait for the smoke to clear. And I turned to Doris Lessing's Stories.

I love the feel of this book — its physical presence. It's new in the catalogue of Everyman's Library. I have a couple other books of this imprint, and they're a real pleasure to read and to carry. If you didn't know:

Everyman's Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

The Everyman's hardcover has peculiar, but perfect, dimensions. Weighty, but somehow in its compactness perfectly weighted. It just feels good!

So I'm reading Doris Lessing again. I've never felt compelled to search out and read in its entirety her oeuvre, and I'm starting to wonder why not. I've immensely enjoyed everything of hers that I've read, and while I truly to believe her work to be Important, my interest in it has been very reasonable — I have not obsessively hunted down obscure or out-of-print works, nor have I compulsively snapped up her latest releases. When I read her, I am pleasantly surprised and reassured to find that it is good. And I am fortunate to have this leisurely but strong relationship with an author, relieved that it is unlikely I will run out her books to read for many years yet to come.

In 1969, Doris Lessing was written about in Time Magazine:

Fans of British Novelist Doris Lessing talk about a composite character called the Lessing Woman in much the same way as people once talked about the Hemingway Man. The Lessing Woman is a formidable female. She hasn't been to a university but she has read everything and remembers it. Her ideals are high and unsullied. She works (or has worked) at lost political causes. Although she loathes marriage, she gamely raises children and endures domestic woes. She cooks well, keeps a spotless house (except when depressed) and does excellent writing, research or secretarial work. She is any man's moral and intellectual superior, and she rarely hesitates to tell him so.

I can't say I've ever heard anyone called a Lessing Woman, though I know a few. I don't think I qualify myself — I'm less political, more naturally maternal, and my house is far from spotless. But there are days I think it's something to aspire to.

The stories were drawn from collections previously published in 1957, 1963, and 1972. They are bleak, in quite a beautiful way, and very real.

Here's one Doris Lessing story (not in the collection I'm reading) I found online: "A Mild Attack of Locusts."

I'll share more about the stories in this particular collection as I progress.

Artful and quizzical

(Via.)

Your result for What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test...

Traditional, Vibrant, and Tasteful

10 Islamic, -4 Impressionist, 5 Ukiyo-e, -9 Cubist, -5 Abstract and 4 Renaissance!

Islamic art is developed from many sources: Roman, Early Christian, and Byzantine styles were taken over in early Islamic architecture; the architecture and decorative art of pre-Islamic Persia was of paramount significance; Central Asian styles were brought in with various nomadic incursions; and Chinese influences. Islamic art uses many geometical floral or vegetable designs in a repetitive pattern known as arabesque. It is used to symbolize the transcendent, indivisible and infinite nature of Allah.

People that like Islamic art tend to be more traditional people that appreciate keeping patterns that they learned and experienced from their past. It is not to say that they are not innovative personalities, they just do not like to let go of their roots. They like to put new ideas into details and make certain that they will work before sharing them with others. Failure is not something they like to think about because they are more interested in being successful and appreciated for their intelligence. These people can also be or like elaborate things in their life as long as they are tasteful. They tend to prefer geometric patterns and vibrant colors.

Take What Your Taste in Art Says About You Test at HelloQuizzy

Debt

The 2008 Massey Lectures are under way. Margaret Atwood speaks about "Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth."

These are not lectures about how to get out of debt; rather, they're about the debtor/creditor twinship in the broadest sense — from human sacrifice to pawnshops to revenge. In this light, what we owe and how we pay is a feature of all human societies, and profoundly shapes our shared values and our cultures.

She presented part 4 of the series the other night here in Montreal. (When I first heard tell of it weeks ago, the event was already sold out.)

The lecture, titled The Shadow Side, [. . .] took on the subject of debt in the philosophical and literary sense, with references to Machiavelli, Charles Dickens and, most thoroughly of all, William Shakespeare. (You didn't have to be a seer to guess Shylock would show up somewhere. Her rigorous analysis of how anti-Semitism is rooted in historical concepts of debt was breathaking [sic].)

The lectures will be broadcast on CBC, November 10–14. Or you can read them.

Supper

On arriving home after a hard
day's work I find
myself standing dutifully
at the stove, right hand
tending the meat
in the skillet, left hand
holding open Baudelaire,
my nose in it.

And I think:
something is not
right with this picture.

Substitute
Les Fleurs du Mal
for a pinch of salt.

The flesh of the world

If you call yourself a poet, don't just sit there. Poetry is not a sedentary occupation, not a "take your seat" practice. Stand up and let them have it.

It's been a rough couple weeks at work. After eating lunch at my desk Friday, I need fresh air. An impromptu afternoon stroll takes me to the bookstore.

I miss browsing in bookstores. The bookstores I know here on the whole simply aren't conducive to it. I go with a mission usually, for "research" or a specific purchase. Some lunch hours I may spend more time there, scanning the bargain bins, but methodically, with only the pretense of leisure. It dawns on me that I may have shut myself off from an introduction to many fine and interesting books, pretty ones that shine cleverly at the cocktail hour, but deep and secretive ones too that leak their mysteries into the last bottle of wine some time after midnight when the jazz records come on.

So I... I don't know what I'm doing there Friday. I'm angry and distracted and tired. And I pluck off the shelf, I know not why — I guess because it's black and red, slim, the title psst-ing at me — Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Poetry as Insurgent Art, and I start to read, and smile. I feel all giddy inside.

Here's the thing. I'm a poet, I'm realizing. I mean... I don't actually write verse. But. No, I'm off to a bad start. How can I explain...?

I think I'm having a midlife crisis. That is, something is crawling over me, or bursting out of me, or seeping through my pores. Part of this is a physical function of age: I'm at, or nearing, my sexual peak, chronobiologically speaking, and the time bomb of the biological clock is pulsing, pounding, through my heart, my head.

This is a lustiness beyond the physical, that has yet to be sated. I am hungry — all my senses together screaming for more! And I am vibrating! Every fibre of my being — my physical body, yes, but I mean my neurons, my heartstrings — vibrating! Singing! My God, do you have any idea how much I love crunchy leaves?!!

Am I crazy? Or is this the noise of a cocoon rustling around me, flaking away?

(Diagnoses welcome.)

And it happens that I've discovered poetry. And I think these things are connected. And Ferlinghetti has me crying Yes! Yes! with every proclamation. Like I am being called to arms. Though I'm not sure my arms are literary ones. And I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with this information exactly. But it's being made clear to me that this feeling, this experience, this crisis, is not a disintegration, but au contraire a synthesis, at a molecular level, of body and mind too long separate.

Instead of trying to escape reality, plunge into the flesh of the world.

Political science

A vote for science. Watch. Learn.

(Via.)

A chorus of irony and disomfort

Tolstoy wrote that "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

I think about this often, rather surprisingly often; I'd say about once a week on average. Not a fleeting glance of a thought, but a fully introspective reflection. Usually on my morning commute, having parted ways with the tiny little family of my own making, and wondering what it is that we are, whether we are normal and "happy" (whatever that means) in our quotidian dysfunction. Or sometimes a call from "home" will set me to appraising the actions and motives of siblings and cousins, though they might be unaware of what ripples they may cause.

Since I was 11 years old, perhaps younger, I've been unhealthily(?) obsessed with the question — the problem — of happiness: What is it exactly, and how can I get me some?

When I first read Anna Karenina some 20 years ago, Tolstoy's opening sentence stuck in my mind. I've wondered if families' happinesses are so alike as appearances (or Tolstoy) would have us believe. (Cannot happiness be unique?) Or if their uniquenesses — every family is unique, is it not? — imply that some unhappinesses lie beneath their happy surfaces. Is it the corollary of Tolstoy's pronouncement that all families are unhappy? Or are more of us more alike than we admit, happy — indescribably, ineffably, tragically, naturally and inevitably, our unique and glorious dysfunctions giving us a commonality, lifting us out of our dark secrets? Are we to find solace — happiness — in this newly realized normalcy? By acknowledging our demons, are we redeemed?

Carlos Fuentes's new collection of stories, Happy Families, has Tolstoy's declaration as an epigram. This book, then — in perfect communion with the path my mind follows on my daily commute, accompanying me over the last couple weeks.

In these masterly vignettes, Fuentes explores Tolstoy's classic observation that "happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." In "A Family Like Any Other," each member of the Pagan family lives in isolation, despite sharing a tiny house. In "The Mariachi's Mother," the limitless devotion of a woman is revealed as she secretly tends to her estranged son's wounds. "Sweethearts" reunites old lovers unexpectedly and opens up the possibilities for other lives and other loves. These are just a few of the remarkable stories in Happy Families, but they all inhabit Fuentes's trademark Mexico, where modern obsessions bump up against those of the mythic past, and the result is a triumphant display of the many ways we reach out to one another and find salvation through irrepressible acts of love.

I don't know who wrote this blurb, but they couldn't possibly have read the same book I did. There is no redemption in love or by love for these tragic characters.

(Did Fuentes mean to be ironic? Or Tolstoy? Or the blurb writer?)

Rape, incest, boredom, and infidelity. The tyranny of parents and the rebelliousness of youth. I don't think Fuentes brings anything new to these age-old stories. He seems to wallow in them.

"Sweethearts," mentioned above, is, in my opinion, crushing: the lovers revisit their a nostalgia to have it erased by the reality of aging bodies and the not-quite admissions of the less-than-romantic dynamics of their own weak-willed youth too easily swayed by their families' wishes.

Still, it was to me one of the more interesting stories of the lot, but not a happy one. No salvation there.

On the whole, these stories seemed to be lacking in sincerity; too contrived, endings — whether of stories or of sentences — too cryptic.

Sixteen stories, each followed by a chorus. I haven't figured out the choruses. Poems, it seems, but long and rambling, intended perhaps to shock with violence of language and imagery. I couldn't find the point in them, either as commentary on the stories preceding them or in their own right.

I found only about half a dozen of the stories to have been worth reading, none of them perfect but with some interesting ideas and a little bit of a sense of passion to help them bear fruit.

I haven't read much by Fuentes — I remember having liked it, but that was long ago and now I'm not so sure. One of the most fleshed-out characters (We don't get to know any of these people very well. As I write this I wonder if Fuentes had it in mind that we don't often ever really know our family.) is that of a girl raped and killed:

You have to know who my daughter was. And please don't protect yourself, as my husband does, behind the lie of Alessandra's supposed human coldness. Ah yes, they say, she was promising girl but barely human. She lacked warmth. She lacked emotion.

People who think that infuriate me, beginning with my husband, I'll tell you that with all honesty. It means not understanding that the "familiar address" Alessandra used with genius — or brilliance, I don't know — was an intense, erotic form of desire. My daughter loved, Senor. Not what everyone vulgarly attributes that verb, physical attraction, not even the tenderness and warmth shared with other human beings. Alessandra loved Nietzsche or the Brontes because she them alone, alone in the graves of their books and their thoughts. Alessandra approached the geniuses of the past to give them life with her attention, which was the form her affection took: paying attention.

She didn't want to take anything from anyone. She wanted to give to the neediest. The dead? Yes, perhaps. It's true, "The dead are so alone.: But she sought out the company of the less frequented dead. The immortals. That's what she told me. She wanted to look after, offer her hand to so many human beings, the artists and thinkers who are the subject of studies, biographies, yes, and lectures, but not of a love equivalent to what we give to a close, living being. Offer her hand to the immortals. That was my daughter's vocation.

I wonder if Fuentes thinks it his vocation, too. A cold, passionless bid for genius that misses the mark.

Cavalier attitudes

At long last I have arrived at The Last Cavalier, Alexandre Dumas's long-lost novel. On my shelf for almost a year already, I was somewhat daunted by this brick of more than 700 pages.

But read a sentence and you can't help but read the next one. How could I have stayed away so long from Dumas, he who sweeps me away with political intrigue and wild exploits? Plus, he's very funny.

At that moment word came to Bonaparte that the horses were harnessed and ready. He stood and asked Roland to pay. Roland dealt with the hotel keeper while Bonaparte got into the coach. Just as Roland was about to join his companion, he found Alfred de Barjols in his path.

"Excuse me, monsieur," the young man said to him. "You were beginning to say something to me, but the word never left your lips. Might I know what kept you from pronouncing it?"

"Oh, monsieur," said Roland, "the reason I held it back was simply that my companion pulled me back down by my coat pocket, and so as not to be disagreeable to him, I decided not to call you a fool."

"If you intended to insult me in that way, monsieur, might I therefore consider that you have now done so?"

"If that should please you, monsieur. . . ."

"That does please me, because it offers me the opportunity to demand satisfaction."

"Monsieur," said Roland, "we are in a great hurry, my companion and I, as you can see. But I will be happy to delay my departure for an hour if you think one hour will be enough to settle this question."

"One hour will be sufficient, monsieur."

Roland bowed and hurried to the coach.

"Well," said Bonaparte, "are you going to fight?"

"I could not do otherwise, General," Roland answered. "But my adversary appears to be very accommodating. It should not take more than an hour. I shall hire a horse as soon as this business is over and shall surely catch up with you before you reach Lyon."

Bonaparte shrugged. "Hothead," he said. And then, reaching out his hand, he added, "Try at least not to get yourself killed. I need you in Paris."

"Oh, relax, General. Somewhere between Valence and Vienne I shall come tell you what happened."

Bonaparte left. About one league beyond Valence he heard a horse galloping behind him and ordered the coachman to stop.

"Oh, it's you, Roland," he said. "Apparently everything went well?"

"Perfectly well," said Roland as he paid for his horse.

"Did you fight?"

"Yes, I did, General."

"How?"

"With pistols."

"And?"

"And I killed him, General."

Roland took his place beside Bonaparte and the coach set off again at a gallop.

The first 6 chapters are available online. I barrelled through them.

One of the many things I'm thankful for

Helena draws me a picture almost every day. Averaged out with those days on which she draws me handfuls of pictures... well, that's a lot of pictures. I throw them out when she's not looking. Not that I don't treasure each and every one of them, but it's a lot of pictures.

Many she specifically designates as pictures I should take to work. And I do. My office wall is covered with her artwork — she'd previously asked for photographic evidence, and I'd obliged, though she's since seen it with her own eyes. We are currently showcasing a series of superheroes (because who doesn't need a superhero on their wall?). My desk drawer is stuffed with drawings that have fallen out of rotation, and dozens of others I throw away (when nobody's looking).

(Make no mistake: though many are destined for the recycle bin, I know full well how much emptier my days would be without these drawings.)

Some drawings I like more than others — because they're prettier, or tell a particularly interesting story, or show significant artistic development. This weekend Helena drew me a picture that met all these criteria.



Here the prince has come to rescue the princess, but the evil witch is thwarting his efforts with her magic power (that would be the green blob between them). I love the fact that Helena is suddenly concerned with drawing people's eyelashes.

The big rotten soup of chance

(Credit.)

Friends

A man needs sad friends to whom he can tell what he doesn't say to his lover. A man needs patient friends who give him the time that a lover denies him. A man needs the friend who talks to him about his lover and evokes a kind of shared warmth that requires the presence of a third person, a special confidant. And above all, a man must respect the relationship with the friend who isn't his lover and gives the assurance that passion could overwhelm him.

— from "The Gay Divorcee," in Happy Families, by Carlos Fuentes.

This is a weeping song

Nick Cave — and the Bad Seeds — play Metropolis tonight. I'll be there.

The periphery

Some things I'm realizing about DFW...

I've read a few essays, a whole collection of short stories plus a couple others, and a fraction of one novel. So I'm an expert now.

I thought there might be some clever way to encapsulate his style, to call him someone's literary descendant. Some part of my mind even suggested to me Patrick Hamilton — there's a certain breathlessness, an inevitable accompaniment to the attempt to follow and explicate the dark and wondrous workings of the human mind.

If he is anyone's "descendant" — in the tradition of those examining the psychology of minutiae, what constitutes the banal — he is so via Calvino, tracing a precise mathematical function of action and reaction.

The stories in Oblivion were somewhat darker than I'd expected. Though I don't really know what I expected. There's death and suicide, grim circumstances. Nasty thoughts. Pettiness.

A couple things in particular strike me.

In one story it's explicitly stated that life happens in our peripheral vision. And I think he's right. The point of things is sometimes brought into sharp relief against things we can barely make out, but most of life is a blur, a mash; if there is a point, it ripples through the mire as we shift our attention.

The other thing is the quick cuts. In some stories we switch story lines by the paragraph. Elsewhere the shifts happen one clipped sentence after another, within the same breath even. This confused me at first, but I came to understand it as the parallel unfolding of simultaneous thoughts, memories, events. We are film-literate enough to understand it if it occurs on screen; but our habits of how to read a page are more ingrained, harder to remould.

I liked the stories better than I liked the bit of novel I've read to date, and I like the essays better than the stories. Keen observation, of which David Foster Wallace is a master, outshines vivid imagination. This thing about the periphery — I think real life is richer in senseless detail than fiction could ever be.

Matiques & matiques

Helena tells me one of the boys in her class is really good at matiques. I don't understand. "You know, matiques... Et matiques. I finally put 2 and 2 together: mathématiques.

She wants to do matiques at bedtime, begs for me to throw her some questions. I oblige. At subtraction involving a 2-digit number (11 - 2), she looks off into the corner of her mind, whispering her own words of encouragement, "Tu es capable, Helena." (Where do we learn to talk to ourselves?)

This afternoon, 2010 is on TV. We watch some, and struggle to make sense of it.

Helena starts chess club this week. We must retrieve the knights from the Lego ramparts.

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."