katiclops

I feel a cold, soft pencil-eraser pushing into my face. Then a facefull of wooly-undoubtably grey-fur. More fur. Purring. Purring? Who purrs before 7am?! The fur stops moving and I start to feel a tentative, rough lick and nuzzle on my forehead, ever so faintly, every so far away, my alarm.

Griz! Good morning Griz! For what more is there really to say? Being awoken by a 7.5 pound mass of fur – especially one so positively elated at the notion of me giving her just the tiniest bit of food – is not the worst thing I could think of. Not to mention that she has also learned intuitively to respond to my alarm clock by sitting on top of it to muffle to the sound, presenting me instead with her purring pretty face.

What a sweet heart.

I stumble into the kitchen, navigating the shadow-grey mass running figure-eights around my ankles like tires at a drill camp. I run the water, top up her kibble and fish, and fix myself a glass of lemon water. Breakfast is served. It’s crazy to think that three months ago there was no Griz, no morning water: nothing but a caffeine powered tardy sprint to the office.

I stand a few feet back from her voracious slurps and drink my own jar of water, letting my eyes adjust to the light, slowly planning the next half hour and my route to work. The rain on the skylight four feet above my head echoes like run-away dried beans down the bulk-food aisle. Spring rain is inevitable, but losing an hour of sleep, and a rainfall warning? What a way to start a Tuesday.

Griz, Killoran Gordan, Dec 2012

My ride to work is short, but often unpleasant. A little over 3km it follows a major road and then a shipping route, not to mention that a bike accident a few blocks off my route had left another cyclist in critical condition the day before. It easily could have been me. As is rote for cycling accidents, the story was quickly flooded with notes and observations about bad bikers: helmetless, reckless yahoos that were obstructing the traffic-flow of good citizens. I am often rattled after reading this type of news, but I also know that if I give into my fear I’m libel to trade in my bike for the bus permanently. I strapped on my helmet, threw on my bright yellow jacket and headed out the door.

In honour of the time change, I decided to break my coffee-less Habit and grab one en route to work. Nostalgia flooded over me as I walked in the door. The café had flown under my radar entirely the first year I lived in town. It’s only two blocks beyond Chinatown, a stone’s throw from our house. I stumbled upon it blindly attending a poetry reading, astonished to find that I had been biking by it daily for months. Stumbling in this morning was like stumbling in for the first time, discovering a little self-contained universe right under my nose.

Unassuming, it’s filled with subtle dark wood, skylights and plants. A friendly, hip-yet-unpretentious staff and noteworthy coffee. The clientele consists of a healthy mix of construction workers (as they are open earliest of all the cafés), old men (who spend hours chatting in the lounge), a steady stream of postal workers (the post-office headquarters is next door), students (free wireless) and government workers (they’re everywhere). After my initial visit, I was completely hooked, joining the regulars. Having a welcoming, quiet space turned me around academically, powering me through my last semester and prompting a “thank you” in the Acknowledgements section of my final Masters project. The name of said café? Oh-so-approrpriately: Discovery.

Discovery Coffee on Discovery st. (Al Champagne)

Coffee strapped in bike rack, it wasn’t until I arrived at work that I realized the news of the accident had subconsciously turned me into an exemplary cyclist: alert and awake, I had worn my lights and brightest clothing, over-emphasized all my turn signals, triple checked my blind spots and stood up extra-straight while I waited to make my left-hand turn in the intersection. An improvement.

A friend once told me that getting what you want out of life is simple; it comes in two steps. The first is recognizing that you want something, and the second is recognizing it when it comes to you.

May you also find unexpected changes to some of your old habits, a silver lining to these grey days and a rinsing away into spring.

Yeah write turns 100 this week! Er, 3! And 100 posts! Go yeah,write!

1 comment

March 6, 2013

Selecky’s Party

sat down to write this hours ago.

It is nearly spring here. No, it’s finally spring here. The east coast in me can’t quite believe it yet, but it’s beginning to snow white cherry blossoms and the light has that liberated full-spectrum gilt to it at last. Nowhere else is winter as long as the dreary grey coast.

I biked home fast after work. I stayed a full ten minutes later than I had intended, wrapping myself up too tightly in a PowerPoint presentation and lost sight of the time. 4:15 means GO! This light you looked at so longingly is yours now! I frantically flew out the door and tried a new route home, up a side street and down a hill so steep I thought I’d fly over my handlebars before curling sharply onto the bikepath. The wind is still crisp and winter-clean, but the angle of the sun is a promise that can’t be revoked, and coasting over the clackety-clack wooden footbridge I wanted to scream at every person I crossed: we made it! The winter is done.

In celebration of our newfound daylight I nipped out for coffees before the cafés all closed at 6. The original plan was to write, but we got caught up meandering lazily home, and it hardly seemed worth it to rush over for the slim twigh-lit last half hour. I got take away cups. Because it is a special day (Day of Sunlight), I permit myself to a latté instead of a regular coffee, and I made his a secret decaf. Since the good weather hit the Island this weekend we’ve kept all our windows open, well into the night, like the people who flap around in sandals and shorts before the snow has melted. To compensate we’re both bundled in blankets and heavy sweaters, and Griz is curled up tight against me with her paws clamped firmly over her nose, but the air is fresh and promising and we sleep the sweep sunburnt dreams we’ve missed since September.

The coffee is ice now, thick and rich, forgotten.

I’ve seen Sarah Selecky’s slick little paperback around. It’s cute. The red Giller sticker is a beacon to the Canadian-lit junkie in me, it turns my head like a pretty bike. Or maybe Tiffany’s blue is has gravitational pull over all women. I like the cover, the empty cracked plate, and the title: This Cake is for the Party. It’s the kind of title you want to say out loud to yourself several times, and articulate every consonant, like the name Maggie.

I had picked up the book a few times at Munroe’s but always seemed to turn to passages where people were talking in weird accents (having read the book, I am not able to identify which passages I must have stumbled upon). Printed with a tightly bound spine, it’s a book that hurts your thumbs if you try to read it without cracking the binding. But it’s glossy and durable and I loved the typeface. Sarah Solecky was also the name of one of my best friend’s when I was five, which gave the whole book an eerie familiarity to begin with. Maybe that’s part of what put me off, and it never made it to the check-out pile. But then last week I read a great article in the Walrus (Gossip Girl, February 2013- you can read the article here). The article was light and funny, articulate and well-written, filled with the kind of insightful insecurities I look for in a novel. This Cake is for the Party: devoured 48 hours after purchase.

That kind of light, last year, Vancouver

I’ve read more Canadian lit this year than any year before in my life. One of my favourites, Zsuszi Gartner, is actually thanked on the inside jacket. Canadian contemporary lit has a strange little niche unto itself. We’re more somber and sober than our US counterparts, more stark and lonely. Our stories seem to stand out stoically against urban tundra. They seep a strange sort of arctic mysticism… I gauge the overarching flavour and temperament of this group I so desperately want to join the way I suss out the lake temperature by dangling one toe off the dock.

Selecky’s book was originally published in 2010 and is comprised of ten short stories set all over Canada. She writes like someone who has been trained to draw using guide lines. Like those books that I would save up for from the Scholastic catalogue, where they would start with an oval egg, add a cross in the next panel to show you where the eyes would go, and then suddenly a completed portrait in the last pain (with no traced of the x-egg to be found). Like foundation drawing, Selecky starts with simple oval mannequins and stick figures, abruptly filling in the fingers on one hand, the crumbled grass under one foot, the soft hair on her left ear lobe, leaving the rest faceless, ubiquitous. She describes people like pressed flowers no fewer than three times, and speaks about smooth pebbles from a river or lake just as many.

Float plane base, Victoria, Summer 2012

This interspersal of wide broad strokes and tiny intricate details is extremely evocative: it’s uncomfortable. In tandem with the fact that her stories take place in a glut of familiar but obscure locations (e.g., Manitoulin Island), the visceral details that Selecky adds somehow burrow under your skin. They impregnant your mind with small bubbles of memory that flow like a marble through your veins until they unexpectedly burst in vivid total recall of some forgotten memory.

Part of what resonated most was the music she mentions: Broken Social Scene, Miles Davis, Metric, Arlo Gutherie. I finally know every artist she mentioned. I’ve lived them. I’ve also sung along loudly to that album in my car. I always wonder if Americans have this proximity when they read fiction. If you lived in New York does the New Yorker resonate with you differently? Are all of these things more vivid to your life? If I were twenty years older would all the literature I’ve been reading smell this much more real, more colourful? We are released.

* * *

Pathetic fallacy continues, yesterday’s brief spot of sun blotted out by the relentless rain. But the tension is broken, the promise is there. Technicolour summer is about to arrive.

Welcome to the Real World. We made it.

Yeah RIGHT this week I’m back on yeahwrite Check them out!

Daily drop cap by the lovely miss Jessica Hische!

16 comments

March 2, 2013

Christie’s Garden II

…Continued from Part 1

Hallway, Vancouver, 2012

Rules.

I read The Beggar’s Garden quickly, over 48 hours or so, and the one lingering thing that clung to me was the rules.

I went to a moxibustion workshop recently. Moxibustion is kind of like acupuncture except instead of placing pins in energy meridians to activate and balance them, you use heat from a lit wand (a sharpie-sized stick of tightly packed “moxa” or mogwort). It was awesome. The class was partially hosted by a freeskool, on a pay-what-you-can basis, with my amazing teacher volunteering her time, as well as organizing and donating the supplies and the space. The turn out for the workshop was very small, a handful of people from the clinic and two freeskool hosts. Before we began the workshop one of the hosts informed me proudly, with no small condescension that they had “dropped out of school to pursue radical pedagogy” and that they “just couldn’t understand why more people aren’t into learning cool stuff for free.” I stared at them blankly for a moment and blinked, translating their words: a reform of (radical) the theory of learning (pedagogy). (I hope that this irony of need to translate that is not lost on anyone).

As the workshop progressed I became more and more irate with the “radical pedagoges.” I fully appreciate that our education system is in dire straits, and filled with barriers and debt, however low barrier education opportunities (e.g., our pay-what-you-can workshop) are still not “free.” They are bracketed by contributions and exchanges that can be just as easily capitalized on at the expense of others. Cultural rules and norms still exist, in large part for our safety. Admittedly, some of these rules and practices can create barriers, but some of them exist to ensure the greatest good to the greatest number.

For example, being on time (or thereabouts) is not a convention designed to “keep people down in the system,” but to ensure that people don’t waste their life waiting around. Granted aspects of pedagogy may need to be challenged, but certain rules also arose out of good. Perhaps the most important thing is that it is understood, or at the very least it is acknowledged that rules exist, and that they are embedded as a part of how we communicate. On this level, you could consider grammar and spelling rules of language. Without them written expression would almost be entirely lost: you need to understand the rules in order to break them.

Culturally this happens often. In Mali for example, it is extremely bad form to chat with someone in the morning before they’ve had the chance to wash their eyes and rinse their mouth. People won’t even acknowledge you. You’ve got carte blanche until you’ve done your morning wake-up rinse. If you’re not the best morning person 100% of the time, this is an absolutely fantastic convention. On the other hand, if you’ve got no idea what’s going on in the situation, everybody comes off as looking incredibly rude. Similarly in relationships this also happens, and surely the onslaught of Valentine’s day themed podcasts and news coverage didn’t help my meditation on the matter.

Morning, Sélingué, 2004

Christie’s little snippets leave you feeling weightless, but have led you to overarching nagging themes you can not shake the rest of the day, like the introductory ambulance story and geriatric care.

I was chatting with a friend recently about recent trends in writing-which is so funny in and of itself, the idea that books are just as much in fashion as wedges or skinny jeans. He was going on about his haughty indifference to it all, the comings and goings of trends, before we digressed into dissecting them. He explained to me there are two great emergences: post-colonial literature (Coeteze, Pamuk, Shteynaart) and (ironically enough) redefining the “forgotten” white guy (à la David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen). I had never really thought about it that way before, but alot of contemporary literature does seem to fall neatly into these camps. What is interesting about Beggar’s Garden is that it almost seems to straddle both sides:

Emerging from the alley, he was met by a cold drift of exhaustion and decided to walk home. He started east. He and Anna lived in Strathcona, the oldest residential neighbourhood in the city, besieged in recent years by the young, progressive, and wealthy, who sought to live within bike-commuting distance of downtown and could stomach the neighbourhood’s proximity to the riotous and hellish, but strangely contained, slum of the Downtown Eastside…At first the city had been thrilling-as if their adventurousness, their willingness to scuttle the past, had been rewarded with their own earthly paradise, a temperate garden way out out on the golden fringe of everything, far distant form the entanglements of her family and the yawing absence of his. Yet as years ticked by, something about the city nagged at Sam’s prairie sensibilities. Its beauty now seemed to him almost obscene, as if to build a glimmering city of glass by the sea at the foot of an Olympian rack of mountains, was to invite calamity. …this doomed neighbourhood …had assumed a symbolic station in his mind, an unsightly eruption that the city somehow deserved and couldn’t conceal…a living monument to all unwanted things-and some parts of Sam hoped it would be there forever.

Vancouver feels a bit campy, that there aren’t enough people, that there is this feeling that the city is perpetually sitting at 20% capacity, with it’s resident’s rattling around and playing cosmopolitan dress-up. Toronto is the population of all of BC, and the population of Hamilton is nearly the size of all the people living on Vancouver Island. When I think of it that way, suddenly the west coast feels very small. In all this mess of interwoven tales, Christie’s Garden seems to fall back into the tiny niche so many Vancouver books seem to fall into, the last frontier of colonialism: post-colonial lit. Vancouver, schiophrenically trying to work through all of these rules that don’t make sense, rules we’ve invented for the roles we are trying to play, in some new form of post-colonial Canadianism.

A great little read, if you can find it. Hats off to Christie.

1 comment

March 1, 2013

Christie’s plea for Flowers I

I’m reading again.

You know those weeks and weeks and weeks when you’re stuck? After two months of drifting through a cloud of magazines, bad tv and crossword puzzles in efforts to coax my brain into allowing just one more acronym into permeating the blood-brain barrier, something finally clicked: critical mass was obtained, and I wanted to read again. It was late, dreary. I had no other choice: I bundled myself up and tumbled over to Value Village.

I know, I know. Value isn’t the most ethical place to shop; I do do my best to support our local bookstores and libraries (through the ridiculous late fees I somehow manage to accrue). For us, the thing about VV is that it is insanely convenient It’s on our block, open until 9 and (although it’s a bit of a grab bag) they often tend to have a decent selection of second hand books. It’s always an interesting array: a smattering of Maeve Binchy novels sandwiched between three different editions of Nicco Ricci’s book and the lesser known titles of best-selling authors. You can always tell what was really hot three years ago by the volume of copies lining the stacks Tuesdays with Morrie and Eat Love Pray seem have been particularly pervasive.

Classics are always in abundance (the books you’ve always intended on reading) – you can afford to be picky on this front: never settle for anything but the nicest editions in the best shape, plenty of copies of Crime and Punishment to go around (you’re going to read it on your Kindle anyway). There is no order here, just sheer chaos, entropic rows upon rows Zadie Smith right next to Babara Kingsolver, Danielle Steele astride Doestoevesky. Your only choice is to descend into a cathartic-catatonic rhythmic state of the thrift store shuffle. Methodologically scanning over each shelf and each row, reading each title, grabbing anything that looks valuable, following the lady chronically restocking the shelves, repeat. Take breaks to skim through Fantasy/SciFi and Cooking to make sure you haven’t missed anything that could have been mis-shelved or hidden and forgotten.

Then, delicately held between copy #87 of Fall on your Knees and this dog-eared copy of Sophie’s World that has lived in the same shelf-spot since I moved to Victoria, there it was:

The Beggar’s Garden.

Michael Christies’ The Beggar’s Garden is a another Vancouver book. A multi-narrative, Christie charts nine peripherally intersecting stories about different people living in the city, spanning it’s width and breadth. Despite being a book of well repute here on the coast, it’s still suffers the collateral of being Canadian: chronically hard to find, new or otherwise. Published in 2011, it was long-listed for the Giller and picked up the City of Vancouver’s book award.

The stories fit nicely into one another, like Timothy Taylor’s Stanley Park. They contain everything you would anticipate from a Vancouver book, deftly demonstrating the poignancy, empathy and awareness of it’s author. As if articulating the faults of the city absolves us from sharing in it’s guilt. Somehow though, in part in his simplicity, in part for his complete absolution to leave the stories separate, to present them objectively, in with an almost mathematical degree of calculation.

In the first instalment, Christie finds us vulnerable and unaware pulling us with the deftness of a tablecloth disappearing from a place setting:

They sent the wrong paramedic, one I’d never met before. He had sideburns sculpted into hockey sticks and stunk of canola oil. He was in my doorway with the gulping eyes of a rodent and the shocker thing in a red nylon duffle over his shoulder. His partner was old and wheezed bedside him from the three flights of stairs. It had taken me a while to answer the door because I was on the toilet, unable to pee for nervousness. When I stood, my hamstrings went pins and needles and I steadied myself on the towel bar while taking a minute to arrange my hair.

Everyone knows someone who is old. Everyone is afraid of turning into someone who is old; alone. It’s a story and a scenario that conjures up fear, resonates with familiarity, universality and empathy. Using this as a starting point, Christie is able to teleport us in through a ubiquitous portal into the Downtown Eastside (DTES).

It’s not for a few more chapters until he pulls out the typical Vancouver fare of addiction and juxtaposition:

The pavement is wet and reptilian…the air thick with evaporation. People are out tonight, like every night, hustling, smoking, chatting, shaking hands, screaming. Everybody is buying, selling or collecting things of a certain or possible value….

I was twenty-six when I started smoking crack. Crack. It sounds so ridiculous even when I say it now, so pornographic.

Skimming quickly over the backstory, with this quick nod to the grotesque, he then turns this into one of the lightest, happiest chapters as we follow-him through a flawless high: airless and clean. His simple ways of writing give a bare-bones west-coast feel to the whole ordeal, letting the rough grain of the wood leave splinters. What I most liked about this book was that it most accurately mirrored life in Van. Each area of town remotely overlapping, sharing walls of a vacuous honeycomb, a hive keeping everyone contained and close but separate, the Hollowness that comes with all Vancouver books.

Good morning Griz! February, 2013

Recently I was listening to “Leaving the Fold” (episode 258 of TAL). A huge portion of the episode talks about Jerry Springer’s career as a politician. At one point one of the guests launched into a tirad about the idea that the element of surprise in context inversely proportional to your reception of the information; that you should wear your most conservative suit the day you present your most creative ideas. In this way, Christie is sneaky. His writing is simple, and precise, which robs and strengthens it, broaching complex ideas through unassuming avenues:

…today was the funeral. It was held outside the city, so Bernice took the bus. After three transfers she stepped from the vehicle’s hissing doors and asked a boy in a pristine white tracksuit lazing on a bicycle with gold-plated rims where the church was. He flicked his chin grimly at what looked like a mall at the centre of a monstrous parking lot, so vast it reminded her of the sweeping landscape paintings often donated to the store, the ones that never sold because, she figured, they amplified people’s loneliness.

Bernice went to the pencil-lead-coloured coffin and pulled from her purse a wooden caterpillar that wobbled when pulled by its string. She set the toy beside her in the white satin interior. Karla had a ponytail-a style she’d never worn-and her face was puffy and spatulaed with makeup.

Christie has a way of presenting complex ideas with very simple language, springing them on you softly like buying a time share. He also does this by juxtaposing the stories, without explanation next to one another. Stories of who would most often be perceived as “the most desperate, marginalized” people are portrayed as quite happy, their detachment and highs and lows crowding out any semblance of the sadness of reality in their narratives. Next to this are some of the most quietly desperate stories, like the one about the dog and the yuppie living in a concrete shoebox apartment in the West End.

City’s are strange places indeed.

Continued in Part II

1 comment

January 28, 2013

New year, New Yorker, and peacock PhDs

Misty morning, Royal Roads, January, 2013

o we made it.

This post is the last in a long serious of abandoned drafts that have sprouted up in the past few weeks.

2012 was a long and intense year; it drew to a close, with the finality and sanctity of a little lifeboat levelling out at the end of a typhoon.

My new job as started, after plunging headfirst into a sea of new faces and fumbling through a wash of acronyms, I finally feel as though I’m beginning to swim my way to shore. I only took a quick three days at Christmas, and in the holiday office-lull I finally made some headway in getting my feet on solid ground. It was a beautiful way to start the new year.

Ogden Point, Victoria, BC – December 2012

I spent a portion of the break travelling, a portion alone, and the past three weeks working through decluttering my existence. Needless to say, it’s been a reflective, belly-button gazing kind of month.

No one ever seems to tell you that or remember that bit about travelling-in spite of all the new adventures, new people and new places you’re ambitiously out venturing towards, inevitably you spend a huge chunk of hours in controlled, cold, public environments, staring at flight schedules, the inside of busses, highways and waiting in solitude. The holidays are exhausting and relaxing in part due to these extremes. What moments you have with people are often intense, emotional exchanges, insulated by vortexes of sterile solitude. Layer this under seasonal memory, apocalyptical apprehensions and the longest days of the year and you have yourself a complete, contemplative, crystalline disaster.

Our brains are the most metabolic, oxygen intensive organs in our bodies, and thinking takes time. This is something I always forget. All of our rush rush rushing everywhere and multi-tasking and fear of silences and empty spaces and no space to think.

We’ve kept our white brick walls empty for the past eight months, sub-conciously for this purpose I think. There is so much texture to white empty spaces, so many imperfections to dwell on. The not-so-perfect pattern of the brick is predictable and calming. Like staring at the white slats in our ceiling, the silence and controlled environments of travelling are so good for this type of processing. In the past decade I cling to them, their predictability and the solace of their silent sanctity.

Insert some emo Eno (Music for Airports?)…

So this month things are settling into their new routines. I’m adjusting to my new schedule (headed to bed much earlier!). I’ve also finished a two week cleanse and started running again. I was lucky enough to be sent away for a training course up at Royal Roads University (RRU) for the week.

Appropriately, we’ve been wrapped up in foggy, cool mornings. RRU is actually designated a National Historic Site, and hosts the (original) X-Mansion from the X-Men. Before I went, people had always raved to me about how beautiful the campus was. I brushed it off, but when I arrived I was taken aback: it is stunning. Each morning after my bus ride, I walked about a half hour down a seaside ridge ridge, through a rain forest into this beautiful old estate. To add to the allure, peacocks roam the grounds, looking as though they should all be puffing away on pipes and discussing Voltaire .

Peacock PhDs, RRU, January, 2013

All this futile thinking and learning as culminated in a bit of a reading hiatus since I started work. In part, I’ve picked over my bookshelf of low hanging fruit (i.e., the accessible books I was anxious to read), and I’m left staring at quite a few tomes I haven’t mustered up courage to crack (i.e., Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, and DFW’s Infinite Jest).

In efforts pre-emptive mitigation, right before Christmas I picked up Wonderful Town, a 2001 collection of New Yorker stories that focus on New York. For some reason New York always reminds me of Christmas. Maybe something to do with the singular symbiosis of cities. Christmas also spurs me (and many folks I believe) into a bit of a nostalgia. It’s the only time of year I feel driven to re-read novels. The New Yorker seems to provide a nice compromise: new stuff from old authors and a low commitment way to get literary.

As previously mentioned, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the New Yorker, and other literary periodicals, but I think I’m beginning to understand them. Fiction writing is hard. Absolutely, incredibly, intolerably difficult. Not for everyone, but for alot of people. Even those authors I really look up to. The New Yorker was founded as a venue for authors to air their stuff. An unfunded mechanism to bounce ideas around, to try things out, to get feedback. Not all of it is fantastic: some of it is, some of it is crazy, but all of it is inspiring. It encouraged me in my recent forays into prose and made a few of my literary giants seem less large in real life. In seeing some of their stumbles, their rehearsals, the bits that didn’t make it into the final draft; not all of it is great – but it gets better.

I was recently corresponding with a pal (i.e., friend and fellow writer) about my looming April 1st personal deadline to start a fiction project. Part of it is this: of the millions of books that exist in the world, the few hundred we read in our lifetime are (hopefully) among the best. Reading the anthology has reminded me that everyone starts somewhere, that not every day is your best day, and there is virtue in all the work that you do. You just have to do it.

The other thing I loved about this past week, was listening to their fiction podcasts. Each month a published author reads a previously published author of their choice. It’s fantastic, because I get to nerd out and hear David Eggers reading Roddy Doyle, Junot Diaz attempt a French accent and Pamuk read Nabokov. Personalities that previously only existed in “sacrosanct Times New Roman” warmly flesh themselves out into full personalities, emulating one another, spinning themselves into a web of people and storytellers. It’s a little astonishing really, to hear narratives I have only ever known in my standard inner monologue, suddenly spring alive into a diverse range of accents, ages and cadence.

Without fail, my iPhone tended to die part way home. The January rain of the we(s)t coast delays and skews transit schedules beyond predictability. The blue-lit busses smelling of lip balm and egg salad were often almost as good as the podcasts: unfettered people watching. The more I revert back into the Real World, the more interaction I have with Real People (i.e., people outside of academia) the more I am completely fascinated by the depths of our differences and the synchrony of our similarities. The duality in our endless scope of choices that perpetually serve to limit and marry us to the outcomes of the rest of our lives.

I will miss the commute, but I am ready for the sunshine.

Literary sabbatical adjourned. Books back next week!

Thank you all for indulging me in the vanity of a new year’s post.

All the best for 2013.

~kmh

Griz, 2012

2 comments

December 12, 2012

The Elegance of Muriel Barbery

Morning, Victoria Harbour, BC, November 2012

Starting in September, I have been writing at this one coffee shop near our house (incidentally, today the shoppe was closed for it’s Christmas party…). It’s far enough away that I needed to get up, get dressed, and think about what I am going to bring with me-I can’t just sprint over, coatless. Routine is vital. When you are unemployed, unattached and floating, you need to create a routine, a regime, a raison d’être. Without these things life can get away from you and move on without you or your consent. It is imperative that you begin each day by getting up and making the bed. Exercise is vital. You must bathe. You must stretch. You must get dressed each day and put makeup on (or at the very least pants without an elastic waistband). These things sound a bit stupidly basic, but after a few weeks of looking they became small mountains, reminders that needed daily tending to to remind myself that not only was I human, but that life is important. That even a fabricated sense of purpose is importent: fake it till you make it.

These past few months katiclops occasionally became my motivation for getting up in the morning. It was a project that I could take with me, that I could build for myself, that was always moving (ever slowly) forward. I hope I do not lose sight of it in the coming months.

Estuary in Mist, Ben Fox, 2012*

*NB: This painting was donated to the awesome Raincoast Conservation Foundation for auction. You can bid on it here.

The coffee shop near our house is very similar to our apartment. It has two skylights, faces south instead of east, with a wall of windows on the street side. It is the same width, and like ours, is quite deep, with the washroom at the back.One wall is white and the other is brick (ours are both white-brick) and the floor is the same distressed, yet maintained (albeit barely) hardwood, the kind of floor that is so warped it makes your table wobble. It is light and bright, two storeys high, with simple black benches, wooden chairs and metal stools. Art rotates through regularly. Right now it is Ben Fox, who paints large landscapes (1.25x1m) in a sort of Lawrence Harris, emotive style; cutting rock, water and mountain from arching curves and geometry. He finds a symmetry and balance in the shapes. Cutting them out using contrasting colours he puls from muted olive greens and greys. Suddenly: red, pale pink shapes the mountains, a forest frosted by pale blue. It is safe. I like it here. The barristas work, and I work. Other writers work. I had my table. I always arrived between nine and eleven. On the rare occasion when I arrived early or late I got a smile, occasionally an eyebrow shrug. Recently they hired a glut of new barristas. They aren’t as friendly as the old ones. They don’t joke with me, they don’t seem to notice me, or they do, but courteously pretend they don’t notice I come in, every day, in the same way, alone (anonymity is one of my favourite and most-missed city-living quirks).

* * *

I picked this book up in October…or was it early november? After getting back from a biking trip up island. There is something so cathartic about long bike trips. Like long hiking trips. Ultimately the only thing you need to do each day is ride. You have a beginning and a destination. There is silence. There is the weather. There is the sky. I yelled at cows. I sang to myself. I thought. The power at my friend’s tiny log cabin in Cedar went out the second night I was there, and we spent three hours chatting around the gloaming fire while we waited for it to flicker back to life. Darkness is the best catalyst for conversation. My friend is taking a year off from university, and has amassed a personal reading list of just over 200 books. He had mentioned he was still looking for a good copy of Ulysses. The next day, (with dry feet, thanks to a fortuitous lobby-find of free Wellingtons), I stopped in at my favourite little consignment shop to browse their curated book collection and pick up a beautiful old copy. However, the first book I laid eyes on was Muriel Barbery’s Elegance of the Hedgehog, which had been recommended to me by the same friend who had first gotten me on to David Foster Wallace: I had to try this one too.

I really, really struggled “getting into” this book. I think a huge part of it was that it’s so rooted in the monotony of the everyday, which perhaps at the time, hit a bit too close too home. Once my fabricated routine became finite, I tore through the rest of it in a few days. Elegance is two intersecting stories about two residents of a Hotel particulier in Paris. The story revolves around two voices: one of Paloma, a thirteen year old bourgeosie, who is planning to commit suicide and is very, very bored with life. The other is Mme. Renée Michel, the keeper of the building and a fifty-year-old-something widower. Much like Super Sad True Love Story each alternating chapter (and voice) is further represented by a different typeface (Times New for Mme. Renée and Arial for little Paloma). Although Cloud Atlas does not employ this technique, it is still interesting to have read several books in quick succession playing with character voicing, highlighting the stregths and weaknesses of each author in turn. It’s a bit odd to think of the dominance (or perhaps only my affinity) for first person narratives in contemporary literature, and the use of the third person historically . What would Anna Karenina have read like written by Anna? Is this symptomatic on our masturbatory fascination with the experiential world? Or moreover the narcissistic need of narrative?

I learned after beginning Elegance, that the book was originally written in French. It has also been made into a(n apparently) popular French film (also available on US Netflix!) It is always a little funny reading a translation. It is like hearing a story repeated from a friend…You know you are hearing 98% of what is going on, but there all these quirky little anomalies, the beautiful ambiguities of language, where often, the character and talent of the author most prominently comes out. For example, this clunky passage:

The use of the imperative and the “I beg you” does not have the good fortune to find favor with me, particularly as he believes I am incapable of such syntactical subtleties, and merely uses them out of inclination, without having the least courtesy to suppose that I might feel insulted.

In French, this wouldn’t have felt clumsy and square. French is peppered with large old-fashioned ways of expressing oneself, and like any language the translations feel klutzy and slightly gauche as a result. As a whole, Elegance embodies so much of what I have come to regard as being very “French” in it’s meandering, slightly navel-gazing analysis of the everyday; the micro-analysis and cross-examination of the quotidienne. For example, from Paloma:

…If you want to understand my family, all you have to do is look at the cats. Our two cats are fat windbags who eat designer kibble and have no interesting interaction with human beings. They drag themselves from one sofa to the next and leave their fur everywhere, and no one seems to have grasped that they have no affection for any of us. The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but [does not apply to them]…[our family is] utterly spineless and anesthetized, emptied of all emotion.

Another aspect that struck me as a particular bit of discrete commentary, was that this story took place almost entirely at home. In France I remember being told that an Englishman would invite you for supper the first time you met him, but then never again, but the Frenchman will take weeks to invite you, but then he won’t stop! While I was in France, everyone loved their third places: cafés, bars, restaurants. Like a bar in Spain, most of these places are interchangeable, they are the third place. It is not at all uncommon to drink coffee and to have breakfast in the same café you have tapas after work, and beer while you watch the soccer match in the evening. In Canada there is alot of awkwardness around third spaces, maybe because of the Prohibition, or religion, or maybe still again our affinity for living in the country. Here, we like to keep all these places very clearly separate, and far apart if possible: food, dancing, bars – all deemed very, very different things from coffee shops. We are so dependent on third spaces, a place outside of home and work. But for the characters in this novel, home is their work, and also their third space. There is no commentary on this, but as someone who was eking out purpose in a third space, I really struggled with this monosetting of the book.

Despite my reservations, I must give the book the same kind of credit: it was a bit of a farce on today’s youth: artificial depth, empty quests in education, foreign cultures and old texts, harsh judgements and critiques arising from apathy and excess, when the elegance lies in the haggard old workhorses. That in assuming all romantic stories exist in youth we overlook the beauty and richness that arises in old age. That youth perhaps become so haunting because we have the longest time to be haunted by it. Elegance is effective as a novel because of it’s tongue-in-cheek ability to not take itself too seriously. That all of it’s philosophizing and name dropping, it’s snippets of poetic genius (“for those who have no apetite, the first pangs of hunger are a source of both suffering and illumination”), it’s ultimately just a trite little story. At one point Barberry even states it out explicitly:

I have always been fascinated by the abnegation with which we human beings are capable of devoting a great deal of energy to the quest for nothing and to the rehashing of useless and absurd ideas. I spoke with a young doctoral candidate in Greek patristics and wondered how so much youth could be squandered in the service of nothingness. When you consider that a primate’s major preoccupations are sex, terrtory and hierarchy, spending one’s time reflecting on the meaning of prayer for Augustine of Hippo seems a relatively futile exercise…a shameless use of resources.

For the most part, Elegance is an uncomfortable book, in the same way that Michael Franzen’s Freedom is uncomfortable for Americans. It isn’t easy. It teases out our insecurities, holds up a mirror and picks at our sore points, our frailties and invented purposes with comfort ourselves with. I have spoken to alot of people who haven’t enjoyed this book, have found it challenging or difficult.

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary–and terribly elegant.

This book is filled with exactly what it critiques, ultimately leaving a hedgehog. It is a trite story, it is all it is. That is why it is happy. That’s why it begs this type of tongue-in-cheek analysis…why the “humour of Kafka” was not lost on Barbery.

For what is culture but a further expression of taste?

A plucky little roman: well worth a quick read.

Lille, France, January 2009, photo credit: David Foisy

2 comments

November 26, 2012

More Clouds (part two)

(Continued from Navigating Cloud Atlas…)

Working nights on Cloud Atlas Sextet until I drop, quite literally, no other way to get off to sleep. My head is a Roman candle of invention. Lifetime’s music, arriving all at once. Boundaries between noise and sound are conventions, I see now. All boundaries are conventions, national ones too. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so. Take this island, midstream between timbre and rhythm, not down in any book of theory, but it’s here! Hear the instruments in my head, perfect clarity, anything I wish for. When it’s finished there’ll be nothing left in me…

The duo of Cloud Atlas book and film compliment each other well.

When I first watched the movie, I was blown away. I had been struggling through the beginning of David Mitchell’s book. I stumbled through the first section, finding it difficult to navigate the old English and identify with the characters. I finished just enough of the novel to allow myself to go see the film, to understand the premise and form a little opinion. Leaving the theater I was convinced that the Wachowskis took a good book, and turned it into an incredible movie. Beforehand I had only made it through about 60% of the book, and was on the fence about whether or not I would even bother finishing it…Leaving the theater, I was so impressed I convinced myself the book warranted another chance.

The sextet of voices Mitchell uses during the story are narratives: interviews, letters, journal entries. They are one way stories focused on experience, light on description and rich in personality. The movie picks up on things and compliments those that the book forgot. Taking advantage of the medium, the Wachowskis flush out Mitchell’s intersecting story-lines with lush scenery and attention to visual details unmentionable in the book. Where in the novel you at times feel as if you are swimming, anchorless in description, scenery and place, the movie is able to compliment the storyline wordlessly with luscious venues that more than make-up for what the book lacks. I have always found film an intense, overwhelming medium; I’m always a little disappointed when a gallery features films, they drain me and rapidly usurp emotional availability for other pieces. At a theater though, you can give yourself over entirely to the experience. Cloud Atlas was so visceral it became corporal: at times you can smell the film.

To be honest, I am not entirely sure if it was the film or the soundtrack that most moved me. I orginally tried to write this post while listening to the music, but I had to shut it off: it’s intensity completely fills every crevice of my little brain, and I can’t really do much else but clean or cook–things that require a different hemisphere. It’s the kind of music that when played during a dinner party, will consume the first lapse of silence that naturally occurs, and continue playing out until the record stops, an uninvited guest.

For writers (and readers-but aren’t we all the same?) and perhaps for everyone, language is the easiest medium through which to buoy yourself. Words invite us to spin a world, our own internal, clumsy experience Off and on throughout my life I have felt this way. That the volume is just turned up all the time. All the volumes. Once when I was travelling, my hosts left on a trip of their own for a few evenings, leaving me to my own devices. I remember spending a dinner alone, soberly absorbed by the way the tines of the fork felt against my lip, the texture of the bread, even the density of the chair I was sitting on. Part of what makes the book so difficult to navigate *is* the lack of setting, of scene. It’s like reading Room for the first time, you spend the first couple chapters piecing together what is even happening, appreciating turns of phrase and brief, isolated moments before you can get into the horrific meat of the story. The brevity of Cloud Atlas means that you don’t really get this type of gravity.

Aside from a chance encounter with an ESL student while I was writing this, I haven’t had the occasion to chat much about the movie with anyone who has actually seen it and disliked it (she didn’t like it because it was too hard to follow). That being said, einmal ist keinmal: it is impossible to imagine what this movie would be like without having some vague knowledge of what you are going to see next. Having read the book, I was able to parse out the voices and piece together plots that might not have been so obvious. Walking out of the theater I was convinced that the movie was incredible, achieving a depth and dialogue beyond what the written medium could find possible: but after finishing the novel I was satisfied that both mediums had optimized their abilities to tell the story. For example, largely due to the lack of description in the novel, the futuristic passages of the book were difficult for me to conceive (let alone navigate), yet visually the film was able to do this seamlessly and well. On the other hand, the book was able to create personal connections and dialogue that would’ve been impossible in the film.

Reading Cloud Atlas was kind of like going on a backpacking trip with one of your best friends childhood best friends. You had heard snippets about them before (probably way more than you realized, before they had a name and a place in your mind). Your friend adores them, but at first you are a little apprehensive: they aren’t quite who you pictured, and they probably aren’t quite how your friend remembers them anyway. At first the trip is awkward: you know you are supposed to like each other and get along – you struggle to find your bearings, adjust your inside jokes; for the first few kilometers you’re working out the pace, the dialogue of your newfound trio. Eventually you (hopefully) come around to the friend. You don’t know the same childhood friend that you thought you were meeting, but in a way you know them better. A more up to date, stripped down version of the person they once were.

Going to watch Cloud Atlas the movie on the other hand, is like meeting someone in their hometown. Things make sense. They may or may not be as you had imagined: but that is how things are. Places and people have weight, shape, explanations for why they appear as such. All of the images that existed in your mind before you had arrived instantly vanish. Each aspect of your friend is explained, even the unnoticed bits, sculpted by the empty space that surrounds them. Their quirky sense of humour? That came from their dad. They have their mother’s eyes and must have gotten their love for Ginko trees from the unmentioned ones that line their childhood streets. Visiting your new friend in their hometown in a way is much more complete. You can breathe the air they breathed, walk the streets they walked and see the city as it stands.

It’s odd though, because in a strange way, the version of the person you met on the hiking trip is a much more complete person.

To be continued …

…The artist lives in two worlds.

* * *

And now, a brief announcement about my other world.

I wanted to include a quick footnote, to my tiny audience (Hello all of you! You are more encouraging than you will ever know: thank you, thank you, thank you for reading and following this site ):

I don’t often include many details about my current life, but I wanted to apologize briefly, (especially to the yeahwrite folks) about my spotty postings the past two weeks. Life has been tumultuous – ultimately, quite hopeful! And very busy…

Recently I have been in the process of interviewing (successfully!!) for a new job. It has been a long and difficult search, and I’m totally thrilled and excited with this new position. I start next week, and I’m looking forward to settling back into a new routine of writing, working and reading. Regardless, lately the process and prospect has detracted from my capacity to focus.

Also, we have adopted Grizelda (aka Zelda or Griz). More details to follow.

Tips for timid cats welcome.

Much love and gratitude to all.

2 comments

November 14, 2012

Navigating Cloud Atlas

After my first year of uni, during my final stages of planning and packing for Africa I found myself staring at a stack of correspondance spread out all over our bedroom floor. I was on exchange in rural Québec, and we were rooming seven kilometers outside of Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes, which had a grand total of 732 people in it. The family had four children, and in honour of our arrival, they had emptied out their bright blue playroom for my counterpart and I. We slept on two foam mattresses on the floor an arms length away from one another, my letters covered the only small 8×10 empty patch of hardwood.

Mail is always exciting. My parents would forward packages of my mail via multiple rural routes until it eventually arrived at our old school mailbox in front of the giant blue farmhouse. Endlessly indecisive, I had applied for transfers into four other university programs and been accepted. The door to return to Ottawa was still open. I had been mulling over the decision for several weeks as the applications were processed, during my runs alone in empty fields behind our house, pondering while I replanted thousands of tiny conifers in the greenhouses at work and during the 44km bike-ride to our friends in Victoriaville. I had all the brochures and appropriate enrolment forms spread out all over the tiny space, and was (once again) trying to weigh my options, with grids and pro/con lists, when suddenly a calm washed over me: I realized I would never be attending some of these programs.
I had already made my decision.

I had never been to Halifax when I decided to move there. We hatched an elaborate plan for my arrival. I didn’t have any friends there that I knew of, and the first night we arrived our car was broken into and a bunch of our things were stolen.
I had zero expectations. I heard it was a rough town. I knew there was an ocean, that there was a good music scene and that the weather was crazy but that was about it.
I remember the exact moment of calm in knowing that this was what I was going to do. It’s funny, of all the things I have done in my life, I think moving out there was one of the best and most effortless decisions I ever made. The calm I felt during my time there is almost unmatched from everywhere else I’ve ever lived. I’ve heard a lot of people move to Halifax in this way.
And yet, I’m still not ready to even consider going back.

Halifax houseparty, 2008 Photo credit: Ben Dalton

Zero expectations are often the best ways to go about life, books, and when possible: film.

Cloud Atlas came highly recommended. Exceptionally highly recommended. Here is a sample update from one of my literary pals:

So for the last time, everybody read Cloud Atlas. Especially before the movie comes out. It is better than any book you’ve read recently and probably the best thing to happen to novels in decades.

Heck even Ben Affleck liked it. I had been forewarned by friends and pre-viewers to avoid seeing the trailer (by all means) before reading the book, and see the movie at your own risk. Good friends had seen it opening weekend, and returned with rave reviews. A few of us decided to head to pho and cheap night last week. We left the theater reeling.

That being said, if you are intending on reading and/or seeing Cloud Atlas I will not be offended, nay perhaps even recommend that you stop reading this post.

* * *

I have picked up several of David Mitchells books before. A few of them are regularly featured at Munro’s for no more than a handful of dollars. Their covers are decent. Provocative, but not captivating. Titles that are slightly ubiquitous: A Thousand Autumns of Jacob Zoet, Ghostwritten - poetic, but almost forgettable. Unfailingly, given enough time I will pick them up, scrutinize the cover, flip them over, skim the back and still intrigued, flip through it again. Each time I’ve put then down and walked away. Mitchell has been short listed for the Booker a number of times before, never made it.Working through Cloud Atlas I wonder if he may have broken the curse.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year’s fragments into a “sextet for overlapping soloists”: piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in it’s own language of key, scale and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order.

Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan’t know until it’s finished and by then it’ll be too late.

-Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

To give you a rough idea of the book’s layout, there are six narratives, arranged like Russian nesting dolls, one inside of the other. First up: Adam Ewing, a sickly yet important traveller on a boat in the late 1800s. Next, a series of letters from Robert Frobisher a composer living in Europe during the early 1930s. This is followed by a series of short, punchy chapters with 1970s journalist and protagonist Lisa Rey, in LA. Then comes Timothy Cavendish, a sixty-something year old publisher in London, UK during modern day (2012). This is followed by an interview of Somni-451, the first self-actualized clone in the not-so-distant future: it alludes to a location likely somewhere in Asia (judging from names and other descriptors). Finally, in the middle of the book the last narrative, a yarn told by an old man Zachry, about his escape from what we can only deduce to be Hawaii, sometime in a post-apocalyptical world.

In Mitchell’s novel they are arranged chronologically, cut neatly in half, ended abruptly (one can only postulate by death). The middle narrative is told in entirety, and then, lo and behold, each of the previous narratives are returned to in succession. We find our characters saved at a crucial moment. We had been deceived, they were indeed rescued. In the latter half of the book our suspicions are confirmed that each of the stories are related. The interview of Somni is a relic in the future, the recording captured on a spinning egg, which becomes a mystic oracle in the future. Each of the previous stories had been interrupted part-way through: Somni was watching a film of Timothy Cavendish which had gotten stuck. Timothy was reviewing a manuscript about Lisa Rey, which he had forgotten at home. Lisa had inherited half of the letters of Robert Frobisher (the balance of which are then sent to her). Robert had been reading the diary of Adam Ewing, which had been ripped in half; the second half had been used (as he discovers) to prop up his wobbly bed.

Before reaching the midpoint of the book, you do notice some repetition and common threads, but instead of finding it clever (ahead of your cogency the method to the madness), I found it vaguely irritating. An oversight by an editor? Or was I losing my mind? Several times I actually flipped back through the book to assure myself that yes, it was the second time that Mitchell had said “his muscles atrophied” or that the name of the cemetery was the same as…a nuclear reactor? Most of these “coincidences” are most notable in the second half, but regardless, I found myself flipping through the book a lot. Somni; wasn’t that the name of the last character? And what is with this recurrence of Hawaii? (On a slightly unrelated note, my friend and I unwittingly ended up attending a Hawaii spirituality workshop at a festival a few weeks ago. I keep finding the ticket stub everywhere-it seems to have the ability of being in the pocket of every jacket I own all the time….). Yet by the time you reach the second half of the novel you are aware that this beauty in serendipty is around us all the time, we simply chose to ignore it.

When I realized that these were embedded, intentional, delicately crafted threads, my heart melted. I was instantly ashamed and embarrassed that I could have ever interpreted these repetitions were oversights, or literary blunders. I chided myself for being so pompous.Isn’t that how we so often deal with repetition? To dismiss it as an oversight, an annoyance?

Since my first reading of his book, Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being has remained firmly etched – for better or for worse – in some abscess of my mind. It was then that the segment that first made me fall in love with the book gently recited itself in my mind:

This symmetrical composition—the same motif appears at the beginning and the end—may seem quite “novelistic” to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as “fictive,” “fabricated,” and “untrue to life” into the word “novelistic.” Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion. They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven’s music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences. … But it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

-The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

For tonight, I leave you with this. Until then, enjoy the beauty in repetition and coincidence.

To be continued tomorrow!

- (Trying to be) Day 10 (!) -

4 comments

November 12, 2012

The Rogue Leaves

The unsung silver lining to Victoria’s long, silvery-white, drizzly winter and pale fall, is that November is nice. Instead of 30 days of grey-brown slush and ice instead we have saffron alders and big leaf acers, sepia-orange oak and walnuts, and a smattering of wine red silver maples and cherry trees. While the rest of Canada faces barren streets, slush and ice, we are washed in a third blossoming of foliage, as snowstorms of leaves rain down scantily lit night skies. They dance their way over thresholds the city-over, swirling over doormats and forcing shopkeepers to sweep their entry constantly. No one here believes in the double door system of the east and the golden leaves a nearly festive atmosphere about the place, as if we were all decorating for the arrival of someone terribly important.

The gusts of November prove a feat for cycling, but ensure the most vital attribute of island weather: change. Rare are the November days when dreary skies will muck up the air for entire days or even weeks. Instead they usher in-and-out clouds of cumulus, bright sunlight and winter rain. Short holding patterns will emerge. Rain in the early morning, clearing with sunrise, sunny until clouds form in the afternoon and rain away the sunset; clear, cold, windy nights. Runs need to be decisive, early and brisk.

Rogue leaf, our apartment, November 2011

November here is a time for silence. A time to listen to the wind and the rain. To listen to the quiet of the empty city.

I am struggling with reading this month. In part the challenge comes from the restlessness of the weather: it’s hard to commit to anything when the season is so variable. The momentum of the Christmas season is also starting to rear it’s frenetic head. I’ve also felt at a bit of a loss for settling my teeth into my next read. The days of the Times Colonist book-sale have come and gone, and the shelves I’ve procured have been culled more than once of the ones I had been most eager to read. Many of the ones that remain were picked up because I have passed over them once too often: part of that internal master list so many of us have in our brain. The books we should read, the ones we should know. I have a stack of commentary in international relations texts, Jane Jacobs and well over a dozen classics I’ve never really come around to reading (i.e., Moby Dick, Oliver Twist, and East of Eden for a start). After six years of school, the last thing one ever wants to do with their “leisure” reading is feel obligated to slog through something they’re really not enjoying. Especially when there are thousands of totally decent books in the world.

Lately I have taken most of my direction through word of mouth, and proof of merit. I tend to read books in torrents and association: everything by Eugenides or Ondaatje. Read Franzen because you like Eggers. The others have been through refferrals by friends, friends of friends, friendly bookstore owners and interesting looking people in coffee shops (yes, I am that person who is also voyeuristically and oh-so-indiscreetly attempting to figure out what you’re reading from across the way). Books are hard. It is almost impossible not to judge a book by it’s cover. I’ll go see music with zero expectations, because their poster looks reasonably cool, I like the venue or I know who is opening. Friends have taken me to see shows willingly based little more on “it’s a bit folksy with a little rock, fantastic vocals,” or a few snatches of a youtube video. It is seldom to see a movie without successfully enjoying the preview in advance, but when was the last time you bought a book based on a commercial?

The latest book that I picked up, highly touted by a few friends as “if you only read one book this year…” was Cloud Atlas. I had been advised by everyone to (at all costs) avoid watching the preview of the film until after I had finished the book, and preferably until after I had finished watching the movie. There was a huge relief in this, of actively deciding to avoid advertising and reviews. These days, cutting yourself off can be just as hard as immersing yourself; saying no just as hard as saying yes. But with it comes freedom and clarity. Shutting off the internet finally gives you space to breathe. As many of my previous posts would indicate, I am an NPR addict, but this month I’ve found myself shutting off the radio and working in the kitchen in silence. Wandering down forgotten avenues of memory, cleaning up and putting away things that haven’t crossed my mind in years.

I watched Cloud Atlas earlier this week, a hundred pages short from finishing the rest of the book. Since then my mind has been crowded, overwhelmed by the three hour long film, trying to commit to finishing David Mitchell’s novel. Trying to enjoy instead of dissect. Trying to be silent.

And it’s really, really hard.

13 comments

November 8, 2012

The unsung exploit of the philosopher kings

Philosophy lovers, prepare to be outraged.

I’ve been trying to stay focused on my job search, but this article, published November 5 in the Atlantic caught my attention and momentarily derailed me back to WordPress (Should Science Majors pay less than Arts Majors?). The article briefly outlines a proposal by the state of Florida: devine the subjects most likely to result in growing the economy, and then encourage enrolment in these fields based on lower tuition rates:

Students would get discounts for studying topics thought to be in high demand among Florida employers. Those would likely include science, technology, engineering, and math, among others. But Art History? Gender Studies? Classics? Sorry, but the fates are cruel. Unless a university could show that local companies were clamouring to hire humanities students, those undergrads would have to pay more for their diploma… The hope appears to be that by keeping certain degrees cheaper than others, the state can lure students into fields where it needs more talent.

Tax dollars are scarce, and the public deserves the best possible return from its investment in education. That means spending more generously on the students who are most likely to help grow Florida’s economy once they graduate. Second, he argued that too few young people consider their career prospects carefully when picking a major. “The tuition differential will increase the probability that there will be some introspection about careers and livelihoods,” he said.

My opinion of higher education has changed drastically over the past decade. I was strongly encouraged to pursue sciences and medicine. A woman in science, one who liked math – was good at math even, was touted to be rare. I was assured opportunities would be there for me, that doors would be open. I pursued a program in bio-chemistry, intending to go into pharmacy or medicine after my five-year undergraduate was complete.

I did not consider my job prospects outside of medicine after my degree. Not succeeding in those fields was not an option I ever even imagined; not liking my program or the work I would be doing was something else that had never crossed my mind. My first year was hard. We had between 39 and 42 hours of scheduled class or labs a week. Then we had hundreds of pages of technical reading, pages of practice problems for calculus and statistics and lab-reports for three or four lab sessions (normally taking between 6-10 hours each). Half of the first year was anticipated to fail out.

At times things were interesting, at times I wanted to learn more, but more over what I remember is the heavy pull of the lab, the drab whitenesss, the enormous, faceless classes the unforgiving fatigue. Walking across the empty barren parking-lots at 8am with Kyle, also another renegade jaded scientist/secret lover of foreign films, ice crystals forming in our insulated cups during the ten minute trek to lecture. Our friends snuggly tucked in their cozy beds, visions of Beowolf dancing in their heads.

In my “spare” time, in order to try to prep for med school applications, I signed up to volunteer for emergency work with the local Red Cross. On the way home from one of our first orientation sessions, I took the bus with another Biochemistry student, well into his Masters. We chatted. He asked me how my program was going, empathized with me over physics, laughed over the crazy bell curves and then in all seriousness confronted me if I liked it or not: “Do you like the labs?” he asked, pointedly. I nodded vaguely, shrugging, trying to say first year was always hard. He shook his head: “Yes, first year is hard, but it leads to more of the same. Next year you will have 6 hour labs, sometimes longer. If you screw up an experiment, you will be there all night. And when you are done, what will you do? More experiments.” His faint French accent allowed him to be blunt while also appearing unassuming. He wished me luck. I nodded, and thanked him, mullin over his words in my head for months. Apparently 80% of biochemistry students that graduate end up employed in the petroleum industry.

I don’t want to say that you don’t work hard in humanities. What I do want to say is that very very few 17 year olds are really in a position to look ahead into the realities of their future. They are prone to simply taking the advice of their parents, their teachers and their peers. It is easy to commit years and thousands of dollars on a path to a destination where you didn’t fully read the brochure. This type of thinking and examination needs time – the type of time most highschool students, desperate to get into the right program at the right school don’t have. The old adage of investment in a good university = an investment in your future is no longer proving as true as it once was, and is not a course to jump into head first before assessing the depth of the water. The educational journey is incredibly important. However university is not the only option for education, nor the best.

I don’t necessarily agree that arts degrees should cost more, but I think that the system is in desperate need for reform. Capping programs would improve their quality and usefulness. Maybe funding and seats could simply remain more open for programs in higher demand. We could train more doctors. That being said, not everyone can be a pipe fitter or a hydraulic engineer, but I think that is article starts to examine some difficult questions.

Like, if Canada was going to devote 10 million dollars a year to it’s olympic team and we had 900 people are interested in gymnastics, 90 people interested in hockey and 10 people interested the biathalon, how do we break down our Olympic budget? Gymnasts are cheaper and easier to coach, but maybe the might considerably less opportunity to win. Should everyone be allowed to be a gymnast? We need more hockey players and they will doubtlessly go on to perform well…do they need more per player support? What about our biathaletes? What if we only have six biathaletes but they are incredible, best in the world, but they still need their own course. Should their program receive equal funding? Should each olympian get equal funding?

Science programs require more money to run, more lab time, supplies, more face-to-face lectures, more marking – is it fair to recoup these costs by increasing their class sizes? Or raising their tuition? If ultimately petroleum engineers will contribute more back to our economy and tax base due to their higher salaries should they then have to pay more or less for their training? Should they be entitled to better training if their jobs are in higher demand? If most of the gymnasts are never going to the olympics anyway, why not just devote some of this funding to other leisure activities?

This was a heated article for me to read – and for many of my friends. There is no shortage of student debt for twenty- and thirty year olds. I don’t necessarily think that our academic pursuits costing more would let us change our opinion about them, but I would argue that a paradigm shift in how we perceive university education would be helpful. There is so much pressure on students right now to go to university to show that “they’re smart” or for “personal development” yet their are so many amazing ways to develop yourself. There also seems to be a huge stigma against going to college – which provides amazing opportunities for a lot of young people, and an excellent avenue into the working world. Maybe part of the solution to the underemployment/student debt equation is to (in part) allow academia to retreat back into it’s Ivory Tower. While education should be accessible to everyone, does it necessarily need to remain a requirement for entry into society? The huge pressures and health issues that are prevalent in many university students are also surely arising out of (mis)conceptions of future career prospects and forcing many people to conform into a system that might not be right for them.

There also seems to be a shift (especially in BC, Ontario and Australia) to move towards self-funding universities…in part by attracting foreign students (who pay an unsubsidized, much higher tuition). My question is this, why not attempt to shift more resources into attracting more members of our aging demographic? If these “leisure studies” (as quoted in the article) are believed to be pursuits for the affluent and bourgeoisie why are young people being exploited and (in part) deluded into thinking these are valid professional paths into the working world, and unfounded entitlement claims to non-existing jobs.

It isn’t that they aren’t legitimate jobs within academia, it is that there are gross misconceptions surrounding how easy and accessible these career paths are.

This was a very emotional piece for me to read, I would love to hear any reactions you have to the article.

6 comments

katiclops

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