atalantasapples

The labyrinth of No, the urge of Yes

Updating Heraclitus: Can't step into the same litblog twice . . . . .
a.k.a. fleeting quality of thought, irreproducibility of time, nothing as permanent as change itself, etc.
Yesterday there was a link at Chekhov's Mistress to a certain Ms Snark (as I recall, not having found the link this a.m., the great river of blog links having flowed on and me not really wanting to revisit the posting itself) -- though not certain whether said Snark is a Boojum, which in itself connotes interestingly for cyberspace. The aforesaid Snark, in response to a purported letter from "a writer" inquiring about the advisability of writers having litblogs, cautioned said writer about the amount of time that would be devoured, pointlessly consumed, counterproductive anent the act of writing, in short: utterly wasted, by maintaining a litblog. There was a memorable metaphor about such activity  being akin to a whale sucking up vast quantities of plankton. I rather liked the Moby-Dick image, the vast ocean of time, and so on. But the metaphor is, shall we say, insubstantial or 'watery'?
"Time'" might be considered "wasted" variously -- let me count the ways: spending years doing a Ph.D. for little fun and no profit; commuting regularly into the city on the subway; sitting all the way through a film that one susses as pointless and boring after the first five minutes; watching television; shopping for clothes; being stuck every day in a job one hates. Everyone no doubt has a custom-tailored extensive checklist which would only be meaningful if "time" were indeed an actual Something apart from our experience. A non-renewable natural resource, say, or a commodity -- much the same thing in our culture. "Getting and spending, we lay waste our time" alas is how I seem to misremember the lines in Wordsworth's sonnet ("The world is too much with us").
Snark opined that publishers would not be likely to consider a writer's litblog: is this surprising, since publishers do not publish litblogs? and that litblogs are in effect a counter-irritant to the dominance of mainstream publishing's cosiness with mainstream media, with litblog writers bringing to view news about and reviews and estimations of writers and writings of infinite variety and the diversity of publications or writerly doings or sayings?
Yet I'm grateful for Snark's firm position, for it made me think about why I even bother to post, rarely as I do, and about this thing called time. I have an aversion to anyone who intones about "time management", "time is money", "you're wasting your time", or any such Taylorist, time-clock philosphy, and refuse to hearken to them. When I do sit down to compose a post here, as when I sit down to work on my novel, or to write long letters to friends, or to do anything (cooking, meditation, reading, being with my loved ones, enjoying conversation with friends) that seems to me fully engaging and meaningful, "time" is inconsequential. It ceases to exist, until I re-enter the world of clocks and cultural scheduling and begin my ingrained chastisement of self for "use" of time. Civilization and its discontents made manifest. Writing for a litblog is . . . . .writing. Is a response to. . . .the writing of others. Is a response to . . . . .the great world. Is the pleasure of using language.
My refusal -- my no -- to those who make time into a dictator of my actions, is inversely my yes, my Molly Bloom yes, to living my life as . . .my life.

Vila-Matas and the "labyrinth of no"
Reading litblogs is for me an extension of browsing, which I do regularly at news stands, bookstores, libraries, even craning my neck to see what the person near me on the subway is reading. The latter is often unproductive, admittedly, but has its pleasures, e.g. a long ago subway ride when an exceptionally beautiful young man chanced to sit adjacent to me and opened his copy of Antigone. He would doubtless not have been nearl so beautiful had he not been absorbed in reading Sophocles, reminding me of my own experience of the play. Bartleby & Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas (The Harvill Press, 2004; the first of his many books to be translated into English and that in itself a powerful reason for reviving my dormant Spanish.) The book was on display among others being paraded as "new fiction" at North York Central Library (it takes a long time for "new" books to manifest themselves in the library system), and though I hadn't heard of this author, was attracted by the title: Bartleby is for me one of literature's most intriguing characters.

The narrator of the novel, Marcelo, sets out to make a search through literature for all those other possible Bartlebys who, for whatever reason, have had the urge to say 'No', and with this in mind he has the engaging notion of keeping a diary and writing footnotes to an invisible text. His references to authors, both read and invented, provide the reader with extravagant doses of humour . . .. [etc] -- the inside flap of the book jacket barely suggests the import of this engaging and slender book. Reviews appeared shortly after the book's appearance chez Maud Newton, Conversational Reading, and The Literary Saloon, I was soon to discover when back at home hunting for more about Sr Vila-Matas.
(interjection re the above 3 litblogs: no, I have not bothered to link them here, for only someone new to the world of litblogs would not know these established and worthy sites, or someone utterly lacking in curiosity and basic search skills would need them, just as an experienced cook knows exactly how long and at what temperature to saute onions.)

Slender as novels go (at 178 pages in a small-format book), the book expands almost endlessly into a larger world of literature. Introducing footnote 54 on Juan Ramon Jimenez is this beguiling sentence: "The death of a loved one does not only breed lilacs, it also breeds poets of the No." The previous footnote is devoted to Henry Roth, whose first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream I had chanced to buy the same day from a public library cart of withdrawn items (such status for this great writer in itself poignant)  .  And permit me, Vila-Matas, but this passage from his footnote 53 seems not only to capture the essence of Roth but is also relevant to my attraction to an aspect of litblogs:

The novel was written "to make dying easier". In it, artistic recognition is mocked in a very entertaining way. The best pages are perhaps those where he tells us of his experiences on the fringes of literature -- these pages, as you would expect, take up practically the whole book -- all those years when no-one knows if he wrote, but he certainly did not publish, all those years when he remained oblvious to the tributaries of the river of literature and was carried along in the rude stream of life.

Bartleby & Co. shares with the best of the litblogs the quality of being extended love-letters to writers, even and especially those who might not be in the "rude" mainstream of published life, and bringing them into our cultural memory.

Still reading . . . .
. . . .the Sept/Oct ''05 issue of The Bloomsbury Review with its excellent interview of poet and translator Richard Zenith in which he writes about his latest translation, Joao Cabral de Melo Neto's Education by Stone: Selected Poems (Archipelago Books) as well as his love of Fernando Pessoa's writing and translating Pessoa's inventiveness: "For Pessoa, writing a poem that merely tells what you did or thought yesterday wasn't worth the bother. To just present what is was too little for Pessoa."

In the same issue: a review of Adam Zagajewski's A Defense of Ardor, a new selection of George Trakl's Poems and Prose (transl Alexander Stillmark, from Northwestern) -- which latter book I will now order from A Different Drummer (Burlington) -- the consummate purveyor of literature -- having the others on my shelf in various stages of ingestion.

. . . .. Nuruddin Farah's Links, which the public library will let me have for another week. It continues to impress me: at the centre of unimaginable destruction is a character of profound humanity. Last night while reading, and noting the epigraphs from The Inferno (related to the protagonist's having studied Dante while at University in Padua), I wondered, "what if Dante came to suspect that his guide through hell might be a spy or in some way intended him harm, might abandon him in those pits of suffering?"

. . . .nearly finished re-reading Richard II, now considering it one of the bard's greatest plays, and coincidentally also (like Links) about another bloody civil war, here at its outset, though minus of course foreign invasions, the intervention of outside "advisors", and sophisticated armaments.

. . . thanks to The LitBlog Co-op and its posting of comments about Steve Stern's Angel of Forgetfulness, followed by Stern's own reponse, I bought the book (delighted to have found it at Nicholas Hoare) and have now finished reading Saul's first section, marvelling at Stern's magic in creating on paper a lost world and the unforgettable character of Saul's old "Aunt Ken". Saul himself, at this stage in the novel, seems to me to rather a nebbech, even possibly Keni's golem charged with a task of rescue, so now I'm curious to discover whether there will continue to be the element of bildungsroman regarding Saul's part.

. . . .The Best American Poetry 2005 (ed. Paul Muldoon), who seems in his selection to want to plumb the "great, many-chambered heart" of American poetry, eshewing the boundaries separating the usual clans to incorporate poems by some of the known and/or loved names like Ammons, Hecht, Simic, Snyder, Ashbery, Hejinian, Rich, Karr, Justice, Kinnell (and many more I read regularly) as well as poetry of current import: "[t]he body count from the Iraq war is a feature of much of The Best American Poetry 2005". Muldoon's brief introduction follows David Lehman's (Series Editor) lengthier assessment, including the perils of poetry ("poets tend to die younger than do other writers"), his invocation of Thom Gunn's words in support of the collection's avowed non-sectarian nature, and his news that "more people are writing poetry and going public with it" presented with a discomfort that much of it might be considered not worth publishing. "It is sometimes said with heavy tones of lamentation tha[t] in this day and age everyone's a poet. The criticism in Poetry [this a reference to Kleinzahler's now-famous trashing of Garrison Keillor's Good Poems collection in that journal] implies that on the contrary everyone's a critic. And criticism is too often the sound of a gripe and the taste of sour grapes expressed with all the sensitivity and thoughtfulness of a midnight blogger."

The first [  ] above indicates a typographical error in the text, supposedly only occurring in blogs, according to someone's (now-forgotten) diatribe against blogging.The highlighting of the last sentence is because I love the utter meaninglessness of its accusation, and that an otherwise articulate editor would botch his comments with a sarcastic slur that he does not both to illustrate with examples of such criticism. O the perils of poetry, that it can cram the mouths even of its supposed advocates with such poisoned verbiage.

. . .and so to lunch (for it's not midnight here) and I'm not a bibliophage:
There's more on my bibliographic plate, and I'm now conscious that I have "wasted" a good part of the morning in writing, when I could have been spending the morning . . . . Writing. As my favorite literary cat would say, "toujours gai kid, toujours gai." (Blame Archie or my memory re punctuation; don't know where my copy is.)

Bloggered

"Where did you go?"
        "Away. Nowhere. Here and there."
"What did you do?"
        "Some of the 10,000 things . . ."

Fortunately TypePad remembered me and I was able to log in after such a long absence. Looking back at my planning diary for the past six (?) -- yes: six -- months with its scrawls and cross-hatching is enough to prompt mental shuddering. Every entry, every activity, fell into the category of "good" but obviously there can be too much of good things, pax grammatica. Any attempt to pick up prior ambitions and readings seems far less possible than picking up the sweater I began knitting on Prince Edward Island ten years ago: the pattern of both the object and my original intention have vanished. Time to start over.
Although not having actively posted to this site or my other one, gates of another world, I have in a sense kept in touch (in itself an odd idiom for maintaining a form of connection to something intangible, with the only physical touch being fingers on a keyboard) by checking in to sites that reliably and with intelligence transmit news from the great world of events mostly literary and that in a context that is in the best sense of the word "cultural." My touchstone has been Chekhov's Mistress, not only for the writing there but for the links to other sites that take me onward to even more writing, book news, ideas. And ever onward, link after link, and the trail becomes more diverse and distracting until after two hours of exploration, I begin to feel oversaturated with words, more specifically: the words of others. The writing is engaging, the topics and books discussed -- exciting, the urge to respond  -- tantalizing, but the loss of Self in the process is not at all in the nature of loss of Self in zazen: it stimulates thought and language rather than quieting them.  Also, when the time designated for my own writing has mostly evaporated from excessive litblog immersion, the only word I can construct that fits this experience is that I begin to feel "bloggered."
I need to step back and consider the entire phenomenon of litblogging and my role in it: passive trail follower; peripatetic commenter; active contributor; all of the above; none of the above.
The questions that litblogs raise for me may not have ready answers, and I doubt that I have the stamina and purpose of so many of the regular, articulate folks out there who post daily and whose contacts with the sphere of literary publishing and events beggars my imagination. As it is, the main effect on me is the alarming accumulation of even more books than ever, reaching crisis proportions both spatially and financially. New titles mentioned on the sites I check into are rarely available (either 'yet' or ever) from the public library. The hunt for the same titles at independent bookstores in this city is especially time-consuming when one hesitates to sell one's soul to the conglomerates and prefers to browse in a "real" bookstore wherein dwell "real" booksellers who read "real" books and don't clutter the aisles with yoga chotchkes and bizarrely-scented gift items. Once the desired books are borrowed or bought, then the discussion of same is either fleeting, or elusive, or too intensive to keep up with. Following one's own path through the woods is one thing, but we're talking here about something even more complex: the mycorrhizae that form the living underground network that nourishes the plant life itself.
Enough said. Time for a few more pages of Nuruddin Farah's Links, which was also being read by the main character in Khalo Matabane's film Conversations on a Sunday Afternoon, one of the more impressive films I managed to see at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Only 60 pages into Links and I suspect that this book will be one of the greats in my personal list of important books. Along with Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire and Andrei Makine's Requiem for a Lost Empire. The former two writers will NOT be at this year's International Festival of Authors in Toronto in October, and although Makine was originally listed to appear with Julian Barnes, Michael Crummey, and David Baddiel on October 25, the online listing consulted today does not include Makine. I have yet to do a count of how many of the authors at the international festival are Canadian/American/British; it would be interesting to consider, having stumbled on an editorial from the IFOA of two years ago in eye that still seems relevant, viz the following:

"It's a problem that comes from living and reading in the dominant linguistic culture. We write a lot, we English-speakers in Canada, the States, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. And thanks to the Americans and the British before them, we're terribly effective cultural imperialists, which means Italians and Eritreans and Saudis have a tendency to want to read Stephen King and Margaret Atwood in their languages in a way that we simply could not be bothered to do with their writers."

It's worth noting in the above that those writing in English in India and the Middle East are missing from  the above observation, and that part of this cultural imperialism is the linguistic dominance of English (even in an officially bilingual country like Canada), which means that English speakers are less likely to speak second languages (or more) and are reliant on translations, which in turn requires distribution of works in translation from publishers for what is in itself a more limited or exclusive market. There's another enlightened perspective from Robert Gray, the literary cicerone of Fresh Eyes: A Bookseller's Journal, that appeared last May at Words Without Borders in connection with his promotion this past spring of books in translation, "Reading the World." I diligently made note of each book from the five publishers, tracked down a few from the library, bought most of them, and now most of them are still waiting to be read, and will be read, thanks to the initiative of the publishers, booksellers, and litbloggers who supported the idea. I also added a number of my own choices, adding more books by women, and more poetry. Robert Gray's awareness that books written with serious intention offer readers an opportunity to cross borders and inhabit even in our imaginations the lives of others, no matter what the country and language of origin, is fundamental to literature in all its manifestations, including litblogging.

All of the above constitutes no doubt a rationalization of my blog indulgences, a justifcation for become bloggered/overwhelmed by blogs, but still amounts to a full literary larder for the coming winter months. None of the above constitutes what is new and exciting and of the moment in the world of literature (e.g. readings, awards, publishing, festivals) but perhaps is indicative of the fundamental passion of a reader and writer for books that I hope will endure.

Summerfallow & dog days

"Once upon a time Atalanta went too far astray looking for apples and gathered far too many to digest or to carry, so had to content herself with sitting on a hill she'd made of them just so she could see where she was and find her way back."

That could be the beginning of a fairy tale or simply an extended metaphor for beginning a litblog with great enthusiasm then finding that life had somehow become too enlivened with too many doings to maintain the level of bloggery that has been set by other people posting, for example the likes of Bud Parr of www.chekhovsmistress.com with his copious & intriguing links. Having found myself absorbed and inspired in the rich world of virtual book-gab, my juggling abilities became unbalanced by giddy over-stimulation as well the intricate dance steps from one event/place/activity/book hunt/forest exploration, visiting friends, and friends a-visiting.  As usual my response to having far too many things demanding my attention, was to add yet more things: another storytelling course; balalaika acquisition; involvement in a local initiative to save some endangered trees; volunteer work on a nature conservancy site; and not least, beginning yet another blog, greengates, which will be the posting place for encounters with writings in the realm of ecology, and what has been dubbed "ecosophy" (Arne Naess?), as well as what some call "nature writing", and also an area that John Anderson has written about, "the mythology of language" (in his article, "Unknown Gods: the Mythology of Language", Mythosphere 2[1] 1-11 -- that fine quarterly now defunct alas). And of course whatever else seems to relate, or overlap, and spill over from the apple basket.

The word-horde has grown to monstrous proportions defying my efforts at intellectual organization. Although a librarian by profession, my specialty is the contents of the books themselves rather than the practice of arranging them in logical categories on shelves. There is moreover an equation, yet to be perfected by physicists, that describes the phenomenon of the quantity of bibliographic material expanding being constantly in inverse proportion to the available space to store it. Poetry books continue to accumulate: Story Hour: Contemporary Narratives By American Poets, ed. Sonny Williams (from Storyline Press); David Hinton's new translations, Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China (New Directions); and Jan Zwicky's Thirty-Seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences (Gaspereau), at the opposite pole of the narrative poems of Story Hour. Non-poetic writings galore: just now, in a recently acquired second-hand paperback edited by Graham Harvey, Shamanism: A Reader (Routledge 2003), an essay by Piers Vitebsky of import for every level of my reading & doing: "From Cosmology to Environmentalism," with the sentence that first grabbed me: "Epistemologically . . .environmentalism is correspondingly badly placed to constitute a core form of knowledge for any substantial section of the public."  -- mostly because of its fragmentation across social planes and as a body of knowledge. This connects back to the issue of Mythosphere mentioned above, and another article there by Daniel Deardorff, "Bright-mind, Strange Companions", dealing with what the author calls "mythopoetic intelligence" as a way of knowing the world, as illustrated by a tale in folklore form, "The Companions", by Michael Meade.

Varieties of knowledges and knowers, and trying to find one's place on the shifting continuum, both by "second-hand" mythopoetic means or direct perception of the local, with flashes of recollection of prairie summerfallow harbouring grasshoppers on August afternoons, sound track by crows. Writing as vestiges of the real, and the real always interrupting the written.

Can't see the trees for the forest . . .

The forest, in this case, is the dense interconnected material surrounding the day to day work of trying to save trees.

The project I've become immersed in as a member of the Ontario Urban Forest Council is all about protecting trees, especially old, full-grown trees, from destruction by developers with limited vision about what matters on this planet. For the past two weeks I've been working flat out on promotional material, a slow and often frustrating process involving multiple communications, problems, minor then major snags, trying to get the essential material printed before leaving on holiday. One small but important detail remains missing despite three days of trying to get that detail from another organization, and I've been trying not to think of the old saying, "For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of the horse, the rider was lost; for want of the rider, the battle was lost . . . . ." hoping that when I return the nail will have been found and the battle will carry on.

In the interim I've been taking care of other smaller jobs, and another large one, and feeling less like a writer than a juggler. My reading has also been neglected and I'm now a splendid example of the way in which a human mind bent on organizing the kind of complex interchanges I've been bent on the past two weeks, becomes drained of creative energy. Don Quixote has been left stranded on page 166, in fact reading of any kind has been desultory, too lean a literary diet for sustenance of the kind I need.

Meanwhile the magnolias have been blooming and are starting to lose their petals, the crabapple trees are coming into flower, trees everywhere are bursting with new green growth, and tomorrow I'll be looking at some of Ottawa's two million tulips in its annual tulip festival.

With tulips in mind, and the flower's coming to prominence in Europe from 16th century Turkey, come a chain of thoughts: a friend now visiting Turkey after an eight-year absence of a place she grew to love after working there for five years, of my conversations with her often including tales of Hoja Nasruddin, and the fondness of storytellers for tales of Hoja, of my fondness for storytelling: now the quest is to find a Hoja story about tulips . . . .and to fill my senses with two million tulips.

"Never on autopilot"

Further thoughts on blogs, nets, connections:

Blogs can help encourage the habit of seeing the world of discourse as a conversation rather than an avalanche of information. And being prepared to respond means your critical thinking hat is never off. That's information literacy. Always with a question, always engaged, never on autopilot. That, I think, is the goal of a university education, regardless of field.

-- this, from ongoing thoughts by a subversive librarian, highlights for me the kind of connection that can be made in a world of discourse that encompasses the responses of literate folk to the larger world.

The excerpt above captures so insightfully the attractions of setting down in blog form (still the word itself annoys -- oh for a lovelier neologism from our extensive word-hoard) some of the links made through individual seeing and being in and listening to the world. This morning, for example, in the phase known as "waking up", which runs the gamut from initial shuffling through coffee-making to the proper focusing of sight on text, I encountered the current issue of Parnassus: Poetry in Review, a periodical so rich in enduring content and excellent writing that I pray for the continued good health of its editor (since 1973), Herbert Leibowitz.

There is an interview of Leibowitz (by Christopher Bakken) on Contemporary Poetry Review (in the CPR Archive, alas only available through subscription, which seemed to me worth it for the wealth of coverage therein) in which the fastidious editor comments: "At its best the art of reviewing conducts a civilized and engaging conversation with the poet and with readers who are curious about how poems are put together, why some succeed and others fail. Above all, reviewing demands the exercise of informed judgment and that requires knowledge, analytical power, style, fairness, not short sound bytes or pompous pronouncements."

Make no mistake: the "conversational" tenor of a blog can not possibly aspire to the depth and informed analysis of the kind found in Parnassus. But within the confines of a blog connections can be made to writings of such quality. I accordingly ingested with my caffeine a brief (by Parnassus tradition, at barely 10 pages) yet incisive consideration of Harold Bloom as a literary critic. "Power Games", by poet Adam Kirsch, is a review of the hefty anthology edited by Bloom, The Best Poems in the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost (2004; HarperCollins). In the sense of "reviewing" as propounded by Leibowitz, Kirsch's essay is exemplary and indeed goes beyond the confines of review to look at the limitations of Bloom's poetry criticism. Kirsch's remarks are supported by numerous examples of Bloom's own "anxiety of influence" and are delivered with both candour and respect. In the spirit of Randall Jarrell, Kirsch in this fine review manages to give readers a glance through "the telescope through which the children see the stars" -- a phrase of Jarrell's that he quotes out of respect for the late (and much revered by me) poet and critic. Jarrell's "telescope" metaphor might seem a shade romantic to our universe-jaded eyes these days, but it nonetheless captures the capacity of a well-written review essay to engage the reader and take her beyond the one given text to venture further. The kind of "judgment" exercised in this case is of the kind that opens discussion and encourages further exploration.

And so I went to my shelves, and pulled down Jarrell's Poetry and the Age, and found in "A Verse Chronicle", this relevant passage:

"This is so much the age of anthologies that it is surprising that poets still waste their time on books of verse, instead of writing anthologies in the first place. If you are about to print a book of poems, don't: make up a few names and biographical sketches with which to punctuate your manuscript, change its title to Poems of Democracy, and you will find yourself transformed from an old pumpkin, always in the red, to a shiny black new coach. For the average reader knows poetry mainly from anthologies, just as he knows philosophy mainly from histories of philosophy or textbooks: the Complete Someone -- hundreds or thousands of small-type, double-column pages of poetry, without one informing repentant sentence of ordinary prose -- evokes from him a start of that savage and unreasoning timidity, that horror vacui, with which he stares at the lemmas and corollaries of Spinoza's Ethics. Those cultural entrepreneurs, the anthologists, have become figures of melancholy and deciding importance for the average reader of poetry, a man of great scope and little grasp, who still knows what he likes -- in the anthologies."

It's not for me to temper Jarrell's own melancholy with regard to "the average reader of poetry" -- possibly an even more endangered type than ever. Kirsch makes it clear that Bloom's anthology errs on the side of prose in the presentation of many of the poets included even to the extent of commending several poets without actually including their work. "Power Games" provides a strong argument that, in accord with Jarrell's own comment: "Anthologies are, ideally, an essential species of criticism." In the case of Bloom's anthology, however, I get a keen sense that the result is less than "ideal."

Storytelling nature: the art of connection

Given the amount of material I have accumulated to read, and the amount of time I spend in any given day writing, or thinking about writing, I'm all too aware of the dominance of visual input to my system. Not necessarily always visual awareness or sensitivity, in the sense so well articulated by John Berger, but more particularly the use of sight and language rather than language and the sound of it. For that matter, in spite of the importance of music to my life, how little deep listening I do either to music, or to the world around me.

This was all brought home to me most powerfully last weekend. I had decided many weeks ago to attend the last three days of a festival of new music in Kitchener (Ontario), and of course bought tickets to absolutely everything happening on each day, also attended all the free events, wore myself to a frazzle, came home in a complete daze and could barely function for at least 24 hours. Drunk and then hungover from an excess of sound. On the Greyhound bus zooming back into Toronto, I administered an audio antidote, a musical "hair of the dog (wolf?)" by listening on my portable CD to the exquisite new recording of Mozart Sonatas for Piano & Violin performed by Mitsuko Uchida and Mark Steinberg. It was Bud Parr at chekhovsmistress who alerted his readers to the CD; my experience of several of Uchida's Schubert recordings (among my most frequently played CDs) led me to track down a copy of the Mozart, and in the past week I have listened to it at least once a day, often a couple of times. Not only are the performance and audio quality luminous, it has proven to be, in the context of the new music festival, especially informative in a way I hadn't anticipated.

The presence at the festival of Hildegard Westerkamp and Anne Bourne had first caught my interest in the week-long program and affected my decision to attend. A dear friend on the West Coast had introduced me some time ago to Hildegard's soundscapes and the deep listening recordings of Pauline Oliveros, with whom Anne Bourne studied. I've bought recordings whenever I've found them, read what I've been able to find. Although the concerts and events I managed to take in provided an intense array of musical experience (some of it admittedly painfully so), what affected me in a potentially more enduring way was the work of these two women as presented in a soundwalk, an octaphonic electro-acoustical performance, and a deep listening workshop.

It can take time for any profound new experience to sink in, to make connections with what one already knows, but this time -- thanks both to the variety of musical sensation and the timing of this event with other new experiences -- the importance of listening has now taken on a more far-reaching significance for me.

Listening to the new Mozart CD was at first a balm to my exhausted mind at the end of the first two days of trying to absorb music that was new in more than one sense. By the end of the weekend, however, I realized that I seemed to be listening to the CD itself in a different way. It can happen quite easily with a piece of music one listens to regularly that it takes on a familiarity, becomes a pleasant background to other activities, as Adorno observed and as Sandy Throburn has recounted in At Last, a Bird's-eye View of the Elephant: a Reassessment of the Work of Theodor Adorno:

This repertoire of great works comprises the canon of music played in restaurants, elevators, telephone hold buttons, and dentist's offices; the resulting familiarity of the works then has the detrimental effect of squeezing every last fibre of originality out of the repertoire by sheer familiarity. This, in effect, creates a whole new class of cliché: the masterwork for the background. As it happens, Adorno has dealt with this phenomenon too. He wrote "Music in the Background" in 1934, declaring: "in our immediate life there is no longer a place for music.

The process of deep listening, as practiced by Pauline Oliveros and Anne Bourne, and the practice of an ecology of listening, as illustrated by Hildegard Westerkamp in her work, makes me want to go back to Adorno to discover where there might be an opening in his critique to the influence of deep listening encounters, a place of opposition to a statement as sweeping as "in our immediate life there is no longer a place for music." (A statement as dogmatic as his "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" which was contradicted by Celan's work: philosophers however insightful are vulnerable to grandiose generalizations.)

Even the limited exposure to three days of markedly different music, and even less to deep listening, affected my hearing of the Mozart CD. I began to hear it "differently", became more aware of the texture, the complexity, the contrasts, and to its emotional colour. But there's more to the act of listening than this mundane personal recognition of the difference it can make to my pleasure of music.

Another new part of my life is the world of storytelling, the art of oral transmission of all manner of stories: myths, fairy tales and wonder tales, legends, sagas, anecdotes, and more. The act of telling is something I had taken for granted, growing up with a father who would sit down with his coffee, roll a cigarette, gaze into space, and begin telling a story about his past with lines from Gray, Byron, Macauley, Hunt, Service, or a host of others. It became a familiar part of my landscape, the repetitions dulling my listening. Only now, too late, do I honour the tradition that seems nonetheless to have seeped into some layer of my consciousness, resurfacing finally to connect the parts of my life that have seemed to pull me in such various directions: poetry, fiction, music, ecology, plant medicine. It all has do to with the thread of deep listening.

Tonight, late as it was, I finally opened a book I've had out of the library for about three weeks, recommended to me by a storyteller I met at the recent Toronto Storytelling Festival: The Healing Heart -- Communities: Storytelling to Build Strong and Healthy Communities. I was looking for something related to a project I'm involved in to save Heritage Trees, wanting to discover whether telling stories about trees might be one of the ways to raise awareness -- the kind that leads to everyday actions that bear fruit -- about our disappearing forests. Perhaps because I don't identify myself as a therapist or a health professional, I hadn't yet gotten to the point of exploring the book. Then I found there an essay by Susan Strauss, "Storytelling nature: Story speaking and listening in the information age" in which she states unequivocally, "I have observed the degeneration of a skill that I believe is essential to healing the rift between human society and the natural world -- namely, the art of listening. Listening is at the core of the storytelling art and is essential to all perception. Deep listening can help us avoid the extensive pain and suffering that are often byproducts of limited perception." The examples from her storytelling experience are rivetting. It's no longer however a question of needing convincing: now that my ears are open, there are suddenly more connections to be made.

Noel Coward redux and litblogs

There is actually a connection between Noel Coward and litblogs, at least: at this moment just passing as I write and try to capture it and pin it down with words.

I recall listening with great pleasure to a library copy of Coward singing his own songs (on HMV label) a few years ago, and although I can't recall which song this occurred in, a repeated phrase has stayed with me. In the course of one piece, he was repeatedly interrupted (as scripted), would pause then say: "where was I where was I where was I?" in his clipped and meticulous "island" (the imperialist one) English. To this day, I've yet to hear any other performer do justice to Coward's own versions of his music, though I have managed to replicate this phrase fairly accurately not to mention frequently in my regular round of gadding about.

Now the notion of setting up a "litblog" (a neologism odious to the ear albeit convenient shortspeak for this particular genre of expression) has in my case seemed a bit grandiose, verging on overweening. The impulse arose from the desire to articulate -- in more or less conversational form --  thoughts, bewilderments, enthusiasms, perturbations, in response to the writings of others. And: not only writings -- creative doings of others. The criterion for me is the nutritional component, in the sense of the nourishment of my spirit -- for want of a better word. It could as easily be the word "soul", "mind", "being", "gestalt", or "is-ness".

Having sampled the variety of litblogs abounding in the ether, I feel comfortable knowing there are those who already produce discourses academic, newsworthy, muckraking, critical, personal, and I tend to look in regularly at the ones I have found to be reliably intelligent, good-humoured, and thoughtful. ("Intelligent" and "thoughtful" are not necessarily synonymous -- there are some definitely "intelligent" life forms out there with litblogs, not all of them "thoughtful" in the full sense of the word.) Once I figure out the technology, I will do the conventional listing of the links I like best on this site. Until then I will be hard pressed to find the time to pull together coherent and connected thoughts about all the recent experience of astounding creative activity I've tasted. I'll let others  keep the curious world "posted" about literary news.

CBC radio news included an item last week about blogs: "30 million of them!", making it sound equivalent somehow to the growing number served by MacDonalds. They referred to the term "blogosphere" (my savvy offspring sniffed disdainfully: "The term is 'blogsphere", and it's hardly news." ) and the report went on to mention employees fired from their jobs for the simple act of having a blog, supposedly because their employers were worried about candid comments about their workplace. In sum, it was the usual puff-piece that so often passes as news from the mainstream media with its clockwork devotion to "informing" the public.

Some other time, should I feel in the mood to rant about the shortcomings of the mainstream media, with regard to their coverage of literary or other artistic events -- and I consider litblogs to be significant literary happenings because of the exciting aspect of INFORMED READERS (I deem the emphasis important) interacting about literature -- I will first get a good night's sleep to clear my head, then will clear my desk and suitably caffeinate myself for the venture. For now, after a solid month of heady activity culminating this past weekend with an intensely rewarding festival of extraordinary new music, my entire system needs to return to the basics of just being, "just sitting" (shikantaza).

Before sitting, and allowing the recent excitement of past weeks to sift through my body, there are a couple of notes to make, in the nature of Noel Coward's "where was I, where was I, where was I".

One of them relates to the aforementioned (interrupted thought: a sudden downpour of spring rain outside my window -- no: make that rain becoming white stuff, not as solid as hail, but something resembling small white balls of sugar-candy -- further evidence that life is ongoing, blogs are part of it, the deer that my husband saw walking down our street early Sunday morning is part of it; now the downpour has stopped and left patches of white in the new grass, and "where was I?") phenomenon of "blogs", the cultural significance of which has yet to be digested philosphically, historically, sociologically, anthropologically, or indeed by any "--ally" to which Euclid's postulate, "The whole is greater than a part." might apply, I came across an essay, Open Letter to Heather Menzies, this morning while searching for further coverage of Maureen Harris's having been awarded the Trillium Award for Poetry for her book, Drowning Lessons. (There has been very little, and I intended to write more about the book itself, also about the two other fine books nominated with hers, but life in its myriad complexity forestalled my intentions.) Meanwhile, I have stumbled on a blog of interest, led to it by another noteworthy site that did congratulate Harris for her book by posting the press release sent out by the publisher of Drowning Lessons, Pedlar Press.

The "Open Letter" discusses the virtues of students setting up their own blogs as a way of inviting comment and discussion -- including from their professors and instructors -- about their individual experiences of course materials. Below is an excerpt:

"When I first encountered weblogs in 1999, I immediately thought they were a wonderful venue for thinking out loud; here was a personal yet public space to hash out ideas and pose questions. For the shy undergraduate without the confidence to stick up her hand in front of her classmates or to step into a professor's office (an act that requires a lot of chutzpah), there are no venues for scholarly communication other than the requisite essay and the exam. I'm currently of the belief that we should never ask an undergraduate to read something without also asking her to write something. Weblogs can be a venue for that kind of regular contemplative thought and critical writing. This is a venue that can be easily monitored by TAs, instructors, other students in the class, subject librarians, guest lecturers, interested faculty and graduate students, or even the authors of the week's readings. Since weblogs come equipped with tools so that any visitor can comment on any post, this means a student's tentative thoughts can be heard, encouraged, engaged, challenged, and commended by those around her. Students' ideas can inform the direction of the class week by week, even if they don't have [the] confidence to open up their mouths and explore a new idea in the classroom. This kind of social software can be used not only to encourage thoughtful and regular writing, but also to help turn a classroom into a community, to help build relationships between students as well as students and their instructors."

Very cogent, truly relevant and thought-provoking, and much more newsworthy than anything I've heard on any actual "news coverage."

Wherever I was, now I'm here, both physically and virtually.

Apples are not the only fruit?

A friend visiting this site commented: "you know of course that it was not apples but oranges in the story of Atalanta."

Surprising bit of news, that, and from someone whose knowledge in many arcane areas seems on occasion boundless. Doubting not so much my own accreted recollections but their fidelity to varied source materials, I went hunting again, eschewing the net and spear and other usual items of capture for the favoured weapon of the bibliographic huntress: dusty books and Google.

The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature claims it was indeed apples that were used to distract Atalanta in her race, as advised by Aphrodite, and they were three in number. They were obtained somehow from The Hesperides, "Daughters of Evening", who owned the tree that produced golden apples, the same source for Hercules in undertaking his labours. Timothy Gantz in his Early Greek Myth:  A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (John Hopkins, 1993) offers all variations on the stories of Atalanta, but one thing is certain: the fruits were apples, and the apples were golden, and Aphrodite was responsible for the idea.

According to a site about "Godesses [sic], women and sex" found with google at a Middlebury college site --

"The 'Apples of the Hesperides' cannot be positively identified, but the phrase makes it clear that new kinds of fruit were being imported into Greece proper from outlying areas, even from as far west as Spain. We have some evidence here for l) fast sea transportation, since fruit rots quickly, 2) for other strains of fruit being produced in the West Mediterranean Basic, strains not found in the East, and 3) for a specific kind of fruit so striking in its appearance that a shrewd, male-phobic girl could be taken in by their striking appearance. One thinks of oranges, found since the fifteenth century in Spain, which produced a striking impression when first imported into central Europe, and were not eaten, but reserved as the playthings of bishops and royalty."

There are at least a couple of obvious problems with this version. The part of the Mediterranean that originated the myth was not called "Greece" at that time, but "Hellas", named for the tribethat settled in a part of Thessaly. In the translations of the Odyssey I've read, the "Greeks" were referred to as the "Achaians".  And of course, "Spain" as a country name did not yet exist. Secondly, Atalanta was not "male-phobic" in her reluctance to marry. In Ovid's version, she was not a man-hater, but had been warned by an an oracle to "shun marriage."

This led to my wondering about the possibility of putting oranges and Hellenes in the same basket. One of my favorite books, now suffering from signs of old age (spine problems), is Familiar Studies in Homer (Longmans, Green, and Co, 1892) by Agnes Mary Clerke (d. 1907), "English astronomer and scientist" and an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as a historian with a love for The Iliad and The Odyssey. In her chapter on "Homeric Meals" she writes of apples, pears, pomegranates, figs, ollives, and grapes being cultivated. No oranges.  She comments further:

"The apple evidently excited Homer's particular admiration; he in fact, made it his representative fruit. That it should have been so considered in the North, where competition or the place of honour was small, is less surprising; and apples, accordingly, of an etherealised and paradisaical kind, served to restore youth to the aging gods of Asaheim."

Now we have not only Atalanta and Aphrodite and Hercules in the apple corps, but also Homer, the Norse gods and, perhaps by allusion, the ur-parents in the Eden story. The question remains: were there oranges in the part of the world we now call Greece, pre-dating even Homer, so that they might have found their way into an ancient myth from that area? Harold McGee writes of the citrus family in his On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (1984): "With the exception of the grapefruit and other recent hybrids, the members of the citrus family are native to Southeast Asia and were first cultivated in India (our word orange comes from the Hindi), China, and Japan. . . .but it wasn't until the Middle Ages that the lemon, and in the 15th century the orange, made it to the West, where they were initially treated as ornamentals and spice plants."

The latter detail is in accord with the web site (mentioned above) concerning oranges in 15th c. Spain, but the myth of Atalanta predates that occurrence by many centuries.

Until further notice, I'm staying with apples, and will no more be distracted by unfruitful references to interloping alternative fruits.

hungry for clarity

For so many days that have lengthened into nights and on into early mornings of the next day I have been drunk on words both heard and read, in stories and books. Now I've reached a point not of satiety but simple weariness. It's at times like this, worn down by the rich clutter of language, that I especially find poetry restorative and I'll go to a collection, hungry for clarity.

One of the poets short-listed last Wednesday night for the Trillium Awards is a dear friend whose poems I have turned to a lot since buying her first book, A Possible Landscape (1993), before I knew her, then seeing some works in progress, then finding myself frequently picking up and reading parts of the new book, Drowning Lessons, since its publication last autumn. What strikes me repeatedly when I read this newest book is that I keep forgetting it's "her" work I'm reading. Poem after poem takes me to a place that is still unfamiliar and the "I" in them someone else, as if rounding a curve in a road I know well yet seeing it almost as if for the first time.

This struck me again tonight, when I opened to the poem, "Dream of the Empty Shore," which begins --

             

  I'm here and not here where dusk stretches
                and flows along an empty beach that curves
                the edge of a lake near clattering reeds.

There's a sense here, as in so many of the other poems, of the poet's presence expressing itself through almost a metamorphosis with the place she finds herself and this comes about not through metaphor, but somehow through that "presence" being part of the landscape itself. "She" is present much as a doe in a field is, then becomes part of the grass, the nearby thicket, the movement of wind, then vanishing but still felt. There -- and not there. "Here and not here."

That first line of the poem, which I repeated several times to myself just to savour its smooth steady movement along three long lines, has great carrying power from the repeated sound of the long "e" in each line touching down in the consonants of dusk, curves, lake, and clattering. But there also came to me a sensation of stillness or pause or waiting, akin to what I feel when reading certain of Rilke's poems and especially The Duino Elegies. In the second Elegy I'm always caught in the passage about halfway in where there appears, mid-line, his "Siehe, die Baume sind . . ." :

            

Look: the trees exist; the houses
            we dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only we
            pass by it all, like a rush of air.

                                                        (Edward Snow's translation)

This sensibility -- here and not here -- or, as in Maureen Harris's poem, "Twilight":

            

Women stare into the dusk holding babies
            and wait for sleep, conversation,
            the second coming, anything at all
            to draw in-here and out-there
            together.

Here is an innerness of the poem's impetus meeting the edge of each day's solid shape, so that even in her more personal-seeming poems she is but part of what happens there, yielding to its movement, carrier and carried in a form beyond her person (the one I know): changed into the poem.

It's an odd experience, this, putting forward a response to the words being read, the poetry, late at night in a one-sided conversation. "Reviews" tend seldom to be organic, end up seeming fixed and solid, like cement. My father used to pour cement sidewalks, and as a child I watched the whole process with rapt attention. First there would be the wooden structure -- the form the sidewalk would take -- the ground beneath made flat and utterly smooth. Then he would shovel cement and gravel into his cement mixer, pour in water from a bucket, and start the motor. The churning sound seemed as much as the rotation to be doing the mixing, as if the mechanism were chewing the ingredients. Then the mass would be regurgitated into the waiting form and he would work at making the wet sludge smooth and even, trowelling quickly and easily and finally marking the lines and edges. When it hardened, the forms would be removed and what was once a lovely slosh of moving stuff would be hard, cold, and unchangeable.

That process approximates how I feel about reviewing. In my ideal world, people would live intimately with poetry, read and re-read it, say to someone close by: "just listen to this!" and the poem would enter their conversation and the conversation would lead to the reading of another poem, so that the poems would go beyond the book and possibly approach even in some small measure the place they started from.

Drowning Lessons is one of these books that I'll keep reading this way -- "a blessing passing between" ("The Drowned Boy").

So much more to be said about this book, poems of grief, loss, memory and more, all of them clear recognitions. And ghazals, and more. For next time.

spellbinding evening

The announcement of the shortlisted writers for this year's Trillium Book Awards was promoted as "a spellbinding evening" but the spell was woven more by my two glasses of house red as I waited with friends to applaud a good friend who was announced this evening as one of the nominees for the Poetry Book Award. Assorted small barely recognizable appetizers were wafted past on  trays held aloft in the crowded darkness, and we perched on stools talking about films (mostly Downfall, which I haven't seen and from the discussion, am not now keen on seeing despite the always watchable Bruno Ganz, an actor much admired by Thomas Bernhard). Perhaps it was the aura of the setting --- the "Underground" of Queen Street West's Drake Hotel -- that was meant to enthrall, although the designation referred not to any exoticism or subversiveness except perhaps to the occupants of Queen's Park who were in attendance. "Underground" was merely downstairs. Short-listed writers in all three categories had been closeted (a binding spell?) and after a small bilingual ceremony notable for the brevity of speechifying, the writers were announced. They paraded out, were named along with their books, drowned in the glare of the lights, then had to forage for seats in the darkness, with suitable hurrahs. I had hoped for a mite of reading -- that might have qualified as spellbinding and more bardic than the silence the writers were allowed. Actual readings of poems may have to wait until the awards ceremony on April 27, and those may only be snippets.
Three poets are on the shortlist: Maureen Scott Harris for her second collection, Drowning Lessons (Pedlar Press); Rachel Zolf for her second collection, Masque (The Mercury Press); and Ray Hsu for his first book, Anthropy (Nightwood Press). I have only one of these books in hand, must go hunting for the others, and will respond to all of them in future posts.
In truth, it was a civilized and pleasant evening, despite my expectations of being spellbound. It's not because I've imagined being Ingrid Bergman's sophisticated shrink to Gregory Peck's well-mannered pseudo-psychopath in Spellbound. Or because I ever have any expectation of government representatives to be more than . . . government representatives. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the recent encounter with storytellers and their ways of enchanting with words, or perhaps I was imprinted at an early age by a passage in Frans G. Bengtsson's marvellous book, The Long Ships: A Saga of the Viking Age, translated into English and printed who-knows-when in Stockholm. In the court of King Harald Bluetooth during the six days of Yuletide feasting, stories are told, well larded with verse, and each of the Viking leaders must take his turn. One of them "was Bjorn Asbrandsson, and he was a famous warrior, besides being a great poet to boot, like all wanderers from Iceland. Although he was somewhat drunk, he managed to improvise some highly skilful verses in King Harald's honour in a metre known as toglag. This was the latest and most difficult verse-form that the Icelandic poets had invented, and indeed his poem was so artfully contrived that little could be understood of its content. Everybody, however, listened with an appearance of understanding, for any man who could not understand poetry would be regarded as a poor specimen of a warrior; and King Harald praised the poem, and gave the poet a gold ring."
If only poetry were as highly regarded now, for we still have a great capacity for both drink and war, but poets are scarcely lauded or praised, nor are their works necessarily reviewed, in what gets generally called "the media" and the gold rings are few, and far between.