radiant fracture

Yesterday I learnt, through observation, that it is better not to paraglide when the wind is blowing away from the sea.

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Saturday was a bright, fine, windy day. All down the long hill of Moss Street, from the art gallery to the ocean, artists had set up display stalls. On the lawns behind and the driveways between, entrepreneurial children set up lemonade stands while their parents sold pottery. This is the Moss Street Paint-in, almost certainly the best-attended event of the local calendar.

There are a few elements I always look forward to -- artists whose work I've been following for decades, a vintage garage sale halfway down the hill -- but you must be prepared for dense (if friendly) crowds and a certain uniformity, or at least consistency, of subject and technique. (When I first attended, this meant oversized portraits of flowers in watercolour; now it often means glint-eyed ravens in encaustic.)

Yesterday, once I'd braved the art gauntlet, I sat down on the grass at Clover Point and, diffusely inspired, tried to sketch, but the flat lines of clifftop, sea, horizon, did not yield much to my lazy pencil.

Below me, nearer the cliffs, a paraglider was busying himself folding and unfolding billows of red and white fabric, so I tried to sketch him instead. For a long time I couldn't tell if he was packing up or setting out.

Finally he harnessed himself and hopped briskly up into the air. Immediately, the wind lifted him and set him down deeper into the grass, rather than swinging him out over the sea. Think of how you might move a small child or a kitten away from danger.

I thought, hmm, that doesn't seem right, but I suppose he knows what he's doing.

Soon I no longer supposed this. The next hop took him higher, but also directly out over the traffic on Dallas Road. This traffic was not insubstantial, but at least it was sightseeing-slow. A double-decker tour bus braked for him, and he went out of my sight for a moment. When the bus pulled away, I could see his chute woven into the telephone wires.

It occurred to me that I ought to go and see if he was all right.

He seemed to be. He was standing, unharnessed, talking with surprising ease to one of the traffic officers from the Paint-in.

I sat down on the fence to observe the chute extrication. A fire engine arrived, and then an ambulance. After long consultation, someone went into the back of the truck and meticulously set out two orange traffic cones. After this came a long lacuna, and eventually I left, so I can't say how it all turned out.

Anyway, here is a small pictorial tribute both to a day of public art and to the perverse human urge towards flight:



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Oh, and we have a new government! The Liberals lost the non-confidence vote, so the Lieutenant Governor has asked the NDP (with the support of the Greens) to form the government.

A positive change from business as usual. I hardly know how to account for it.

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1. North

Waking at 5:30, just on that borderline between "much too early" and "interestingly early," I put books and vests into my backpack, and carrying in one hand a small green paper bucket of strawberries (a little aged but still edible), I went out to seek my fortune.

I peered into a couple of Little Libraries and left a few books here and there, happily disburdening myshelf. Then I walked up to H.'s to drop off the vests and the strawberries, since she leaves for work around 8.

Then, because I was in a good mood, I climbed the hill to the Secret Park, where the scattered playground equipment stands hip-deep in wild grasses.

From there, up even higher to the aquarium store. It was not open, but I like to visit the salt-water tank in the window. At first, you think you see some dark rocks and a few bright fish flickering between them. Then you realize that everything you thought was still is moving, and everything in the tank is alive. Every surface is really a living skin. Everything is twisting, very gently, in the artificial current -- leaning, opening, retreating, closing. All sorts of eyeless mouth-riddled life.

There were some new crabs, white as delicate living bones of the inner ear, and something like a crayfish with a bright stripe and shocking white antennae typing out rapid messages on the rocks.

If I'd had my notebook and provisions, I'd've set off into the world, but I didn't and I was hungry, so I went home and checked on the no-confidence vote (no result until this evening).

I knew H. wanted strawberries because we ran into each other last night at the neighborhood market; she was hoping for berries but found none, and I knew I wouldn't eat all of mine before I left to visit the fam (today or tomorrow -- tomorrow, as it rolled out).

I know that writing "I can't eat all of these strawberries" makes sense only grammatically, but I can't help it. I cannot account for myself. I will not try.

It's a fine feeling to have done so much before nine o'clock in the morning, though I never can sustain such motion over a full day.

2. East

For the day's second walk, the Walk Proper, after much map-checking and bus-aligning, I simply followed one of my usual routes, more or less due east towards the sea.

(I mean, it's the sea in all directions, obviously, though north would take you a while. It's more that the only thing of note to the east is the sea -- north is tracts of suburb and farmland and tech park (and sea), south is gardens and castles (and sea), and west is downtown-and-sea. So -- east to the sea and the white sand.)

The beach was very crowded for mid-day on a Thursday, but then normal people are probably on vacation. I bought a cherry popsicle, which broke as I walked, thereby requiring some nearly obscene acts of consumption.

Then I lay down under a tree and dozed to podcasts of clever conversations until the shade moved, and the sun, clapping me full on the face, ordered me to rise and walk again.

To the library to return a shamefully unread volume of poetry, and then home. I washed all the dishes and put away all the clothes, so the house won't run wild in my absence.

I've spent a number of the sunnier days over the last few weeks inside, working -- and perfectly all right with that -- feeling even a bit mole-ish, a bit dim-underwater-denizen-ish, a bit relieved to have a reason not to go out -- but I had full use of the sun today.

3. South

This is only an errand -- to get a bus pass for me and bus tickets for LB, but the day is so fine that every errand risks translation into some almost ethereal, light-soaked realm -- you might, at any moment, suddenly and helplessly transubstantiate into your radiant plasmatic true form.

It's pretty out, is what I'm saying.

I ought to have a fourth walk west to round out the compass, but I may simply end up returning to center.


{rf}

ETA: Oh, also it is moving season, and the curbs are piled with treasure. I found four brown IKEA bowls and three semi-matching IKEA plates on the way to H's. This is a great boon from the universe, as I would very much like to have simpler dishes, but I have no funds to replace my existing set, which I bought while in a post-divorce fugue.

EATA:

4. West

And then LB roused S. and I to drive West, towards the sunset (and the cruise ships) for a last night walk, so in the end the compass is complete.

It's a stunning Sunday evening: the blue-violet sky is still hours from sunset; in the sunlight white paint is burning like tungsten; and insistent birdsong corkscrews through the still air.

I'm preparing for work tomorrow -- marking, musing, making things up -- and waiting for Episode Six of Twin Peaks to drop. I'm intrigued by "I know where she drinks."

So far, the show is sort of an anthology of experimental film-making techniques. I feel like I'm in a brilliant seminar about the possibilities of visual and sonic form. It has such scope, depth, and weirdness --

[Looks up a bunch of measures of intensity]

-- It rises to the top of the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale. The watts per m² shatter glass. All the candelas are lit and blazing.

Stuff like that.

However -- I'm really unhappy about and disappointed in the way the returning series has dealt so far with the female characters and their physical being. ( spoiler )

I'm hoping for a payoff in the end, but I hoped for that with True Detective, too, and ( spoiler. )

Ok, why not -- True Detective.

I felt like with True Detective I finally understood the difference between direction and writing.

The cinematography, the sound design, the actors' chemistry -- amazing.

Yet I think if I had the script in front of me as bare text, it would read weak.

Apart from Rust's arias, which I loved, (I was all like "finally someone on TV who speaks the truth!") the dialogue isn't actually very good -- instead, it's illuminated by the way the words are performed and articulated.

Further, the plot is full of loose threads, and the show raises, then forgets about, all kinds of essential ethical questions, yet the whole always looks and feels like something full of meaning and revelation.

Season 2 -- same writer/showrunner, different directors -- utter pants.

Resolution: Fukunaga, not Pizzolatto, made Season 1 a work of art -- which I think it is, though deeply flawed, and in some of the same ways Season 3 of Twin Peaks seems to be.

Now. I'm just going to walk down to the store for marking/viewing snacks.

My first walk today was a loop down a beat-up minor artery flowing by irregular ways to the sea, then along the ocean and back inland to commit some mundane errands.

The solstice will be here -- then past -- before I can prepare any ceremony worthy of it (and anyway it might be cloudy), so I'll celebrate today. Hurray.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates -- Black Panther #1

I thought this was really well-written: morally intricate and self-critical about its own backstory, without collapsing into postmodern cliche. I enjoyed it. I hadn't really followed the character previously, so I can't compare him to previous incarnations.

Barbara Comyns -- Sisters by a River, The Vet's Daughter

I'd like to read more Comyns. She turns over a deep weirdness you want to dig further into, but she's also a little forbidding -- to keep with the gardening metaphor, there's something stony about her writing. I don't see loving her books, but I definitely appreciate them.

Sisters by a River does a clever thing with the voice which I won't spoil here, except to say that it's quiet and tragic. I don't think I've seen an author do something so specifically narratively interesting with the character's diction. River is Comyns' first novel, and the structure has problems -- the story just sort of wanders off until it's out of sight -- but you can see an original mind at work. I'd quite like to read Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's next.

Jane Gardham -- The Hollow Land, Bilgewater, Old Filth, The Man in the Wooden Hat

(A Long Way from Verona was technically April.) Gardham is very good on Being at School in various incarnations. Old Filth might be the best of these books in being about old age rather than youth, and thereby being both wryer and more sobering, but I found that novel less warm than the other books. Filth is the only masculine protagonist -- I don't know whether that's a factor or not, as my sample size is too small.

The Man in the Wooden Hat is the same story as Old Filth, told from the wife's perspective. The warmth was there, but not quite the same depth, and for whatever reason the device of repeating the same scenes (I think verbatim) from Old Filth didn't work for me. They did not feel newly illuminated: just repeated.

Gardham was a pleasure to discover -- not quite the revelation I had with Penelope Fitzgerald or Elizabeth Taylor, but good company.

Gardham has some distinctive structural habits -- the story proper is often contained in a brief framing device. Old Filth, for example, is bracketed with brief faux playscripts of characters discussing the dozing Filth within his earshot.

Oh, I liked what Gardham did with time in The Hollow Land -- it was unexpected, and, though the details are not quite right, plausible.

(I'm not being mysterious to be annoying -- I'm just too tired to write a proper spoilery review.)

G. Willow Wilson -- Ms. Marvel #1 & 2

As comics, these were less my thing than Black Panther, being goofier in tone and especially in visual style, but I liked the stuff about millennials responding to being unvalued.

Other bits

The Prose Edda had to go back -- who, I would like to know, had an urgent need to consult Snorri Sturluson? I wish they told you where your books were going when they got recalled.

Better news: Lincoln in the Bardo came in. I've heard some people say the novel's structure is brilliant and experimental, and some that it's "like a party trick" (Lissa Evans) -- a form put on for show, without being integral to the story.

It's early to say, but I think I may come out somewhere in the middle on the question. Which is to say -- so far I like it.

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Here's the poem. You may recognize the camas.

[Eta: Still tinkering]



No Ideas But in Things


i.
 
The landlord’s son ranged this
Thicket of bonsai
Around my front door.
 
The kid had two concussions
In six months of hockey.
They had to pull him out.
 
Now he's taken up acting,
Played the Boy in Waiting for Godot.
The bonsai grow as they like.
 
One's a pine, long needles.
Don’t know the species.
Maybe it's spruce.
 
Nine inches high, gap-toothed
As an ancient goalie
Tiny shudder of percussion when it storms
 
Dots and dashes
Of needle and leaf
Mark out a path in negative space.
 
One day they'll clear it all away
Or I'll move, and I won't remember
He played hockey, the drums, or the Boy.

Not even important
To me, these
 
Awkward little figures
I trip over in the dark.

 
ii.
 
Wild roses and buttercups
Arise again in the park.

I crouch down to let him read the smells
On the stone, awkward monument
At knee height
 
Press my fingers hard
Against intaglio letters                      
Welting forms in reverse

iii.

DOOTS ECNO HCIHW NOPU

He expresses a pungent opinion


iv.
 
The field of blue camas nods, nods.

It is a morning like wearing an upturned iron pot that drips condensation directly into your mind. The Beautiful Shed refuses to be warmed or comforted. There's nothing for it but to make a book-buying post with minor material culture notes.

The local newspaper's book sale happened last weekend. You will be delighted to know that the sale is usually held in the curling rink. Cheap rent, big space, authentic cultural aura.

The sale is one of the iconic events on the city calendar, with the Moss Street Paint-In (local artists line the titular way with booths and demonstrations) and the Symphony Splash (the symphony plays on a barge in the harbour, culminating in the 1812 Overture with real cannon fire from the nearby naval base).

I have to be careful, faced with the rows and rows of heaped books, with more stacked in boxes beneath the tables, or I get trapped in discovery anxiety -- you know: must look at everything so as to miss nothing. Instead, I try to surrender to serendipity. I try.

There are themes in every sale, and one can't help but speculate -- who moved? Cleaned house? Split up? Got together? Who died (peacefully, after a brief illness)? Who grew suddenly tired of old preferences and began anew? -- all to create this momentary pattern. This year there seemed to be a lot of A.S. Byatt, which is admittedly not a very dramatic finding.

I spent more money (and concomitant time) than I intended, for they had two levels of paperback pricing: pocketbook and large-format. However, the prices are still fantastically cheap, so I escaped at the cost of a pricey brunch. My only quibble was finding out afterwards that I'd paid $2.00 for a Dover Thrift Edition of Bartleby that cost only $1.50 new. (It's all in a good cause.)

The 2017 Haul

• Annharte. Being on the Moon. (1990) Annharte, an Anishinabe poet, is one of the poets in the anthology I used in teaching Indigenous Literatures and Oratures. I don't know her work well, so this presented an opportunity to deepen my knowledge. Signed by the author!


• Byatt, A.S. The Game and The Shadow of the Sun. (1967, 1983) (1964, 1991) -- honor the pattern. Also, they were about British academics. (Goodreads is not so sure about my choices.) Sun is one of those nice solid Vintage editions that came out I think with/because of Possession. Game is orange-spine-era Penguin.


• Clarke, Lindsay. The Chymical Wedding. (1989) I had no prior knowledge of this book's existence, but John Fowles claims to have liked it, and Michael Wood said "the very craziness or the Hermetic Quest is turned into a sane metaphor, representing a glimpse of how symbolic the world actually is, how much it is made in our image, littered with fragments of our dreams," and I thought "Yeah, all right." (Goodreads is fairly positive.)


• Eliot, T.S. The Sacred Wood. (1960). As booksales are for the cheap acquisition of classics, and as it is fun to read old criticism. A dramatic University Paperback with vermilion woodcut trees on age-stained ecru air.


• Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. (1984, 2001). To remedy my lack of having read Erdrich. When opened at random, full of beauty.


• Lathers, Marie. The Aesthetics of Artifice: Villiers's L'eve future. I'm actually not that interested in artifice-for-its-own-sake -- more in self-creation and inhabitation -- but I picked this up and read from the Foreword (by John Anzalone, a person of whom I know nothing): "Defiantly unconventional, despite his deep-seated traditionalism, Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam produced a body of writing so uncomfortable for canonically determined hierarchies that for a time it seemed in danger of disappearing altogether." This is a convergence of an author, a forewordist, and a subject I have no knowledge of whatever, but sometimes these convergences produce beautiful inkblooms in the mind, where mystery must be filled in by supposition.


• Le Sueur, Meridel. The Girl. (1982) Seems to have been damaged in a fire: a river of smoke runs up the gutter of the dedication page. (Goodreads cautiously approves.)


• McEwan, Ian. The Cement Garden. (1978, 1980) I'm not a particular fan of McEwan, and I don't know his oeuvre that well -- I found Sweet Tooth a little disappointing -- but I liked the film of this book a lot when I saw it in my hazily distant past. A nice old weird-looking Picador edition.


• Melville, Herman. Bartleby and Benito Cereno. I really just wanted to have actually read "Bartleby," rather than nodding and chuckling knowingly whenever someone says "I would prefer not to."


• Meredith, Richard C. We All Died at Breakaway Station. (1969). One of two purchases from the SF table. Here's a sample from the back cover copy: "these brutally injured officers had been restored to temporary, artificial life ... because no intact man or woman could be spared from the main conflict" (to take a hospital ship back to Earth). Um, yes please.


• Merril, Judith (ed). Judith Merril's England Swings SF. (1968) -- for this, I broke my rule about no dilapidated/stained/smelly books. It was dusty, and someone had spilled an alarming substance on its first few pages at some point in the 1970s, but it is an intoxicatingly self-delighted artifact of New Wave SF. (Only 12 ratings and one review on Goodreads! A true Find.)


• Tonks, Rosemary. Bedouin of the London Evening. (2014) Bloodaxe Books. Poems and an interview with Tonks in the back. I believe I first read of Tonks' poetry and this collection only a few months ago in the TLS, so this was fortuity manifest and was obeyed. (Her name always makes me think benignly of the Harry Potter character.)


• White, T.H. The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once and Future King. (1988) There were actually two copies of this -- one in a random fiction pile, and one with SFF. This scholarly edition (U of Texas P) is an unbeautiful but intriguing artifact in a bright vermilion cover. (Vermilion again!) Prologue by Sylvia Townsend Warner (!!)


• Yeats, W.B. The Poems of W.B. Yeats. (1966) A nice little hardcover, just a hand high, green, smelling of horse-glue. Probably the best artifact here for material culture. The owner's signature on the flyleaf in black ink has imprinted its mirror image in yellow on the inside front cover: M (E? G?) Y (F? J?) Williamson, in an upright but emphatic hand. A Macmillan (Canadian) edition. I wanted a proper Yeats -- my last one is a Dover all marked up from class.

There are more important things to be said, but they cannot be copied from the copyright page of an aged book, so they will have to wait.

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Coughing and/or sleeping

Sick again all this past week. It seems to be lifting.

For two nights I couldn't sleep. After the first night, I was strangely energized; after the second, I was all in ruins.

The next night, I worked out I could sleep if I sat on the futon (which sits on the floor), then propped my torso up on the bed with pillows and quilts. This way, I could lie upright but completely supported. I listened to the soundtrack of West Wing episodes all night and finally slept, not heavily but at least for a reasonable duration. Last night I slept in a more usual position and it seemed all right.

I've had these happy dreams the last few days, jumbles of community and confusion, with Mild Peril but a general sense of positive action.

News in noises and images

I'm starting new courses on Monday. I'm running an online course for the first time, and tonight I finished a super goofy little audio intro for the course website. I open with the distinctive harmonica line from "The Times They are A-Changin" -- distinctive in this case for being almost unrecognizeable when played breathlessly upon my bent harmonica. This, because the long text for the course will be Alan Moore's Watchmen, and the Dylan song is, of course, played over the opening credits of the film version.

I want to watch the new MST3K, but I don't want to re-sub to NetFlix. LB & S & I are contemplating American Gods as our next group viewing project. Also, there are two episodes of John Oliver to watch.

Booking

Because of Backlisted podcast, I'm reading Jane Gardam's A Long Way from Verona, and it's really pretty wonderful. I've never read anything by Gardam, but I like her voice and I'm already seeking out more.

( Mild spoilers and peril )

Money and planning and grimacing adulthood

I have been making a budget, a proper one, for the first time, well, probably ever. It shows me I am terrible with money, which I knew, and yet it grieves me. However, it also offers me scope for reform.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I was so committed to procrastination that I actually wrote two poems and sent them out, thus doubling my submission rate as compared to 2016. So I did *something* for poetry month.

Next up: meal planning.

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(Edited to correct spelling of Gardam's name and the title of her book -- I keep muddling it up with A Far Cry from Kensington, which I own -- somewhere -- but have not finished.)

Recently LB & S & I finished the first season of Legion.

The visual and sound design are amazing – particularly the sound, actually, which was reminiscent in parts of (what little I know about) Gaspar Noé’s soundscapes – for example, the use of low-frequency tones that make you tense and/or vaguely nauseous.

Legion is giddy and intoxicating, and each night when we were finished I walked home in a genuinely altered state.

( Several Spoilers for Legion Season 1, and Some Points of Critique )

To sum up: brilliant sensory experience, clever structure, rollercoaster-of-the-mind plot, and slightly disappointing lack of risk-taking with the characters/focus, given the other accomplishments of the show.

{rf}


Notes

1. Though certainly the Kerry/Cary dyad doesn't split along traditional gender lines.

2. To be fair, that might actually be true, but it's not necessarily something to revel in, narratively.

"Emotional problems" might not be the right term here, since the story is at least ostensibly about mental illness, but Legion felt preoccupied with David's negotiation of his powers, rather than with the lived experience of mental illness itself. Then, I don't know where they're going with David's identity, or how close it will be to the comic character.

A very quiet weekend, without much ceremony, but a small deep thing happened nonetheless: this weekend I babysat my nephew for the first time.

I have a baby nephew, aged 8-1/2 months. He was born with a heart defect, though he throve much more than expected right from the start. He had surgery at six months and he has healed amazingly. His energy has doubled. He is not quite crawling, but he wriggles very quickly.

Monday night I babysat him for the first time. I was very nervous, because I hadn't babysat in -- perhaps 20 years? -- and I showed no aptitude at the time. Rather the opposite.

The elder nephew, aged 19, was also at home; however, he had to go to bed early to get up and be a lifeguard at some ungodly hour, which is why my presence was necessary at all.

(Note: Be grateful for your lifeguards, please, and do not be rude to them about the placement of lane markers. They are young, and they had to get up early, and they are just following instructions.)

In the evening, I got to feed the baby a little, and also to see him starting to understand that if he signs for something, he will get it. He only knows the sign for milk, because that's really the only sign the rest of us are clear on.

I noticed he had started making the milk sign, a little squeeze or clap with the fingers of one hand¹, and I tried to reinforce it by bringing him the milk bottle every time he did it, though he did not really want milk all that much -- he is more excited about solid food right now.

This same small nephew has come to a point where he does not want to go to bed. He loves people and attention and socializing. He loves having his picture taken and always smiles. He hates to leave all this in order to sleep.

Yet on Monday it fell to me, least experienced of sleep-guides, to put him to bed.

There is a whole routine. It involves a diaper change and a sleep sack and a last feeding and a prayer and a song and a story and some declarations of love and some firm instructions to sleep.

None of this was remotely convincing to Small Nephew. He cried and cried in that profound outrage babies can express so crushingly. His body taut as a bow, he would not be comforted.

The thing to do, of course, was to put him into the crib and leave, but I knew I could not, quite, put him down in a state of such distress without trying to remedy it at least a little.

But how, without language to explain, persuade, convince, argue, command?

He was so so so so sad and angry, and he did not want to go to bed at all, and I was not his dad or his mom, and what was I even doing there, and what was even going on?

At one point I put him down on the floor, which is not part of the routine at all. He looked very surprised and then flipped over and started worming in his sleep sack along the carpet. He crawled towards the crib and grabbed its leg, then stopped, and I thought to myself you dolt, you're just making it worse. So I put him in the crib.

This was no better. Then he signed at me for milk. "Milk?" I checked. He intensified the noise, which I took for yes.

So I gave him the milk, and he drank it, furiously.

And he did not stop crying entirely, but I think he felt a little better. So I said the words and left the room, and in ten minutes by the baby monitor's reckoning he was asleep.

Surely what he wanted with his mother or father, or to feel properly comforted, or not to have to go to bed at all, but he could not ask me for any of those things, and I could not have given them to him if he had asked me.

Yet he could ask me for milk, and I could give him that.

It just seemed like the whole human condition, right there.

I once read a lot of Lacan, and his sort of interpretation comes easily², but this exchange also felt like something simpler -- the way we want and are not answered, and we see and recognize want and cannot answer it, and therefore we end up exchanging something else entirely, because it's the best any of us can manage.³

Once Small Nephew was asleep, I tried to be "helpful" by tidying up the kitchen. I unloaded the dishwasher into weird places, as people who don't understand your kitchen always do. It's like an Easter egg hunt, but for your dishes. Then I loaded the dishwasher all wrong, because no one can load anyone else's dishwasher properly.

And then I wrote this down, checking the monitor periodically to make sure that in recording my Meditations Upon Watching the Baby I was not forgetting to actually watch the baby.

{rf}

1. The sign derives from milking a cow, but I prefer to think of it as one hand clapping.

2. A Lacanian reading would be something like this: you cannot have your heart's desire (the return of your mother), and in fact you cannot even have that desire properly recognized and answered, because it happened before language, and neither the asking nor the answer can be properly expressed or understood -- only the absence. Once you learn language, you still can't have your heart's desire, but you can have something else. You can call something to amend the absence, and have, not the satisfaction of your desire, but the satisfaction of calling for a thing and having it come to you -- the power of language. The endless substitution of the signifier.

3. Or, you know, maybe he was hungry.