radiant fracture

I found a meme I like. It's just an equation on a plain background:


YOUR FIRST NAME
+ YOUR LAST
NAME = YOUR
NAZI-FIGHTING
NAME


A friend posted it from the author Amy Stewart's Facebook page. I like the meme because it worked on me exactly the way it was supposed to work – my eye skimmed over it (ah, one of those name memes), stopped on “Nazi-fighting”, then went back to scan the first line and register the joke.

I like, too, the implication of adequacy here – no need to take on another identity or a new name. Your name is enough as it is. You're already ready.

And look at the cleverness of that line break: "+ YOUR LAST / NAME" – expecting some quirky interpolation of randomness (possibly designed to help hack password recovery questions) – last food eaten, last book read – we find instead just what we already possess.

(The text was probably just centred in a box of fixed size, but that doesn't make me wrong. It just makes me an English major.)

Silliness aside, I like the simplicity of this call to arms.

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In progress / housekeeping

Early in July, I was most of a week at my parents' house, ostensibly to help out my mom post-surgery. Ultimately, the visit became more of a family party.

During the visit, I read half of Zarqa Nawaz’s Laughing all the Way to the Mosque, but I left the book there. I'll probably finish it when I visit in August for the Writer's Festival. Nawaz spoke (hilariously) at last year's festival.

Conversely, I forgot Christopher Milne's The Enchanted Places at home, so although I listed it as a June book, I really finished it in July.

Unsurprisingly, I did not make as much progress with work- and review-related reading in July as I'd hoped. I am reading two books for review, one of which is also useful for prep. So far, that one is fantastic: Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures, edited by Deanna Reader and Linda M. Morra.

Part 1: Alphabetical Listing

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, Book Two. I'm still really enjoying this series. It's like an essay on power in the form of a comic book. My favorite character is probably the conflicted academic radical of a previous generation (natch). He has a smaller role in this volume, but an interesting confrontation with the anti-monarchists and himself.

Coates is setting up a stimulating resistance between the story he's telling and the story-world as it existed before his own series. The central character as originally conceived is defined (narratively, archetypally) by being a king. The story's sympathies (while complex) are clearly on the side of rebellion. Will T'Challa be destroyed by the paradox? We shall see.

Like the first trade paperback, this collection included reprints of earlier Black Panther stories – I am not well-'versed enough to identify authors, artists, and styles, but I enjoyed the slightly scraggly 70s/80s art.

Han Kang. The Vegetarian. Now, this was a book. A book book. A work of strange and agonizing quiet. In three acts, a woman's transformation, seen three different ways, by three different external viewers, all who know her well and also not at all.

( Not precisely spoilers but sort of spoilers )

Hanff, Helene. 84, Charing Cross Road. I re-read this little book of letters between book-buyer and bookseller, and then I listened to various audiobook incarnations as I washed the dishes, and it was all just lovely. This is another comfort read, of course. I can't read this book without thinking furiously at Hanff's younger self: Go to England! Just go! JUST GO. Every time.

Hayes, Bill. Insomniac City. I'd been waiting for this to come in at the library for some time. As I've noted elsewhere, this is a memoir by Bill Hayes, Oliver Sacks' partner. Hayes is an attentive diarist, attuned to small details and interactions. He seems like a remarkable person in himself – profoundly giving to his partners. Nothing really happens in the memoir, except lots of dinners, walks, talks with strangers in New York, drinking red wine right from the bottle, and smoking pot. The picture of Sacks -- brilliant, infinitely curious, delighted by every discovery, from kissing to chemistry -- is endearing. Though Insomniac City is not all about Sacks. A reader who had never heard of him could read this book as a gentle memoir of New York. I am a latent fan of Sacks' books (that is, I loved them once but haven't picked them up in a few years), and I mourned his death in 2015, so this visit with him was sweet.

Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry. This was an enjoyable essay that made a fair point — we expect poetry to live up to the abstract ideal of itself as a kind of trigger for ecstatic/transcendent aesthetic experience, and we resent the inevitable failure of any actual poem to become The Poem. Readers of Leaving the Atocha Station will find this a familiar theme.

I would have liked this essay better as part of a collection. As a standalone monograph, it was enjoyable but not quite substantial enough.

Also – maybe I'm projecting plenitude into the past, as (I think) Lacan would insist, but I'm pretty sure I've had many at least momentarily transcendent experiences of poetry (and other art, and music, and ritual, and nature, and sex, and so forth). Lerner seems to regard this as a myth (or at least he likes to take that pose).

This kind of romantic expectation/analysis obviously does not really include poetry like L.A.N.G.U.A.G.E. poetry, which aims to disrupt/resist the ideal of the lyric and beautiful and expressive poem. However, I am always reading that poetry all wrong anyway, since disruption can also create ecstasy/catharsis. I, too, pretty much read all poetry for ecstatic experience, and maybe – as Helene Hanff's friend said of London – if you look for it, you find it.

Taylor, Elizabeth. A Wreath of Roses. I liked this for its accuracy about the transformations of friendship that happen over time and changed circumstances, and for the simple domestic tyrannies and complicities, and for the atmosphere. The ending I almost liked. It is certainly unnerving. It reminded me of a Muriel Spark, but not quite as ruthless and therefore not quite as successful.

My favourite Taylors are probably still Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont and A View of the Harbour, but she’s just so reliable. Her prose and her attention are like no one else's – unflashy, yet devastating.

Part 2: Women Suffering Hilariously

Ephron, Nora. Heartburn.

Loos, Anita. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.

( I'm going to put these three books together. )

There was TV in there, too, and I also watched the Monroe / Russell film of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which was disappointing, though I'm sure someone has written a clever article about the differences between the tightly regulated sexuality of the film (Monroe's Lorelai never really strays from her fiancé) and the anarchic self-interest of the novel.

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For weeks now I've been thinking I smelled smoke.

Since no one else seemed to notice it, I've been wondering if the smell was some sort of guilt-induced hallucination, a reminder to pay more attention to the wildfires.

I say guilt because the worst burns are in an area I know well, but have lived far away from for decades. I have lately thought much more about American politics than about great tracts of my own province being on fire, until it struck me that this, a fire in my home landscape, ought to be something that affected me; that this indifference or numbness was not a strength but a failing. I started to try to make myself think about it, and somewhere in there I began to smell smoke.

We were promised a heat wave. Instead, today the sky filled up with a deep haze -- not the dull surface of overcast, but a translucent zone, illuminated but empty, with no visible other side of blue.

This morning, as I sat at the counter with my cold coffee, I could put my hand into the patterning of orangey light and strong shadow that dropped from the window -- as I might put my fingers into a pool to see the shadows at play. I've seen this light before, I thought. Once when the sun turned red at midday, and I was spooked and entranced; and two years ago, when the wildfires were burning up-island.

(I looked up the name for the patterns of light in water and found that they are called caustics, meaning burning.)

Two years ago last month it was Pride, and the wildfires -- on the island, but not close to us -- turned the sky a dingy orange for days. It became oppressive, like the atmosphere of an alien planet. The Pride march was big and noisy, but everything felt stifled by the sky.

You may have heard that the fires are huge this year. The biggest fires are in the Interior, on the mainland, in an area called the Cariboo (not to be confused with caribou), just south of Prince George, the city where I grew up.

The full population of Williams Lake, a city of about 11,000 people three hours south of Prince George, had to be evacuated, and thousands of other people in the area.

The other day on a ramble in the park, I ran into an old university friend and some pals of his. One of the friends had been working up in Prince George. He said that most of the evacuees ended up there. It's a bigger city, and its usual population sits at about 74,000, so that's a population increase of about 15%.

The park was matted with dry golden grasses as usual for July, and looked like perfect tinder. They walked on and I sat on my rocky outcrop to sketch the trees.

There have been air quality warnings as far south as Vancouver, but none here so far that I know of. Until today, if you lived here and had no news access, you wouldn't have known anything about a fire, except for that maybe-smell maybe-hallucination.

Today the air feels dry and scratchy. The sky is not tinted, as it was in the year when the fires were closer, but the light that falls has a sunset quality. It's as though it's a different time on the ground than it is in the sky -- one o'clock of a grey afternoon up there, and late on a sunny summer evening down here, only it's evening all day long. The shadows are strong, and the dyed light turns them bright blue, like watery inkstains.

That other year I brought some articles about the wildfires and forest management into class for discussion (though I made rather a ratty job of it, I'm afraid.) This year there hasn't really been an opportunity to respond that way.

The first seventeen years of my life were given form in a place that by now has changed a great deal, what with beetle invasions and fires. My family doesn't live there any more, and any remaining friends there I've lost touch with. It isn't home, yet it's never quite not home, simply because it was the first place. This season is like a fire at the beginning of the world, or that's how I think it should feel: like a burning-out of my memory. Maybe that's the smell of smoke.

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Wednesday after work LB and I hiked in to the lake. We took a more strenuous route than usual, over rough ground, but nothing requiring high endurance -- or so I would have thought. The moment I got home, however, I lay down on the couch and did not rise until night.

The last few days have been like days of recovery from illness -- not soreness or fatigue so much as a sort of muzzy-headedness I dislike much more than pain.

Therefore, I have not done much writing or reading.

I did manage to read Insomniac City, Bill Hayes' memoir of his relationship with Oliver Sacks. It's a lovely, gentle book, a kind of idyll of daily life in New York -- lots of drinking wine on rooftops and talking to strangers in the park. Hayes invokes the sensory detail of their life together with the attention you'd expect of someone who could properly appreciate Oliver Sacks.

I'd read Hayes' description of a piece of music -- Beethoven's Op. 133, say (The Great Big Fugue) -- then cue it up on YouTube and listen -- or look up a meal they ate or an artist Hayes admired. In this way, the book became a delightful multi-sensory experience.

Reading or writing for work and other projects, though, did not seem to be on.

When writing is too difficult, I draw. One of my comfort activities is attempting loose copies of the exquisitely strange radial creatures from Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature. Listening to Beethoven' bright, angular notes, I thought -- why not try to draw this as well?¹

Under the cut are a few creatures drawn out of the music, though they are not perfect synaesthetic renderings of these pieces or anything -- more a fusion of what I was looking at, what I was hearing, and what I could actually draw.


( Musical Drawings )

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1. I do see a little colour to music, but it's a very limited palette, shading from blue-white through golden brown to dark brown, and probably has more to do with the colour of the piano whereon I failed to learn to play music as a child, rather than any intricacy of brain connections.

Twice now I’ve been to Finishing Class at a terrific little workspace called Good, started up by a wonderful arts organizer and her partner, who recently moved back to town.

Finishing Class is a monthly event wherein you show up to sit down at a long hand-made table with other people who want to Finish Something. Once greetings are given and tea is made, together you each set to work on your Something, and try to get it or some stage or draft or piece of it Finished by the end of two hours (but this is not strictly enforced).

At the end of Finishing Class, you get a gold star. At the break, you get a home-baked treat made by the proprietor herself. Last time it was a perfect brownie. This time it was a maple butter tart.

Even though the process is more than half a game, the focus and the title and the deadline function, underground in the mind, to make you want to Finish your Something.

Last time I had no idea what I was going to work on, and felt a bit nervous about that, and then my brain very kindly offered me the use of a short story idea. Without the class I don't think I'd have written it at all. Last time, I drafted the story to the end, and tonight I second-drafted it and patched the ending together a bit. And by posting it here, I finish my Finishing for tonight.

I like that it arrived, I'm glad that it stayed, but I don't know what it amounts to. Not that it has to amount to anything. It was a happy thing just to make it.

Anyway, here it is.

( The New Sea )

Cheers.

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This was a busy month at work, without much time for pleasure reading. The rest of the summer is less officially busy, but contains plenty of requirement for self-motivation in the direction of reading things and also understanding them.

I've got two academic reviews to write. Both books tie directly into my courses for the fall, so this also counts as prep. And there is much prep. My reading may of necessity become less haphazard in July and August, or at least that is the plan, so I've enjoyed letting it take hazard for June.


Re-Reading

Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (1972), because it is a sure pleasure. I had remembered the simplicity of the prose and a few of the incidents — the water tank, the rich man’s house — but I had forgotten its complexity, or else not registered its intricacy fully in that first reading.

What strikes me this time is the celebration of the grandmother's perspective — her intuition about how to be with and of the land. There's an obvious connection to the North American ecological and Indigenous writing that I've read.


Books of the Moment

George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). I liked this, though not the ending, which seemed interminable and unnecessary. However, my reading was rushed because I was about to get on a helicopter, so I can't say I gave it the ideal level of contemplative attention.


Quietly Uncanny British Novels

This is the genre closest to my slowly thumping heart: ordinary events told with such clarity and intensity that they seem irreal. Two more Barbara Comyns — The Skin Chairs (1985) and Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's (1982). I think Comyns has joined Penelope Fitzgerald and the Other Elizabeth Taylor among my favorite novelists. I liked both of these novels better than The Vet's Daughter, and maybe Woolworth's best because it is about Bohemian Life in the 1930s.


Nonfiction

Ben Blatt's Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve (2016). This is data-driven literary criticism/journalism. I believe it is a collection of pieces from Slate.com. It reads like that: a series of short statistical studies of various literary works and genres.

Blatt's conclusions are generally thoughtful and generous. I wanted a bit more critical complexity on both the literary and the data side -- for example, he analyzes the use of -ly adverbs and finds that, indeed, prose broadly considered as having higher quality does use fewer such adverbs. However, I don't recall his drilling down on the precise use that is most often objected to — describing how people say things. It seems to me there's a distinct literary difference between over-description of speech attitudes and modifying action in general — but maybe I speak inaccurately.

Blatt uses a lot of fanfiction for his analysis, which I liked — as a paraliterary genre, it often doesn't get that kind of attention, and yet it's an enormous galactic body of collective imaginings. He also scrupulously points out interesting exceptions to the rules, even the -ly one, which leaves room for hope.

Some of the pieces I found illuminating, and some dull. I'd recommend reading the bits of this that look interesting to you and skipping out the ones that don't.

I think of myself as a reader of Serious Nonfiction, or maybe a Serious Reader of nonfiction, but GoodReads tells me otherwise: this was my first nonfiction book of the year.

The Enchanted Places (1974). This is Christopher Milne's account of his childhood and youth as A.A. Milne's son and as the inspiration for the Winnie-the-Pooh books. I'm just finishing it. It's very English. Quiet, melancholy, celebratory of the countryside.

I like it. I knew some of it contents as literary rumour before reading it. And once I saw a Fringe play in which Christopher Robin goes off to the War and betrays Pooh to the Germans. "Das ist Ihr Schwein?" they keep shouting at him.


Speculations

Anansi Boys. (2006) I think that ends my Neil Gaiman revisit. I liked the mythworld in the novel very much. I found the main storyline rather flat. It also has some problems with the narrative's portrayal of consent, which I suppose can be explained by a) its having been written before the latest iteration of that conversation, and b) its being about gods, who aren't very good on that sort of thing where mortals are concerned.

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I gave my students a midnight deadline for their online exam, and then extended it to one a.m. because I was worried that so few of them had submitted it.

Now I'm sitting up in case someone sends me a desperate last-minute email.

Or else I'm sitting up waiting for the latest podcast episode of Twin Peaks Rewatch to drop (it's by the inimitable Idle Thumbs reviewers, from whom I would listen to discourse about anything at all, and indeed often do, because they discourse so well.)

Or else I'm sitting up waiting for my antiquated old MacBook to copy over some music files (it is so old it can't properly cast my music unto the cloud.)

Or else I'm just sitting up.

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Hullo Britain. Good luck. Please vote if it's possible.

I love this, which I see many folks pointing to (and adding to) today.

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You may remember that the province I live in had an election two weeks ago, but we didn't know if anyone had actually been elected or not because a) close races and b) massive pile of absentee votes.

The final counts and recounts happened, and the seat distribution is the same: Liberals 43, NDP 41, Green 3. No majority of seats, no government.

Today, the best possible thing (from my perspective) was announced: the Greens will support the NDP, giving a combined total of 44 seats. (It's not technically a coalition, apparently, but a "Confidence and Supply Agreement".)

Since this better represents the preferences of a majority of the voters, my sense of fairness is satisfied as well as my personal glee.

Various things can happen at this point. I know because I asked my proximate political wonk for a telladonna¹.

[ETA: I had two different points confused, so this is an amended list. Thanks to redbird for the query.]

1. The premier resigns and the Lieutenant Governor asks the NDP (+ Greens) to form the government.
2. The premier doesn't resign, the legislature takes a confidence vote, and she's, I guess, removed. The Lieutenant-Governor asks the NDP (+ Greens) to form the government.
3. The premier does resign, but the LG for whatever reason decides another election is the better choice. (My consultant says this would be unprecedented, though.)

Obvs. I'd like #1, though I'd take the high drama of the no confidence vote. (Well, you know, high drama in Canadian terms.)

[ETA (June 6): Sounds like it will be #2!]

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1. Awesome @westwingweekly reference

Our provincial election took place on Tuesday. Well, I say it took place, but the absentee and special votes won't actually be counted for two weeks. There are something like 175,000 of these votes (of about 3.2 million), and some of the races came down to tiny margins -- in one riding on this fine Island, the candidate won by 9 votes (or did she?).

So the election is still in fact taking place, and it's impossible to know the outcome, which is a strange state of affairs.

There are three parties of note in this election: the Liberals, who used to be considered centrist, but are now on the right; the NDP, who are left; and the Greens.

The Liberals came to power sixteen years ago, and that was a moment of revelation for my young radical self. "The parties are all basically the same capitalist powermongers," my rhetoric went, "and it doesn't really matter which one is in power." The advent of the Liberals was the way I found out what you already know, that it matters a hell of a lot, materially, on the ground, in real people's lives, who is in power.

If it isn't obvious, I vote as far left as I feel I can do and still have some chance of bringing a left party to power.

On Tuesday night, at my suggestion, LB, S, and I convened to watch the numbers. (Superstition might have told us not to, given the results of the American election and the number of leftover tacos.)

At first, it looked grimly like a clear Liberal win. Yet as the counts increased, weird things began to happen. Ridings flipped and then flipped again. The Greens began to take more seats. The NDP pulled ahead in ridings they had to win in order to shift power.

LB was on the phone to her mom for part of the time, teasing her about the Green win in that riding.

Conventional wisdom has it that the Greens split left votes away from the NDP. However, S. took a different position throughout. Like C.J. when she said Bartlet's approval rating would go up, he held the position that vote loss from the Liberals to the Greens would reduce the Liberal lead. That seems to have been at least partly true.

Right up until the "end" (really a cliffhanger before a hiatus), ridings kept flipping, and for two brief beautiful moments the screens showed an NDP lead.

"So this is a tie. This election is a tie." I said at one point. This ended up being not quite true.

There are 87 seats in the legislature, and right now the count looks like this:

Liberals 43
NDP      41
Greens    3

-- a hung parliament, technically, though it's being called a Liberal minority government.

And now we wait.

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