radiant fracture

What do we think about Erin Morgenstern's The Starless Sea as the novel for a first-year lit course?

A friend recommended it. I've just started reading -- well, I'm up to about page 50 -- and feel cautiously optimistic.

It has the advantage of taking up the idea of games and of being a game (it would appear so, anyway), which is one of my themes or lenses or whatever. It has the disadvantage of being alarmingly long, but I could work with that.

I really want there to be a magic answer to this problem of the Novel that just softly descends on me like, well, you know, starlight. Snow.

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I've just finished Maria Campbell's collection Stories of the Road Allowance People,¹ which I both ordered online in the 1995 edition and put on hold at the library in the 2010 edition, because impatient. The 2010 edition includes one more story and a CD with fiddle music, which I alas cannot play on my computer -- I'll have to make a rare journey in to the office.

The transcription of these stories is interestingly complicated. Most were, if I understand properly, first told to Campbell in Michif². Then they were translated into Village English, the dialect of English used in Campbell's community. So the stories are translated into English with a Michif accent.

Two interesting linguistic features of Campbell's transcription of Village English:

1. Campbell writes can when the person says can't. I think this is because the final T of can't is dropped. That's similar to the BC Interior accent I have, where can is usually said more like kn and can't is kaʔ with a nasalized vowel. I cn do it. I ca' do it.

As a reader, you just have to figure out from context that this is can' rather than can.

2. Campbell's Village English doesn't have gendered pronouns, so everyone is "he" in these stories. I enjoy that a lot.

Campbell learned the stories from old men in Métis communities (4). She doesn't name the individual storytellers, so a reader can't tell how many voices are here, though I think you can hear different ways of telling come through.

What I find most captivating about these stories is the way that big history is so familiar and so recent in them. So there are some great tall tales, and a story about shapechangers, but also there are stories about Gabriel Dumont and Louis Riel and the North-West Resistance. Often these are all the same story. The storytellers weave these elements so fluidly that it's possible to miss how masterful that movement often is.

There's a version of the story of Almighty Voice, which could make a really beautiful lesson combined with Daniel David Moses' play Almighty Voice and His Wife, one of the first Indigenous-authored plays to see mainstream production (in 1992, six years after The Rez Sisters), and, say, an encyclopedia-style version of the story for contrast.

My favorite story, which I would love to research further, is "Joseph's Justice."

The story is about a Métis man who doesn't fight in the Resistance -- he just wants to live his life.

Then Joseph runs into the English general who is taking Louis Riel to Regina:


The intimacy with Riel and Dumont and Dumas is so moving.

Joseph is walking home with his gun and beaver pelts (95) and the soldiers decide to arrest him, even though he's had nothing to do with the war. He is dragged into court, but the judge believes him and he's released. Then Joseph asks for his gun and his furs back:
But Joseph is not taking any more shit, so he files charges against the general. An Irish lawyer helps him out, and, after a long struggle, he wins! But he still doesn't get his stuff back.

And then the storyteller says this:


And I stop, and I count.

It's 1995 when this book is published, probably a little earlier when Campbell writes down the story. Say the storyteller is 70 in 1995; then he's born in 1925. The North-West Resistance was in 1885. Say his uncle was 70 in 1935 to tell him this story at age 10. That would put his uncle's birth in 1865 -- 20 at the time of the Resistance. This guy, hanging out in his kitchen telling Maria Campbell this story -- his uncle was there.

That kind of intimacy between 1995 and 1885 isn't something I have experienced or even really imagined. I can see why it would be so for the storyteller, for Campbell, but I have nothing like that in my sense of community, of time, of history.

Anyway, I'd love to teach that story, too, for its beautiful braiding of personal and national history, of satire and comedy and tragedy. It's like a Victor Hugo novel in miniature.

* * * * * *

The book is one of many mentioned in Jo-Ann Archibald's Indigenous Storywork. From the list I made of her suggestions, I ordered this, and George Clutesi's books, and Keeping Slug Woman Alive, an earlier book about teaching storywork.

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Notes

1. Campbell on the title: "You will have to do your own research .... however, I can tell you that the name Road Allowance People was coined by white government officials and land owners to describe the dispossessed Métis people who, having nowhere to go after the Resistance of 1885, built their homes on unoccupied crown lands, more often land that had been set aside for highways or roads" (4).

2. Michif is the Metis language, grown out of Cree and French, with some English and Anishinaabe elements (The Canadian Encyclopedia).

In searching for more information about Michif I found some very exciting statistics like "94% of Michif nouns come from French and 99% of the verbs come from Cree" (The Polyglot Files). That kind of information makes me all dreamy.

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.)