We were listening to this Nicholas Wade interview en voiture on the radio. Puffin so engrossed in Mr Wade’s thesis we had to sit in the dark and listen til it ended. On entering the home he was wrestling with the concept of religious belief. “I don’t believe Jesus was the son of God,” he said. “I think he just said that.” Some unlacing of shoes and pontification later he became impassioned announcing there are huge gaps. For example he says for all we know he wasn’t born on the 25th at all. He could very well have been born on the 27th, another shoe off rising to resounding declaration and horror “he might even have been born in November”.
I loved how November was the biggest affront over any other troubling aspect of the existence of God.
Rob Kovitz’s Pig City Model Farm was one of my reading moments of 2009. Found on the library booksale trolley. Like a cadaver, once sliced full of organs and explanation. Before I sliced it, I had no understanding what it was and figured it was a handbook on pig farming that would be very useful someday in the way I scoop virology textbooks from the pavement. Lookit I said to the library woman, no one will want this pig farming manual and I only had fifty cents and I would love this pig farming manual. In praise of confusion and poverty!
Ice fishing in Gimli — a new nation to frolick in. Or perhaps more appropriately ice core drill into.
Here, as promised, are some paragraphs and snips from DM Fraser’s work that I spent my Sunday night enjoying.
This para is from his story Eschatology.
Friday evening downtown: the place should have been packed with husbands killing the pain while their wives were out looting department stores: but now husbands retreat instead to lectures on Fiscal Responsibility, Chinese Architecture Through the Ages, Aggressive Childcare. The wives, bankrupt, meet in covens for belly-dancing therapy at six, paragynecology at eight, Kung Fu at ten. After that it’s too late for mere amusement. Couples night at the Eschatology Centre begins at dawn, and someone has got to get up early to feed the Dobermans. Dobermen?
It was the opening line that struck me in that para. How Fraser creates place without referring to any physical description or dropping road names or lavish layering of trees and buildings. I’ve constantly been trying to resolve the construction of place or setting in prose as a reader and a writer. Writers display for us his/her potent ability to paint a scene. Paintbrush over paint. Ostentatiousness over bricks agus mortar. I’m quite interested as a reader in seeing place manifest through the behaviour of the people in it since lives are lived within places, they are not lived “at” or “toward” places so the external construction of place in parallel to people seems odd.
I recently took part in a poetry salon which was both stimulating and vexing in equal amounts. At times the language in the room would become dominated or hijacked by academic terms: the assumption being that everyone present spoke that language. The reality being several of us in the room did not. Tho’ when I requested meanings generally people were obliging.
The main activity involved a reading by a poet, a response to that poet’s work by another poet, in the form of a written piece and then discussion followed by responses, written or whatever from the participants. So there was a great deal of writing out from or back to a particular work. In the course of these exchanges I realized I am not particularly compelled by this act of writing to and from. I found aspects of this corresponding engaging as a listener. But as a writer I find myself compelled to write into the piece I am writing. That the piece would actually write further and further into itself. I can see several disadvantages to this because the piece can only engage with it’s own internal dynamic and rhythm and it’s a much more singular and lonelier approach.
There was a camaraderie around “response” that is impossible when you’re in a tunnel. You’re only hope maybe the odd sandhog who pops a head up along the way and says how’re ya doing there, it’s shite but on you go now.
Curiously though in discovering and reading Fraser’s work I find the stories I’ve read follow this. They just unwind and unwind on their own internal turf.
Tryin to figure out if I’ve fractured me arm.
Note arm not injured reading Bataille. Nor Fraser. Arm injured in dramatic airborne pursuits.
My bones never break. That’s a lifelong rule. They can’t start this messy business at this late stage. But arm won’t turn. And protests from elbow to the wrist. Plus fizzy fingers and thumb.
Hmmm.
Post note: I have not fractured my arm. Yippee. The lifelong rule is uncontested.
Next Post
Another arctic trek and late night to convene with DM Fraser’s books. There are three titles (in addition to Class Warfare) on the shelves at the univ library. One of them Prelude appears to be a complete works, but it’s hard to be certain. Another blue cover what the heck is the name of it?? …was published posthumously. Basically they contain many of the same stories. I like the idea of reading single stories in the different books rather than only reading them in the same book. Just because.
He does very interesting things around place, sometimes by creating what is not in a place to create the place. His sense of place is also informed less by signage and description and more by the way people behave in a place and when that is captured we know precisely where we are.
His is a flexible voice and reassuring the way he maintains casual encounters with pronouns, the same way people pass us in the street. Our eyes do not remain on them once they’ve passed. A hand runs through a peg bag to take out a peg that’s only advantage is it didn’t slip from our fingers. The hand doesn’t need to establish anymore than it’s a peg.
I like a degree of flexibility around pronouns that English can sometimes not permit.
Tomorrow I will post some of his arranging of words that delight me so much. So much that I take icy cold treks out to retrieve them.
Bataille meanwhile contains to usurp the homefront. My Mother in particular.
Here’s a link via oneinfour.ie to Mary Rafferty’s original documentary Prime Time investigation Cardinal Secrets that exposed the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in particular in Dublin diocese as complicit in allowing and facilitating pedophile priests to be moved parish to parish continuing to inflict their horrific abuse on children.
Saturday night, in Vancouver in winter
What it is not to have a bewk when one desires it. It’s Saturday night, in Vancouver in winter and I would like to be able to read Saturday night, in the world in winter, a short story by DM Fraser found in a book that’s out of print, in a library I don’t have a card for.
How and ever, I could journey out to the library which closes in 41 mins. The journey would take 44 minutes.
Ever and how I can instead contemplate Saturday night in the world a reader.
Reading and the reader especially are two topics I have been humming on. Increasingly the focus on the writer and what the writer has to tell us beyond the books they write (which sometimes admittedly tell us very little but )… recently we had writers (amongst others) asked whether or not they would be getting the flu shot, we have anthologies of writers regaling us on childbirth, I am awaiting the anthology by writers called how I take a breath. My query would be why writers would have the more interesting stories on giving birth, over say, the rest of the population. In all likelihood they do not, so therefore it becomes an exercise in knowing more about or of the writer.And then like the grading of pears there’s the selection process of which writers we are going to hear more about. And who will be appointed as ambassadour of what?
Par example: we have certain writers appointed as writers who write about the city, especially here where the city (Vancouver) is constantly trying to oxygenate its presence on the page. ‘m here, huff puff, I’m here. What qualifies you on the page as writing about the city? Is it that you mention the streets?
From the writer’s pov this demand to be a purveyor of advice and insight (aka brand writer) they are also now required to provide active counselling to the audience of writers attending their readings. How do I do what it is you have done? How is it done? Rather than what have you done?
Where has the reader gone?
The other night I met a reader in a kitchen and it was such a blessed relief. I could cross examine him, he informed me on so much about Bataille. He handed me books.
Reading well requires time, application, and an appetite. And or multitasking. One can read by listening. One can walk and read, with a bit of practice. Indeed walking is a perfect analogy .. I am particularly curious about the solitary reader though. And would like to hear much more about the solitary reader in any area of life. One place turning to writers can assist the solitary reader is to create more stations on the tubemap. Reading out from a particular writer. Sometimes letters and journals contain lists and references to texts that were read by particular writers. It would be more useful to have an anthology that contained this kind of information rather than how I got over my dilemma with itchy toes. Writers are often a solitary reader therefore I am not sure why if we are curious about writers we aren’t asking them solely about reading.
I keep trying to find (write) my way into essays that are accessible, essays about books (in whatever form online, off, recorded, in print, out of print,), but they don’t quite work yet, they hum yes, but are too anecdotal, too fractured or insufficient. I think I need to hear more from the solitary reader. And must endeavour to do so.
incursions
Last week, somebody, with decidedly few jokes and a less than playful lexicon, labelled me (inaccurately as labels often are) a “cartoon Brit” in response to using the word youff. I have subsequently been thinking of which cartoon would be on the rossette and it’s a toss up between Postman Pat, Trumpton, and Bagpuss. None of which would match the insulter’s lack of appetite for the individual tongue breaking out of generic jail. Postman Pat would be too determined, Trumpton is full of bells and fire engines (overly decorative, urgent, and auditorily disturbing) and Bagpuss is full of wooden spoon dolls and stretching.
Later that day or week at the swimming pool two older Chinese women were explaining to me in Cantonese and hand signals why my locker key wasn’t functioning and then that I may have forgotten to take my quarter out of the locker. The exchange was about curiousity and concern. The medley of words in two languages, neither of us understood, was minor compared to the greater intention to help and the inability to understand only enhanced it all the more. As I walked away to go swimming, a woman attempted engage me with some racist aside about the excessive amount of Cantonese spoken in the room! It was easily quashed, but stung the air nonetheless.
What drives people affronted by the sound of the words that sail out of other peoples mouths? What is this language/voicebox policing: this too much, or you can’t employ that word or you’re x. It is truly a nonsense. (deliberate poor English grammar, acceptable Hiberno-English grammar)
As a child people often complained I spoke to fast, when I related this to my mother, she instructed me to tell them to “listen faster”. In that instance she instilled in me an acceptance of voice, the defense of the right to speak, however your tongue may form it. I was also raised surrounded by a strong dialect and patois. An English of the inbetween. Hiberno-English. An English informed by another language. A language of the voice (spoken) over the page perhaps. And yes, she speaks fast.
Thirdly, and lastly, I happened to be sat in a caff and introduced to a Lebanese woman living in France. Our conversation took flight when I relayed to her that I had heard a woman on the bus in Dublin say a line about Beirut (in a working class Baile atha Cliath – ease) in a conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with Beirut. It had stayed with me, the way she created Beirut for a second in that bus with its condensation laden windows and Beirut lived in and for those 5 words in her incarnation. This had inspired almost a third of my current novel that I am completing. There was a lovely closing of the geographic distance in talking of this in a caff in Vancouver, and having the stranger on the bus in Dublin and the two of us strangers at the caff, briefly holding the same cup of tea. All facilitated by the paying attention to the capacious roundabout of language. The Lebanese woman kept repeating the Dublin woman’s words.
The uptight examples mentioned in this post are frankly “ensuque” and “ensuquering” my verbal nerves.
Just watched the Prime Time report Death in Santa Cruz about Michael Dwyer the Irishman shot dead in April in Boliva. Obviously the report is inconclusive, raising questions mainly, both about his activities and the manner in which he was killed. It enlightens slightly on the political situation in Bolivia about which I knew precious nothing.
What seemed significant was where it all began: The Corrib Gas pipeline site in Mayo, where he was working as a security guard.