Poly saints
What a remarkably complicated day in the area of car tires.
First they were doomed, double doomed at Kingsway and 11th.
Then they were not doomed, 2 man spoke them not in the slightest doomed at Fraser and Kingsway.
Then I had to dance all the way back down Kingsway to celebrate with 3 pieces of toast and a cup of coffee with Jane to recover from all the diagnosing and misdiagnosing.
I am a short person with a Greenhouse needing reconstruction. I do not have time for such rubber excitement. I am down and too far gone with the Poly.
And all this in the quest for the road to Campbell River followed by a detour into the museum of miners. I wonder if there is a patron saint of poly tunnels, the way there is a patron saint for just about everything.
After pulling the mighty spuds yesterday I woke with the crazed idea I wanted to construct a greenhouse on my balcony. As per usual with me getting notions, I couldn’t let them away so sped off to the hardware shop and engaged the knowledge of approx 10 different individuals and emerged with what I thought were the necessary ingredients to construct my greenhouse in the manner in which I imagined it.
Inbetween I went to a meeting with Lori Wiedenhammer at Vandusen to discuss our upcoming Fall performance art collaboration Chaos. Lori has the greatest ideas and fueled undoubtably by their potency and the sight of two trillion floating lilypads I threw myself into building the greenhouse in a very cramped work space on my return.
Quelle Disastre! At one point I was rolling in poly (4mm if you’re wondering, I went cheap) the poles were collapsing in on me, I was entombed in plastic and bricks were not co-operating. Then I got a call from “loveliest of trees the cherry now” Ms Ita Kane and how tempted was I to hop out this mess and see her and the wee man. I have to keep going, I said. You have to keep going, she replied.
I returned to the hardware shop I engaged the knowledge of 4 further men there, who all said the same thing, you’re trying to build the thing without doing any affixing. We discussed cement, concrete, filler, expander. Every one of them had a different idea on how I could do it. Some of them were Spanish which given the outcome of the match gave them good cheer and patience with this dementing small person insisting there must be a way to do it with the minimum of hassle.
Inbetween a fella decided to rob a very pricey table saw and there was a bit of distraction as they chased him across the car park to retrieve it. He looked like he was participating in an insurance advert — the robber — so thoroughly composed was he throughout, swinging it as though it really belonged to him. Alarms clanging. I was amazed at the number of random customers who gave chase (biblical chase?). Everyone wanted in on the action except me who just wanted an explanation on packaged filler versus the pot stuff.
Out the back, finally, I alighted on them. Precisely the holey bricks I needed to make my poles co-operate. Unfortunately they were very heavy, but it had to be done. The Greenhouse dream must live on. I hoicked them home to the distress of my lower back. It took 12 journeys to get 4 bricks upstairs. I now have 4 excess red bricks.
But remarkably I do have a greenhouse. It’s not the world’s most official looking greenhouse, but that’s grand. And I built it. And I feel very useful.
In celebration I went to my garden plot and a second victory … I found them lying in state on the chard plant. The four slugs who’ve been visiting after nightfall and making polkadot of the chard. They had a salty night alright.
What a botanically victorious day it was. Alas there’s a bit of a breeze so I hope I still have a greenhouse by tomorrow.
Next Post
Random generation (Possibly Related Posts) is pretty funny. An old post on this blog, a review of an art installation during the Olympics that I took a fairly dim view on now pops up as a “you might like this” alongside an explicit description of a young woman’s sexual exploits as she rides her way across random males in London. My original post is about as sexy as a stale baguette, so Lord knows exactly how they have randomly achieved relevance.
In any case the diary of the gal getting it on is a way better read (if at times disturbing. I also wonder if it is not actually written by a male). Strangely though it hasn’t generated a link in reverse, so you cannot get to it from my post.
I can imagine the disappointed fringes in high elevated state after reading Story of (London) Eye type blog, then clicking on my review and shaking their bangs in dismay.
Sunday questions
1. What has been the role in the explosion of writer as teacher and creative writing industry in reducing the amount of literary criticism (and such considering) generated?
2. And the question of academia. It seems to me that academics are able to generate critical writings because they have a pay check. Is this the only model by which such writing can be achieved? Is it fair to make a distinction between an academic and a working writer (someone who doesn’t have a pay check from a teaching job) and for whom the writing generates the food source? Or is that entirely irrelevant?
3. How can I build an improvised greenhouse on my petite balcony? (low budget masking tape and pole style)
This morning at 9.36 I experienced pangs of homesickness, which is odd since I am technically at home. As the hour carried on they became stronger and defeating like a big old bag of sigh. Two hours later I realized I was not homesick for place but for people, particular people. The ease, the natter, the what, what the and stories. The oxygen of a tale. The endless tales about sometimes very little that mean so much in the course of a day. The endless stop and interruption for a tale. You’ve to work so much harder in Vancouver to find a tale. They’re there alright, but require a bit of dig or budge. There’s a lack of ease in this constant need for extraction and tempting.
I turned to reading for relief.
I continue to read Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us and find that for a book so specifically about one text (Joyce’s Ulysses) it propels me not so much into or inside Ulysses but rather out, out, out into the possibilities for literature.
“Oh rocks, she moans, tell us in plain words” (p77)
***
Early in the book Kiberd cites the loss of common culture, he describes how
“because of the rise of specialists prepared to devote years to the study of its secret codes — parallax, indeterminacy, consciousness-time being among the buzz words. Such specialists often tend to work in teams. Many of them reject the notion of a national culture, assuming that to be cultured nowadays is to be international, even global, in consciousness. In doing this they have often removed Joyce from the Irish context which gave so much of its work meaning and value….
…The middle decades of the twentieth century were the years in which the idea of a common culture was abandoned — yet Ulysses depends on that very notion. “
I have been engaged in a nonsensical debate with myself whether common culture could be reeclaimed or recreated through fictional creation of common culture(s) in the novel. Then it struck me that the very exoticization of place in literature (certainly prevelant in Canadian fiction of the last 20 years. At times it seems an “anywhere but here” took over the novel, sometimes triptych in its approach. Three places: none here) has perhaps done that. What seemed promising on first consideration suddenly disappated to having perhaps had the opposite effect, that of being a plugger up rather than an opener outer. And then the thinking mitt snapped shut on it.
dear helen…
apparently there was something growing below that dubious foliage … mighty spuds revealed themselves.
Thanks for the digging.
Thanks for novels.
D.M. Fraser Ignorant Armies: a consideration
Here, I offer, my consideration of D.M. Fraser’s Ignorant Armies (out of print alas, but Pulp Press originally). It was suggested the piece needs to be more friendly to readers, therefore if you are confused you can ask questions in the comments section. (since the piece has yet to be published in print, link/attribute pls). And a nod to Helen Potrebenko, Brian Kaufman, Jeff Derksen, Michael Turner for reading/comments/discussion.
Buried Treasures: Ignorant Armies. D.M. Fraser
D.M. Fraser is a footnote in Vancouver literature where he should be the headliner. Attracted by the title of his first collection — Class Warfare — I discovered his work last year, but it was his posthumously published book Ignorant Armies that spared my sanity during the recent 5 ring bling, all out flattening invasion of our city.
Ignorant Armies, published in 1990, by Pulp Press (out of print) emerged as a stand alone volume, during the attempt to create two complete collections of Fraser’s work. Fraser began work on the novel in 1978 and was still working on it when he died suddenly in 1985. The book was put together over three years, with input from close colleagues. In a note entitled You aren’t supposed to be reading this, Ignorant Armies editor Bryan Carson reflects on Fraser’s interminable, perfectionist approach: “He couldn’t tolerate a mistake on a page, would tear one out for nothing more serious than a typo and start the page over…”
This very process and happenstance of how the book formed itself, both by it’s author’s generation and subsequent external collation provides us with a lively reading experience, which we can wonder about, delight in each paragraph and choose how and where to darn them together overall. Knowing as we do that whatever Fraser intended finally for his book remains to be seen. While he left “structured units”, he did not indicate a conclusive map according to which they might sit.
The despot thruline of narrative is bid adieu in Ignorant Armies and instead we revel in a fragmented repository of chunking. Fraser’s sentences are long, lifting, yet single word succinct. His resplendent prose owes something to music: looping phrases that riff and repeat (Johnny Girardi came into town singing), phrases also delineate new events (May all our sins be forgiven). A lead in and a lead out and always in his sentences, an elevation. Therefore, identical to a piece of music the reader could chose, non-fatally, (any) where to join this prose.
The overall shape of the text reflects what’s happening in it. A Venn diagram of loops within loops that perhaps reflect the tad loopy nature of his characters. Characters, sufficient in number to form a small circle, thus rotate the tale, weave their lives, intricately around each other and bounce off each other like a game of rounders: They recall, rotate, remember and recoil. Gus Asher, (who is the main man) “if he recalls Johnny it’s to recall that was the winter Joan went crazy, and I too perhaps…”
While Johnny Girardi concludes on Asher: “A tour of his personal history yields little insight: it is an official visit to an exploded coal-mine or any industrial disaster, where the object of the ceremony is not to see what is there, but to be recorded as having been seen seeing it and weeping.”
Cut to Asher on Joan: “Asher broaching the notion with what he hoped was the suitable level of candor, I’m gonna fuck off out of this stinking house, felt a messianic exaltation that so amply irrigated his arid spirit that he began to weep almost immediately, loudly, thereby missing Joan’s murmured answer, Why don’t you do that very thing, tonight for example?”
Asher has handed the reins to Johnny Girardi to complete his tale. Johnny Girardi (sometimes Giraardi) plows through the book swinging his arm, like a marching band, as he bears agreed witness to Asher’s life. As noted in the text “The story is over by now and this is the epilogue”
Even Fraser’s point of view resembles the gliss of string instruments. It merges, and dissolves in the same paragraph to the extent I reached the last sentence of the book startled to discover Johnny Girardi had been talking to me, where I assumed Asher was. With not a bother on me, I read the book again.
Essentially the tale, if we must entertain such a bland notion, is a man sorting events (“an accounting”) in his life and allowing external points of view to consider the same situations. Some of the most poignant reflecting is Asher on his lust and love of manipulative Devon (who has murdered or knifed someone I think), his accounting affords an honest representation of the fluid nature of sexuality. This, while, still married to Joan from whom he is certainly, latterly in the book, separating. Devon concurrently has stolen Asher’s writing to create the “most notoriously unperformable opera in the world”.
As Devon is literally running circles around him, within his stagnant marriage lies Asher’s tranquillity and while he’s consuming both, it is at the stake of his wife’s sanity. Joan quietly commits suicide.
Gus Asher may be a self-centred, panicking, drunk, yet his rigorous honesty and pondering offer us the contradictory nature of human behaviour. Much seems to pain Asher, yet he adheres to his honest appraising. When Devon seeks to comfort him after Joan’s death he’s having none of it.
“I let him (Devon) hold me and pat me like a wounded puppy, saying obviously unbelievable things like It’s not your fault, she didn’t know what she was doing, but it was I who hadn’t known, hadn’t seen, love was a lie, as it may indeed be, and I summoned from impoverished memory everything mean and gross and ungiving in all of us, I charged all of us with every crime I could name (and god knows the list was long enough to occupy a night) I beseeched Devon to beat me until I bled from nose and mouth, to fuck me in the ass because I’d always hated that and feared him in his moods to do it…”
Separation or unfolding is a constant mode in this text. Even as readers we are embroiled: what is Asher’s actual truth? Is Johnny Girardi reliable? Blimey who on earth is Eli? Petrov would you stop being a pain in the hole.
It’s rare as a reader to bounce up a set of stairs with material that could be construed as likely to bring one down. Get blasted on Fraser’s pneumatic prose. He transforms the most vicious of maladies.
En route to my gymnastics training last night I was listening I subsequently learnt to Arlo Guthrie on the radio. I did not know Arlo Guthrie, but he was singing a song about a train in New Orleans. I do know of his dad (I subsequently learnt). So how come I don’t know his son. I suppose it’s reasonable not to know of him.
Anyway there he was singing fresh as a daisy bout a train. At the training session, I was working with a new coach on what they call “drills” trying to link two moves into a tumble, having worked the two moves separately. The coach, a very patient young fella, wanted me to do these various drills before hooking the engine to the carriage. But these drills felt so odd, hurling myself backwards into a pit and having to land one move before the pit started and being at the age of reluctance, this old Missy was having none of it.
We discussed it. I said you know psychologically these drills aren’t doing it for me. He said maybe I thought the drills were boring. I said I didn’t think I could find them boring since I was basically so resistant I couldn’t even attempt them. We debated a bit more. I said I have a funny brain. I like to run before I can walk even if I land in a heap. He explained the drills were to remove the psychological fear that’s inherent in linking two moves. I said hmm. He said he’d look at my first move and based on whether or not it was iffy, he’d decide if he was willing to spot the second move. I showed him the round off, he said it was good. We set up sting mats on tumble run thing, we set the first move up, then I was to throw the two moves with him offering a spot for the second.
I was standing on the tumble run. He looked uncertain and mumbled uncertainty. I suddenly felt a holy terror about what I had just set up as needing to be done, was now actually going to have to be done and neither of the two of us were certain what was going to result. Then I remembered some of my fury this week and said fuck it, and launched into the damn thing, which was as it turns out damn fine! He kept his head without getting clacked, and I couldn’t believe I had landed on my feet.
He said something like ok there we’ve thrown it as in we know you can throw it. I thanked him. We moved into refining it. I was grateful to him for facilitating my arse about face approach. It was a great moment. The link had been tentatively made and will not be unmade only improved one hopes. Then we had a long philosophical discussion about absolutely nothing to do with gymnastics.
Every aspect of that sport reminds me of novel writing. Except the progress is indisputable.