The Creative Act

Here is a speech I read at the closing of my grandfather’s casket. I sat between my mother and grandmother and cried along with them as I did.

I am Christopher, Gerry’s youngest son Paul’s eldest. I would like to thank you all for being here with us today to celebrate the life of my grandfather. I spent many nights with my grandparents and I would like to share a few thoughts about him that I have had since his passing. Most of you knew him as a young man, or an active man with his whole life ahead of him but when I was born he was already 57, just five years away from retirement and Florida winters.

My relation to him was as a grandchild, which means I grew over time and came to appreciate him in new ways and for a few years he actually got younger in my eyes. For instance as a child I found it annoying that I had soo many aunts, uncles and cousins that I had a hard time remembering all their names. As an adult I see the size of the family tree and the love found within its branches as his ultimate accomplishment. During the photo shoots grandma orchestrated he seemed like a young man, the father of a gaggle of people rather than an old man. The tree recently grew as my wife and I welcomed our first child into the family. Oliver arrived just in time to meet Gerry. When we all met for a photo shoot featuring 4 generations of men. Gerry, whose time with us was clearly running out, turned to my two month old and very matter of factually said “You’ve got a lot of living to do.” This sort of hope in reaction to life is the story of my grandfather.

I can’t count how many nights I slept on his couch, or ate poached eggs or played cards at his table, or fed the ducks on the Rideau with him, but it was certainly enough times to get to know he had done a lot of living. Maybe it is because he was so much taller than me but I always looked up to him. On one of our many walks together we stumbled upon a sidewalk being built, being a child I was fascinated by the machines involved and the hole that could easily have swallowed me up. Grandpa dutifully explained everything I was seeing and explained how a sidewalk would be the result. He really knew the details and I was very impressed, even as an 8 year old I knew this was weird knowledge for an economist to have.

But Gerry was full of surprises. Imagine my level of admiration when I learned that he had built his own house in the evenings and weekends after work when I could barely construct a snow fort that wouldn’t cave in. As if I was not impressed enough I later discovered the old photo of him in a military uniform and learned that he had been in airplanes during World War Two. Airplanes! Imagine! I am sure you can see how my 8-year-old eyes would have shone with pride as he explained he could tell me where we were based on the stars while I could not read a map.

I will remember a man who danced with my grandmother every chance he got, who could swing a club as well as any grandpa I ever heard of (I’ve seen the old hole in on trophy that proves his talent), had a den, and was king of the mixed tape. He was a man who when he learned he had Alzheimer’s wrote the most beautiful letter I’ve ever heard of and never tired of the Lawrence Welk show.

I was but a small part of the living he did, but he was and remains a large part of the living I have done. He was a man with the inside scoop on how to live the good life I hope today can be a celebration of that and also a reminder that we all have a lot of living to do.

The Orange Trees of Baghdad. In Search of My Lost Family. Leilah Nadir

This is the story of a woman whose father left Iraq at the age of 16 and never managed to return because wars and Saddam Hussein made a return unsafe. Leilah always wanted to visit her homeland, and possibly move there with her family. This book is her story about the recent wars and sanctions and their effects on her family. I thought this book would be angry and galvanizing; I thought it would be a poetic memoir that was extremely critical of the American occupation or Iraq; I thought wrong.

Her impressions are more balanced than I expected. As a person that has always lived in the West (spending time in Vancouver, Montreal and the U.K.) she has a pretty clear idea of what life is like here. The upshot is that while critical of the occupation (not being sure what the purpose of it is nor what good it will lead to and angry at the waste involved in both lives and cultural works) she has never been willing to even visit Iraq let alone move there despite having many heartfelt reasons to do so.  She wants the country to go through massive changes to become livable and so it is hard for her to be completely against the war. She wants a peaceful Iraq so that she can live there but she concedes it was not peaceful prior to the occupation. She does not think war is the answer but she does not forward a better option for changing the country.

The writing in the book is only mediocre and the story is dramatic but the tragic elements are not well harnessed by Nadir. She does pick up speed and power near the end of the book. Her discussion of Farah Nosh’s photographs of injured Iraqis is powerful. It made me want to see the photos, perhaps try to get a showing of them here in Montreal. The writing is elegant when some of her women relatives from Baghdad manage to make it to London and there is a gathering in the kitchen. The women  talk about their life experiences and the Iraqis women’s impressions of the West while the recipe of what they are cooking is slowly revealed. Passages like this one make me want to read a later book by her, she seems to have learned a lot about writing over the course of this book.

This is a book worth reading if you are interested in the history of the Middle-East or the impact of modern warfare on the “little people” or “everyman/woman.” This is not a book for readers that see the world in black and white and refuse to accept the gray sides of our complicated world. If you are someone that was compelled by Sergio de Mello’s attempts at diplomacy with genocidal rulers then you will like this book. If it was about Afghanistan and the impacts of war on its people I would suggest all Canadians read it, as it stands I suspect there is a lot of crossover between the two topics.

Anne Michaels. Winter Vault.

This is the best book I have read in a long time. The author of the best-selling Fugitive Pieces took her sweet time (more than 10years) in writing her next novel. It shows. This is a polished book where every single sentence feels like it has been crafted with extreme care and patience. I ran out of ink underlining passages I wanted to remember. Michaels has the ability to put ideas so clearly and emotions so precisely that that I was engrossed into the admittedly slow moving book. This is not a narrative driven page turner but rather a book to mull in a book that you can take your time with, a reader’s book.

The Winter Vault the reader learns is where dead bodies are places during the winter, when the ground is too frozen to accept them. Elsewhere Michaels refers to the part of the skull containing the brain as a vault. A place of limbo. The ground like our experiences are impenetrable to each other, at least some of the time. Our ability to express, describe and vocalize our experiences so that they are as original to others as they are to ourselves is questioned in the book with much success. I will not tell you what Michaels believes is our potential for such transfers because you should really read the book for yourself, suffice it to say: she weaves a magnificent tale trying to understand exactly this.

The story itself is a more compelling one than it has been given credit for in other reviews. With characters falling in and out of love, children being born and elders dying, it travels from the goals of ancient Egyptians and their pyramid building to us and our cemeteries and gardens. The number of facets of western culture and history that Michaels touches upon is very impressive, more impressive is the interweaving of them. From Gilles Villeneuve to Facebook (not directly mentioned but I think alluded to) it is all there. I could have spent hours just trying to make a list of all the cultural reference points that popped up organically in the work but that would have been a waste of time, better to just sit back and enjoy.

I have been listening to a lot of Bach lately. I have been really excited by the Cello Suites and the Goldberg Variations. I am new to the world of Classical music, I spent my youth jumping up and down to everything from Nirvana, Green Day, I mother earth to Wu Tang and John Lee Hooker. Enter a new part of my life.

As a father-to-be I have spent a lot of time thinking about things that I cannot do that I wish I could. The main two that pop into my mind are 1: when looking at a painting know what I am looking at and where it fits in. 2: when hearing music being able to recognize at least who the composer is, if not the actual piece.

The painting thing I will have to deal with later when I have money and time to go and see more of the works in person. The music one feels more pressing because music is all around us all the time and for me a more fulfilling aspect of artistic life (I love to write poetry and essays with blaring classical music in the background). It seems time to learn about the music behind the writing. For that reason, and the fact that I stumbled upon the two previously mentioned pieces, I have been immersing myself into the world of Bach, the so-called father of music.

I read two books that were very very fast reads. I literally could not put them down. Evening at the Palace of Reason by Gaines and The Cello Suites by Siblin were both easy to understand books that lived up to my excitement. They are books that help you to maintain the excitement and interest that made you pick them up in the first place. They make you want to listen to the music, go to the concerts, enter the chat rooms, learn to play Cello etc. I strongly recommend both of them.

The thing about books on artistic subjects is that they almost always contain a contagious energy and regard for the subject. A book about Kerouac will be fast paced and exciting, the writing will be strong and enjoyable. The same can be said about books by music aficionados, they are passionate about their topics and their passion rubs off.

Both these books sort of reminded me of Simon Winchester’s books on the Oxford English Dictionary. History that is incredible readable and interesting. They are a great entry level read for people that want to expand their horizons. You need to know little about music or history to enjoy these, and if you are interested in either then they may fill in some gaps and be some of the better written works (from an aesthetic perspective) you delve into.

Have you read these books? Are you a Bach enthusiast? Then leave a note behind, tell me what you think.

Rebecca Solnit. A paradise Built in Hell.

This is a compelling book about the ways communities react to natural disasters. Solnit got the idea for the book while interviewing survivors of the  hurricane that hit Halifax in 2005. Many got a particular look in their eyes in discussing the events. Their was a fondness in the memories of what transpired in the wake of the disaster. Solnit decided to study this fondness, because she herself had experienced the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake and her memories were similar.

Personally I remember the Ice Storm of 98, and the blackout of 2003. I look back on them as having been exciting times, and good ones as well (bbqs, cards with grandparents, quie and stillness) . This book compares the accounts of people in such situations with media reports and finds the media to be serving us very poorly. It also studies the effects of government on the situations and tends to find them negative. This is a book that reminds us of the power of spirit and community, even if it lays dormant most of the time. (An ad-hoc soup kitchen in in the wake of the 1904 S.F. Quake had a sign proclaiming “Eat, Drink, And be Merry because tomorrow they might make us move to Oakland,” and with that we know the meaning of perseverance.

While the argument may at times become a little too straight forward and simple, a little too anti-government for my tastes, it is compelling in its admiration of the human soul. It counters tales of mass raping and pilaging with stories of people giving away food, shelter and services, like the plumbers of San Fran that offered their service free around the clock for two weeks trying to fix the city’s broken piping system. It leaves you wondering how generous you would be in such a moment, and knowing how good you would like to be.

This book would make an excellent christmas gift for many readers, especially because you can read it before wrapping.

Adalbert Stifter. Rock Crystal. NYRB

This is a 76 page book that reflects upon events familiar to just about everyone. Two children set out on Christmas eve from their grandparents to their home. The path is over a small mountain, one they have traversed many times. The boy is young, the girl younger (perhaps 4 or 5).

A very short while after they leave it starts to snow.

Local communities form several valleys set up search parties when they realize what has happened. The children hideout in a cave for the night and see something akin to the northern lights, which they associate with the Christ child they had expected to arrive that night in their village. This is a tear jerking story for those who have been lost or lost someone.  It is about a community coming together, being defined by a moment that will go down in their village history an change the way they see the mountains around them.

I highly suggest you read this book, assuming you have encountered either, estrangement from a community or loss in your life. You want regret it.

J.M. Coetzee. The Master of Petersburg.

J. M. Coetzee has won all the prizes and, in a style Thomas Bernhard would approve of, rarely bothers to pick them up himself. The man is known to never smile, to attend parties without uttering a word all night. Despite this seemingly cliché persona, he writes damn good books. He is one of the few living authors in my personal library, I now have four of his books, placing him in an even smaller category.

The Master of Petersburg was recently brought to my attention by a customer at the store. We were discussing Dostoevsky because he was buying a Coetzee book and I told him I find the Coetzee feels a lot like Old Dusty and Kafka. The customer, knowing more than I, laughed because those two are well-known as his influences. More to the point, Coetzee had written a book featuring Dostoevsky as the main character.

The book takes place in the late 1860s, fame but not fortune have already come to the protagonist. His stepson has died mysteriously and so Dusty has to go get his papers and see to the final details of his son’s life. The narrative itself is quite interesting, involving Nacheav a young revolutionary out to use Dostoevsky, an old one. There is love, hate and plenty of inside jokes for Dostoevsky lovers.

The book is really about the cost of writing. The torture a “real” writer must go through in order to put his/her soul on the page. The fact that they must use their every action and those of their family and friends in order to have a product. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky sees himself as selling his soul to pay his gambling debts. Importantly it is not just his soul but also the dead boy’s soul, and the poor people he encounters and everyone else’s souls that are to be sold. I suspect Dostoevsky thought along these lines more then once as he returned home from some event or other and tried to figure out how to make it into a novel or how to use so-and-so’s character in a book. This would feel dirty. I have felt this in my attempts to write poetry, inevitably other people’s stories are told, against their will. The personal internal conflict caused by this would grow with fame and fortune, at least I suspect that to be true.

I wonder if Coetzee feels this way too. Is the book really about a man living in South Africa? Is it really an explanation for his refusal to pick up those awards or to even smile? This book is a lot of fun, moves well and is a great read for those unfamiliar with Coetzee. For those familiar with both authos, mthis is a masterpiece not to be missed.

Raymond Carver. What we talk about when we talk about love.

Raymond Carver is an author I have long heard about an never read. He comes up in discussions and in book reviews regularly but never in a way that made me rush out to read him. Then I read a review of the Library Of America volume of his work and became interested enough to finally pick up a book by him. I choose his shortest book because somehow I was skeptical of him and very uncertain I would enjoy his work.

This little book of short stories takes less then a day to finish but at least a week to sink in. These are hard-nosed stories about a twisted kind of love. Some people are inclined to read very deeply into these stories and offer hopeful readings of them, “he is showing us what he doesn’t have, what he is missing by not writing about it”,  ”reading between the lines we can understand that he knows what he is missing” etc. No matter how compelling such essays may be they fall flat in the face of the work itself, like when the loved ones of a person on life support are told the person is but to the loved ones in the room it is clear that life is still present.

Carver is man that may never have really been in a healthy loving relationship in his life. These stories suggest that his father, mother, uncles, aunts, girlfriends etc. had poor relationships with Carver. The variegated types of relationships that we expect to find love within are all explored and the result is a vision of love that focuses on all the wrong aspects of love. Carver sees jealousy, possession, humiliation and pain in all these relationships.

There are beautiful moments in the stories, like the young couple dancing in a driveway during a garage sale, but they are ruined, always ruined. Like the one with he dancing, where drunkenness rears it head leaving a feeling of discomfort and uncertainty. We keep reading though because the writing is very sound, it affects the reader and holds a mood throughout, but not the mood you might expect from a book about love.

While I understand that some people view love as hooky, as impossible and if happy then not a topic worthy of serious authors, but I am convinced that this work should be called something else. Not “hate” because that is not Carvers point, but rather; “the ways love can fail” or “the twists love can take” or “in relationships humans require love and these  examples  demonstrate that necessity” or ”only those oblivious about love dare to talk about it and they don’t know anything.” Or some such title. I was not looking for a sappy romance when I picked the book up, but I at least expected to read about a type of love I could call familiar, or at least love. But this work is nothing like that.

It may be a book that offers a lot of insight for those who have read some of Carver’s other works, but as an introduction to him, I suspect it is all wrong. This book does not make me want to read more by him because I see him as failing to understand true love. If he at least had a single story in here that suggested he knew how tortured and tormented the forms of love in the other stories were (though of course he knows this or wouldn’t have written them with such a tone) that would help. But to have the negative without an example of the positive is to have the ying but not yang; and that is a serious failure.

I am not sure which type of reader I would recommend this book to other then someone that loves his other work. I am sure there is a type, he is popular after many years and sells, but I am curious to see who I find myself handing this book over to despite the masterly writing.

Next Up: J.M. Coetzee. The Master of Petersburg.

Alberto Moravia. Boredom. NYRB.

Alberto Moravia’s book first came out with the english title “The Empty Canvas.” The story follows a painter that is no longer interested in art nor able to paint. His big problem is that he is rich and bored (read whiny). By boredom he means that he is unable to attach anything outside of him to himself therefore he is bored as nothing has a meaning. He feels disconnected from the artifacts of the material world and so stays in his mind at all times, which is the vantage point from which the reader watches the tale unfold.

Enter Cecelia, the would-be model come sex toy. Dino (the painter) essentially inherits this young fox from a sly old painter whose studio was in the same building. Dino comes to think that in her he has something he can connect with and possess. His attempts to accomplish this are failures as the girl proves to be an especially difficult nut to crack, uninterested in money and life to such a complete extent it becomes obvious to the reader that it is she, and not Dino, that is truly bored and detached from the world.

For the first 80 pages I could not help but think this must be a poor translation and I pondered putting the book down. The only reason I held on was that the New York Review of Books has never let me down with one of their printings. Suddenly on page 189 (a little more than halfway) a chapter ends “I was still at the stage of jealousy when a surviving sense of dignity prevents one from spying upon the person one is jealous of. Nevertheless, as I went away I knew I had merely postponed the moment when I would start watching her. Next time, I thought, I should no longer be able to stand firm against circumstances which encouraged me, which indeed almost obliged me, to spy upon her.” And suddenly the novel takes off at a terrific speed until, dazzled and surprised you put the book down and think, Huh?

I will not attempt to explain the metaphysical character of this book because an awful lot is going here besides the narrative and I fear that doing so would give far too much away. The pleasure of this read for me is in the pondering of its metaphysical aspects.  This is a book you’ll have to read twice and think a lot about, perhaps you could read some Nietzsche on boredom in order to truly grasp it. If that is too much work, then I suggest reading the final 200 pages because as a thrilling tale of obsession wherein you hate both the spy and his “victim” this book is pure gold.

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451.

Some people were recently surprised to learn that Ray Bradbury is not only still alive in 2009 but was furious when Michael Moore entitled on of his “documentaries” Fahrenheit 9/11. The issue, of course was the title which directly linked the two men without Bradbury’s consent. Anyone familiar with Bradbury’s life work knows he had good reason to be upset. One has only to read 451 (1953) to recognize that Moore is playing a role that Bradbury has long worried will lead to the end of reading. Let me explain.

Based on trends he thought he saw developing at the time, 451 offered some stark predictions about the future. One such prediction was the easiest way to appease the masses. “If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him, give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is even such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top heavy, and tax-mad better it be all those than people worry about it.(p.61)” an Orwellian concept (or just skeptical middle-of-the-century-English obsession?). The only question for leaders would be how to make this happen. One way, according to Bradbury, is to get rid of books.

His 451 prediction regarding the fate of books is interesting because he did not think sinister leaders would have to mandate their demise. He seems to have agreed with Hitler’s famous claim, “What luck for rulers that men don’t think.” In fact, in the book there is a gradual dismissal of reading. The books became of worse and worse quality, they had more and more pictures, lost meaning and became disposal items like consumables, not to be remembered better than a television show (which is to say not memorable at all), classics were boiled down and down until only a paragraph or sentence long synopsis remained whose goal was not pleasure but the ability to say “yeah I know that one.” (think of cliff notes on steroids or the new series “So-And-So in half the time” and you’ll see this prediction coming true). No the government did not have to ban books, people would cease to want books because they’d become unreadable and effectively ban themselves.

He predicted  change in the way we would receive news, “I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. (p.89)”  and saw trouble in this. The effects of all this are seen in his characters  who remember nothing and are completely disconnected from each other.  The beautiful Clarrisse tells Montag (the “fireman”) that her house is full of lights because people are sitting and talking together. “But what do you talk about?” Clarrisse laughs in reply. Society has become so degraded that conversation between the members of a house is a rarity and Clarrisse and her family are rare. This didactic passage, the house is lit-up and the others are dark, where there are books there is light, begins to show us that reading offers more then reading, that conversation and society happen through it. The written word if, of course, the hallmark of civilization and without such communication, according to Bradbury, things fall apart.

So people no longer have anything to read and they deem reading useless and choose to watch and become involved in television. Here we have another cute prediction, that television would become more interactive, that there would be boxes that would respond to you, so that a person on the screen would say your name and their lips would make this look true, but really it said no-ones name, just made you feel involved, like your one of the actors (rock band or guitar hero anyone?). These fancy boxes would trick people into spending yet more time watching television and they would become less and less critical (people love themselves enough to maintain blogs like this one), remember less and less and wind up completely disconnected even from those they live with. As guitar-hero is a lazy substitute for playing guitar and unlikely to lead to the emergence of good guitar players, these sorts of television tricks were unlikely to create savvy and aware citizens, they were too-plugged in, too distracted.

If you know about Michael Moore then it should be clear why Bradbury was mad with him. Moore makes entertaining “movie news” wherein he toes the line between fact and fiction. His books are simply-constructed and time-sensitive (in that they deal with issues of the moment and after the moment may as well be thrown out by everyone but the libraries that one day have researchers looking into this. Thrown out because they are not to be read again and are simple consumer items). Moore is exactly what Bradbury was worried about, a ‘newsman’ or ‘media player’ who would dumb everything down to entertainment until people saw no point in reading or learning (and perhaps even find readers and writers antagonistic and annoying).

In the book people become angry at those who still read. They feel such people are snobby elitists out to make everyone else unhappy, or at least feel stupid for watching television. James Howard Kunstler has spoken to this. When asked if he was an elitists (an insult in America) Kunstler claimed he was. He is an elitist in the sense that he does not think everything is equal, that some books are better than others, not all poetry is equal, certainly not all music is as good to listen to (if you do not agree and are a hardcore egalitarian I suggest you line up a 3$ shot of whiskey and compare it to a 10$ one and see if you cannot blindly guess which costs more). Kunstler worries that the equality thing is going too far and that a failure to understand the good from the bad is becoming a greater and greater issue. I have the impression Bradbury would agree. The failure to realize this is that the people choose to have books banned since all are only as good as the worst ones people read. Fire departments are changed into a service of book burners and they go out and burn books, at first for everyone since they all wanted their books roasted and later they would burn down entire houses of anyone who was still holding onto books.

People had willingly given up books because they had been so degraded. This prediction is a stark one and to anyone paying attention to the book industry knows, is coming true. I have hope that enough people will continue reading and appreciating doing so because I cannot fathom a world in which we reject books outright. At Argo we see everyday students that hate books and laugh spitefully if we say “enjoy your book,” because they know they will not and by not being open to the possibility are likely right. We also sell more Dostoevsky and Stefan Zweig than any other authors so hope we maintain hope.

I will not tell you how the book ends (and where the hope is to be found). It has a strong narrative that keeps you turning pages and deserves to be read. If you read the book a long time ago i urge you to read it again and be surprised by how accurate his predictions were and how current it still is after all these years.

Next up Alberto Moravia’s Boredom.