I fell asleep reading DQ last night

It would be nice if this were a prelude to dreaming. I often dream travel dreams – both good and bad, both outdoors and indoors, both gothic horror and trampoline dreams…and more. DQ is kind of dreamy right now. DQ and Sancho are in two different places and Cervantes moves us back and forth between the two of them. As we leave one or another of them, we are always told that there is someone there, a steward, writing…so that when we drift away from Sancho and back to DQ, we will not have missed anything. And time shifts too. It’s two steps forward and two steps back (hopefully with some hip lifts, shimmies and turns thrown in). Is this how memory works? Or psychiatry? Who is my scribe? Who is writing when I’m away so that I know what happened to me when I come back?


Because I’ve been so much with death recently (I was at a wake this past Saturday night too), I can only think of myself as swirling, a little dizzy, turned around. I swear that sometimes I can feel the world turning in my body. None of the people I know who have died in the past year knew each other. But I feel forced to connect them, squeeze them together, just as a way of coping or as a way of creating a pattern that has the potential for disturbance. Maybe I shouldn’t try to do this…


Perhaps we should never have eaten the parabola cookie. It’s a shape and a line and an explanation.

Reading the 'To Do' List

I have been driven by the ‘To Do’ list lately. It’s unusual for me to even write these kinds of things down. Others tell me that they feel satisfied when they cross things off their list, that the list brings them pleasure – I feel pressure. Sometimes it’s clearer to me when I see things written down, when I see the list lying on the table before me…but what about the things that you don’t write down on the ‘To Do’ list but that you really need to do more than any of the things on the ‘To Do’ list.

Smell
Walk
Touch
Smile
Read
Ride

And when do you know if it’s enough, if it’s time to cross it off the list? The ‘To Do’ list is so purposeful and quantifiable. Is it at all in keeping with my wandering?

The verbs on my current ‘To Do’ list are:

Redo
Report
Reassess
Mark
Revise
Reassess
Write
Give Feedback x 7
Pay
Write
Call
Write
Call
Submit
Edit
Call
Copy edit

Don Quixote is under siege by the Duke and Duchess…
He’s been accosted and pinched by mysterious intruders.
He’s been worried about his chastity and he’s tested.
Sancho is the victim of an elaborate ruse which is now extended to include his wife and daughter who is cooking eggs and rashers of bacon for a ‘hot’ page.
Theresa Panza is preparing a package of fat acorns for the Duchess.
I feel a sense of injustice. I find it hard to laugh at DQ and Sancho. They fill me with too much wonder. And with them I wander and we fail to focus on the 'To Do' list.

Reading a Corner (Walking); Or, Reading the Signs (redux)

I love to walk and watch and read. It's not a new phenomenon. Lots of people learn to read this way. Tombstones and advertisements.


















I can provide one example -- of the 18th century British labouring class poet, novelist, playwright, Ann Cromartie Yearsley.

As [Hannah] More claims, other than a translation of Virgil's Georgics, Yearsley had no substantial exposure to classical writing but what she "had taken from little ordinary prints which hung in a shop window" (Yearsley 1787, xii).

This could be a false claim. Labouring-class writers were often promoted as 'natural geniuses', their histories rewritten by patrons who preferred the notion that genius sprung out of the natural world and that if cultivated by the proper patron/gardener, it might bear fruit. I'm not sure where Yearsley was supposed to have picked up Virgil's Georgics though...

Disclaimer

"It is stated, they say, in the true original of this history, that when Cide Hamete came to write this chapter, his interpreter did not translate it as he wrote it—that is, as a kind of complaint the Moor made against himself for having taken in hand a story so dry and of so little variety as this of Don Quixote, for he found himself forced to speak perpetually of him and Sancho, without venturing to indulge in digressions and episodes more serious and more interesting. He said, too, that to go on, mind, hand, pen always restricted to writing upon one single subject, and speaking through the mouths of a few characters, was intolerable drudgery, the result of which was never equal to the author's labour, and that to avoid this he had in the First Part availed himself of the device of novels, like "The Ill-advised Curiosity," and "The Captive Captain," which stand, as it were, apart from the story; the others are given there being incidents which occurred to Don Quixote himself and could not be omitted. He also thought, he says, that many, engrossed by the interest attaching to the exploits of Don Quixote, would take none in the novels, and pass them over hastily or impatiently without noticing the elegance and art of their composition, which would be very manifest were they published by themselves and not as mere adjuncts to the crazes of Don Quixote or the simplicities of Sancho. Therefore in this Second Part he thought it best not to insert novels, either separate or interwoven, but only episodes, something like them, arising out of the circumstances the facts present; and even these sparingly, and with no more words than suffice to make them plain; and as he confines and restricts himself to the narrow limits of the narrative, though he has ability; capacity, and brains enough to deal with the whole universe, he requests that his labours may not be despised, and that credit be given him, not alone for what he writes, but for what he has refrained from writing".

From CHAPTER XLIV:
"HOW SANCHO PANZA WAS CONDUCTED TO HIS GOVERNMENT, AND OF THE STRANGE ADVENTURE THAT BEFELL DON QUIXOTE IN THE CASTLE"

Eating the Parabola Cookie

The parabola (from the Greek: παραβολή) is a conic section generated by the intersection of a right circular conical surface and a plane parallel to a generating straight line of that surface.

A parabola can also be defined as a locus of points which are equidistant from a given point (the focus) and a given line (the directrix).

A particular case arises when the plane is tangent to the conical surface. In that case the intersection is a degenerate parabola consisting of a straight line.

ORIGIN Latin, from Greek parabole ‘placing side by side’.

Sources: OED & Wikipedia. Photo and emphasis are mine (things I'm thinking about...potential roles/shapes to try-on, routes to take, directions to follow/avoid). One of my students made the cookie.

another piece of the puzzle

Cleaning my basement (see Tuesday February 28, 2005, “Dust”) means fundamentally that I'm reading my basement as most of the pack-ratting I do involves papers, writing, books, files, postcards and weird little scraps of paper often with the name of a book-never-read written on them. One thing I found the other night was a “diary” I kept of sunrises. These were recorded during the same period of time I discussed yesterday – sometime during the seven years that I commuted between Hamilton and Toronto. The entries are dated but there’s no day-of-the-week or year so I can’t say exactly when they were written. The sunrises were recorded on the GO bus. While I drove the evening shift, I took the bus when I was on day shift. I’d get the 5:20 am bus. I had a portable cassette player/AM-FM radio and I listened to music and watched the beginning of the day. (I remember I became strangely attached to some morning show on a rock station. I forget who the celebrity hosts were but they revelled in bathroom humour and, for some reason, I enjoyed it or maybe it was the music they played…) I never slept on the bus in the morning but I almost always slept on the way back – waking just at the curve in the road around Cootes Paradise.

Here are some excerpts of what I saw:

Nov 7
Red & navy clouds
Navy clouds rise up into the blue
Red spreads into peach

Nov 13
Best seat in the house!
This Mortal Coil
Mild sunrise pale pink
Lighter shade of navy
All with a wash of grey

Nov 19
I saw both sunrise & set today
The back wheel of a quickly peddled bicycle silhouetted against the orange setting sun
Soles occidere
Sunrise singles bar

Nov 22
“all my senses rebel”
a hole in the sky with the sun leaking through

Nov 27
Yesterday the driver let us off at Adelaide and University rather than at King and University. Everyone was really confused by this.

Nov 28
Spectacular sunup – Flamboyant.

Nov 30
Muted purples, oranges, greys. Dull spectacle. The days are getting so much shorter right now that I’m arriving too early to even see the sunrise!

Dec 7
Mauve (clouds) and peach (sky). Nearly translucent.

I want the sunrises to return.

Reading without a Map

I could say that I’m travelling without a map but that would be a cliché…except it’s true on my new Saturday morning drives to Waterloo. And I am actively resisting reading a map.

What does familiarity with a particular route bring to the traveller?

Efficiency:

I remember driving to Hamilton from evening shifts in midtown Toronto. It was always around 1:30 am. Route One was the Southern Route. I’d drop my co-worker at King & Jameson and then land on the Gardiner. (We usually worked 8 consecutive evenings and this took some stamina). Route Two was the Northern Route – up to the 401 West, to the 403 and then south to meet the QE in Oakville.

The routes offered variety. If I was working with the King & Jameson co-worker, the southern route was inevitable.

The route to work was fixed. I don’t know why. There was never any northern route to work. It was always QE, Gardiner, Jarvis, Mt. Pleasant, Eglinton. I remember my little Honda Civic labouring at the corner of Front and Jarvis, catching its breath before we got into the city driving.

I’m trying to remember more of what I experienced in the driving then. I always turned the music up loud. What did I listen to? I knew the road well enough that I knew exactly where and when to change lanes on the QE. I often drove at the speed limit and kept to the right. I was coming home from work but there were a lot of people driving drunk and driving out of some just-prior exuberance. There were angry drivers too and I tried to lie low, stay under their radar.

Is this too much preamble? I haven’t got to the place where I wanted to start writing. I am wandering again. There’s been another death and lots to think about…

What else does familiarity with a particular route bring to the traveller?

Haecceity:

I used to drive to Guelph every Sunday. I had developed my route without a map. It came out of my childhood and out of knowing people along the route – in Morriston and Carlisle and Flamborough. I’d change sometimes out of whim, necessity, weather. I’d range like a dog and sniff out a new section of the place that was me and the route moving together. In the last days of my driving to Guelph, I was the route.

I’m lost now. I drive to North Waterloo without a map. I know how to get there efficiently but I don’t want to take that route. I’m ranging now trying to find my place in this route. I’ve found some bridges (one one-laner!), a butterfly conservatory and an airport. I’ve figured out some of it but every once in a while, I hit a T-junction or a one-way system and I’m lost. And I range and weave and turn the music up loud (mostly jazz radio or Handel or Bach) and follow the river. I always hope that I don’t end up in a subdivision too soon though this is inevitable as I get closer to North Waterloo…it’s just the nature of the place.

Saturday Reading revived (and revised)

I forgot to mention that I got back to Saturday reading again last Saturday. I snuck out for about half an hour and went for a coffee on my way to Waterloo. I was reading my own work. The reading was really editing. I'm reading my own writing and finding (at this point in the process) little errors, the ones that you say you don't really care about but that really bug you if they get into print. I don't like this kind of reading and rereading.

I also, earlier in the week -- I think it was on a Thursday night, got back into reading D&G. Otto has been really inspiring in this respect. I had fun with D&G when I first started reading them but then started not having so much fun. Reading them on Thursday was fun again. It was nice to be back in their universe and do some mental stretches with them. And draw some more cartoons...(see Monday February 6, 2006, "Two Cartoons;Or, reading D&G just before Xmas with the Carpenters running interference").

I'm finished with my editing (for the moment-until the next reader finds more mistakes ) so maybe I'll bring D&G with me this Saturday. One thing I did do that last time I read them was look to see how much I've read in the chapter I'm on. I've read about 30 pages of it but it's a long chapter...Another book that's going take me a long time to read...I also thought the post-its I've stuck in the book and the other notes I've made in the book are very graphically appealing. Writing on and in books I'm reading is pleasurable and not always a curse as I might have suggested in an earlier comment.

Turned-down corners

Sometimes when I’m reading DQ, I don’t want to stop. I want to keep moving through the story but there’s a passage that warrants rereading. I don’t like to mark-up pleasure-books. I’m not studying DQ, I’m just reading it. I don’t want to read it with a pen-in-hand. So I turn down the corners of pages that I want to return to. The corners are like memories – they’re there but I don’t have to retreive them...Or maybe I do...

Sometimes I do go back to them and sometimes I have to search the page and really wonder why the corner is turned down – did I do it in the wrong direction and really want the next page, did the book fairies coyly, or with more malicious intent, change the configuration of the turned-down corners in my book or is there something really significant that I'm forgetting or something in the moment of reading that can't be retreived?

Reading a Poetry Reading and reading a review

I went to a poetry reading at the library the other night. It was kind of serendipitous. I felt like going and I didn’t have to sell the idea to anyone else. There wasn’t anyone else. The headliner poet was Patrick Lane. He’s a famous Canadian poet. I haven’t read any of his poems. His celebrity has percolated into my consciousness enough that I know the name of his wife (another famous Canadian poet whose poems I’ve never read) and I know that he is a recovering alcoholic (don’t ask me why I know this – he did mention a friendship with Al Purdy whose work I have read & loved, so that may be why I know this fact about PL or maybe it was on the poetry news or something…).

I liked the poetry reading and I liked the poems that PL read. They were very narrative and prosy so they were easy on the ear, easy to follow. He even generated quite a bit of suspense when he read the one (it may not have actually been a poem) about his dad getting killed at work by a disgruntled former employee.

The poem I liked the best was the first one he read, “The War”. It was partly about the Holocaust but also about the irony of murder – how it’s bad when we’re the victim but somehow justified when we’re the perpetrator or at least that’s how I read it. It was the image of fly-catching that really nailed the poem for me. I liked the way PL read this part, how he made it complicated just like the way a fly flies, how he moved his hand when he read it. I liked the rhythm of his reading – he paced the language, phrased it so that the word “click” clicked just at the right moment.

Of course, I would (with my fascination with all things animal) zero-in on the fly wondering as I always do, if the fly would speak and, if so, if it would speak out of its own subjectivity or if it would speak with some kind of anthropomorphized voice – cartoonish or simulated real… PL, I think, let us hear the fly speak for itself. We heard its last “word,” its sound as the speaker’s friend taught the speaker how to catch the fly in mid flight and dash it to the ground and kill it. Before he killed it, he held his hand up to the speaker’s ear to let him hear the caught-alive fly speak. The episode was repeated twice in the poem. It had to matter.

The day after the poetry reading, I went on the internet to see if the text of the poem was printed anywhere. I wanted to read it. There were other things in the poem that interested me. PL’s sense of place was very powerful and he listed a lot of endangered species and, of course, being a war story, there was a lot of allusion to memory, re-membering and nostalgia (stuff I’m preoccupied with right now). I wondered too if he could be called a nature poet and thought, vaguely, that I might try to find out.

I didn’t find the poem but I found a review of the book (Go Leaving Strange) in which the poem appears and a reference to the poem with a quotation from the very section I was interested in.

The heat/ and a single fly he caught in the middle of the telling, his one hand/ holding what was left of the bread and his other, the left one, coming/ behind the fly and then sweeping slowly, catching the fly as it rose/ backwards as flies do when they first lift from what they rest on, bread/ the crumbs fallen on the slick surface of the table, a lick of wet butter./ He held his fist to my ear so I could hear the buzzing/ then flung the fly to the floor, the single sharp click of its body/ breaking there. And the story going on, the fly an interruption…

But the reviewer,(for The Danforth Review) Shane Neilson, read this poem completely differently than I did! He described the “fly episode” as a “paragraph of digression”, a “monster-size digression” and “irredeemably prosy”. I saw it as central to the poem (really nailing the message that we really don’t learn from our pasts despite the stories we tell, that, in fact, our pasts interrupt the ongoing story, the one we want to, ironically, get on with). Neilson saw the fly episode as something that should be edited out of the poem along with a lot of other stuff (which is funny as PL said at the poetry reading that he doesn’t edit his work, that most of it is published in first draft because he types slowly and figures he edits in his head). Maybe Neilson needs to see PL and hear him read it - the way he moved his hand, paced the language, phrased it so that the word “click” clicked just at the right moment.

I learned other stuff from reading the review of Lane’s book – that Lane is thought of as a superb poet who hasn’t changed much over the years and that Neilson sees this as a major failing. He champions the poet who “upon acquiring a style, first exhaust[s] and then relinquish[es] it in favour of seeking out another”. This assumes that we read the complete works of a poet and follow them along their poetic path rather than just read selected greatest hits etc. I read a lot of some poets but for the most part tend to flit through anthologies dipping deeper into the work of poets who tantalize me with a work I like. And I liked “The War” so I’ll dig deeper…and keep digging at the questions of DQ's ongoing and unfolding story and our own reasons for moving.

Veil (Resized)

Otto's comment (placed here because we can't figure out how to get photos into the comment box):




the veil (curtain on the clothesline) image reminded me formally of this blank screen. the presence of the objects surrounding the blank rectangles in the
centre of the picture is heightened; the curtain is meant to let light through, and the screen is meant is to reflect light. but both speak of framing
the natural world.

Quixotic?

I met a group of really nice young women yesterday at the local Jane Austen Fellowship. I decided in the end to talk about quixotism and I asked them a lot of questions (see below). They felt, frankly, that they were to some degree, quixotic. They asserted that they were balanced and not mad in their quixotism. They also talked compellingly about the comfort and sense of escape that reading brings them.

How well do we read romance/reality?

I asked them to quickly and parodically create the elements of a romantic comedy. And then I asked them some more questions:

Was it easy to do this?
Is it a form of self-mockery?
Do any of us “go too far” with our attraction to this sub-genre?
Do any of us live life as if it were a romantic comedy?
Are we Quixotic?

Do we know how JA felt about romance?
Do we know how the reader feels about romance?

Is there a connection?
Sense of identification?
Are we partly engaged, partly “above it all”?
Do the foibles of Austen’s characters allow us to indulge in fantasies we know are not true but are comforting in some way?
Have you ever been attacked for what you read/view because others view you as too quixotic?

Can how we relate to /identify with romance effect our own reading?

Why did Austen need to defend the novel (her famous defense in Ch. V of Northanger Abbey)?
Would Austen concur with our definitions of Romantic Comedy?
What would she do with these definitions?
What did she do with them?

Is Austen a snob when she privileges characters according to their ability to read perceptively?
Or is it an accurate way to judge character?
Do we do this?

How well do Northanger Abbey characters read?
What about Persuasion?

What about us?
How well do we read romance?

How do we balance the tension between fictional romance and real romance?
How do we live within our real romances if we privilege fictional romances?
Do we need a little fiction in our real romances?
Or, is this a recipe for disappointment?
Does Austen offer any practical tips?

(They felt that Austen was very helpful, that she creates intelligent heroines who model intelligent attitudes about romance. Most of them felt that they wanted to be like Elizabeth Bennet. Others preferred to model themselves after Elinor Dashwood, Anne Elliot and Fanny Price. They valued patience in romance - something Don Quixote could relate to, I think!).