Travelling and working in Arlington, Texas this week. Here are a few things that caught my eye.
On reading at random:, Elspeth Wilson notes:
Just before Christmas 2019, a friend told me that the less they know about a film, the better. If they see a trailer or read too much about it, it makes them less likely to want to watch the film. They explained that there’s something about encountering a piece of art with as few preconceptions as possible that makes you meet it where it’s at, on its own merits. This also basically made them uninfluenceable, I realized. Why not try it with books?
I started off by picking up books from the library in the tube station near my house, swapping ones I’d read for whatever caught my eye. I might glance at the blurb but considering I was choosing from a limited selection, I usually had no choice but to pick something I wouldn’t normally gravitate towards. I asked family members—often older with different interests—if they’d got any books they were looking to pass on. I joined a book club with people with different taste from me and made myself read the books, even the ones I didn’t like the sound of.
My reading has certainly got less aesthetic as I have read more randomly. My shelves don’t always look beautiful but they are a lot more varied than they were before.
A bunch of my reads from last year came from little free libraries scattered around neighbourhoods, or as is the case on Bowen Island, the waiting shelter at the ferry dock. The book I’m reading now is from my local library’s “give away” shelf.
Patti Digh reflects on a trip she took to East Germany as a student and an uncomfortable stop by the East German police.
I did not yet know what a wall could hold in place. Only that the air felt heavier on that side of the border, as if weather itself were governed. Rules applied not only to movement but to posture, to appearance, to how long one could be looked at without flinching. At twenty, I mistook compliance for safety. I believed that if I followed instructions closely enough—kept my hair where it belonged, my hands visible, my answers brief—I would pass through unchanged.
The post is called “Close enough to share weather” and it’s a pretty powerful story.
Patti is always good for some insight a couple of times a week! Here she is talking about imperfectly tending a garden – which I can relate to – and drawing it into a reflection on the stewardship of we can do:
Tending the garden you can touch does not require mastery. It requires that we return to it. It asks only that we keep coming back to what is in front of us, willing to notice what failed, what survived anyway, and what might still grow with a little more care.
One of the profs I met this week at University of Texas Arlington is Desiree Henderson. She’s teaching a course called Literature and The Good Life. It’s designed to cultivate a love of reading in students. The featured novel is my favourite book of last year, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, but it also features which features works by George Saunders. I don’t know Saunders’ work but Open Culture has me covered with links to ten of his short stories available online.
Another professor I met is Tim Richardson who teaches English and dives into his passions around ambient sound and music. We had a great conversation about radio, the artist Chainsaw and our various artistic endeavours over the years using sound and music in multimedia performance contexts. Our conversation reminded my that somewhere I may still have a recording I made of a flute and guitar improvisation recorded in a squash court at Peter Robinson College at Trent University. I made it with Todd Hildebrandt, one of the original members of the Born Again Pagans.
We met these folks through participatory leadership training we have been doing at the university. This is our fourth cohort of senior leaders from UTA and one can imagine all kinds of conversations that we are having these days. Over lunch today a group of us were discussing assessment, compliance and the bigger purpose of higher education. This afternoon I came across this interview with Jennifer Frey from the University of Tulsa. Worth a read and a think. We need an active conversation about this stuff outside of the academy.
Final boarding. I’m travelling back on American Airlines. When you check in the ask if you’d like to check a bag which we needed to do for one of our small otherwise-carry-ons. The charge is $25. You pay it and the next screen says “would you like to check your carry on bags for free?” That represents the shittiest behaviour of customer facing businesses who see their customers as eternal ATMs. So word to the wise. Try checking in first WITHOUT paying for a small checked bag on American and see if you get the free screen.
Some very cool places I’ve only just visited for the first time at YVR. #FirstNations #Musqueam #Autusm #Neurodiversity #YVR
I’m returning to Bowen Island after a week in Ottawa working and visiting friends and the old haunts we occupied back in 91-94 when we lived there. Some things are the same, like The Manx pub which opened the same week we arrived right at the end of our block. Or good old Octopus Books, now in the Glebe where I bought Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s latest book The Theory of Water. Of course much in Ottawa has changed since the early 90s, and it is fun to find new places like The Rowan where, among other things, we ate a plate of salt-roasted carrots that had been grilled. It was one of the finest things I have ever tasted.
Being back in Ottawa also brought me to a state of mind that was a little bit slower. We lived there long before smart phones and social media had been invented. I spent many days in Ottawa writing poems, reading journals and lingering over words. I served a short stint as an associate editor of ARC magazine, so I always associate Ottawa with its literary scene.
During this trip, I travelled with the latest issue of Poetry and a couple of poems stand out.
Try. Elegy at Middle River by Courtney Kampa which threw me to the ground.
Or how about this one from Rigoberto Gonzales called The Luna Moth Has No Mouth which is both astonishing and true.
Gonzales, by the way, won the Ruth Lilly Poetry prize and in his reflections on his craft published in the October edition of Poetry, he remembers a line he wrote years ago which someone quoted on Twitter: “what is a kiss? The sound loneliness makes when it dies.” That is some lovely.
Christina Baldwin, in a lovely post remembering her father’s death:
We often pray to our ancestors and call upon the angelic/invisible realms for help. We attune ourselves, like this favorite quote from Willa Cather (in Death Comes for the Archbishop): “Miracles seem to rest not so much upon healing power coming near us from afar, but on our perceptions being made finer so that our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there around us always.” We look for signals, for morphed presence. A bee that hovers, a raven that follows us, a light but discernible hand on the shoulder, a voice that calls out warning or blessing.
Thirty years ago tomorrow, Back in 1995, Quebecers nearly voted to leave Canada. Paul Wells was at the Montreal Gazette during those days and wrote a great piece for The Walrus about his experience covering the campaign.
This week I’m in Calgary where Albertans are facing two Constitutional issues. Yesterday the provincial government used the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Constitution to end a legal teacher’s strike and unilaterally impose a contract settlement on teachers in the Province. This clause, which is a weird piece of Canadian law, allows governments to temporarily suspend some Constitutionally protected Charter rights for a fixed period of time. It has been used recently for populist causes, to suspend the rights of children in Saskatchewan, to order education support workers off the picket lines in Ontario, to ban the wearing of religious symbols in public by Quebec public servants and, yesterday, to end a teacher’s strike in Alberta teachers. Ironically, it is often the supporters of these governments that advocate for the sanctity of the Charter of Rights.
The other Constitutional issue Alberta is facing is a problem of the Premier, Danielle Smiths’s own making. Populists are fond of courting outrage and a nascent spark of a separatist movement has been fanned into a smouldering pile of angry incoherence by the Premier and her government as she tries to hold on to folks at the far right of her base. In a very clever effort to upend this movement, Thomas Lukaszuk, tabled a petition request to create a “Forever Canada” referendum and he secured hundreds of thousands more signatures than the referendum law required. By law, that referendum would have to be held first, before any separatist referendum takes place. Strange things happen in Alberta above the waterline, but deep down folks are both focused on making their communities and province better and also a lot more thoughtful about how to do so. The outrageous soundbites we hear from political leaders are just not what everyone is always talking about. Those signals are important to heed.
I’m on my way to Ontario for ten days or so. Jumping on a redeye, because I had a job to do today. Tomorrow morning early I will land in Toronto and my brother and neice will pick me up and we will travel to the Beaver Valley where we will interr my father’s ashes and finally lay him to rest. And then we will celebrate Thanksgiving together and watch the Leafs game (and probably some Blue Jays games) and marvel at the beauty of the Beaver Valley in all of its autumn glory.
And then, later in the week I’ll head out to eastern Ontario and find my way to my friends Troy Maracle and Cedric Jamet and Jennifer Williams and we’ll set up our meeting spaces at the Queens University Biological Station on Lake Opinicon, where the skies are dark enough to see comets and the lake is like glass and your breath hangs on the still morning air as winter drops hints of frost all around.
Our Canadian National Men’s Team played a friendly today against Australia. I caught bits and pieces of it as I was getting myself to the airport. Seems it was a performance that feel short in many ways and despite having enough chances to win 5-1, Canada couldn’t solve the Australian block and we lost 0-1. I figure that many teams might play like this at the upcoming World Cup. With 48 teams in the mix, we will have to get used to playing teams that will try to keep their 0-0 draw intact. Australia had 1 shot on target, a goal. We had 8. Another friendly awaits on Tuesday against Colombia.
One highlight tonight was the 18th appearance of former TSS Rover Joel Waterman who played 8 games for our plucky little team in 2017, our first season in existence. Joel apparently had his best game yet in a Canada shirt, according to smarter people than me who were able to actually watch it. He won his duels, got a tackle in and helped keep a clean sheet for 71 minutes. Since he was trade to Chicago where he scored the goal that got them into the playoffs, it seems like he’s been much happier. Montreal was a dumpster fire.