Snakes and Ladders

Heya Blog. I picked up a novel the other day, a sci-fi book. After traipsing through Victoria's used book stores, Chapter's, and Monroe's, I came away with two books of pretty good value I think. It wasn't easy though: I had to pass up at least one book I wanted, and the fellow with me also had to leave one on the shelf because they were both just too damn expensive. They weren't rare or particularly special reads in any way. Mine was first published in 1956 and then re-published again and again, so at least it seemed to be popular in surges, and now that it will soon be made into a movie starring Will Smith (I Am Legend written by Richard Matheson) it is popular again now running in trade paperback with a "cool" altogether too busy cover leaving nothing for the imagination at price of $20 ($21.98 plus taxes). The other book was close to $40 bucks because it was hard-cover and the was no room to budge on the price despite its soon appearance in paperback. Those, I guess were the snakes.
The ladder on which my spirits somehow began to climb again were the good books I found: King James Version of the Bible, and Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (no "good book" pun intended here, and I've nothing to say about the man with two first names, but there it is). I like the James version if nothing other than for its language stemming from Tyndale who did a major overhaul in 1520 something; so, just after Shakespeare. He is "the father" of the James and much of his language remains intact in the James version, and in a ways when I read passages I think of Shakespeare and his gentleness.
But, what I originally logged on to say was about Spin and how its structure is designed to lead into the novel like the bottom rungs of a ladder to get one up. Now this is a technique I've come across before because I think it is fairly common but I've just not really noticed it or paid any kind of attention. In retrospect, the opening is so crucial and has to instigate some kind of relationship with an audience. This technique, if that doesn't sound arrogant for me to do so, is something like the once-upon-a-time, but it is less abstract than that, and although it does tap into some mystical area of the reader, who I assume has some feeling of want or need to be tapped into or why else are they reading, I'll call it the "tapping the core" technique. I may come up with better name someday, but for now there it is. Here goes; the tap: This novel focuses on three main characters who are put in this sci-fi novel which requires some ability of the reader to maintain a state of suspended disbelief. However, even sci-fi can only go so far, thus the introduction of "hard sci-fi" to add an air of plausibility. The "tapping" works to the same ends: to make the situation reasonable. I'll get to the meat. Because the novel begins with the main characters in their youth, we might expect them to do anything and be set in virtually any situation. Myself, as with all I would expect, remember my youth and wouldn't be so surprised to be put into a totally unimaginable world at the drop of a penny. In fact, I'm sure this happened many times: have you ever walked up to play a solo piece at a piano recital where you are obviously the worst of three kids in your group and you know that third place, while still a prize, is totally circumstantial and kind of pathetic (poor kid in third, give 'm a ribbon and some candy)? What's with giving a third place when there are only three people...are these adults crazy or have I entered another plane of existence here where pianos are the altar of some religious cult on which parents rituistically sacrifice the young? Did they expect me to tap into some spiritual epicenter? Had they met Mrs. Bee Bruin my piano teacher, had they met any piano teacher who keeps time with a yard stick that doubles as a reminder of missed notes with a crack on the knuckles? Maybe not. Youth, yes in youth stange things are afoot. The point is, small happenings can make you feel alien when your a kid, but when we get older we get stiff and protect our self against feeling alien and we question: what is this, is this believable? So it is that connection with our own lives, our youth, that Wilson is tapping into and depending upon to drive some kind of affinity with his characters, their circumstances, the plot, and overall something we can hold onto through novel to make it much more than believable, hopefully that drops somewhere down the list, but primarily enjoyable.
Tapping, of course, works well in establishing chronology, and that makes sense too, depending I guess.

Monkey Beach

As a Giller Prize finalist and a Governor General Award nominee in 2000, Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach comes well recommended. The first-person narrative style brought me alongside the inner thoughts of a teenage protagonist, Lisamarie Hill, as she was forced to deal with the eventual deaths of her new found uncle Michael and her Grandmother Ma-ma-oo. However, this is much more than a coming of age story; in fact, it asks us to consider at what point we have "come of age"? While we come to see that Lisa's personal troubles are also rooted in the fading of her family's native Haisla tradition, and that as a result there is a gaping disconnection between Haisla and European culture where Lisa is constantly pressured to indulge one set of customs over another creating a truly unsatisfying and conditional life for her, Robinson describes a world where it appears impossible for two worlds to co-exist. In such a place, what are the opportunities for reconciliation?

I enjoyed the new perspectives Ma-ma-oo offers to understanding the world, both in a spiritual and bodily sense. For me, having spent a childhood exploring along coastlines, in wooded lands of lakes, under starry skies, and often around a campfire, the overarching imagery of nature bound the narrative together. The Haisla proverb that introduces Monkey Beach uses nature to belittle our vindictive capacity and to suggest that unity is possible, but it is a unity found outside of the imagination:

It is possible to retaliate against an enemy,
But impossible to retaliate against storms.

What do you make of this proverb?

Pitter Pater

Like footsteps of imagination tracing my mind, Walter Pater encourages me to think outside the box.

"Art and poetry, philosophy and the religious life, and that other life of refined pleasure and action in the conspicuous places of the world, are each of them confined to its own circle of ideas, and those who prosecute either of them are generally little curious of the thoughts of others."

While I don't like the idea of being "confined," this seems to be the general trend to meet the ends of Victorian progress. It might be the result of popular philosophy of economic specialization bleeding into the world of aesthetics: an assembly line of ideas, any takers? Pater seems to be ahead of his time in 1873 foreshadowing the multifariousness of post-modernism. I can see how this statement could be seen as lacking any recognizable position other than chaos, and to me Pater is presenting an entirely different way of looking at the world, a way of existing outside of dogma and doctrine.

"For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake."

Pater tells me the moment is a deep well of pleasure, that art should be accepted as honest and rejuvenating, and as I rethink his words, I contemplate how in return I can best reciprocate the favour.

Charging Up "The Electrical Field"

Book publisher W.W.Norton & Company has a web-site designed to help spur discussion and interest in their authors.

This link takes you to a "Reading Group Guide" for the The Electrical Field by Kerri Sakamoto. The site presents an interview with Sakamoto concerning her novel and further questions to help give the book some depth to individual readers.

Questions asked of Sakamoto largely revolve around the effects of internment camps not only on those who experienced them, but also on those of future generations; differences in internment camps between USA and Canada; personal responses to writing an emotional historiography and choices in character and narrative style; and, Sakamoto tells about the imagery of her novels title, The Electrical Field.

I liked the discussion questions afterward because they left me with a sense of ownership of the novel that is all mine...greedy, maybe, but satisfying.

Here is that link:
http://www2.wwnorton.com/rgguides/electricalfieldrgg.htm

All that is not silence is the voice of man.

In "Woman's Secret," Elizabeth Robins seems to present a fair account of the Victorian woman's struggle to assert her voice. I think by considering the roots of the patriarchal tradition, Robins tries to understand the perspective of men; at least, she seems to attempt to empathize with the socialization that Victorian men were left to deal with. In essence she sets up her essay in a way that it can revolve around culture rather than gender: "we begin to inquire into the origin of the order under which we live."

However, when I read that men and women alike are equally "victims of circumstance," I begin to wonder about Robins' writing style. I would guess Robins is trying to create an even playing field so that Victorian men are not dumbfounded in a defesive haze or made to feel as though they are being objectified, and that her rhetorical approach is excellent for the era. Even if Robins doesn't believe everything she writes in "Woman's Secret," she certainly knows her audience and knows how to rally support for such a major shift in sensibility by drawing on anthropological/historical (male sphere) and emotional/empathetic (female sphere) arguments.

For me, "Woman's Secret" reaches beyond a treatise for equality between the sexes. When Robins writes about writing style comparing the content of autobiographical versus imaginative prose, she hits on contemporary issues of narrative. This is not to say by any stretch that equality of gender is not an issue in the twenty-first century, it is to instead intended to express that Robins knew that the "Woman's Secret," and by implication man's "reflections," will be ever-present.

However, Robins seems to be asking too much for the patience of men in allowing for women to catch up in "his game," and not enough for women, as individuals, to establish themselves in their own method. This is, I suppose, because of a fear Victorian men would denounce "the other half" as unsubstantiated and incongruous with mainstream discursive patterns. If it doesn't fit, it must be wrong...right?

Half-devil and half-child: The Other Side of Burden

Reading Kipling from the other side of the coin. From the perspective of those "captive" rather than the "captor": what a great way to approach "The White Man's Burden."

I like this point of view because reading both sides allows me to better situate imperialism and colonization from a distance. Here, the view of one side or the other doesn't take the fore, but instead the "burden" itself takes presidency.

However, in reading this speaker as though he (he because of "Man's," "sons," "manhood") is part of those being colonized, I am forced to read the poem as being entirely sarcastic: who would promote taking up the burden of an oppressor? This would seem to undermine the credibility of the speaker to the extent that the poem becomes silly.

Further, if Kipling is writing in the voice of the colonized, then isn't he assuming to know the emotions and mind of the colonized, and isn't that showing a type of egoism and perhaps "racist" behaviour?

History

I think about the importance of studying history a lot, partly because people are always asking me, "why study early Canadian literature? isn't it all crap?" One of the things that I think history does, (or archaeology, for that matter, viz our novel Fugitive Pieces), is to preserve the traces of "otherness" in the past -- to point out that people really did think differently than we do, that what seems "normal" now was not always considered normal, and what we think is natural is actually cultural. History preserves the choices that faced people in the past, the options they did not choose as well as the ones they did, and reminds us there are different ways of thinking about things like love, and the self, and the family as well as politics and the natural world. This helps me remember that things can be different, things can be changed, by acting in the present. This is a cheerful thought.