Meeting writers

A strange feeling comes to me when I'm introduced to authors whose writing I love. I know one aspect of their mind so well already. I've spent hours reading their work, with their words filling my head, carrying me along the drift of a narrative. I surrender myself when I read, give myself over.

But the book is a collection of artfully arranged thoughts, trapped in the formaldehyde of print. A specimen I later examine. The writer is a person, responsive, secret. Some switch is flipped. It's at once a reduction and an intensification of intimacy, and I become awkward.

Sympathy is the dangerous necessity

"That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps ours frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity." - George Eliot

This quote both renews my sensitivity and forgives my lack of it.

Newfoundland Store

Riding transit to Port Credit for a wedding. I read Alistair MacLeod. Stories of small towns in Cape Breton. Socio-economic gravity wells. The obligation a young generation has to the dozen that came before it. A crushing weight. A man is killed while fishing. Another man is injured while mining.

We found a Newfoundland-Britain import store in Port Credit. I was astounded and then excited. However, it was terribly disappointing. There was a box of square milk lunch, a bottle of purity syrup, and some partridgeberry-apple jam. It is like NFLD sent me a signal, but a weak and meaningless one.

I saw Tennessee Williams' bum

I saw the Morgan Library's exhibition of notable diaries. Tennessee Williams's is there (under glass). Something about it entreated me, this diary, open to a single page. Be kind to Tennessee Williams, it said. Somehow.

Down in the gift shop they had the diary reproduced in full for purchase, with photos added. I read a dozen pages from the early 1940s.

There was a photo of him naked on a bed, face down. He held himself up on his forearms. I can only describe his backside as "friendly-looking." The back of his head, the way he held it, suggested meaning.

Fugitive Pieces

Picked up Anne Michaels' novel Fugitive Pieces at The Strand in Manhattan ("18 miles of books!") and started reading it in a coffeeshop in Soho.

That was a very privileged sentence fragment.

I'm 130 pages into it. I'm quitting for the day because sunburn has given me headache and weakness, but the desire to keep going is almost strong enough to overrule. This is my first Anne Michaels Experience. I see why she's a Big Deal. The book is beautiful and complex. I got choked up on the train back to Queens because of it.

36 hours left in NYC.

Explaining Canadian Literature to an American

Telling non-academics about life as an academic is productive but awkward (these qualities pal around a lot). Telling an American non-academic about being a scholar of Canadian literature is doubly so.

He didn't know Canada had a literature. "Oh yes!" Is it like Canadian Content regulations for the music on our radio? I hemmed with Joni Mitchell and hawed with Margaret Atwood. "No! Maybe! Yes? I'm no Canadian patriot!" As if mutual understanding required that info-nugget to be in play.

Anyway. Do you know Girl Talk? Everyone should. It is necessary, if you like music. Here's some nice trans-national Girl Talk.

Travel Writing

Today I was in a bookstore's travel section. I browsed books about places I've already been, not places I want to go – not Scandinavia or Argentina, but Ireland, where I lived for 8 months.

The longer I spent in a place the stronger the impulse to read about it. I always, always look for books on Newfoundland, or the Newfoundland section of books on Canada.

I guess I want to judge the depictions, to see if they got it "right." Usually they get something wrong. Or maybe I want to check my impressions and memories against someone else's.

Come, Thou Tortoise

I’m gonna write a paper on Jessica Grant`s Come, Thou Tortoise. I’m gonna do that by May 28. I told some nice people I’d present it then. So I’m nervous that it’s yet unwritten.

I can’t wait to start. I think Come, Thou Tortoise is a rare book. I loved reading it. It’s doing something new and important. It makes a claim for Newfoundland’s difference, but it decouples it from cultural/historical essentialism. Grant’s Newfoundland is a queer space that’s accessible to any weary weirdo soul who needs it.

It’s also goddamn funny and heartbreaking. As I said, a rare book.