Causerie à deux in “Kathleenville”

An interview with Kathleen Winter

Two months ago I published a post on this blog, which was a review of Kathleen Winter’s novel, Annabel. It was followed, soon after, by a review on my other blog, Zero to One, where I called it “a book of contrasts.” The novel had been a finalist in the 2014 edition of Canada Reads, the most important book-reading event taking place in Canada. I was a little upset when the novel was excluded from the competition based on an interpretation that I found (and still find) completely wrong and unfair. As my friends know too well (and as will become apparent below), I am not a Canadian. But Annabel caused avalanches of thoughts in my mind, a lot of them too Canadian not to be highlighted. So I wrote the blog posts mentioned above. But I wanted to know more. And there was only one way I could find out the author’s perspective on place and space (which are, to me, the strongest elements in the novel). I contacted Kathleen Winter and asked her to give me an interview. To my delight, she accepted. Here is the result of our electronic exchanges:

The novel features a strong contrast between geography and urbanism. On the one hand, there is Croydon Harbour, a place that doesn’t exist on real maps – a mythical place of vast expanses, of white winters, of seasons that follow their own path, where humans are nothing if not subservient to ontology. On the other hand, there is St John’s, a real place in Labrador-Newfoundland – a place of human interests, of explosive colours, of distances that can be measured, of streets that limit movement or channel people’s actions. This contrast reminded me of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who proposed a distinction between what he called “smooth spaces” (the equivalent of your Croydon Harbour) and “striated spaces” (your St John’s). Would it be fair to say that the novel hinges on the understanding of this relationship and its own hermaphroditical nature? ||| My brother Michael told me that my writing about Croydon Harbour is really about a place he calls “Kathleenville”. He sees it as an extension of my imagination, which I suppose in a way it is. I have to admit, though, that as I wrote about Croydon Harbour, I thought I was writing about the real Labrador, and not really an imaginary place. It surprises me to find out that what I think of as earthy, real, tangible aspects of a place might in fact be none of those things. When I was writing Croydon Harbour, I envisioned Labrador communities I had seen and known. The landscape, the animals, the vegetation and the skies are “real”. But yes, the power and electricity and magnetism of the place, well, I guess they are real as well, but in order for them to be manifest they need a person, or consciousness, to meet them. St. John’s is a place I lived in for decades, but there again, in a way, it represents layered myth and story, to me. It’s sort of like a ragged, east coast San Francisco – the hills, the coloured houses, and what my daughter calls the higgledy-piggledyness. I love it there. The contrast between Croydon Harbour and St. John’s is, for me, partly about intimacy. Croydon Harbour is a place where the soul expands out into great space, whereas St. John’s is where it rests, like a cat, kittycorner and protected.

Croydon Harbour feels like a place that had to be imagined. My question is: what came first – Wayne or Croydon Harbour? Which one started the engine of the novel? ||| The character, the person of Wayne/Annabel, started the engine and caused me to begin writing a short story that would turn into the novel.  I met a Labrador artist who had worked a startling and mysterious figure into a beaded work on black felt, and when I asked her about this figure, she told me it was “a hermaphrodite.” She told me people of dual gender were known about and accepted in Labrador as having special powers. I had already begun writing the book when she told me this, but she helped me see a bigger picture, and Labrador was part of that picture.

Did you imagine the other places mentioned in the novel (I mean, of course, the places visited by Thomasina, which you describe to a certain extent) or did you actually see them all yourself? ||| I knew some of the places, such as London, from experience. My dear friend Elizabeth wrote me postcards from Bucharest that I used, with her permission, when describing Thomasina’s postcards. Elizabeth was my friend in St. John’s and she rented her basement apartment to a pair of Mormon missionaries. They came upstairs in the evenings and she gave them tea and cookies and they enraptured her so thoroughly with the Book of Mormon that they converted her and she became a Mormon missionary herself, which is how she got to Bucharest. Elizabeth is an artist and she has the best stories of anyone I know, the most humane and heartrending and compassionate. I beg her to let me use them and every now and then she does. Other places in Thomasina’s travels I researched or imagined.

In my review, I reflected on the myth of the androgyne, because it seemed so obvious to me. I have not seen this aspect mentioned in other reviews. Of course, I haven’t seen all of them! But how does this stand with you? Did you draw inspiration from literature that accommodated the idea of the hermaphrodite? ||| I have always been fascinated with gender, and have always felt a tension at having to play-act at being female. All my inspiration is unconscious, so it’s hard for me to be exact about a question like this. I just know that androgyny excites me and always has, whether in myth and story, or in life. Whenever I see or hear of someone who has broken the prison of gender duality, I feel released, somewhere deep in myself. Every single one of my favourite writers lives or lived beyond gender.

Wayne is written as a boy. Did that make it difficult to you to imagine him, to write his ‘gender-specific’ thoughts and actions? ||| It was the most difficult part of the book. In some ways, I feel it was impossible for me to do justice to this, which is why if you examine the story it becomes obvious that most of the gender-defining comes from people around the main character. In a way, Wayne/Annabel is transparent, and might even be said to be nonexistent. This is why I needed the idea of bridges in the book. The structure of bridges, their substance and their engineering, along with their overarching beauty, loftiness and grace, gave me a sort of whole entity that Wayne and Annabel could embrace and be interested in. I mean, you can’t have one without the other.

A Canadian trapper (a type embodied by the character Treadway)
Source: Le Dernier Trappeur, via www.avcesar.com

Wayne is the protagonist of the novel, but his father, Treadway, covers a lot of narrative territory as well. And of course, the ending belongs to him too. I don’t have the right metrics to measure this, but it seems that he appears more often than other characters in the novel. Why is that? ||| I began with one opinion and vision of Treadway, as a macho, one-dimensional man. But I based him on several men I know, and I think perhaps because of this, he quickly taught me that pinning him down would not be so easy. He taught me that nobody is one-dimensional. He taught me that love can make a father change his mind and question his own fears, and accept one’s child. He was not what I expected. My editor, at one point (when a fourth or fifth draft was not working), asked me if I should maybe “kill off” Treadway in the second half. I think that when she asked me that, I suddenly knew how important Treadway was, to the book. Her question made me work on bringing out his power and loveliness.

Also on Treadway: he never struck me as a person capable of thinking about murder. He kills animals for a living, but that’s where his capacity to kill seems to stop. He is not violent, he is not unfair, he is not revengeful. And so his determination to punish those who had dishonoured his son took me by surprise. Not that I though him incapable of reaction; but to me he seemed more likely to respond with a reflection rather than such a drastic action. When did that transformation happen in him? ||| I think of that time in Treadway’s mind as the time he regretted that he had not been able to protect his daughter. He thought of the attack as an assault on a daughter, and felt a father’s quiet, poisonous and lethal rage. I think it was fuelled by deep sorrow and regret that he had failed to prevent the violence against Annabel. Also, I felt that he knew the perpetrator would hurt someone else in the future. He wanted to at least prevent this. From a purely practical standpoint, he would dearly have loved to incapacitate the cruel, stupid bully.

To end with, there’s another aspect that I find striking in your novel: reading. Your characters read a lot. And not just each other’s letters, but books, serious books: Aristotle, Diderot, and so on. Is that normal for a man who goes out trapping in the Labrador wilderness? ||| Yes, it is normal for a Labrador trapper to read. I spent time with an old trapper who told me this, and I also heard it from other people. Trappers like Treadway were part Inuit and part Scots, and there was a lot of European influence on the Labrador coast. If you go to some of the coastal communities now you will find libraries full of books brought by the Moravian missionaries, and Labrador is full of fascinating people who combine practicality and deep knowledge of the land with a knowledge of literature and philosophy, as well as music.

Photo for Le Monde, (c) Jessica Auer

This is where our interview finishes. But I have to say I felt, from the very beginning, that I could spend days talking to Kathleen Winter, on all the intricacies of her novel and the specificities of her characters and stories. In order to understand all this, her novel needs to be read. Annabel needs to be on people’s bookshelves. For its hermaphroditism, for its themes, for its beauty.

||| Also, visit Kathleen’s blog, with a title taken from Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry, to see her other ways of approaching writing, as well as the other wonderful talent she has: drawing. |||

Why I think writing is super-human (2)

Let’s come again to why I think writing is super-human. The question put again. The question re-membered.

Writing is more like a divorce

You see now how close writing is to data storage, which is the thing we tend to associated with computers. They (writing and the computer) both preserve texts for the use of an entity different from the one that’s doing the storage. What this means, if I manage to put it into simpler words, is that mere storage – mere writing – is not sufficient if taken in isolation. A piece of text can stay where it has been written for thousands of years and be a masterpiece; nobody knows about it – it’s useless. So the text is nothing if not read. Reading is the soul of writing; it is the life blown into that text. Can you imagine an archive? Millions of texts sitting there; so many, it has been impossible for the whole team of archivists to go through them all – to even know what many of them contain. Those are dead texts. Inexistent texts, in spite of the fact that they are right there, in that confined space of the archive.

Writing is separation.
Source: www.astavki.com

And from the above sentence I arrive at another one: writing is separation. Only things cut away from their source can be stored. Right? Let’s take a look at our thoughts again. It wouldn’t be hard for us to agree that it’s impossible to pickle them inside our brain, like millennium eggs, and keep them there for eternity. No, that is not humanly possible. Maybe in the world of Funes the Memorius, but even there, some problem will arise at one point or other, and the whole castle will crumble, as attested by Borges, who would have liked things to be different.

So now, if we’re taking these thoughts to their logical conclusion, we may finally say that writing is not human. It is, indeed, super-human – not as in Superman, but as in prosthetics.

Writing is more like a fake limb

All forms of art (and writing is one) are prosthetic in nature. They do what we cannot do by means of our physical abilities. At the beginnings of science, the scientific disciplines were called arts – you probably knew that. So seeing further (telescopes) or deeper (microscopes), helping people walk when no limbs are in place – all this, of course, implies prosthetics. Prosthetics help the human individual do what he/she wouldn’t be able to do by using their limbs/bodies alone. And so with writing. It does something our minds cannot do: remembering.

iHand. Source: Designboom

For this reason alone, writing is, indeed, super-human. (The title of this piece finally makes sense.)

And now you’ll look upon your daily scribbling in a different way, won’t you? Nah. Maybe not. In fact, writing has become so closely tied to you – your breath, your heart beats, your blood pressure, your bone marrow – you don’t believe it possible for you not to have it. The thought of not having writing is perhaps more tormenting than the thought of being left alone in the middle of a jungle, snakes and tigers and tarantulas lurking around and looking at you from the dark with fiery eyes. That’s how deeply writing has penetrated into your blood stream. And it’s not at all a bad thing, because without this forgetting of writing’s nature we would never be capable of accepting other, more subtle, more sublime, more miraculous things enabled by writing. I say ‘Literature,’ and I need not go any further.

Let us not disparage writing, though

I said here things that have put writing in a bad light. I said it didn’t help memory. Well, it doesn’t – in principle. But writing is not entirely foreign to the things we remember. No. The device, alright, the device is the holder of the memory. That’s where we believe it’s safely deposited, like a bonus bond promising a certain return. But there’s a process taking place here. The very process of scribbling; of putting pen to paper. Well, it so happens that between pen and paper something occurs. And that’s a mental process: we activate the thought that will be immortalized on the page. This thought navigates from our brain to our hand, and from there not straight to the paper but to our brain again.

I say, to the brain again. How’s that? Well, writing doesn’t happen haphazardly. Yes, Master Plato, it doesn’t. It is the result of a mental process and it generates another mental process. If it weren’t this way, we wouldn’t be able to re-member with the device. We would not recognize the text. But as we very well know, when we see the post-it on the fridge we recognize it. We re-visit it. We recollect having known it before. Which means when we read the message we are in fact finding something we have always already been familiar with. We are returning that thing to the receptacle of our mind, where our mind rejoices at the sight of a dear old friend. What we recognize is not only our own handwriting, but the very nature of Writing itself: the inscription of marks on a solid surface. That, before anything else, appears to us as a recognition of writing. The device is showing us the way. (The Tao of Writing. Somebody should use this as a title somewhere.)

I just can't resist the association.
Source: www.peachesandhotsauce.com

This sounds good, I know. Feels good too. It feels like relief. We’re not so doomed to be Platonic failures, after all. But beautiful as this may seem, we need to realize that we won’t escape the device. Technology (and this is a word I haven’t used in my posts so far) is the grand mediator without which we would be left with a huge gap between us and the thing we like to call ‘the world.’

Proof? Don’t forget the way we store phone numbers in the phone’s internal memory. At least that. Oh, and maybe this as well, from Edgar Allan Poe:

“If you wish to forget anything, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.”

Just to take us back to the post-it issue, and the super-human nature of writing.

Why I think writing is super-human (1)

Let’s try to clarify one thing about writing: its association with memory. Writing enables us to remember things – that’s how the saying goes. But I wouldn’t be so fast in perpetuating this almost dogmatically embraced dictum.

Let’s take a look at the most recent thing you’ve written. I don’t know – anything. Say, the email you’ve written this morning. How much of it can you remember? Really. Not just recollecting (which is a milder version of the same thing, don’t we agree?) but remembering: putting the members together. Got it? Re-membering. Yeah, that’s what I mean.

Writing is not (our) memory

So. How much can you remember? Let’s say, a lot. Let’s say the whole frigging thing – commas and full stops and exclamation marks and all. Every single thing, to the breath in your lungs while you were typing the message after having brushed your teeth with your favourite mint-flavoured tooth paste, and after having had your breakfast eggs the way you like them: sunny side down. Let’s say.

Wow. I’m hardly ever capable of that. I’m more of a Platonic type, you know. (Of this, a little later, though.) So well done you. Well done.

But.

If you say you’re so good at remembering things, I wonder: why did you need to write the whole damn thing? How is this feat of memory indebted to your having put all that stuff into words?

Of course, an email (you’ll say) is never written in order to remember anything, but in order to remind (presumably others). Not to re-member, but to re-mind. To re-mind. To make the mind feel good in repetition. But you are catching my drift, aren’t you? If not, check out another type of writing. Let’s take a post-it stuck to your fridge. Telling you that you need to buy milk and coffee. Now that’s a more accurate depiction of how we are made to remember through writing, right?

Wrooong!

You didn’t remember because of those words, but in spite of them. You remembered because you were endowed with a spectacular memory in the first place – you lucky thing you. You did not remember with the words on the paper but with the words in your mind. And in that mind of yours, in that beautiful receptacle of ideas, things are not written. Never. Not with a pen or pencil, no.

Source: TMG

Writing is more like putting things in a cupboard

The question that arises straight away is this: when we speak of memory, whose memory do we mean? Because, we need to admit it, some kind of memorisation is taking place every time we write. And we kind of agreed (have we?) that it’s not our memory, because ours is busy with all manner of things which are not written – cannot be written, unless we’re talking about writing in a metaphorical sense; but we don’t want to complicate things.

Here’s my thought: the memory we’re talking about belongs to the device: paper, computer, smart phone, tablet, piece of bark with incrustations on it, papyrus, wall, noticeboard – whatever. I mean the object itself, not the text upon it. It’s in the device that the text is placed. It’s in the device that we find what we stored earlier. So what does this make of the thing we call writing? Well, let’s say writing is not actually a form of memory. It is not mémoire (read this à la French, s’il vous plaît), but aide-mémoire. Help to memory, to be more precise: a prop, a prosthetic device.

Now we’re onto something. And that’s this: Writing is truly storage. It’s where we put things in order to find them later. Like a cupboard, if you like, or like your kitchen drawer. Or (yes, why not?) your bookshelf.

Do you understand now where our obsession with having things in the right place at all times comes from? Oh yes, we have derived it from another obsession, which is truly a necessity: the need to store. Since we can’t carry all our possessions with us everywhere we go, we need a safe place to put things to rest; to take them off our minds, in fact. Hence – writing, reading, and the whole OCD we have developed around correct reading, the ‘right way’ of texts, the ‘actual’ meaning, and so many other legends we’re not going to elaborate on here.

Source: Treasure Chest of Memories

So what was that thing that Plato said?

Theuth, the inventor god of numbers, calculation, geometry, astronomy, and writing, meets king Thamus to exhibit the extraordinary features of his arts. When it comes to writing, which he promotes as “a potion for memory and for wisdom,” Theuth goes:

“O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wised and will improve their memory.”

But the king, wiser himself than the god who’d spoken to him, finds the effects of writing “the opposite of what they really are,” and swears that those who employ the art of writing are doomed to millennia of stupidity:

“They will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality.”

Plato is famous for this rejection of writing, in Phaedrus. The reason of his distrust is clear, I hope. Haven’t we, so many centuries after him, discovered the truth of Plato’s words when we started using the memory of our mobile phones rather than our own memory? We have given the device what has always been the device’s. We have embraced writing together with the reliance on its memory.

What can we say to Plato, then? Sorry, Sir, but among other things we have also discovered the pleasures that lie in the art of forgetfulness. Oh, yes, we have. We’ve built libraries and archives, we’ve conceived of human beings capable of remembering everything, and have invented machines that do so in real time. We have, in other words, fallen prey to the lures of this art, of this deceit. But man, we’re loving it.

(to be continued)

Call me clumsy

It’s funny how clumsiness dismisses authority. When speaking to a person with an accent, we suddenly slow down, speak in spaced words, simplify our vocabulary. As if having been born in a language where vocal chords are used differently makes one stupid without remedy.

Source: Huffington Post

In a person who speaks with an accent we see a potential to err. Before any idea has had a chance to be uttered by that person, a barrier of words keeps it from coming forth.

This is mostly a problem of design. Of wrong design – or what we perceive to be wrong. In the acceptable scheme of things, when we perceive the world we expect to hear the other speaking with the intonation of our voice and the natural inflexion of our sounds. That, to us, is proper design: design that doesn’t surprise, doesn’t seem impudent, doesn’t scream with pain. It’s design in a blessed state of perfection.

Naturally, to this sense of perfection, every change in intonation is a crime against normality.

Want another example? Go online and visit a website. If its overall design looks unprofessional, awkwardly put together, without any consideration of proportions, composition, thematic unity, they’re doomed. If they use an ugly font or a magenta background, they’re as good as dead. We have no high regard for them. They may as well just go and shoot themselves in the head – very few will care about their suffering.

The problem of the first encounter

All this disparagement happens as the result of a mere glance. In reality, I’ve read interesting texts on numerous badly-designed sites or blogs, and loads of crap on their flash counterparts. I’ve heard people with accents uttering more ideas worth listening to than many natives, with their entire plethora of perfectly rounded vowels and perfectly lisped th’s. The point of difference between them – the turning point, in the most literal of senses – was this first glance, the hiccup of a clumsy design.

At the moment of the first encounter many things are wrongly interpreted. The other is more distant than ever, and because of that, he needs to be simplified in order to be better understood – or understood at all.

The first glance is really a self-defence technique. It helps the fragile self of ours overcome the shock of the encounter. If it’s not in the accent, then it’s in the gestures; if it’s not there, it must be in the social relations developed by the other; and if it’s not there either, it will certainly be in the way they eat, they sleep, they read, they write, they accept, they reject, they blink, they wear their headwear, they flush the toilet, they turn the light on, they walk, they run, they jog, they stroll.

If it’s not this, is that – this is the logic of the first encounter; a logic of animadversion, of nit-picking, of hair-splitting. At the moment of the first encounter everything is clumsy, because everything is out of tune.

So the problem with clumsiness is that it lives in this grey zone of the first impression. Since it does so, it doesn’t have much chance at rehabilitation, because first impression is an animal hard to tame.

Source: pxleyes

Clumsy things are rarely allowed the privilege of depth. Being clumsy is like erecting a barrier of perception. I still refuse to read texts whose authors use the apostrophe where it shouldn’t be, and who write things like “your not going to be taken seriously.” There’s something in the genetic package of my mind, I guess, that recoils at the sight of these crimes. And I can’t do much to resist it.

A stage and nothing else

But clumsiness, you see, is in the making of things. It is an unavoidable stage. Like a creek that needs to have been a spring in order to become a river. When a house is being built, when it has only the structure in place and a couple of patches of insulation in a room or two, it looks very clumsy – inhospitable, uninhabitable, unappealing. And so are ideas. When the idea in my head is work-in-progress, when I’m still trying to figure out where it’s taking me, I am in the land of clumsy. I look at the screen of my computer, where words come one after another, and nothing is taking shape; everything is potential. This is how I work most of the time. I write and I write, focusing on one thing, then on another. All this time, the text is out of my control; it presents itself to me as a testing field, where I try my best to shoot as close as possible to as many targets as I can see. The whole thing is clumsy. It is only after the throwing away of all garbage, after the clarification of all doubts, that I can say, hand pressed against my heart, that I am pleased with what I’ve done. But before that happens, my idea is inhospitable, uninhabitable, unappealing. It is not even an idea at all: only a handful of crumbs scattered on the tablecloth of my undecided mind.

Source: Urban Omnibus

And so there’s virtue in clumsiness. Imperfection leaves room for things to come. I am inspired by my indecision. I live well in the bedlam of my thoughts. And what’s left clumsily scattered on the page forms a healthy mine-field, where ideas are always on the verge of exploding into new forms.

So call me Clumsy; I won’t mind.

Popularity IS Authority

I seem to have developed the need to talk about professionals. Today I’ll have to give in to the temptation once again, hoping that this odd attraction will let me be once I’ve left it in the open.

To put it bluntly (the way critics put it every time, with that grin on their faces), everyone’s a specialist these days. Their words matter, their opinions are posted and pasted everywhere, they get cult-like followings, they shine in their own resplendent light. In other words, the ‘new professionals’ show serious signs of having become authoritative. And with this statement – on we go.

Between the good and the many

You know how the argument goes: in order to be an authority in a given field, you need to have what they call substance. In other words, you need to have something to say that is worthy of other people’s attention. But here’s exactly where things get really blurry. Because I Can Has Cheezburger, with their lolcats and things, are gathering more attention than a hardwired Harvard professor of Astrophysics. And man, what a difference I can see between a cat and a star!

Source: DeviantART

“But don’t forget: the really good ones are often hidden away from the eyes of simple mortals,” the devil’s advocate is yelling into my ear.

What I understand from this is that a person of authority must be a person of distinction. But, alas, distinction is all about singularity; and a singular thing is any of the following: outstanding, outrageous, irreverent, odd, bizarre, out-of-the-way, atypical, abnormal. In other words, the odder a person, the higher their chances of acquiring distinction, since the likelier it is for them to have no match. What we call authorities, then, are the oddest people we can think of. So odd, we can’t possibly identify with them, because (remember?) they have no match. And that puts an end (for me) to the old habit of voting for a person endowed with the thing formerly known as authority, since authority is dubious without masses to acknowledge it. According to the argument outlined above, once you have a mass of followers you are no longer odd. Whether you like it or not, you’re no longer special; you’re more like a slice of pizza shared between friends: yummy but enduring too many bites to remain good for long.

Authority equals popularity

Professionals who defend the tenets of their own profession on grounds of authority tend to easily forget a simple historical aspect: that their own profession was, at some point in time, regarded as substandard, ridiculous, bizarre practice. In the seventeenth century, those we nowadays call scientists were ridiculed as stargazers, useless blokes given to the debauchery of pseudo-intellectual practices. And to some extent they were. But look where science has gotten: to the point where almost everything it produces is regarded as a set of ultimate truths; to the point where being a scientist is the highest mark of one’s intellectual prowess; to the point where calling yourself a scientist is like placing the lid onto all debates, once and for good.

Source: Nicholas Lundgaard

And science is not all. Let’s give a thought to the literary genre most highly regarded since mid-nineteenth century: the novel. At its origins (whether we’re talking about the Greek prehistory or the eighteenth-century revival), the novel was looked at as a cheap pastime suitable for the “small minds” (as they were thought to be) of the rising middle class.

So here’s the point: most of the things we’re enjoying now have started on a wrong footing. They took off only when a critical mass of followers was finally gathered. In other words, they had a chance at becoming what they are only when they started rising in popularity. To cut it to the core: authority equals popularity, no matter how we turn the issue around.

Let's not fear the popular

Then what upsets me sometimes is this thing: the habit of completely ignoring the role of popularity in the appreciation of authority. As if popularity were an evil we needed to keep at a distance for fear of contamination. But popularity is not an alien thing. It has not been bestowed upon humanity by an evil-doing Martian race. It is the way we exist: through interaction, through the sharing of common understandings of things, through contagion. The history of human ideas is a history written using the terms of epidemiology. It takes into account not how many ideas have existed across centuries, but how many of those ideas have become significant; popular, that is; or even better – authoritative. Think religions, and we’re done.

Source: www.esquire.com

But at the end of the day popularity is a very hazardous thing, which depends on the whims of so many factors... Which is not a proof that popularity is bad. On the contrary, it shows that authority is fragile. It only takes the next popular thing to put it out, like a cigarette butt that hasn’t even had the chance to burn to the end.

The saddest piece of news in a hundred years

Sad day, very, very sad day. The death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, although not exactly unexpected, considering his age and illness, feels like a blow in the head. I think I've always thought (as I'm sure many others did) that he was going to live forever. But reality really sucks when it comes to keeping up with fiction, and his Hundred Years of (not quite) Solitude have come to an end before the century could have a chance at reaching its upper limit.

Knowing how his death had been foretold, when he was wrongly declared deceased in 2000, I thought, for a second, that this could be just another mistake; just another joke. But then news came in waves, and now the death of the greatest Latin American author ever is a certitude. A Chronicle of a Death Foretold has, unfortunately, found its confirmation.

This is how I want to remember Gabo: giving the bird to death.
'Coz he hasn't really died; he's just gone somewhere to finish his work.
Source: San Diego Red

With Gabo dead, a new page in the history of literature will have to be written. I don't really care about what so many have found "controversial" in his life. It's not the controversy that I found insanely appealing in his texts, but rather that incredible extent of his story-telling. I don't think anybody else has managed (although many have tried, and some have come very close) to get to that kind of loss in the midst of a flood of fiction, which I discovered in Garcia Marquez's novels.

Things will be said these days: good and bad, in equal measure. Someone like him could not have passed through life without leaving the others debating over his presence. We have a few more hundreds of years to talk and talk. History, that bitch!, is a lot more generous in this regard. In the meantime, he's moved quarters to that celestial Macondo where angels are laughing about us.
Rest in peace, Gabriel Garcia Marquez!

Let’s do something wrong!

Last week I talked about garbage – the waste of writing, the stuff that’s condemned never to be encountered by the reader. But there were things that went unsaid in that post: my own garbage, of course. The part I took out was about mistakes: writing, reading, and the way mistakes intrude to mess them up. Or do they, really?

In order to arrive at these mistakes, I think I need to take the usual detour, which will prove to be of some importance later on. Critical reading: that’s what I’m thinking of. The two things go hand in hand, don’t they? Critical attitude and reading. Only a type of reading that is critical in nature can bring to light that which we take to be a mistake. Do you remember your years in high school or college, when you had to produce an argumentative essay? What was the thing that you were most likely to do? Read the original text with the intention of finding a flaw in it. A flaw serious enough to warrant the grunt in your response. A mistake that could not go untreated.

Source: JTM Games

That kind of reading, which placed critical unrest before and above everything else, was meant to develop one’s ability to judge. So they said, remember? But there was something else at work as well. Through the cultivation of this critical spirit, you were being trained into the profession of academic reading. It made sense, didn’t it? You were in school, not in a factory. You had therefore to learn how to read, write, and think the way schools read, write, and think.

But schools teach almost always through mistakes. Remember your teacher’s comments on the margins of your essay? That’s what I mean.

The critical profession

Critical reading is characteristic to the academia the way cleaning a pipe is characteristic to plumbing. What I mean by this is that it only makes sense to exercise your critical abilities if you read with an academic mind, or in order to impress (we say ‘interact with,’ or ‘find a channel of communication with,’ but it means the same thing!) another academic mind. That's like saying that you can only clean a pipe if you have the authority vested in you by the profession of plumbing. Once escaped from the confines of the academia, your reading turns into something else: something that is no longer limited by the predicaments of that profession. Once you’re outside of school, you discover that reading can take place without rules and neat margins; you discover that it can be full of garbage. And you like it, in 9 cases out of 10; the way you like not knowing what could cause a pipe to block. Ignorance is bliss, as they say, and the saying seems to be equally applicable to readers and plumbers.

All this has one major reason: being an academic is a profession, and critical reading is the major outlet of this occupation. (As for the plumbing profession, I'll let the knowledgeable ones say it in their own words.)

Let’s see if that makes sense.

When the professionals of critical reading are asked about the practicality of their profession, they spit scorn back at you. And that is precisely the response of a professional, since all professionals spit scorn when it comes to questioning the purpose of their actions. There is always a literal, fundamentalist, dogmatic reference to the letter of the profession (to what constitutes its purpose, to what warrants its lunacies, to how important it is in the context of human experience).

Based on this, one thing needs to be said: professionals are not flexible. Why? Because they are bound by their guild to defend the territory of their profession and to scorn all attempts at defamation – of which the world is full, since the world is made up of other professions too.

Mistaken?

Yet there’s another thing about professionals: they tend to have words of criticism to utter about others in their own line of duty. And this is where we get closer to what I wanted to talk about: mistakes.

I have spoken to plumbers who, instead of giving me the straight answer about what had gone wrong with the drainage in my house, spoke about the insufficient professionalism of the plumber who did the job before. To professionals, there’s always something to criticize in the past of others. Not their own past – let’s be clear about this: always the past of others. The past in general is always flawed with them. A true professional lives in a continuous present, where the only thing that’s worth the penny of everybody’s attention is their present practice: the way they perform here and now. This immediacy of professionals is due, I believe, to the fact that they are task-driven. They don’t just choose what’s next. They don’t do what they want, but what needs to be done – what the world requires of them.

Source: Boomer to Gen-Y (and Gen-X)

But what’s very, very important is that the task itself depends on something bad having happened before. Let’s admit it: without a mistake there’s no task; without something wrong there’s no need for something good to be done to right it. Without an incomplete story there cannot be a sequel. Without a wrong theory there’s no need for a scientist to test his own. Therefore, the past has to be bad. Whether they succeed or not, the actions of a ‘fixer’ are expected to lead to an improvement, to a change in the wrong course of things. That’s why the intervention of a specialist, insofar as they are fixers-of-things, takes up an almost heroic aura.

Hunting for errors

Similar to plumbing, critical reading has its own professional fief. Academics will think of their work as significant in the present, while at the same time highlighting the insufficiency of their predecessors. In an academic dissertation or peer-reviewed article worth their title, there is a very clear demand for the assessment of previous work, which is expected to appear as incomplete. It is within the gap left uncovered by the predecessor that academic readers place their own performance. In this regard, the academic reader is by definition a fixer: a plumber of texts, a professional promising to provide the actual way of doing things.

The major task, here as in the case of plumbers, is to find that mistake, that shortcoming. An academic who writes his or her article is demanded (by professional rules, by peer-reviewing eyes, by colleagues and readers) to drill a hole into their field of expertise and plant inside it the seed of their own argument. In order for that seed to catch roots, it has to enjoy the photosynthesis of a well-discovered mistake.

Source: Odd Job Nation

Not long ago, I read a seemingly innocent article with a seemingly complicated title: “Promotional(meta)discourse in research articles in language and literary studies.” To take it to its nitty-gritty, the article is about how academics pitch themselves by downgrading others. It talks about “boosterism” and “self-advocacy” – two terms that speak for themselves. These may be only self-marketing techniques, the way they’re usually employed by professionals (doesn’t Pepsi thrive on showing how different it is from Coca Cola?). But behind the whole marketing thing, behind the pretentious assertion that irreverence is necessary if what you want is progress, lies the truth of The Mistake: this unavoidable engine that stands at the roots of everything.

Everything, really – you may ask? Of course, I say. Think no further than Adam and Eve and you’ll see what I mean.

Writing and garbage (a kind of advice, if I may)

A couple of days ago, Seth Godin published one of his brief but dense posts on the blog he is managing, and that post got me thinking.

Says Godin, on the blog:

"For every post that makes it to this blog, I write at least three, sometimes more.That means that on a regular basis, I delete some of my favorite (almost good) writing."

Godin wrote this to back up an argument about how organizations seem to be incapable of divorcing ideas that seemed too good to part with – often in spite of the logic of the market and the vindictive facts of efficiency.

I’m not thinking of organizations right now, and that’s simply because I believe Seth Godin’s post is so, so, so much about writing – about it in general, but especially about creative writing. The crux of the matter is this: we fall so deeply in love with our ideas, with our blood-stained, sweat-soaked pages, we often refuse to believe that some of them are just useless matter: the puss of those pages, the yucky bits. It’s not easy to believe otherwise, I know. It’s not easy to admit that we can be sources of waste more than generators of brilliance. And that may be due, to my mind, to the allegiance we have sworn to the idea of productivity.

Source: Written Words

Those who have given up all hope for a day job in favor of their writing adventure will know that once your life depends on it, you want every single word to shine in a way that makes it impossible to be ignored. And that is the dream of all creators. Nothing wrong with it. Nothing in essence, that is; but in practice? Isn't practice the testing ground of all theory? In practice, there is a lot of dead matter surrounding us. And I mean a lot. From a sentence we have backspaced into oblivion up to the most enchanting idea that’s never found the channel through language in order to live on a page.

Nothing else but human race

Writers do handle issues of life and death – they do it every day, they do it with every letter, they do it with every dream. Behind every success there is a ton of wondering, of doubt. What’s worse, behind every success there’s a lot of flotsam: not only scattered bits that make no sense, but also the painful memory of ideas that could have been and have never made it.

So what do we do with all this?

To answer the question let’s ask another one: What do we do with waste in general – with our domestic, daily garbage? The simple answer (in fact, I don’t think there could be a complex one) is this: we discard it. We chuck it away. We shake it off. We jettison it. So that we never see it again. The thing about garbage is that we never want it back. It is a form of embarrassment we inflict upon ourselves, and because of that we want it out of our sight. For good. The same goes, I guess, with writing. Ever since computers started being used (ever since typewriters have been forgotten, that is), it’s no longer possible to trace our writerly garbage. It’s gone for good. When we print a page out, we do it afresh. Every printed page is a page without blemishes, where discarded matter is never mentioned, never thought about, never acknowledged. And so, with every variant there is a form of forgetting taking place as well. Painful as it may seem in the beginning, it is all gone by the time the words appear on that white sheet freshly pulled out of the printer.

Glory to our masochistic selves!

This is what Godin’s post is about, I believe: about acknowledging that, no matter how much pain we feel – we do, eventually, forget things we have been deeply attached to. But this rupture will have to happen. There is very little text that shines after the first draft, unless you never doubt yourself – in which case, I would like to have the recipe, please, and I promise to start a campaign for dubbing you the God of Writing.

In reality, there’s more doubt in a creative act than leaves in the Amazonian forest. So all comes down to this: how to find, through all this doubt, the light that brings sparkles in our eyes? The answer I have in mind is this: Never write one draft alone. Always try, always shove stuff onto your pages, always have more versions to compare. If you don’t, you’ll never know the taste of alternatives. If you don’t delete your favorite writing you will never write that thing that becomes the favorite of others. And to do that, you need to get used to pain.

Source: Finding Wonderland

Yes, writing is an act of masochism – has anybody given you a different impression? Cultivating professional doubt is perhaps the peak of a writer’s standards of best practice. Doing away with the child of our brain is always a matter of severing an umbilical cord and watching that child float away, never to return. We watch and we cry; but, sooner or later, that child will be a distant memory.

What about hope?

This is not everything to be said, of course. Things we throw away are not exactly removed for good. The garbage in our trash cans doesn't vanish the moment we have discarded it. It is taken further, transported to another destination, handled by other people, processed, transformed. (From this very blog, for instance, to other places.) Yes, they may be doing the dirty work, but dirty work is done all the same.

What’s more, the garbage we throw away today stays with us forever, in forms that we may not always be conscious of. A writer’s style, his or her voice, his or her personality, his or her success, are things built in layers. Upon the ruins of a missed idea grows the luxuriant vegetation of a prosperous one. A word detested today may turn up tomorrow dressed like Prince Charming. An idea we kicked in the proverbial three years ago makes its way back, taking us by surprise long after we have forgotten it. This stuff happens a lot. It does. This is the backbone of writing, the meat and fat of creativity. This is the way forward.

Is Kathleen Winter's "Annabel" a Canadian novel?

I’m not sure if any other readers of Annabel have grown frustrated with the discussions televised in the second and third days of Canada Reads, around two weeks ago. Judges could simply not get over the issue of the pregnancy featuring in the novel. I don’t care if what I am saying here is a spoiler, because even if the episode of the pregnancy was meant to remain a secret, the judges have done a great job at making it known to the entire world. So now, we can talk about it without fear of disappointing other readers.

Motto:

“To what strange end hath some strange god made fair

The double blossom of two fruitless flowers?”

(Swinburne, Hermaphroditus)

When I was about thirty or so pages into Annabel I made a note on my bookmark to check if there were any allusions in the novel to Plato’s myth of the androgyne. With a hermaphrodite as the protagonist, the novel had presented itself as a likely contender to the reference.

So when I came upon the ‘pregnancy moment’ I knew I’d found what I’d been waiting for.

Wayne, the character in question, the novel’s protagonist, is discovered to have impregnated himself (unknowingly) due to a natural – says the author – disposition of hermaphrodite bodies to perform sexual functions of both male and female organs.

Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium, says this:

“The two parts of man (the Androgyne), each desiring his other half, came together and throwing their arms around one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one; they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect because they did not like to do anything apart.”

Wayne is found to be in a state of constant self-embracement. He behaves equally as a man and as a woman. He has the feelings of both, the physical attributes of both, the desires of both. Even the way he satisfies himself sexually, his idea of orgasm, is ambiguous. What’s more, he reaches a stage where the tension of his singularity is so great he takes no care of his external appearance – something that other characters notice. I found this to be Plato’s Symposium almost to the letter.

As a consequence, I was not at all concerned with the medical possibility of the act of pregnancy in a hermaphrodite body. There was no way I was going to trivialise the beauty of this book by checking out if such self-impregnations were possible. Well, the judges in Canada Reads thought it was worth their salt to play the role of fact-checkers. And what a show they made when they discovered ‘the medical truth.’

Canada Reads, Day 3
Source: CBC

Now, when it’s well known that Annabel is not the winning book, I can reflect on something that became apparent to me as soon as the debates were over. This time, I can say it with confidence: the judges were right to think that Annabel was not a Canadian book. That’s because the scope of the novel and its narrative force go well beyond the geographical limitations of a given country. I am not a Canadian, but I don’t think Annabel was written with Canada in mind. I may seem wrong, since so many places (even the imaginary ones) are so Canadian in nature, but the book certainly doesn’t present itself that way. Catherine Winter has aimed a lot farther and a lot deeper. And in order to arrive at this destination, she employed, at so many levels, this universal myth of the double, the doppelganger, the Janus Bifrons, the facts of coincidentia oppositorum, the internal conflict that transgresses issues of gender, sex, race or any other issues capable of generating binary oppositions. In other words, Annabel is not Canadian because it is too hermaphrodite, too unstable, too risky to pin to a single space or a single idea.

Annabel is a book freed of the strictures of geography, and yet a book in which geography features prominently, blending in with the characters, growing to overwhelm the human.

Unhinged characters

All people in Annabel are soft. They are not people of flesh and bone. They are people of words. So that even the harshest of them, the most brutal or unfair, is laid on the page with a light touch, similar to that of watercolour. There’s really something about the way these characters settle on the page that creates, in my mind, the whole mood of the narrative: a mood in which life is not fought-for but negotiated, and where sentiments are turned on the proper side the way you turn a pillow on the cool side on a hot summer day when your bed is soaked in perspiration.

These people are never complete. They have unresolved issues that loom large after they’ve had their narrative turn, or when they’ve disappeared from sight: like Treadway on his last tracking season, after which he comes resolved to avenge his son; or like Thomasina, who returns to her errand life in search for the best places on Earth; or like Jacinta, who drifts into madness, where all things oscillate between dream and reality. Because of this indecisiveness, no characterisation is ever complete. In almost every chapter there’s a new reason to rest on these characters’ physical appearances, or to delve into their anything-but-static psyches, as if we were seeing them for the first time.

Silky people, their actions - blobs of aquatint. That’s how I like to think about them. They never just speak. They speak while performing little domestic actions or paying tribute to little domestic memories, as if life on Earth were the only source of action. Jacinta and Thomasina talk to each other “as they spread jam on toast thinly, the way they both liked it.” Of her life in the city prior to the marriage, Jacinta remembers with striking accuracy “the pigeons who lived in the O of Browning’s department store.” That’s how the lives of these characters unfold: with exactitude; with the dot on the ‘i’ and the cross on the ‘t’; with details squeezed out of the diachronic nightmare of life.

While reading Annabel, one very often gets this feeling that one is midwifing a world into being. Somehow like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo, perhaps: a world that doesn’t explode into life, but develops slowly, through little additions, through little events that take place in an almost natural course of events. This is a world that’s constantly assessed but never invented.

Larger than life

But the novel, a text of in-betweens and dualities, is not only given to these engagements with the little world of domesticity. The other side of things is one that envelops the narrative in a gigantic, mythical veil; in a trans-human blanket.

When the unprecedented fact of a hermaphrodite child occurs to Jacinta, she asks Thomasina (the only other person who knows the secret):

‘’Will other people love it?’

‘That baby is all right the way it is. There’s enough room in this world.’

This is how Thomasina saw it, and it was what Jacinta needed to hear.”

Here, the world is weighed and found capacious. But it is not made into a capacious thing. It is merely assumed to be so. Because, as via the Platonic myth, the world, in its mythical (Labradorian?) age, used to be large enough to contain the third sex: the androgyne.

The world is large enough for all the people who inhabit the world of fictional Croydon Harbour to become palpable. People of flesh and bone, laid on the page with gentle touches, but who perceive geography on a verge between the grandiose and the sublime.

“They didn’t call this place the big land for nothing. It was big in a way that people who came in either respected and followed or disdained at their peril. You could live like a king in Labrador if you knew how to be subservient to the land, and if you did not know how, you would die like a fool, and many had done.”

This is the logic that affects Treadway directly, and the other characters in oblique but not unrelated ways.

Atmosphere

I could go on forever quoting this book. Catherine Winter provides metaphors so evocative they stay with the reader for long, long time. This is, by and large, a book of atmosphere. Its weight and appeal rest in the weight and appeal of its luxuriant descriptions. In this atmosphere, the characters live as if in a warm, comfortable amniotic liquid, refusing to be born: refusing, in other words, to be part of this world, in which us, the readers, reside. 

The colourful city of St John's, the opposite of fictional Croydon Harbour,
a place Kathleen Winter knows by heart.
Source: www.stjohns.ca

Like Macondo (I just can’t help treading this bridge!), the world of Annabel is a self-sufficient world, a world that could live without our reading it. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear someone saying that reading through this novel feels like violating the heavy secrets that make the atmosphere of the novel so dense.
But once you’ve started reading, secrets or no secrets, there’s no way you can stop, unless you find a goddamn good excuse. More importantly, this is not a book to skim through. There are surprises at every corner, beautiful things at every turn of the story. You can’t take a vacation without being burdened by the thought that you have missed a lot by not reading every sentence.

Labradorian winter
Source: www.perceptivetravel.com

This is the kind of reading after which you need a rest. Its imagery and metaphors come in such poetic avalanches, you need to remind yourself of how prosaic the real world actually is.