Writers Inc.

About Gerard Manley Hopkins on CBC radio

2011-04-22T22:10:00.001-04:00

CBC.ca | Ideas | Original Spare Strange

This CBC show provides a biography of Hopkins' life and why his poetry is still relevant.

If you want to learn more about the poet that I am studying for my master's thesis, check it out.

Kathy Acker's "Blood and Guts in High School"

2011-03-28T09:50:00.001-04:00

Of course just when first flipping through the novel/modern art/pastiche, I was taken aback at the sexual sketches, the Book of the Dead images and typewritten text, the drawn maps of her dreams, handwritten translation notes, and even at the narrative fragmentation morphing from script of a play to diary entries to poetry. Kathy Acker’s work solidly fits within Fredric Jameson’s perimeters of postmodernity’s depthlessness, play, and pastiche even before we start reading it! Once we do, however, we’re immediately confronted with an ambiguous incestuous relationship. I kept questioning, perhaps optimistically, if Johnny really was Janey’s father. After the destabilizing opening sequence, the narration continues the fragmentation of Janey’s identity by referring to Janus, her namesake, the two-faced goddess looking in opposite directions. Even by the end of the work, readers could never piece together a coherent identity or personality for her. This accentuates Jameson’s claim that postmodernity shifts the “dynamics of cultural pathology” from the modernist “alienation of the subject” to the “fragmentation of the subject” (PM 63).

I was the most interested in Acker’s plagiarism (or resurrecting and revitalizing) of Sextus Propertius’ poetry. The original’s eroticism, masochism, and themes of patriarchal sexual slavery and rape mirror Janey’s love-hate relationship with her pimp. Janey’s versions/translations are surprisingly close to other more authoritative translations, yet include snippets from her own reality: watching TV and writing poems instead of weaving and listening to a lyre, for instance. The overall effect of the poems, the narrative, the imagery, simulates the schizophrenic, incoherent attempts that Janey makes to defy her agony.

Zoe Whittall's "Bottle Rocket Hearts"

2011-03-20T23:28:00.001-04:00

Zoe Whittall’s debut novel Bottle Rocket Hearts has sparked several stimulating conversations in our home. When discussing her nuanced treatment of the separatist debate, my husband recounted his understanding of the 1995 referendum over the question of Quebec separating from Canada as a sixteen-year-old from Lac St-Jean, the region of the province that had the highest percentage of “yes” votes. He blames both the limited information that was available to this remote region (the only television stations in the area were TVA and Radio-Canada, for instance) and the history classes given in high school that emphasized the oppression of French-Canadians for the overwhelming optimism that separation would restore the rightful balance-of-power. He had not heard the voices of those like the novel’s Rachel who cautions that giving power to the Bloc Quebecois may only shift the power to one oppressed group (French-Canadians) who would continue to oppress marginalized groups (First Nations, immigrants, homosexuals, feminists, etc). I appreciated the varied opinions related through the characters: from Seven’s comic concerns of a diminishing marijuana supply from British Columbia (which we later learn only mask his real reasons: his rights as a homosexual and his estrangement from his separatist father) to Eve’s father’s family arriving in free buses from Ontario to join pro-Canada rallies to Della’s adherence to her father’s separatist political position although her mother was/is English-Canadian to Eve’s aunt’s ironic disgust over her lover being a separatist and not because she is a woman. It is also telling that Eve’s own placement of the “x” on the ballot is never revealed, reminding readers that not all Quebeckers were polarized (as XXXX (Katherine) says “it’s really not an us-against-them thing, for most Quebeckers) (68). Portraying this and other historical events through the eyes of bilingual, bi-cultural and marginalized Montrealers provided a perspective that I would never have considered if not for this book.

One such event is the characters’ reaction to the then-Quebec premier Parizeau’s comment that the separatists had lost their battle for independence because of the ethnic vote. Although they are not immigrants, Rachel and Eve respond with indignation. In fact, Eve calls him a “racist prick” (76). Della however tries to understand the reason behind his remark. She reasons that he is crushed by the weight of failure. My husband agrees with her. In our conversation he explained that before the referendum the Bloc Quebecois claimed that the federal government was sending immigrants and refugees to Montreal because they were likely to vote “no” out of loyalty to the government that had allowed them to come to Canada. He argues that Parizeau was criticizing this battle tactic of the federal government and not the immigrants themselves. Through Della’s perspective and then the ensuing conversation with my husband, I realized that there are other interpretations of this remark that I had always assumed was a cut-and-dry racist comment. Whittall explores these opinions and positions with insight and skill that makes for an enlightening reading experience without becoming a textbook for Quebec’s political history. Unlike Hugh MacLennan’s use of type-characters of Two Solitudes, she is able to breathe life into the debate with her complex, realistic characters. Through the perspective of the gay community, the voices of the marginalized are heard, not just those of the dominant English-French polemic.

As in “real life,” the reactions to homosexuality in the novel are varied and nuanced, and also as in “real life,” the differences in opinion are often generational. Both Seven’s and Rachel’s parents have cut ties to their children because of their sexual orientation. Rachel’s parents blame her choice to engage in such a “lonely lifestyle” for her death and not the homophobic skinheads who murdered her (129). Perhaps the most open acknowledgment of the gay lifestyle among the parents of the characters comes from Eve’s parents who continue to develop their relationship with their daughter. Yet even they “tolerate” homosexuals and do not “accept” them as Eve desires. The society as a whole is also shown to be intolerant. Not only by Rachel’s murder, but also through Della and Seven’s recounting of the police crack-down of a warehouse party, the reader, as well as Eve, learns of the violence committed against the community. The Sex Garage raid and the ensuing police violence towards those protesting the incident also underscores the mainline position of intolerance towards gays. Whittall succeeds in providing context to the oppression of Montreal homosexuals during the 1990s.

In fact, one of the aspects that I most enjoyed about this novel was its place in 90s culture. It is quite rare to read a book that is set in the era when I was in high school. The cultural references, well-known people and events, and concerns of the era were much more meaningful to me than books set in any other time period. Since the 90s were a period of relative stability and economic prosperity in the United States, where I grew up, I was reminded that it was not the case for Quebec. In fact it was a turbulent decade for the province. The decade began just after the Polytechnique massacre, uniting many women (including Eve) to the feminist movement. Not long afterwards, the Oka crisis revealed the prejudices of the Quebec and Canadian governments towards First Nation peoples. The Hells Angels were active in Montreal during this period, as revealed in Eve and Della’s experience of one of their bombs exploding nearby buildings. AIDS became a major concern as indicated by Seven’s involvement in the AIDS Community Care, his own status as HIV+, and his album of obituaries of those of his friends who had succumbed to the illness. On a less serious note I liked being reminded of my own experiences, such as watching O.J. Simpson’s white bronco on its slow get-away or listening to Alanis Morrisette’s album “Jagged Little Pill” on my portable CD player on my bus rides home from school. Although I would never have chosen this book out of the thousands in a bookstore, I am glad that I was assigned it for a class. Otherwise I would have missed out on one of the most enjoyable, interesting, readable, conversation-starting, and thought-provoking books I’ve ever read.

Check out the "Globe and Mail" review/rave: http://bp2.blogger.com/_SjHd9N2ipFY/RliAlOOQSJI/AAAAAAAAADs/s2LDWVs20O0/s1600-h/globereview.jpg

And check out the video the publishers made to promote the book for Canada Reads (it made it into the Top 10!)

Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon"

2011-03-20T22:41:00.001-04:00

Morrison's interweaving of the irreal with the real in Song of Solomon reminds me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism (One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera) and and also that of Gloria Naylor's Mama Day. Like Mama Day, Pilate is able to manipulate unseen forces in order to enrich others' lives or to punish them. She provides nourishment to her people in the guise of literal food (she always starts a conversation by offering food, usually peaches), pleasurable soul-food (by making wine and whiskey), the sustenance of life and regeneration (providing the lust concoction that leads to Milkman's birth), the sustenance of health (as a natural healer), providing peace (by healing the emotional wounds inflicted by arguments), providing manna as prophetess (announcing Milkman's birth through song, for instance), and protecting her people as punisher of wrongdoing (whipping Hagar because she tries to kill Milkman).

She is the Mother of her nation, a navel-less Eve ensuring the continuity of her bloodline. Pilate is the ultimate Black leader, a nonconformist who is able to balance eccentricities (the irreal) with common sense (the real). Although Milkman is the protagonist of the novel, Pilate's overwhelming presence surpasses his own. She guides him, saves him from prison, teaches him and rebukes him, so that she becomes the hero of the novel. Although her name links her to the shameful killer of the Christ, Pilate's life-giving powers and sacrificial death also connect her to the Resurrection and to immortality.

Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior"

2011-03-20T21:39:00.000-04:00

While reading The Woman Warrior, Hong Kingston’s word choice struck me. For example, in the recounting of “White Tigers,” after the woman warrior leads her army to Peiping and beheads the emperor, they attack Mongols “en route” to visit the Great Wall. This French expression inserted into a Chinese tale pulled me out of the narrative for a moment. My immediate reaction was to criticize such discordant language, but soon realized that this was the author’s attempt to reify the central theme of the novel: the anxiety induced by attempting to reconcile two distinct cultures.

Specifically, Hong Kingston recounts the experience of immigrant children navigating the culture and language of their parents’ homeland and those of their surroundings. The wisdom supplied by their parents does not translate onto their new experience. For instance her incomprehension of her mother’s explanation for why she tastes sugar in her mouth when she has not eaten any (that her grandmother in China is sending her candy) emphasizes her disconnect with Chinese legends. This anecdote leads to the conclusion that to her parents, “home” meant China, a word that “suspended America." The inclusion of motherline symbols (umbilical cords, midwives, women storytellers, string, circles, loops and hoops) further emphasize the tragedy of a mother not able to teach her daughter how to live and survive. Instead of retelling the woman warrior stories to empower her daughter, she uses them to dismiss her victories. Therefore when Hong Kingston earns straight A’s, her mother retorts that it is nothing compared to a girl who saved her village. From the first line of the novel, she tells her daughter directly “you must not tell,” and symbolically has cut her tongue. In order to find her voice, Hong Kingston must break free from matriarchal control, beginning a new motherline that will provide strength to her daughters.

Slaughter-House Five

2011-02-05T15:42:00.000-05:00

Time travel and interplanetary travel as both narrative device and critique on Western assumptions of the absoluteness of time and space allow Kurt Vonnegut to interweave and interrelate the two World Wars to the Vietnam War. References to the painting The Spirit of ’76, the novel The Red Badge of Courage (Simon & Schuster Enriched Classic), and the battle for Hill 875 affiliate the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and the Korean War to his deconstruction of political metanarratives of patriotism. Time travel allows a juxtaposition of the lies told to Pilgrim’s (and Vonnegut’s) generation about WWII to be inscribed on the war of his son’s generation, the Vietnam War. Voyages to Tralfamadore also undermine American metanarratives as the aliens provide an outsider’s perspective to the narrative.

The metanarrative of American imperialism calls for the sacrifice of its citizens (mainly young men) to expand its “much-envied” systems of capitalism and democracy to better the lives of those under the “oppressive” system of communism. Vonnegut undermines these presumptions by retelling his experience at Dresden when Americans bombed civilians under false pretences. Americans, not the enemy, are shown to be “a threat to world peace” (142). Even the disjoined paragraph structure of the novel undermines grand narratives, allowing for gaps in memory, enforced and voluntary silence, and repressed memory. These breaks in narrative emulate the absence of the Dresden raid in the Official History of the Army Air Force in World War Two, a conscious decision to keep the events “a secret from the American people” (191). Likewise, the inclusion of living people into a world of fictional characters, some of whom appear in the context of Vonnegut’s other novels, causes the reader to doubt the authenticity of the information provided, thereby calling into question the authoritative voice of historians. For instance the fictive Howard W. Campbell, Jr, the protagonist of Vonnegut’s earlier novel Mother Night, quotes an actual line attributed to the American humorist Kin Hubbard in his critique of capitalism, which he calls America’s “most destructive untruth” (129). Capitalism, he claims, has made American prisoners-of-war the “most self-pitying, least fraternal, and dirtiest of all prisoners of war...incapable of concerted action” (131), hence not the exemplars of “truth, justice, and the American way” which the metanarrative presupposes. As the narrator relates, there are almost no Supermans, almost no All-American boy heroes in this story. Throughout the narrative only Edgar Derby stands up for the American ideals of “freedom and justice and opportunities and fair play for all” (164), only to be killed for a petty crime soon afterwards. Hence, the hero does not triumph as in a Greek epic, but is doomed. Even in the commodity of ideas, the best ideas, like those of Kilgore Trout, cannot rise to the top if, like Trout’s novels, the “prose [is] frightful” (110). The packaging and marketing of ideas, heroes, ideologies, etc is shown to outweigh their inherent value, thus undermining capitalist ideals. Democracy, another component of “the American way,” is also ridiculed through Edgar Derby’s election as the leader of the American prisoners-of-war. An Englishman calls for nominations, when there are none, the Englishman nominates Derby for them, after which two or three of the hundreds of soldiers second the motion while “[m]ost of the Americans were in stupors or asleep” (144).

The Traflamadorians’ ability to observe a fourth dimension, allowing for the collapsing of chronological time, attacks the foundation of history and the causal relationships of the metanarratives (example: if you are good, you will be rewarded, if bad, you will be punished). Their perspective of reality differs greatly from that of the metanarratives propagated by Western societies. Narratives concerning sex and reproduction (114), chronological linear time (114), war and peace (117), free will (151), the form of human bodies (87), Christianity (108-110), conceptions of beauty (113), etc are all shown to be faulty, subject to the same perspective-shifting as changing of a pair of eyeglasses, being blind, or suffering from blurred vision engenders (emphasized by Billy Pilgrim’s vocation of optometrist). In fact the Tralfamadorians’ ability to see the future as a fact already accomplished indicates that the American-centric belief of causing the destruction of the universe is completely unfounded, since a banal mistake made by a Tralfamadorian test pilot will bring its demise. Depthlessness, as Jameson suggests, reigns. Similarly both the “Three Musketeers,” as signifying to Billy Pilgrim the death of three fellow combatants, and the “Milky Way,” as a reality to him in his space travels, are both reduced to commodities: the candy bars his wife consumes.

The History of Emily Montague

2011-01-29T23:23:00.000-05:00

As the first novel written about and set in Canada, Frances Brooke’s 1769 epistolary novel, The History of Emily Montague, contains surprisingly little insight into the political and socioeconomic realities of post-Conquest Quebec. In fact, what we can deduce is Brooke’s prejudice of colonialization. For example she portrays the land/landscape as both “naturally rich,” thus ideal for English gentleman farmers to cultivate, and as “sublimity” itself, in order to entice their wives to accompany them (letters 22 and 131). The lives of the protagonists are shown to be full of leisure and pleasant company, completely removed from and unaffected by the “squabbling at Quebec” (letter 45). Hence, Brookes assures the English gentry that they can comfortably integrate into Canada without involvement in the inconveniences of “some dregs of old disputes” that they may be wary of encountering (letter 45). Other fears that potential colonists may have, such as of the harsh winters, uprisings by the French, or savageries by the native population, are all diffused. Thus the narrative is framed as an argument for the continued colonization of Quebec by Brooke’s audience: the English elite.

This ideal settler resembles Ed Rivers and also his correspondent in England, John Temple: single, relatively wealthy, and healthy. Rivers provides his friend many examples as to the advantages of living in Canada which I read as Brooke’s appeal to such men. Even if most of her readers were likely women, Brooke’s narrative gives them arguments to convince their husbands to move to Canada. One such enticement is financial and social betterment. Rivers tells Temple that he “cannot live in England on [his] present income, though it enables [him] to live en prince in Canada” (letter 36, italics in original). Female readers could use this anecdotal evidence to prod their husbands into making the move. If these potential colonists were resistant to the hardships of cultivating the land of Canada, Brooke responds to this argument by emphasizing the fertility and availability of the land; one can be a gentleman farmer even in the New World. In fact, Rivers tells his sister that “the pleasure of cultivating lands here is ... much superior to what can be found in the same employment in England” (letter 7). This is partly due to the “extreme fertility” of the “naturally rich” soil which makes growing crops possible even for the most lazy (letter 22). Furthermore Rivers points out that the land is available to those that come to settle it; again to his sister, Rivers writes that the “far greater part [of the land] remains unpossest, and courts the hand of labour for cultivation” (letter 2). The “wilds” of Canada are thus presented as tameable, even by the least experienced.

The land beyond the farms and gardens and outside of the city limits is shown to be formidable, yet safe even for young single women to venture into. Here Brooke seems to be directly addressing her educated, leisurely female reading audience. She relieves their fears of the harsh wilderness so that they will not be resistant to their husbands’ plans to immigrate to America and may even encourage them to become colonists. To do so, Brooke has the character Arabella (Bell) Fermor emphasize the awe-inducing aspects of nature and minimize its dangers and hardships when addressing her friend, Ed Rivers’ sister Lucy. The comparison of the landscape and natural phenomena with that of England is one method of making this argument. For instance, she claims that the “thousand wild graces” of “bold, picturesque, romantic nature” that “reigns in all her wanton luxuriance” in Quebec “mock[s] the cultivated beauties of Europe” (letter 10). Thus “the thunder is more magnificent and aweful than in Europe, and the lightening brighter and more beautiful than in Europe” (letter 10). Note that here “aweful” takes on its significance of “inspiring awe” (Random House Dictionary 2011). Again describing the “wild magnificence” of Montmorenci Falls, she writes that “you are struck with an awe...from the grandeur of a scene, which is one of the noblest works of nature” (letter 81). Another hardship of Canadian life, that of the long, harsh winters, is also shown to be rather agreeable. Bell assures Lucy that “the season of which you seem to entertain such terrible ideas, is that of the utmost chearfulness and festivity” to such a degree that she considers a winter in Quebec to be “pleasanter ... than that of England” (letter 80 and 52). Winter is not to be dreaded, but rather enjoyed as the “season of general dissipation” in which “amusement is the study of every body” (letter 52). She estimates that there are only a dozen severely cold days in a winter (letter 80), but even these days are bearable because of furs and their “uncommonly warm” houses and carriages (letter 52). These fears are thus dissipated.

Brooke realizes that others may be wary of entering a hostile political environment. To this end she portrays the French as lazy and ineffectual (See Letter 6 for example). In fact, the English protagonists rarely have to interact with the French so there is no cause for conflict. The C anadians are never shown to be a threat, but rather in need of English influence to overcome their superstitious, backwards religion and their inferior government structures (See Letter 117). As for the natives, although Rivers declares that war is “the business of their lives,” Bell passes an agreeable afternoon with several native women (letter 4 and 16). Anecdotal evidence shows the natives to engage in death dances and drinking the blood of Englishmen (letter 152 and letter 4) leading to the natural conclusion that increased English influence over these “savages” is needed (See letter 152). Thus, the French and the natives alike must be ruled by the English for their own good.

Nausicaa episode of Ulysses

2011-01-29T14:51:00.010-05:00

The narrative arc of this episode corresponds to the Alexandrine school of thought for the composition of dramatic plays. In fact, Stephen Dedalus makes mention of this schema in relation to Shakespeare’s plays (in the Scylla and Charybdis episode). Like Hamlet, "Nausicaa" also starts with an introduction of the scene and protagonist, the “protasis,” followed by a continuation of the main action, the “epitasis,” after which the action meets its climax, the “catastasis,” before attaining its final event, the “catastrophe,” such as a death in a tragedy or a marriage in a comedy. The climax of this episode is obviously the orgasm accompanied by fireworks. The protasis (the introduction of Gerty to the narrative) and epitasis (the flirtation) lead up to this moment from which the catastrophe acts as a refractory period. An analysis of the structure of Nausicaa’s narrative arc expounds Bloom’s response to Citizen’s assumptions of Irishness as presented in "Cyclops" as well furthering the opinion of the impotence of Irish revivalism as Stephen Dedalus projects in his parable A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The Parable of the Plums (in the "Aeolus" episode).

In the epitasis, Gerty is presented as a Nausicaa-figure, a Mary-figure, and a personification of Ireland. Sitting on the shore with the Mary, Star of the Sea cathedral behind her, remark the similarities in her stance to these portrayals of Mary, Star of the Sea.

1.St. Mary Star of the Sea, Houston, TX

3.Mary, Star of the Sea portrayed on a card from Slovenia

These two latter roles suggest Gerty undermines the three “nets” Stephen Dedalus vows to “fly by”: religion, nationalism, and language (from Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man). Then, as Citizen’s granddaughter (from the "Cyclops" episode), Gerty again subverts the nationalist argument. She is also related to her fictional counterpart Gerty Flint, the heroine of Maria Cummin’s sentimental novel The Lamplighter (of which Gerty makes mention). Lastly, Gerty can be seen as a representative Nora Barnacle, Joyce’s lifelong partner with whom he had his first date on June 16, 1904. The explicit passage from a letter from Joyce to Barnacle on December 3, 1909, adds credence to my position. Because of its explicit nature, read it here if you desire. Like Nora, Gerty “leads the way” near Ringsend. Also Nora's “saintlike eyes” echo Gerty’s association to the Virgin.

After introducing Gerty to the narrative, the action rises when Bloom becomes aware of Gerty’s presence on the beach. The epitasis begins when the twins, whom Gerty and her two companions are baby-sitting, kick a ball towards Bloom. The adman comes in contact with the consumer. Gerty, as consumer, has been influenced by the beauty standards projected in the London magazines she consults, The Princess’s Novellettes and Lady’s Pictorial, from which she decides to purchase English products such as Beetham’s Larola, Widow Welch’s female pills, and Dolly Dyes. By packaging herself as a feminine woman, Garry Leonard argues that “Gerty has a better understanding of sexuality than Bloom does”. Based on Lacan’s theory of “The Woman,” he contends that Gerty has realized that women must masquerade as what they are not in order to capture the attention of men who want to imagine that they are who they believe themselves to be. Of course, her masquerade hides the fact that she has a limp. Bloom is glad that he didn’t know of this “defect” until after she put herself “on show”. Although Bloom thinks of her as a commodity for whom “[n]o reasonable offer [is] refused”, Gerty voluntarily offers herself to satisfy his sexual appetite. In fact Gerty considers Bloom in terms of the colonizer, her “new conquest”. Both feminist critical theory and political readings of the scene interpret Gerty as a commodity; as a woman, Gerty tries to attain a “male-defined standard” (Leonard) and as Ireland, she is subject to England not by force, but by choice. Neither Gerty nor Ireland are portrayed as “raped” but rather “whoring” themselves.

Although the catastasis, the ejaculation, is the climax of the episode, it is in fact an anti-climax. Bloom’s spermatozoid are useless, like the plumstones the “[t]wo Dublin vestals” spit out of their mouths from Nelson’s Pillar in Dedalus’s Parable of the Plums (from the "Aeolus" episode). As an Irishman, as Bloom insists he is, Bloom’s failure to produce a male heir forebodes the downfall of the Irish nationalist movement. Without a new generation to “grasp the baton,” its efforts will also be ineffectual and vain. This national impotence can be seen apart from his ejaculation and may also suggest the irrelevance of the Catholic faith. For example, he notices that his watch has stopped which is immediately linked to his reproductive abilities as Cissy remarks that “his waterworks [are] out of order”. This is followed by a reference to the second verse of the hymn they hear coming from the church. The hymn, the Tantum ergo, finishes with the lyric “omnipotence”, which paired with the imagery of the candles setting fire to the flowers at the altar bring to mind Bloom’s “languid floating flower,” “the limp father of thousands”. In this context then, consider the phrase “the memory of the past”. Of itself the line seems insignificant until reconnected to its origin as a lyric in the song “There is a Flower that Bloometh,” at which time the pun becomes clear.

Lastly, the action falls to a catastrophe, which in the Alexandrine use of the term may refer to a tragic ending, but may just as well refer to a joyous occasion. In the case of “Nausicaa” both readings are possible, although I find that the evidence for a tragic conclusion is more compelling. One symbolic example is the bat which flies above both Gerty and Bloom. As archetype, the bat is the primordial enemy and portent of peril or torment. As vampire, it recalls man feeding on woman in sexual frenzy, such as in Dedalus’ poem in which “he comes, pale vampire...his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss” (in the "Proteus" episode), then as he develops the poem the mouth heads south. In Finno-Urgic tradition, the bat is one of the forms the soul takes when it leaves the body during sleep. Similarly, “ba,” the expression Bloom repeats in reference to the bat, is “the soul,” pictured by ancient Egyptians as a bird with a human head, which was thought to leave the body at death. Lastly, the nine “cuckoos” which complete the episode could foretell Bloom and Gerty’s marriage in nine years after its traditional connotation, but “nine” in the numerological chart refers to eternity, which would mean Gerty never marries. As a tragedy, Bloom’s association of the sunset with Home Rule’s “sun setting in the southeast”, as opposed to the northwestern sunrise of Home Rule represented on the headpiece of the Freeman’s Journal predicts the downfall of the movement.

My main sources and references for this essay are:

Gifford, Don and Robert J. Seidman. Ulysses Annotated. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 2008. Print.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Oxford University Press,

2008. Print.

---. Selected Letters of James Joyce. New York: Viking Press, 1976. Print.

---. Ulysses. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

Leonard, Garry. Advertising and Commodity Culture in Joyce. Gainesville: University Press of

Florida, 1998. Print.

The Crying of Lot 49

2011-01-29T13:38:00.003-05:00

After studying White Noise, I was able to identify similar marks of postmodern thought in Thomas Pyn The Crying of Lot 49. For example in both television is pervasive, as in the homes of many Americans at the time. Like Jack Gladney who tries to “[f]ind the codes and messages” in television, Oedipa Maas tries to unravel the significance of Metzger’s/Baby Igor’s film Cashiered and later that of W.A.S.T.E. and The Tristero. Neither is able to make the necessary connections that would make sense of these perceived codes and messages, a reflection of postmodern thought which insists on the absence of absolutes. If even science is suspect, religion a conspiracy to numb/dumb the population, and government to be feared, only paranoia remains. All authorities, such as historians and sacred texts are shown to have no founding. For instance, the recounting of the skirmish between the Confederate man-of-war “Disgruntled” and Russian cruisers is “not too clear”: “One of them may have fired, if it did then the other responded; but both were out of range”. Here authoritative text is also deemed unreliable: “If you believe an excerpt from the “Bogatir” or “Gaidamak”’s log ... now somewhere in the Krasnyi Arkhiv” the “Disgruntled” vanished during the attack. Similarly Maas is never able to find the definitive version of the Courier’s Tragedy. There is no original, only copies of copies like Metzger’s analysis of an actor playing a lawyer who, in front of a jury, “becomes an actor”. In the bio-pic of Metzger’s life, a one-time lawyer plays “an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to being an actor”. Although the pilot to the film is in a climate-controlled vault in a Hollywood studio so that it is indestructible, the version they are watching has the reels out of order. Likewise nature is imitated as an “artificial windstorm” blowing a statue’s dress in front of the hotel and the artificial island surrounded by the fake Lake Inverarity.

Birthday cards

2010-07-15T15:46:00.000-04:00

Yeah, most cards are rather corny, of the "Hope lovely surprises are coming your way / To make your Birthday a wonderful day" sort. Yet, this year, I've received so many beautiful, smart, and funny cards for my birthday.

A quote written in one of them by Thoreau: Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think there is nothing, not even a crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

This one reads: birthdays...what a perfect time to get down with your bad self.

My friend Lizz sent me one that reminds us that "With each passing year, we need to accept and appreciate ourselves for who we are....Smart, special, super, amazing, awesome, wonderful women!" It reminds me of a song we learned as 5th graders: I like myself, I'm worth a lot, don't say I'm not, 'cause you can't see inside of me, huh!

Another funny one from my sis:

Thank you my dear friends for making me laugh and making me think as well as making me feel so loved...as always. You're great! -Sarah

Imagism

2010-06-18T11:59:00.004-04:00

Imagism, a school of modern poetry founded by Ezra Pound, seeks to portray an image with words, hence its name. The goal is also to use the exact word and to employ as few words as possible to portray the image. For example the title of Pound's poem "In a Station of the Metro," is almost half the length of the poem itself. Originally the poem was 30 lines long, but Pound destroyed it because it was the work "of second intensity." To condense the impact, he rewrote the poem, this time half of its original length. Then a year later he rewrote the poem to the form we know it today:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals, on a wet, black bough.

Pound tells the story of the inspiration for this Imagist poem in the memoir he wrote about the artist Gaudier-Brzeska (pages 86-89). While in a station of the Paris metro, he saw "a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion."

The goal of an imagist poem is to recreate a visual image with verbal utterances using the most exact words possible.

My friend, Nathalie Le Beller, wrote a poem in the imagist form for a class we had together. I feel the image as well as the emotion is well captured.

With No Ink

with no ink
left

the empty pen
scratches

invisible words and
drawings

against the used
paper.

This one my friend Lysandre wrote...which I just love for its imagery and feeling.

Carnival

Faces
Round unseeing
Eyes twisted frozen;
Pushed piled grotesque
Lifeless, carnivalesque.

Another friend from my class, Alisa, wrote this one. The rhyme scheme emphasizes perfection and also the motion of waves.

The Ocean Touching You
Waves glide through one another
Admirable in perfection
When they leave the weave and wander
Perfect meets interruption.

Read aloud you can almost hear the waves crashing.

Cadence

2010-06-18T11:12:00.004-04:00

Cadence is often neglected when constructing a poem. For Ezra Pound, one of the initiators of the Imagist school of poetry, cadence was essential to the form.

Think of it like this...a runner has 2 minutes to run 2 laps. If the first lap takes 1 ½ minutes, the second must only take 30 seconds. The distance is the same for both laps, but the cadence is greatly varied.

I kept this point in mind while writing a poem in the Imagist model for a British poetry class.

Being

Groggy... morning... waking... slowly....

Yawn... long...

Fist to eye and foot to floor

"Being": noun to verb

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

2010-05-20T22:24:00.005-04:00

This is also a summary of a presentation given by classmates in a 19th century British novel class.

Wuthering Heights is the only novel written by Charlotte Brontë's (the author of Jane Eyre) sister, Emily.

A summary of the novel's characters can be found here.

Family Trees:
   Wuthering Heights
   Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw
Hindley m. Frances Catherine m. Edgar Linton Heathcliff (adopted) m. Isabella Linton
Hareton Earnshaw Catherine Linton

     Thrushcross Grange
   Mr. and Mrs. Linton
   Edgar m. Catherine Earnshaw Isabella m. Heathcliff (adopted by Earnshaw)
   Catherine Linton Linton Heathcliff

Catherine and Linton marry. After he dies, at the book's end, she is planning on marrying Hareton Earnshaw.

Time-line:
1771: The owner of the manor Wuthering Heights Mr. Earnshaw, adopts an orphan, Heathcliff.
1773: Mrs. Earnshaw dies.
1774: Their son, Hindley, is sent to college.
1777: Hindley Earnshaw marries Frances; Mr. Earnshaw dies.
1778: Hareton is born to Hindley and Frances; Frances dies.
1780: Heathcliff runs away; the owner of the manor Thrushcross Grange Mr. Linton dies.
1783: Edgar Linton and Catherine Earnshaw marry, uniting the two families
1784: Heathcliff and Isabella Linton marry; Edgar and Catherine Earnshaw Linton have a daughter, Catherine; Catherine Earnshaw dies; Heathcliff and Isabella have a son, Linton Heathcliff; Hindley Earnshaw dies.
1797: Isabella dies.
1801: Catherine Linton and Linton Heathcliff marry; Edgar and Linton die.
1802: Heathcliff dies.
1803: Catherine and Hareton are to be married.

Themes:
Love: destructive love, marriages based on social advancement vs. passionate love, weakness and manipulation, successful/hopeful love, familial love.
Social Class: can be seen in the architecture of the manors, within the characters
Revenge

The trailer for the 1992 film:

Buy the book here:

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

2010-05-20T20:54:00.002-04:00

Based on a summary by some of my classmates in a 19th century British novel class.

Plot Summary:
When the creature that Victor Frankenstein comes to life, Victor is so frightened he leaves but so does the monster. Victor becomes depressed thinking about the monster's possible return. When he hears of his five-year-old brother's death he goes to the scene of the murder in Geneva where he discovers that the creature he made has killed his brother. Eventually the two speak, the creation sharing with the creator stories of his bouts of loneliness. He asks Frankenstein to create a female creature to accompany him, an "Eve." Although Victor initially agrees, under the condition that his creature will stay far from him and his family afterwards, apprehension over the mayhem that two creatures could cause to humankind, he destroys the second creation before she comes to life. His creature is so angry that he kills Victor's fiancée in revenge. Victor is charged with the murder and imprisoned although he is later acquitted of the crime. He marries his cousin, Elizabeth, but she too is murdered by the creature. Victor thus pursues the creature in an attempt to destroy it, keeping it from causing further harm. He follows him to the Arctic where Victor meets Walton, a ship captain, and shares his unbelievable story with him. The novel is composed of letters that Walton writes to a Mrs. Saville to convey the account. Frankenstein dies and his creature, overwhelmed by sorrow, destroys himself on a funeral pyre.

Themes:
Death: many characters die throughout the novel; an execution; murders; suicide; manhunts; cemeteries; creating the monster from bodies.
Effects of Rejection and Isolation: Victor and society rejects his creation. Victor does so out of guilt and fear. Society out of fear and prejudice. The monster feels lonely, unloved, and unwanted which leads to murder.
Reversal of the Roles and the Burden: Victor is the hunter, then the monster becomes the hunter, ending with Victor again being the hunter.

The trailer to the 1931 movie:

And that of the 2004 version:

Buy the book:

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

2010-05-20T20:51:00.002-04:00

As the 2 past posts, this is based on a summary prepared by fellow students in a 19th century British novel class.

Like Gaskell's North and South, Dickens' novel is also an industrial/social novel which takes place during England's industrial revolution. It is also a moral tale, didactically revealing the downfalls of being overly dependent on the rational to the detriment of the enjoyable. Hence, the two main concepts of the novel are the opposing poles of fact and fancy.

Characters:
Fact:
Mr. Gradgrind: a school principal, a utilitarian. He raises his children to follow the philosophy of fact. He adopts one of the students in his school, Sissy, when her circus performer father deserts her.
Mr. Bounderby: one of Mr. Gradgrind's friends, also a utilitarian, claims to be a safe-made man.
Louisa Gradgrind: Mr. Gradgrind's eldest child. She marries Mr. Bounderby based on rational evidence. She falls prey to a seducer.
Tom Gradgrind: Mr. Gradgrind's second child. He works with Mr. Bounderby to escape his father's influence. He does not have the necessary tools to manage his life.

Fancy:
Sissy Jupe: Represents the balance between fact and fancy.
Stephen Blackpool: the embodiment of the working class.

Themes:
Utilitarian education: be efficient to achieve the greatest amount of happiness for the most people. Children are therefore raised to be machines that will please their future industrialist employers.
Economic laissez-faire: capitalism without limits
Social mobility and humanism.

Buy the novel here:

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

2010-05-20T20:27:00.004-04:00

This summary is also based on presentations made by fellow students in a 19th century English novel class.

North and South was first published as a serial in Charles Dickens' weekly, Household Words from September 1854 to January, 1855. In it, Gaskell presents the industrial life of Manchester, England by portraying the fictitious Milton. She had settled with her husband in Manchester so she had a first-hand account of this massive industrial city (based mostly on the cotton industry), using it as a backdrop of her industrial novels. In 1847 trade slowed causing wage reduction and generated a strike.

Plot Summary:
Margaret Hale is an emotionally-strong young middle-classed woman. Her family moves from the prosperous south of England to the industrial north. There she meets John Thorton, the wealthy owner of the local mill. He exposes the struggles of industrialization from a businessman's perspective. She also makes friends with Bessy Higgins, from the working class, and from her learns of the harsh realities of the mill workers that are on strike. A love/hate relationship develops between John Thorton and Margaret as she attempts to make him aware of the strikers' needs and of their miserable living conditions.

Themes:
North of England vs. the South of England: The differing lifestyles of those living in northern England from those living in the south greatly caused great cultural differences among the two areas. Industrialization brings technology, factories and a burgeoning economy, but also diseases and pollution to Milton. Industrialization commoditized humans as dispensable workers.

Sickness and Death: Create a separation between the strong and the weak. Strong-minded characters (Margaret, John) survive in Milton despite the poor living conditions while weaker characters (Bessy and Mr. and Mrs. Hale) often get sick and die.

As a social/industrial novel, North and South reveals feminist concerns, addresses educational deficiencies, discusses some of the economical issues of colonialism, as well as putting the industrial revolution to the forefront.

This is a trailer of the 2004 BBC television series based on the novel:

Buy the book:

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility

2010-05-20T17:49:00.004-04:00

These summaries are based on presentations given by fellow students in a 19th Century British Novel class.

Pride and Prejudice (1813)
This is Austen's second of six novels. The original title was First Impressions which perhaps better captures the moral lesson of the dangers of mistaken first impressions. It is a romantic comedy of manners, but it is also a moral tale, offering biting social satire as to the superficiality of the gentry.

It has consistently rated in the most popular novels ever written: over 20 million copies have been sold. It has faux-sequels, been adapted to screen and stage, reworked with Zombies and spawned fan clubs and guides to romance.

Plot Summary:

The five unmarried Bennet sisters cannot inherit their father's manor as it is entitled to a male heir. The novel, set in turn-of-the-19th-century England, present the ups and downs of their searches for the right husbands, aided by their mother. Austen humorously portrays this "man hunt" by exposing the prejudices and vanity of aristocrats. The underlying social reality of the period is made clear: a woman's social status is directly related to that of her husband, while a man's social status is based on wealth.

Themes and Social Context:
The opening sentence of the book, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife," touches neatly on three of the principle themes.

Prejudice: Most characters harbour prejudices, both positive and negative, towards those of higher and lower social classes. The main plot is based on a negative prejudice that leads Elizabeth to abhor her suitor, Darcy, and refuse his hand in marriage

Personal Fulfilment: As demonstrated by Elizabeth, fulfilment of a married woman depends on her ability to find love, her capacity to reason well, and the freedom to make her own decisions.

Marriage: Jane Austen presents three types of marriages in the novel.
Desirable marriage: based on love, mutual compatibility, and good manners.
Practical marriage: based on financial needs and convenience
Undesirable marriage: based on poor judgement and lust

Check out the difference between the 1940 version and the 2005 version of the same scene!

And just for fun, the book trailer for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls

Sense and Sensibility (1811)

Austen's first published novel.

Major Themes:
Marriage: Presented as the ultimate fulfilment in a woman's life
Matriarchy vs. Patriarchy: Absence of paternal authority and controlling mothers.
Reason vs. Emotion: Finding equilibrium between them.

The book trailer for Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. (It won Amazon's best book video of 2009)

Psychological Disorders in White Noise

2010-05-18T17:13:00.001-04:00

My friend and classmate, Vanessa Bergeron, explores mental disorders in Don Delillo's novel White Noise. She argues that these mental disorders are caused by the rapid tehnological and social changes which took place in the western world in the 1980s. Here is a summary of her essay:

Don Delillo’s novel White Noise, which takes place in the mid-eighties in the fictional Midwestern town of Blacksmith, encapsulates the mental anguish caused by such change, a state for which American writer and futurist philosopher Alvin Toffler has coined the term “future shock.” Delillo has said that his novel “is about fear, death, and technology. A comedy, of course." (This is a great insight into the postmodern Black humour that pervades the novel). “Fear, death, and technology” cause most of the adult characters to suffer from mental disorders. By referring to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM IV), published by the American Psychiatric Association, mental diagnoses can be made of the characters. While technology acts as a gateway to schizophrenic behaviour for Jack, Murray’s concerns about urbanization are reflected in his various sexual disorders. Babette’s fear of death and upcoming loss of her identity as a mother trigger dependence related and amnestic disorders and the mental illness observed in other minor characters help in painting a bigger picture of collective mental illness experienced in adulthood.

The most obvious mental disorder in White Noise is thanataphobia or fear of death, a phobia which stands at the very basis of the novel’s plot. In fact, white noise refers to Jack and Babette’s theory that death may be “nothing but sound,” an electrical, uniform, white noise that you hear forever and from all directions, a notion they find terrifying. It also refers to the incomprehensible buzz of advertisements, media outlets, pointless conversations, in short the background noise of postmodern American culture which forms the backdrop of the novel.

For an overview of these characters, visit this site.

Jack Gladney, the narrator of the novel

Paranoid Schizophrenia, which is characterized by hallucinations and fear of being watched or secretly manipulated by others.

- Hallucinations: he sees floating spots at stressful moments and feels the television and radio are communicating with him

- Fear of being watched/influenced: he feels that television has a “narcotic undertow and eerie diseased brain-sucking power,” “where the outer torment lurks, causing fears and secret desires.”

Murray Siskind, a professor at the College-on-the-Hill, where Jack also teaches

Sexual disorders

One of the first things Murray tells Jack about himself is that he has run away from urban life so that he could free himself from the “the heat of food and sex”, “sexual entanglements” and “situation,” leaving the reader with the impression that sex is as much a source of torment for him as technological advancement is for Jack.

- Paraphilias is defined as: Any of a group of psychosexual disorders characterized by sexual fantasies, feelings, or activities involving a nonhuman object, a nonconsenting partner such as a child, or pain or humiliation of oneself or one's partner. Also called sexual deviation.

Examples: The way in which Murray is aroused by a woman “wearing stockings”, or by a woman “in spike heels and a slit skirt, with high-impact accessories” demonstrate how, despite his saying that he is mainly attracted to women’s minds, his sexual arousal also highly depends on the presence of certain objects.

- Fetishist = “fetish object is required or strongly preferred for sexual excitement”

Example: he reads the magazine "American Transvestite," which reveals a transvestite fetishism.

- Necrophilia = sexual arousal stimulated by a dead body

Example: He tells Jack that some writers he knows only have one topic of conversation: Sex and death. The two are therefore interlinked in his mind. He pays a prostitute to pretend to be choking so that he can perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on her...to act like she’s dying.

Babette, Jack's wife

Anxiety disorders caused by thanataphobia and gerascophobia, the fear of aging

- Substance Dependence Disorder: She's addiction to nicotine, caffeine, chewing gum, and call-in radio shows)

- Generalized Anxiety Disorder: She says she feels “keyed-up or on the edge.”

- Amnestic Disorder = “unable to recall previously learned information, or “new information”

Examples: She has “difficulty concentrating without her mind going blank.” She asks “What is...” about common things mentioned in conversation. She tells Jack that she forgets “names, faces, phone numbers, addresses, appointments, instructions, directions.” Other things she forgets: her children’s names, how her children want to be called, she dials a number and forgets who she’s calling, goes to the store and forgets what she came to buy, having to repeatedly ask the same information. She says, “I forget where I’ve parked the car and then for a long, long moment I forget what the car looks like.”

Minor characters

Tweedy, one of Jack's ex-wives.

Hypochondriac: she wears gloves, eyeshades and socks because she believes that sunlight, air, food, water, and sex are all carcinogenic

Shared Psychotic Disorder: She shares Jack’s schizophrenic tendencies.

Dunlop, Jack's German teacher

We know little about this character but from these statements: he never comes out of his room, which is described as a “dark crowded room” in which he accumulates objects “against the walls and windows," we can conclude that he probably has a social disorder and is also prone to compulsive hoarding (which may be a type of OCD)

Winnie Richards, works at the College-on-the-Hill with Jack

Agoraphobia = Phobia of open spaces

Extreme shyness

White Noise indicates that most adults find themselves unable to adapt to a world that they perceive to be transforming at an unsettling pace. They thus gradually lose touch with reality, leading to a form of collective mental illness that affects “hundreds and thousands of people.” As Babette’s father says before leaving, “the mind goes before the body”, an undeniable fact which establishes a certain kinship and strong empathic bond or “odd affection” between the elderly, the mentally ill and aging parents. The slowly approaching sunset at the end of their lives is contemplated with either “wonder or dread” and while “[s]ome people are scared by the sunsets, some determined to be elated” but until the time comes, they will all keep “trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic” of an ever-changing world.

There is an interesting review of this work here:
http://www.hipsterbookclub.com/reviews/copy/0210/white_noise_don_delillo.html

Buy White Noise here:

The Oedipus Complex applied to Canada and Quebec in Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes

2010-05-03T01:23:00.004-04:00

A review of Hugh MacLennan’s novels led literary critic T.D. MacLulich to declare that “all of MacLennan’s novels exhibit oedipal motifs." MacLennan’s fascination with the Oedipus complex, shorthand for the Freudian theory of the child’s (usually male) fondness for the parent of the opposite sex and the subsequent jealousy and animosity towards the parent of the same sex, stems from his relationship with his parents. Whereas he developed a close friendship with his mother, his attempts at being accepted by his father were futile. Dr. Samuel MacLennan, a third-generation Canadian descended from Calvinist highland Scots, was a severe man; in fact, many family members remember being “terrified” of him. Having achieved the dreams his father had set out for him, Hugh finally rebelled against his father as a twenty-five year old man, disillusioned with the path he had taken in order to please his father. As he wrote late in life, upon reflection of his youth, he considered his rebellion to be the “slaying of a father-image." MacLennan’s relationship with his father led to his interest in the Oedipus complex, which he applied to the characters of Athanase and his son Marius Tallard in his novel Two Solitudes, in which this Freudian concept is also applied to the relationship between federalist and nationalist Quebeckers.

Like Hugh and Samuel, Athanase and Marius have a strained relationship. Their rupture occurs when Marius becomes aware that Athanase makes love to Kathleen in a hospital room while his wife and Marius’ mother, Marie-Adèle, dies. In Freudian oedipal theory, this moment is the “primal scene” in which the son realizes that his father’s relationship with his mother is sexual. In their case, the mother-figure is not Marius’ biological mother, but his youthful step-mother who is not much older than him. Consistent to the framework of the Oedipus complex, Marius feels a sexual attraction towards a maternal figure. When Marius feels “sick from shame” after lusting after Kathleen’s “lush body," he recovers by focusing on the “virginal face” of his mother which is like a “nun’s." Thus, he considers his own mother to be sexless, but Kathleen, his step-mother, to be a sexual being. A latent rivalry develops between Athanase and Marius as they position themselves as Kathleen’s lover. Hence their relationship echoes the oedipal myth which is based on sexual tensions within family triangles. Since the root cause of the animosity Marius develops towards Athanese is not vocalized or acknowledged, it reveals itself in the secondary political dissention of the nationalist son and his federalist father.

The political debate surrounds the decision for the Canadian parliament to force conscription on Quebeckers during the First World War. Athanase, a parliamentarian, supports the bill, but only in an effort to improve the perception that English-Canadians have of Quebeckers. He reasons that the English-speaking provinces would force conscription on French-Canadians no matter how he votes, but by voting with the other provinces Quebec appears willing to cooperate in the war effort. However, Marius reacts against his father and his political position, without trying to understand the reasons behind Athanase’s federalist leanings. After speaking at an anti-conscription rally, punching an English-Canadian soldier, and then fleeing from the scene, Marius “felt wonderful. He felt as if he had broken all the chains that had held him all his life." He is thus an Oedipus overthrowing his father’s ideology. As his neighbour Yardley reflects, “Marius is the mathematical product of conflict within the country and also within his own family." Their troubled father-son relationship magnifies the federalist and nationalist debate in

Canada

Marius’ desire to bring about the demise of his father is based on misunderstanding. His father is not advocating the colonization of the French, but rather a unified country. Until Canadians came to view each province as an equal partner, rifts between the French and the English would continue to surface. Yet, at the time of the First World War, Canada had not yet adopted a flag, how could it be expected to have forged an identity based on the views of ten equal provinces? The epigraph that MacLennan chose for his novel suggests that until the “two solitudes” come together to “protect, and touch, and greet each other,” Oedipus would attempt to overturn the father, King Laius. In the last moments of Athanase’s life Marius reconciles with his father. He is relieved that as he lies dying, he calls out for Marius’ mother, the religious Marie-Adèle, and also hints of a desire to return to Catholicism. Athanase is thus re-baptised into the faith and into his son’s favour. In fact, Athanase dies in a similar way to MacLennan’s father, Samuel. Both die from complications of high blood pressure. Both sons arrive at the deathbed in the final moments to hear the Cheyne-Stokes breathing that announces the end of life is near. For MacLennan the oedipal struggle is over, as inscribed on his father’s gravestone, in “Peace, Perfect Peace," but for Marius his struggle continues as he now places his efforts on convincing his half-brother to follow nationalist ideals instead of the more moderate position Athanase had hoped for him. Such is Quebec’s continued struggle for a national identity within Canada.

Biographical information taken from Elspeth Cameron's book Hugh MacLennan: A Writer’s Life. She has provided a short biography here: Hugh MacLennan: Biocritical Essay

Information about the Oedipus complex from T.D. MacLulich's Oedipus and Eve: The Novels of Hugh MacLennan.

ImagiNation: The Morrin Centre's Literary Festival

2010-04-22T22:19:00.003-04:00

From April 7-11 I enjoyed readings, concerts, videos, plays, wine and cheese tastings all at the Morrin Centre in the Old City of Quebec. It was all part of the ImagiNation Writers' Series.

On Wednesday I heard Karolyn Smardz-Frost and Lawrence Hill read from their novels about fugitive slaves and their relationship to Canada. Smardz-Frost, by trade an archeologist, explained how her book, I've Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad, came into being. She never set out to be a writer, but found stumbled upon a story that had to be told. In 1985 she was leading school students in an archeological dig in Toronto. To facilitate the day (bathrooms, cafeteria, etc...nearby) she focussed on schoolyards that may have an interesting past. She found that the oldest school in Toronto had been owned by a Mr. Thorton Blackburn in the 1830s. On the census he was listed as "coloured," leading her to suspect he had been a fugitive slave. Her research confirmed her suspicions and led her to the miraculous story of the Blackburns' escape from slavery in Kentucky. In fact, the schoolyard had housed the last stop along the Underground Railroad, as Thorton and his wife Lucie aided escaped slaves to integrate into Canadian society. Read a summary of their lives here.

Then Lawrence Hill read from his novel, The Book of Negroes, which won the 2009 edition of Canada Reads. It recounts the true tale of fugitive slaves who fought for the British during the Revolutionary War. Even though the British were defeated, they kept their promise to these ex-slaves to take them out of the United States. Most of these families moved to Nova Scotia. They remained there several years, but many felt badly received by the Nova Scotians, so the British government agreed to send those that met certain requirements back to Africa. So Africans that had been born in Africa, captured, sent to the Americas, became slaves, escaped from slavery, fought in the Revolutionary War, were then relocated to Nova Scotia, finally returned to their native continent! What a story! And it's true! I loved hearing Hill read from his novel. He became the old woman that was speaking. I could see her before me.

On Thursday I heard Neil Bissoondath, a creative writing professor from Université Laval, speak about his writing process. For him, writing is character-driven, not plot-driven. He has a flash about a character and starts writing not knowing what will occur throughout the pages. While writing the first page, the second page is still a mystery. He advised us to trust the characters to unveil themselves.

Last, I attended Alistair MacLeod’s presentation of his novel No Great Mischief: A Novel, for which he received the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1999. Because the novel is based on several narrative levels of history, as well as the immediate story, MacLeod explained the historical background so that the audience would better understand the passages he read. It was very interesting to hear about the Highland Scots, their involvement in battles for Scottish independence from Britain, their immigration to Eastern Canada and their participation in the Battle of the Plaines d’Abraham. Throughout the narrative MacLeod refers to music, especially as an integral part of Gaelic culture. One of the highlights of the evening was to hear Gaelic songs performed by artists. The similarity between French-Canadian airs and Gaelic airs could be heard, a comparison that is made in the novel to show that there are many resemblances between the two seemingly disparate cultures.

The three evenings that I attended the writers’ series were enriching. I understood No Great Mischief to a much deeper degree and Alistair MacLeod’s presentation has given me the desire to read the entire novel. I am also looking forward to reading Karolyn Smardz-Frost’s and Lawrence Hill’s novels during the summer. Although I may not seek out Neil Bissoondath’s novels or short stories, his advice to aspiring writers will continue to guide my creative writing process. I am already looking forward to next year’s writing series and wish that I could have attended all of the events this year.

The Great Gatsby’s Empire State of Mind

2010-04-07T01:38:00.013-04:00

   For Jay Gatsby of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby and the persona of Alicia Keys's song "Empire State of Mind (Part II) Broken Down," New York City represents the fulfillment of the American Dream. For Gatsby's companion, however, the Midwesterner Nick Carraway, New York City causes anxiety. For instance, Keys notes that "[t]here's nothing you can't do / Now you're in New York" while Carraway anxiously remarks that "[a]nything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge" from Long Island to New York City, "anything at all." Carraway refers to the Queensboro Bridge which crosses the East River connecting Long Island to the borough of Manhattan whereas Keys mentions the Brooklyn Bridge which also spans the East River although connecting the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Hence, Keys's persona is leaving Manhattan, while Carraway is entering it. The fact that Carraway is leaving the relative comfort of quiet, middle-class, mostly white, Long Island by crossing the bridge, readers see the city through his lens of wonder, especially as he recounts his astonishment at seeing a limousine with three Black youths driven by a White chauffeur. Such a cultural race reversal would be far from common only a few miles away on Long Island. For Keys however her starting place is Harlem, a Manhattan neighbourhood renowned for its slums, high crime rates and poverty levels. Therefore, the Brooklyn Bridge, leading to a comparatively safer part of the city, thus indicates a "going up" of the social ladder for her, while for Carraway the Queensboro Bridge leads to an area of diminished social standing, as revealed by his racially insensitive references to "the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe," "three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl," and Meyer Wolfsheim, a "flat-nosed Jew" with "tiny eyes."
   On the same trip to the city that Nick Carraway recounts, Gatsby seems to agree with the persona of "Empire State of Mind" that the American Dream can be realized in New York City "by any means." First, he avoids a traffic ticket by flaunting the Christmas card that the police commissioner sends him. The police officer goes beyond not giving him a traffic violation by excusing himself for having stopped Gatsby and promising that he will be sure not to do it again. This action reminds Carraway once again that Gatsby is not "just some nobody"; he has social connections which place him above the law. Second, Gatsby meets with his associate Meyer Wolfsheim, a gambler and a bootlegger. Both Gatsby and he are wealthy men that have built their riches on illegal activities. Like Gatsby's outdoing the traffic ticket which he rightfully deserved, Wolfsheim has outsmarted the legal forces that have evidence that he fixed the World Series of 1919 for his own financial benefit. He has yet to be punished for his crime and openly profits from his illegal earnings. Gatsby reasons that Wolfsheim did nothing other than seize "the opportunity" that capitalist America afforded him.
   New York City is this mythical land of opportunities where, in Key's words, "dreams are made." The rags-to-riches mentality is clearly stated in her song: "Some will sleep tonight with a hunger for more than an empty fridge." Presumably the "hunger" pertains to "seeing [their] face in lights [...] down on Broadway." Additionally, the persona has a "pocketful of dreams," implying that her pockets are empty, yet she is confident of future riches and fame. Gatsby also embodies this ideal. He moves east to Long Island and works in the city to make enough money to win his socially-superior former love, Daisy Buchanan. He contacts Daisy through his friend Nick Carraway when he feels that he has recreated himself to the extent that she will now accept him. He has a fine home, a Rolls-Royce, eight servants, and moves in chic social circles. He is even acquaintanced with the movie moguls that make the "movie scenes" to which Keys refers. Perhaps he does not "[see] his face in lights" per say, but his reputation and fame draw crowds to his parties every weekend. Nick reflects that Gatsby must have felt that "his dream [was] so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it." This desire for refashioning is echoed in Keys's lyrics "[t]hese streets will make you feel brand new." Yet his efforts prove to be futile as Daisy ultimately decides to stay in her marriage. Nick suggests that Gatsby regrets having "paid a high price for living too long with a single dream," that of wooing Daisy Buchanan.
   The myth of New York City as the place where "[t]here's nothing you can't do," leads to a feeling of invincibility. When Tom Buchanan heads towards the city to see his mistress, Myrtle, he does not consider that his wife Daisy may leave him because of his affair. He enjoys both the loyal wife, as well as the illicit lover. Yet his belief in his own invincibility is only an illusion; the novel ends tragically as Daisy hits Myrtle with Gatsby's car, killing her. Myrtle's husband then kills Gatsby in revenge, thinking he was at fault, and then he commits suicide. Gatsby, the man who had surrounded himself with socialites, has few mourners at his funeral; not even Wolfensheim makes the effort to attend and Daisy does not even send a card or flowers. At his funeral, readers learn that his father had great hopes for his son. He commemorates Gatsby as a potentially "great man" if he had lived longer, having "a big future before him," and one who could have "helped build up the country." Mr. Gatz, as well as Jay Gatsby, and Tom and Daisy Buchanan believed their American Dream would be realized through another person. For Mr. Gatz, achievement would have come through his son's successes. For Gatsby, it would have been fulfilled in a relationship with Daisy. Likewise, Daisy married Tom in hopes of attaining her dream "of love, of money." And for Tom, he desired the independence of sexual relationships with women, such as Myrtle. For each, their American Dream becomes "the dead dream." Ironically, the unravelling of their individual dreams starts in the heart of New York City at the Plaza Hotel. It is here that Daisy definitively refuses Gatsby's proposition that she leave Tom because she has learned of Gatsby's illegal dealings with Wolfsheim. On the way home from the city, the tragic accident will occur and then the subsequent murder-suicide, demolishing each dream. Leaving the city, Carraway drives "on toward death" crossing over "the dark bridge."

Listen and Watch Alicia Keys sing the song here:

QUEUC (Quebec Universities English Undergraduate Conference)

2010-03-30T11:33:00.001-04:00

I just got back from a wonderful weekend at Bishop's University. It was the first annual undergraduate conference for English literature students in Quebec (QUEUC). I went with five other students from Université Laval to present a paper on Frederick Douglass (see a summary at my blogpost here). There were a large range of topics presented from students from Concordia, McGill, U. of Montreal, U. of Sherbrooke, as well as from Bishop's. Of course there were the standard Shakespeare papers read, but also works from more obscure authors. As there were 55 presenters, I did not have the opportunity to hear all the papers, but those I did were excellent. The conference was divided into 14 panels separated thematically. The panel I was apart of was entitled "Patriarchy, Parenting, and Personas." There was a comparison of the use of blues music in Langston Hughes' poem "The Weary Blues" with bebop in Jack Kerouac's San Francisco Blues. Having read both Hughes and Kerouac this semester in my American novel class, her exploration of how music was central to their poetry was interesting.

The other three presentations were by students from Bishop's who commented upon Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard: A Novel (Delta Fiction). The first presenter reviewed the role of patriarchy in the life of the main character, Janie, of Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie is a young black woman who had been raised by her grandmother. After being "put on the marriage auction block" at the age of sixteen by her grandmother, she reluctantly marries Logan, an older man. He expects her to do heavy work on his farm, seeing her more as a farmhand than a wife, so she runs off with Jody. Once again she finds herself in a patriarchal relationship; Jody, the newly elected town mayor, wants her to be a trophy wife. After being widowed, she falls in love with a vagabond, "Tea Cake" and finally finds an equal, although imperfect, marriage.

The second applied the framework of feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow to both Hurston's and Vonnegut's novels. Based on Freud's Oedipus Complex, Chodorow expands the theory so that for both girls and boys the mother is the first love. Hence, for males, the love for the mother is therefore replaced by the love for the wife, but for women, they can never truly love a man, so their love for the mother is replaced by the love of a child. The presenter then revealed the how this theory was upheld in the novels and also how it was unreliable.

Lastly, the third of these presentations concerned autobiography's importance in the novel. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the narrative is orally transmitted to the protagonist's best friend, Pheoby, whereas Vonnegut writes Bluebeard as the fictional autobiography of the fictional painter, Rabo Karabekian. In Bluebeard the writing style is affected as he experiences the events he writes about. The presentation explored the differences in style and influence that these fictional "pretending to be" autobiographies had.

One of the other students from Laval spoke about murder in Hamlet and MacBeth. The other four students from Laval spoke on American works. Jonathan considered the change of Henry Fleming's identity throughout Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage. Simon revealed how "Ragged Dick" denied his true selfhood while pursing American Dream in Horatio Alger's children's book Ragged Dick. And Jenny spoke on Nathaniel Hawthorn's transcendental tendencies (rather than the common Puritan beliefs of his era) in his own life and in his novel The Scarlet Letter. Lastly Kathleen used PowerPoint slides to show Jacob Riis' influence on modern-day photojournalism, especially through his work How the Other Half Lives (referring to the poor of New York City).

Although, as you can tell, it was a very intellectual weekend (Jenny called it the most intellectual weekend in her life), we had soooo much fun! It was great getting to know each other better.

Spring Thankfulness

2010-03-19T15:09:00.003-04:00

My soul touches e.e. cummings' today:

i thank you God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

I found a beautiful Wordle of this one too (yeah, I know I'm Wordle obsessed this week!)

Wordle

2010-03-13T18:29:00.005-05:00

My good friend Jill (whose well-written blog is here) told me about a creative and free tool on the net: Wordle.

You can create word clouds by typing in related words, and retyping the words that you want to be the largest. Or, as I experimented with, you can have the program scan a blog or webpage to create a word cloud. I guess I write a lot about racism, huh!

(click for larger image)

I like the idea that this tool could create poetry or word artwork. I'm going to play around with it for sure!

Here's how I see God:




 

Here's someone else's Wordle of the first chapter of "The Scarlet Letter."  
I love how "virgin" is by itself and "human" and "prison" meet up. 
And also that "beetle-browed" is one of the main words!

Colour Discourse

2010-02-25T11:14:00.017-05:00

I've just finished another essay dealing with racial issues in the United States, this one for my 20th Century American Novel class. In fact, I haven't even turned it in yet! Here's the introduction and some of the main points. Of course, if you'd like to read it all, let me know.

Or just check out the main terms from wordle.net: (click for larger image)

When O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder in 1995 the media focused on the contrasting reactions of Blacks and Whites. The opinions of other racial groups were not actively sought (Enomoto 146). Similarly, societal debates surrounding Michael Jackson in the last decade of his life questioned whether his very pale skin colour overrode his African ancestry. These contemporary examples illustrate the historic tendency of Americans to identify people according to the binaries of White and Black, and this based on skin colour. Historically, pseudo-scientific racism, propagated by eugenicists, categorized people into the dualities of the desirable White and the undesirable Black, in an effort to ward off the reversal of the evolutionary process through racial intermarriage. Similarly, the “one-drop rule” adopted by eighteen states between 1910 and 1931 reinforced the dualistic categorization of people since it determined the legal definition of “Black” to include anyone with at least one drop of African blood (Herring 129). Because of these racist concerns, Whites enacted Jim Crow laws to segregate Blacks from Whites in hopes to reduce the births of interracial children.

During the 1920s, in an era when eugenicist’s arguments, Jim Crow laws, and one-drop rules were commonly accepted, a strong emphasis was thus placed on skin colour as both Blacks and Whites appropriated racist rhetoric that deemed light skin tones and European features to be more desirable than dark skin tones and African features. Two novels from this era, Langston Hughes’ Not Without Laughter, which takes place in 1910 and was published in 1930, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, set in the Roaring Twenties and published in 1925, reveal this preference for lighter skin tones in both Black and White communities. Through the inclusion of a panoply of skin tones in his novel, Hughes critiques racial binaries and also the intraracial schisms brought on by the preference in the Black community for lighter skin, while the characters in Fitzgerald’s novel are described on the more limited colour scale of white, tan, brown and golden revealing the characters’ acceptance of eugenic arguments for the conservation of the pure Nordic race.

Through the use of colours, Hughes critiques the prejudice within the Black community which considers lighter-skinned Blacks, the “high-toned” or “yellow” skinned, as more sexually and socially desirable. This stereotype creates racial divisions among Blacks. One reason for this intraracial prejudice is that light skin refers to a white ancestry which connects the light-skinned to the dominate culture and people of the United States. Blacks that hold this view accept the power structure created and upheld by Whites in which Whites are superior to all other races. This racist ideology claims that pale skin and European facial structures are beautiful and all others are undesirable (Fanon 183). The novel’s protagonist, Sandy, appropriates this aesthetic, identifying the Africans in his geography book as “ugly” (175). That other Blacks in the novel, besides Sandy, have also appropriated the ideology of considering whiteness as more attractive than dark-skinned complexions is evident. For example, at the jazz club, black girls are told to “stay where [they] are” while “[h]igh yellers” and “brown-skins” are beckoned to “draw nigh” and to “come near” (100). Obviously, the women are being divided into the sexually attractive light-skinned and the undesirable dark-skinned. Sandy’s teenaged aunt, Harriet, wants to be among the sexually desirable as she powders her face and neck which gives the impression of “pink on ebony,” before going to a barbeque with teenage boys (57). Men, too, try to be whiter to appear sexually attractive, such as the stranger Sandy meets in Chicago whose face is powdered with white talcum.

In The Great Gatsby, Whites idolize a standard of whiteness which is different from that of the Blacks in Hughes’ novel. Fitzgerald’s characters base their scale on the supposed perfection of the Teutonic physical features of the Nordic nations. Miscegenation is therefore conceived as a threat to the conservation of this pure Nordic race. The ideal Aryan body would be blond, blue-eyed and tall (Stoddard xiv), in short the embodiment of Fitzgerald’s character Tom Buchanan. It is thus noteworthy that it is he who voices the racist opinion that Whites and Blacks should not marry. His theory is based on the writings of eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, which Buchanan, in ignorance, or by the narrator’s mis-remembering, identifies as Henry H. Goddard. Both Stoddard and Goddard advocated scientific racism, dividing races along the scale from the most evolved White to the least evolved Black, including the races of Yellow, Brown, and Red in between the two extremes. The United States, with its influx of immigrants, was thus a battleground for the conservation of the Nordic race. As Madison Grant writes in the introduction to Stoddard’s book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,

Democratic ideals among an homogeneous population of Nordic blood, as in England or America, is one thing, but it is quite another for the white man to share his blood with, or intrust (sic) his ideals to, brown, yellow, black, or red men. This is suicide pure and simple, and the first victim of this amazing folly will be the white man himself. (xxxii)

Through the influence of these men, Buchanan warns his white friends of the threat of the downfall of modern civilization occasioned by the pure race being submerged by the “colored empires,” a grouping which includes the inferior White races of southern and eastern Europe (13).

At each recounting of Buchanan’s racist views, his companions mock them, such as when his wife tells Nick, in Tom’s presence, that she and her friend Jordan passed a “white childhood” together in Louisville or assures Tom that she and Nick were talking about the Nordic race during Tom’s absence (19). Nick, as narrator, treats Tom’s views as “gibberish,” and is tempted to laugh aloud at Tom’s ignorance, but neither he nor any other of Tom’s acquaintances openly confront Tom’s racist rhetoric (130). In fact, they have internalized it without vocalizing it. The Whites live in “white palaces,” wear white clothing, and powder their white skin in the attempt to convey racial purity (5). The desire of Whites to reflect a pure whiteness is based on the eugenicist Stoddard’s insistence on three races of White peoples, of which the Nordics were the most evolved. People hailing from the Mediterranean regions, including the Republic of Ireland, or from southeastern Europe were considered less sexually and sociably desirable, as well as being less intelligent (Stoddard xiii-xiv). Although Gatsby is white, Tom does not consider him to be of the pure race because he is of the working class and is descended from ambiguous European ancestry. Gatsby’s “brown,” “tanned” skin is a testament to his years as a sailor on Lake Superior and also excludes him from the purer white skinned of the leisured upper class (98). Tom’s contempt for Gatsby as an inferior White is evident in his consideration of a relationship between Daisy and Gatsby to be comparable to “intermarriage between black and white” (130).

Racist preferences of lighter skin tones are evident in both Not Without Laughter and The Great Gatsby, yet Hughes’ inclusion criticizes the practice, while Fitzgerald upholds it. Hughes’ unflattering portrayal of Tempy and her snobbish attitude toward her family and other dark-skinned poor Blacks, whom she considers “niggerish,” (158), reveal that haughty attitudes based on skin tone divide a community already oppressed in American society. Fitzgerald’s characters mirror Fitzgerald’s own questioning of eugenics. During his undergraduate degree at Princeton eugenics theories were “palpably in the air,” mainly due to the teachings of biology professor Edwin G. Conklin (Bender 225). Like his character Tom Buchanan, Fitzgerald seemingly embraced Nordicism, writing to Edmund Wilson four years before the publication of Gatsby, that Americans should “[r]aise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo Saxons and Celts to enter” (Fitzgerald 47). However, Buchanan’s views are dismissed by the other characters, revealing Fitzgerald’s own uneasiness with the claims of eugenics. Rather, Fitzgerald’s concern with the “rising tide of the colored empires” is disclosed in Nick’s apprehension of the presence of Blacks and “inferior” Whites on the bridge crossing to New York City, a city where “anything can happen [...] [e]ven Gatsby” (69). Americans had to choose in the opening decades of the 1900s, and presently have to choose, if racism will continue to segregate a nation based on the colour, and more appropriately, the shade of colour, of the skin of its citizens.

Check out the books here:

Creative Prayer

2010-02-15T20:15:00.009-05:00

There are more ways to worship God than just through talking to God through prayer and singing to him worship songs written by other Christians. I've been using art to pray to God for several years. As I make a collage, paint, or draw, I praise the Lord and pray for specific people and needs. Last week in our small group we made collages in prayer to God. Here's one I did that night:

and here's another one:

(click on either image to see larger)

God is creative, and as we are made in his image to glorify Him, I can use the creativity He's given me in prayer and praise. How do you worship God creatively?

There's some great ideas at the "Praying in Color" site.

And here's a video from that site:

And the book she's written:

Frederick Douglass, An American Slave

2010-02-02T16:33:00.008-05:00

At the moment I'm reworking an essay I wrote last year about the ex-slave and abolitionistFrederick Douglass. My argument is that his title Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave reveals the paradox of the American slavery system in that someone could be both American (from a country that prides itself on being democratic, on capitalistic ideals of property ownership, and of being the home of the free) and Slave (a position of absolute submission without any rights). Here are the first two paragraphs, after the introduction, to this paper that I hope to present at Bishop's University's literary conference for English lit undergrads.

The status of Douglass' own parents exposed the absurdity of the dichotomy between "American" and "slave." His father was a white slaveholder therefore having all the rights of an American citizen. His mother, however, was a slave with no rights in American society. To further complicate the familial incongruities, his mother was most likely Douglass' father's slave. By introducing himself as an American slave, Douglass reveals the irrationality of such a system that would allow one's father to own one's mother. Through this persona, he also asserts that he should have the right to inherit his father's status, even though by law (established by white males to uphold the slave system) he inherits only the status of his mother."

"Frederick Douglass asserts his persona in the title of his autobiography, identifying himself to his readers as an "American Slave." The apparent oxymoron would shock his contemporary readers. It seemed impossible that a person could be both American: white, property-owner, free, rich, and proud and yet also slave: black, property, constrained, owning nothing, and humiliated. His choice of identifiers was deliberate. They displayed the inherent hypocrisies of American slavery. Douglass had been born in America, "the land of the free," the country that declared that "all men are created equal." Additionally, at the time he wrote his narrative, Douglass had attained freedom "in form" in the North, yet legally he continued to be a slave and could always be recaptured according to the Fugitive Slave Law (Douglass 78). He considered himself to be a "fugitive in slavery," not to be a "fugitive from slavery" (Fisch 208).

Get the book here:

Watch Danny Glover reciting one of Douglass' most famous speeches, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?.

(if you're lacking in time, watch from 3:40 - 5:21.)
Read it here.

2010-01-19T19:16:00.007-05:00

Yesterday I submitted three haikus to a poetry contest. I only had one ready, but since the flat submission fee was $5 whether I submitted one, two, or three haikus, I rewrote some of my existing poems into haikus, trying to capture the poems' essence into 17 syllables. Here's an example of one I didn't send in.

The original:

Picture Day

Click

And another year is captured

Connecting you to that morning your mother lovingly dressed you in a plum jumper with a gray mouse sewn on the chest.

Bringing back

Memories of recess, research papers, and rejections

Memories of friends, Friday night dances, and your first French kiss.

As a child-

Frilly dresses, thick stockings, and Mary Janes

Striving to look as girlish as possible

(Even with buckteeth and while resembling your brother in a pearl necklace)

As a teen-

Braces flashing

Practicing your smile in the mirror

Dazzling,

Or refined,

Perhaps playful

Thrusting your fingers through your tangled hair - frustrated.

Finally satisfied - Wandering to the end of the line

Sitting up straight, ‘Oh Please don’t blink!’

And now the last Picture Day of your life

Your senior year of college- a degree almost earned

And you think on the quote you read just yesterday:

“Change is survival’s praise.”

Smile, Cheese, Click.

Here are two haikus I wrote from this poem:

Snap – moment captured

Flashes - connect you back

To who you once were.

Mary Janes spotless

Blond pigtails and frilly dress

Picture Day again

And why not a Wordle haiku?

A New Year, A New Look

2010-01-13T12:03:00.007-05:00

I thought I'd play around with the blog templates a bit. So far this is my favourite for 2010. The beach, the waves (can you hear them?), plus lighthouses always remind me of Grandma, so it seems like a winner.

Here's a picture of me with my Grandma Keller feeding the seagulls popcorn.

Back to School

2010-01-13T10:31:00.010-05:00

Today I start back for my last semester of complementary undergrad classes...which means I can start my master's in the fall. Since I last posted I've been doing a lot of reading. For Christmas presents I found some great literary journals that I gave to some of my high school friends that love to read. A quick overview:

Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century:
A monthly poetry-only journal. The December 2009 issue was dedicated to the sonnet (a 14-line poem made famous by Shakespeare). All sorts of sonnets were highlighted: traditional Shakespearean to inventive backwards sonnets. As the blurb of the magazine aptly says: "there’s nothing more liberating than a little restriction." When writing poetry I've found the same thing, having a pattern beforehand helps to reduce the anxiety of filling the blank page before me. Interesting and innovative, this review is great for those who like to play with language and only want poetry in their issues.

Tin House: A quarterly filled with all types of literature and artwork. Each issue has a theme (work, love, obsessions, winter reading...) and is full of both fiction, non-fiction, and stories related to the theme. And on top of that there's great artwork. I was immediately drawn to the Fall 2009 issue which had the whimsical design of having half the issue dedicated to "dread" and the other half to "hope," each having its own front cover and meeting in the middle. To top it off the pages were upside down of each other. It's hard to explain in fact. I remember having childhood books like it, that had two stories in the same book that started from either end of the book and met in the middle. Anyway, it immediately caught my attention. Since I bought it I learned that my best friend, and poet, has submitted a poem to be published in it. Crossing our fingers!

H.O.W. Journal : A semiannual journal with a great mélange of poetry, short stories (fiction and non-fiction), photography and artwork. I'll let the website speak for itself: H.O.W. Journal is an art & literary journal that publishes an eclectic mix of today's prominent writers and artists alongside upcoming talents with an effort to raise money and awareness for the 15 million children worldwide that have been orphaned by HIV/AIDS. Honestly I wanted to keep this one for myself, but I gave it to a friend for Christmas anyway. I may just buy myself a copy soon!

White Wall Review: An annual publication of poetry, short stories, artwork, and photography (all in black and white). This one I did keep for myself! Published by the literary society of Ryerson University in Toronto, the stories and poetry are excellent. I especially enjoyed Jennifer Burwell's exerpt from her first work of fiction, Thrown. I also read and reread Adam Seelig's poetry, especially "Irises Flower." The one drawback, (okay, get ready, I'm a horrible person), was that every issue showcases the writing of two or three students enrolled in Ryerson's writing workshops. Of course this encourages a new generation of writers, but really the writing is sub par, especially compared to the professional writers included in the volume.

Poetry Magazine: A monthly poetry review. I also kept this one. It's affordable price (only $3.75 American and $5 Canadian, newstand) makes this a no-brainer. Half original poetry and half a review of poetry collections, this slim volume is great for reading on public transit. (I get mine out on the bus ride to the university). This is for those that want poetry, and only poetry, nothing fancy.

Of course, I also perused the December and January issues of The Sun. As always, the Readers Write section is my favourite. December's theme was Anger and January's is Narrow Escapes. Do you have any stories to share about either of these topics?

Well...it's time to get ready for class. I hope this list gives you some ideas about what to read in 2010.

For those of you in the Quebec City area who would like to look through these and other literary journals in both English and French, there's a good selection at Lecto Magazines on Quatre-Bourgeois near the 2nd Cup.

“As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame”

2009-12-24T00:07:00.012-05:00

To follow Christ is, according to Micah 6:8, to "act justly," or as Gerard Manly Hopkins expresses it, "to justice." While we celebrate Christ's birth, think on how you can be Christ's presence on earth now.

This is the second half of one of Hopkins's poems, "As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame," in which he compares the kingfisher, one of England's most colourful birds, catching the fire of the sun on its wings, and the dragonfly drawing flame on its iridescent body to humans that should reflect Christ, since God sees us, by His grace, as "little Christs."

Í say móre: the just man justices;

Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—

Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Hopkins was a Jesuit monk, so a follower of Ignatius's theological teachings. Jesuit professor Tim Muldoon explains this poem as such:
When a kingfisher, a dragonfly, a stone tumbling down a well, a bell does what it is made to do, it "selves"– it speaks itself. And when a human being "selves," the person manifests Christ in the world. That, according to Aristotle, is virtue. That, according to Ignatius, is freedom. (http://ignatianspirituality.com/4534/faith-and-action/)
Hopkins's beautiful verse and inventive language convinced me to study his works for my master's thesis. I hope you will also be inspired by his words.

(photo of kingfisher from Creative Commons)

The Poems of Gerard Manly Hopkins

You can hear another one of Hopkins' most famous poems,"Inversnaid," here.

Chaucer: Neither Feminist, Nor Sexist, Yet Both and Neither

2009-12-16T10:21:00.007-05:00

Geffrey Chaucer is one of the most important authors in the English language, probably only second to Shakespeare. He wrote during the Middle Ages, so before Shakespeare, often playing with earlier legends, fairy tales, and serious books. By "playing with," I mean he adapts the story to make it more ironic, funny, or to make a point. In many ways his style was very post-modern. Sometimes he inserts himself into his stories (he is one of the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, for example) and sometimes he interrupts his narrative to address his readers. Just the practice of recreating a story that already exists, is rather post-modern. Case in point:

For my Chaucer class, I wrote an essay on how we can't know if he was a feminist or a sexist because of his ironies. In fact the debate does not only rage among opposing camps, but amongst feminists themselves. He engages in the antifeminist rhetoric (Example: Emulate the Virgin Mary, Avoid Eve-like behaviour like the plague), but also allows his female characters to combat this rhetoric. The most powerful example is the Wife of Bath (Alison) whose fifth husband reads to her from a book called "The Book of Wicked Wives" which records evil women from Eve, passing by Delilah, and several women from Greek mythology that murdered their husbands. Of course, he's trying to show Alison how women are inferior to men and much more evil.

One day she can't take it anymore and rips out three pages from the book. This leads to a physical fight, which leads to Alison's deafness in one ear...BUT, although she's hurt, she wins her point. Her husband agrees to stop reading his favourite book and even more remarkable, he agrees to let her have control over their house and land. (Ironically, the house and land were hers to begin with, but by marrying him, she had lost her rights to them simply because she was a woman). Furthermore, he grants her complete "maistrie" (mastery) and "soveraynetee" (sovereignty) in their relationship, telling her she can do as she wishes for the rest of her life.

Sounds like Chaucer is advocating women's equality, right? Not exactly. His description of her is far from flattering. She is much more sinful than saintly: sensual, unfaithful, deceitful, proud, lustful, frivolous, manipulative....On top of that, she takes biblical passages out of context to defend herself. As one critic, S.H. Rigby, asks, is she in fact just "a debunker who is herself being wittily debunked?" Her argument for the equality of women, or more accurately their superiority over men, may be Chaucer's farce of the feminist point of view.

In the end it is impossible to know. As another critic, Priscilla Martin, put it Chaucer's "ironies, ambiguities and multiple narrators present a hall of distorting mirrors" so Chaucer can be seen as sexist or feminist, neither, or both.

The Wordle:

(click to enlarge)

Jude

2009-12-01T23:02:00.003-05:00

Kate Winslet starred in the movie adaptation of the book in 1996. Here's the trailer, which covers the main points of Jude and Sue's relationship.

Jude the Obscure Themes

2009-12-01T22:33:00.006-05:00

He regrets that he doesn't accomplish these goals or later goals of having a lasting relationship with Sue. On his death bed he "he often rambled on upon the defeat of his early aims."
And the Wordle (click to enlarge image)

Here are some of the main themes of Jude the Obscure that we presented to the class.

Sexual tension:

Jude the Obscure is rife with sexual tension. In the first part Hardy highly sexualizes the narrative. We can almost sense the hormones coursing through Jude and Arabella's bodies. For example, after running up a hill together Arabella falls to the ground in exhaustion pulling Jude to his knees beside her. As she speaks to Jude, the narrator describes her body "heaving and falling in quick pants, her face flushed, her full red lips parted, and a fine dew of perspiration on her skin," a description that seems more appropriate to a woman recuperating after sexual intercourse than after exercise.

Unconventional view of Marriage:

Sue says, "it is foreign to a man's nature to go on loving a person when he is told that he must and shall be that person's lover." After his marriage to Arabella, Jude calls marriage "a daily, continuous tragedy."

Social Conventions:

Although they live outside of the boundaries of societal conventions, Jude and especially Sue live by strict moral codes. For the period of time during which they both share the same moral compass, they are the most harmonious. Yet when their values differ, it leads to tension and eventually rupture. For example, Jude is dissatisfied with Sue's principle that dictates that they not have sex until both are divorced even though they live together. Because they are an unmarried couple living together, they are shunned by their communities forcing them to move often. Sue is disowned by her father. Sue realizes the reason that they are disdained is that their views are before their time; as she says, they are "pioneers." It is because of her moral views that Sue later decides to return to her ex-husband, arguing that since they had a relationship sanctioned by society and the church he, not Jude, is her rightful partner. So her views lead to the death of their relationship.

Death:

Jude is an orphan being raised by his great-aunt Drusilla Fawley. His father had suddenly died of an illness about a year before the beginning of the narrative and his mother had committed suicide by drowning herself.

After learning of his mother's suicide and being depressed about his loveless marriage with Arabella, Jude tempts fate by walking on the thin ice of a pond hoping to fall through and drown. When the ice fails to break, he rationalizes that he is not "sufficiently dignified" for suicide.

Death by suicide and murder is the great tragedy of the novel. Sue is honest with Father Time, admitting her feeling that it would be better for children to be "plucked fresh than stay to wither away miserably." This yearning reflects the "coming universal wish not to live." As one critic writes, this "modern" solution of the "dilemma of birth," suicide, is the only acceptable solution posited by Hardy in his later novels.

Treatment of Children:

It seems that in their romanticized ideal of union, Sue and Jude neglected the realism of raising children. "Father Time" feels that he and his half-siblings are a burden to Jude and Sue. Just the fact that the children's names are never mentioned suggests the parents' emotional detachment from them.

Unfulfilled Goals

Other than being a scholar, Jude wants to be a Christian divine/mystic. His marriage to Arabella is the first of many obstacles hindering him from realizing his dreams.

Jude the Obscure

2009-11-27T14:23:00.005-05:00

This session, I've spent a lot of time discussing, researching, and writing about Thomas Hardy's last novel Jude the Obscure. It is a tragedy and a depressing depiction of society.

The tragic life of Jude Fawley can also be seen to symbolize the tragedies of hasty marriages, social ostracism brought on because of living by a different moral code than that of the society, poverty, and the abandonment of dreams. Disillusionment with organized religion which seemed cruel, civil law which seemed irrational, and natural law which leads everyone, no matter their supposed worth, to suffer and eventually die, causes Jude to eventually enter into a state of inertia. He resigns himself to death. What has brought him to this state?

As a child, an orphan, Jude Fawley dreams of becoming a scholar in Oxford (named Christminster in the book) because his beloved schoolmaster does so. So as a teenager, he works as a stonemason to make enough money to move there and pursue his dream. But one day when he's nineteen years old, as he's walking down the street thinking on his future plans, he's hit by something. When he bends down to see what it is, he finds it is a pig's penis! Yep, a pig's penis! Thrown at him by the flirty, uncouth country-girl, Arabella, who works in her father's slaughterhouse. She wanted to get his attention...and she sure does. As with many men his age, his hormones shout louder than his reason. Jude abandons his dreams of scholarly pursuits to spend time with Arabella, who wanting to trap him into marriage, seduces him and then pretends she's pregnant so he'll marry her. He does the honourable thing and marries her although they are completely unsuited for each other. Less than two years later Arabella leaves him to move to Australia with her family.

Free from his responsibilities to Arabella, he finally moves to Christminster. He seeks out his cousin Sue Bridehead and quickly falls in love with her. They are completely suited to each other, but cannot marry because Jude is already married. When Sue finds this out, she marries Jude's ex-schoolmaster, to whom HE had introduced her. Jude is devastated and Sue immediately regrets her hasty marriage. Although in Christminster Jude cannot enter any of the colleges because he is too poor. So having completely lost hope of marrying Sue and of becoming a scholar, he turns to alcohol. In a bar one night he runs into Arabella who had returned to England and is working as a bartender. She tells him that while in Australia she got married again thinking that no one would ever find out she was already married. She wants a divorce so that her Australian husband can join her in England. Jude agrees to it. Sue, meanwhile, is completely repulsed by her husband and leaves him. She moves in with Jude, but refuses to sleep with him until both officially divorced. Her husband agrees to the divorce on the grounds that she is having an affair, so it is a faulty divorce.

Living together, unmarried, in nineteenth century England, the couple is shunned by society. Jude cannot find work to support them because as soon as it is found out that he is living with a woman, not his wife, he is fired. It is even hard for them to find landlords that will accept them as tenants. They have to move from town to town throughout rural England. Then, Arabella drops a bomb on them...she had been pregnant when she had moved to Australia and although her parents had raised their son there, her parents have decided to send the child back to England to be cared for by his biological parents. Of course Arabella does not want the responsibility of raising the boy, so she sends him to Jude. The boy had never been christened so is nicknamed "Little Father Time" because he is so serious. He doesn't find joy in what most children enjoy. At school he is ridiculed because his "parents" aren't married, so Jude and Sue decide to marry. Yet every time they go to a church or before the justice of the peace they think that the marriage vows are anti-passion and decide not to go through with the ceremony. But they let those around them believe that they have married to protect "Little Father Time" from taunts at school. To show Jude that their "marriage" is serious, she agrees to sleep with him.

Fast forward three to four years. The couple now has two children of their own and Sue is pregnant with a third. On impulse, Jude decides to move back to Christminster. They arrive completely unprepared and have to find a place to sleep for the night. They are rejected everywhere because they are unmarried. Finally they find a place that will accept Sue to stay with the children if Jude sleeps elsewhere. Being in Christminster reminds Jude of his failure to achieve his dreams, depressing him. Sue is overwhelmed by their poverty, taking care of three young children with another on the way, and also feels guilty that Jude never realized his goals. "Little Father Time," now nine or ten years old, in his uncanny sensitiveness asks Sue if she is upset because of life's difficulties. Instead of soothing him, she verifies that life is hard and that it would be better to die young than to have to suffer through it. He takes this to heart.

The next morning Sue leaves the children alone to meet with Jude at his inn to decide what to do about finding a place for all of them to sleep that evening. When they return to her room they discover a ghastly scene. "Little Father Time" had hung his younger half-brother and half-sister by the neck to hooks on the door. Then he had hung himself. With the shock Sue also loses the baby she was carrying. Obviously Jude and Sue are in great distress. Sue decides that the tragedy happened to teach her that she should never have left her ex-husband, from whom she'd gotten the divorce on false grounds. She leaves Jude and returns to her ex-husband. Jude is completely devastated; he's lost his whole family. Arabella learns of the disaster and tricks him into marrying her again (her Australian husband had died by this time). Of course he is entirely unhappy with her and when he falls ill and can't provide for her anymore, Arabella comes to hate him. He becomes an invalid and his dying wish is to see Sue one last time and to try to mend their relationship. He sneaks out of the house while Arabella is gone and makes the long voyage to Sue in awful weather. Sue rejects him, so he returns home to die. When he dies, Arabella is out courting the doctor, so he dies completely alone and abandoned.

SELLING OUT: version 1.0

2009-11-03T21:20:00.003-05:00

I had just turned 21, never having tasted alcohol until the day before my birthday, and that was in taking communion. I was, and still am to a degree, a responsible, obedient citizen. I respected and listened to my parents who respected and obeyed the government. So, it wasn't that my parents were against drinking, Dad often had a beer with supper on smouldering summer evenings, it was just that I hadn't reached the age that had been decided on by wiser-than-we politicians as the moment I could start.

Now I had reached that milestone. At the time I wasn't at a party school at all. Far from it!
I chose to go to a conservative Baptist college in Tennessee mostly because it was cheap, so it would keep both me and my parents from going into debt. Again, a responsible decision. There I was taught that drinking was wrong for any Christian, even if they had passed the government-sanctioned age. What could this substance be exactly, I wondered, that it needed to be regulated and banned? Is it possible that something God created could be essentially evil? And wasn't Jesus' first miracle the changing of water into wine?

So I decided to write my essay for an English Composition class on whether or not Christians could drink in good faith. Desiring an objective approach, I decided to wait until after I'd done my research before proposing a concrete thesis statement as to alcohol's immorality or morality. Our professor brooded over us like an over-involved kindergarten teacher, explaining each and every step of the writing process in detail. When we came to "writing a clear thesis statement," he had us each read ours aloud. When it was my turn, I told him that I would study the stance Christians should take towards alcohol. Being completely imbued with the ideology of conservative Protestantism, he assumed I meant that I would write an argumentative essay outlining why Christians should not drink.

I didn't correct him.

So, although I found more Scriptural evidence supporting reasonable alcoholic consumption by Christians than not, I focused on the verses that could possibly, if interpreted within a conservative Southern worldview, convey alcohol as an immoral beverage for Christians.

I got an A.

But now I drink.

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Selling Out

2009-10-26T13:14:00.006-04:00

The Sun Magazine's theme of the month of November is "selling out." I wrote this and sent it in in the spring and it was published! In fact it's the first one published in the "Readers Write" section! Now you can read it on their site. When I saw the theme at first I couldn't think of anything worth writing about, and then this flash:

I went to a conservative Baptist college in Tennessee mostly because it was cheap. There I was taught it was wrong for any Christian to drink. My parents weren't against drinking. Dad often had a beer with supper on hot summer evenings. Though I'd never tasted alcohol, I wondered why my instructors felt it should be banned. Could something God had created be essentially evil? Hadn't Jesus's first miracle been changing water into wine?

So I decided to write an essay for English on whether or not good Christians should drink. I would wait until after I'd done my research before making up my mind as to alcohol's morality or immorality.

Our professor said we would need to present a thesis statement before we began. When it was my turn to read my thesis for the class, I said I would "study the stance Christians should take toward alcohol." The professor assumed this meant I would write an essay on why Christians should not drink.

I didn't correct him.

Although I found more scriptural evidence supporting the consumption of alcohol than opposed to it, I focused on the verses that could, if interpreted a certain way, make drinking alcohol seem immoral.

I got an A.

This is the edited version that will be published. I think I actually like the version the magazine editor came up with better than my own. It is more toned-down and less negative. Perhaps I'll post the original later on so that you can weigh in on which one you like best. The only part that I wish they'd kept is that I had originally ended it with "But now I drink," which I think is much more fun. Oh well.

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Jehovah-Jireh

2009-10-22T21:35:00.004-04:00

Beaming

Overloaded with benefits

You just keep piling them on me

And I am thankful.

Providing abundantly,

Beyond the requests lurking in my imagination.

My heart pushes hard against it- for I do not deserve your grace.

I am no more than a wretch, most despised of all mankind.

But Alas! And did my Savior bleed?

The crimson trickling down

Oh yes, that sacred head, He gave for such a worm as I.

The perfect Lamb

The sacrifice

faint ashes on the altar

Crushed, broken, slain. Redemption paid.

And I am thankful.

(inspired by: Ps. 22:6, 68:19, Eph. 3:20, and "At the Cross" by Isaac Watts)
I wrote this one about 7 years ago. I'm not too happy with how it came out. I would like to edit it. Any suggestions?

Worms Dying

2009-10-12T01:34:00.004-04:00

This is the story I sent into the Sun magazine for this month's theme, Rain.

As soon as I could smell the dying worms bloated in the puddles in the driveway, I knew it was fishing season.

Saturday morning before the sun's rays poured over the low Appalachian hills out my bedroom window, Dad lightly tapped me on the back. I burrowed under my covers, warm, before I drowsily let myself be lifted out of bed by my father.

Mom said the worms came up to the surface to keep from drowning from all the rain. Those that made it to the surface then died in the muddy puddles. And those we used for bait also drowned, I suppose.

Sitting on a black garbage bag to keep my backside dry, Dad showed me how to put the hook through the two thick purple pouches of the worms so that they wouldn't fall off the hook (certainly leading to drowning). I did, until he added that the thick parts were the bloated stomachs of pregnant worms. I couldn't bring myself to push a hook through a lady-worm killing her babies. So instead of fishing, I emptied out the styrofoam cup of worms onto the black trash bag. There, I let the worms crawl through my fingers, tickling me. It didn't bother my dad that I wasn't actually fishing; at least we were spending time together. And I didn't mind offering him one of the worms when he needed to rebait his hook.

Rainy days meant indoor recess. I'd stare out through the blurry window pane imagining all the worms I could gather for our next fishing trip. The day after a rainstorm was the perfect opportunity for digging up worms under the swing set. I figured they'd have come to the surface the day before, so that those that hadn't drowned would not have had time to burrow far into the earth. Kneeling under the swings with my hands trawling through the mud, I pulled the worms up from their tiny hollows. Then I thrust them into my jacket pockets.

As a quiet, almost silent, child, the gift of worms was my language of gratitude. I so enjoyed my moments with my dad. Even at a young age, I realized that our relationship was unique. My girl friends' fathers rarely spent time with them doing "masculine" activities. I hoped that Dad would correctly interpret the meaning of my gift as a plea to continue inviting me to go fishing with him on rainy spring Saturdays.

I imagined how pleased my father would be as I held out the worms in my cupped hands- a living sacrifice.

But when I stepped off the school bus and threw my hands into my pockets, I only felt their shrivelled, hardened corpses. I'd spill their parched bodies onto the driveway- a burnt offering.

(this photo found in Creative Commons)

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Rain

2009-10-03T20:50:00.004-04:00

When I was in high school I loved to sit on the curb outside my house and watch the warm spring rain through the street light's rays. Inside the house, the air was charged with my brother's abusive anger, my father's misplaced guilt, and the fear that our family was falling apart. Outside, I could let that anxiety wash away in the illuminated streams of rain. I'd get up from the curb, where I'd been crying, dejected and discouraged, pull out my arms from across my chest, and spin, swirl, twirl in the grace of God falling upon me.

This picture reminds me of the evening rain that inspired the following poem.

Liberating Rain

2009-10-03T20:13:00.007-04:00

It's been raining a lot this fall.. cold, windy storms.

As the Sun Magazine's theme this month is "Rain" I offer you a poem I wrote several years ago on the very subject.

Liberating Rain,

Fall,

Fall,

Fall,

Upon my face,

Upon my bare legs,

Upon my arms extended toward heaven.

Rinse away the longing for my past.

Remove the impurities from my soul.

Reconcile my heart with all that's true.

Renew the life within.

Namesake

2009-09-16T14:30:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I long for a name

like Rebecca or Katherine or Elizabeth

that would grow throughout my lifetime

But I can be none other than Sarah,

not Becky or Kate or Liz.

Then I look to my namesake,

Laughing in Doubt

        Then

    Laughing in Joy

All the world blessed through the tiny seed buried

deep within her fallow soil.

Tainted by salted tears

    Flowing-

    Rinsing away all hope

So she laughed.

Its echo resounds throughout the centuries

And pierces my heart.

Its flesh bleeds by the identical saber of doubt.

And though Sarah planted an indestructible weed,

God brought forth her seed as an unyielding oak.

Overwhelmed by joy, she burst into delight

Once Again.

Naming her promised son Isaac: 'Laughter.'

My wound knits whole by the salve of joy.

And I no longer long for a name.

At the Dinner Table

2009-08-30T14:07:00.004-04:00

"No, don't ask him, he doesn't talk about the war. It must have been traumatic for him. Probably best not to bring those memories back, especially now when his memory's so vivid, but his body and mind so frail." I explained this in French, so that no one but our friend Kathleen and my husband could understand.

We were sitting at the supper table at my grandparents', a nook in the kitchen. The dining room was for special occasions, like Sunday dinner, and tonight we had take-out from Dominoes. I had come down to central Pennsylvania, my childhood home, from Quebec City, where I now lived with my husband, Jean-Philippe. We tried to visit my family at least three times a year, especially now that my grandfather's health was deteriorating. On this visit, in June 2008, we had invited Kathleen to come with us since she had always dreamed of visiting Philadelphia and Gettysburg.
Between bites of pepperoni pizza, Jean-Philippe convinced me that Kathleen could ask about the war. "Sarah, she's a guest. It's okay if she asks. If he doesn't want to talk, he won't."
"All right, all right. Go 'head."
Kathleen turned to my grandfather sitting beside her and asked "So, Mr. Keller, Sarah says that you were in the war. Were you on the front?"
"Oh no, no," he answered, "I was a radio operator even then. They'd sent me out to California to relay messages from the Pacific."
My entire perception of my grandfather as a soul troubled by the nightmares of the brutalities he'd seen as a young man crumbled before me. The images of years on the front line in France killing his German "cousins" dissipated. It wasn't that he was traumatized by what he'd experienced at war that kept him from answering my sister's and my questions about it for school projects, but just that he didn't have anything to say. Perhaps it seemed sacrilegious to him to speak of his safe existence in a Californian office while his childhood friends had been killed in action. Maybe he was ashamed of his security in a time of insecurity.
The cloak of silence fell with the curiosity of a stranger.

(Inspired by the Sun's March 2009 Readers Write theme)

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Rap Spherical

2009-08-11T11:59:00.002-04:00

I went through a rap phase a couple years ago. The Christian hip-hop forum Sphere of Hip-Hop inspired and motivated me to write a rap myself.

Here it is:

Philosophies and ideologies circle round, "spherical"/ been recycled 2,000 years, threadbare, our rhetoric simply rhetorical.

Purely analytical, logical seeking evidence from periodicals, all else deemed magical/ Skeptical, cynical, while gazing eyes on the freeing scars, slightly mystical.

Generation to generation the lies multiply, no longer practical, but lifeless liturgical/ Spiritual pride blinds eyes to practices that are borderline comical/Flattered as the big, black crow, the cheese...satirical.

Cock crows three times, yet you deny the one you've seen eye-to-eye/ smells political, like Good Ole King Cole before his pie/ as he slices it open and the crows cry.

Proverbial camel through the needle's eye, Rich Young Ruler like the typical American guy/ Refused to give his all to keep his piece of the pie.

I still admire those that can expertly mix rhythm and rhyme with references to pop culture.

The Fence

2009-08-04T21:19:00.003-04:00

Dad built the wooden fence around our yard to keep my brother and I from running out into the street. We were rambunctious toddlers and our yard led directly into a narrow alley downtown, so an inattentive moment could be disastrous for us.

I remember him digging deep holes and pounding the posts into the ground. Then he nailed two rails across the posts.

The screams of the belligerent teenager next door were not considered when constructing the fence. Mom and Dad figured her parents were dealing with a rebellious teen. Even when her little sister would cry and yell and kick when her father would pick her up from playing with me to take her to their cabin, Mom would try to soothe her. "You can come back to play after your trip. You can start where you left off." She didn't realize that the little girl would never be able to start over again.

When Dad read in the newspaper that the neighbour was being investigated for sexual abuse, he and Mom decided to put the house up for sale. The fence had kept us safe from running out into the street, but now seemed too weak to protect us from others getting in.

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Fences

2009-08-02T14:53:00.003-04:00

This month's topic at The Sun Magazine is "fences." I've been lucky enough to never live in a home that needed one. Do you have an experience that portrays fences, literally or figuratively?

A Little Bird Distracted Me

2009-07-13T10:02:00.007-04:00

A gorgeous day yesterday and even though I usually stay inside to study when it’s nice out, I decided to go outside to the picnic table.

Why, you might ask, would I choose to stay inside when I can go out on my patio? Because I get too distracted.

Case in point:

Yesterday, the next-door neighbour found a parakeet in the tree next to her balcony. When she went outside to see it, it flew onto her and climbed onto her head. She called down to me and another neighbour, who was washing his car, to ask if we knew who the owner might be. Nope. The bird then flew onto the balcony of my upstairs neighbour and when it saw me it dove right down onto the chair I was sitting on. Then it hopped onto my hand. Well, I couldn’t continue typing with a bird on my hand, could I?

When she (it looked like a girl bird, so let’s go with “she”) saw its reflection in my computer screen, she was here to stay. She even pooped on my “I” key!

(Notice the "Gerard Manley Hopkins" book...Good intentions!)

She passed at least an hour with me. My neighbour and I gave her water and the top of a hamburger bun to eat. She was so friendly, she even gave me kisses! I realized that I was talking to her as though she could understand me, asking her about her owners, her home, and reassuring her that we would take care of her until we got her home.

I finally realized I needed to get back to work, but I didn’t know what to do with the beautiful yellow and green bird. I didn’t want to let her go just to be eaten by a hungry cat. I asked around about a bird cage, but no one had an extra one. So I decided to go door-to-door to find the owner. I felt like a pirate with a parakeet on my shoulder knocking on doors. I subdued my desire to hurl “Aye, matey” when the doors opened to me. After visiting two houses, the bird bolted into the air through the branches. I was surprised how high she could fly after spending most of its life in a cage.

My nap yesterday was full of yellow and green blurs as the little bird tried to lead me to her home. And she COULD understand me after all.

My afternoon was enriched by the presence of a little bird. That distracted me.

Prize

2009-07-12T19:17:00.003-04:00

One of my poems, "Kaleidoscope," has won an honourable mention (2nd category) in a poetry contest! Because I still hope to have it published, I won't publish it here, but if you'd like me to email you a copy, let me know.

2009-07-11T17:08:00.002-04:00

This month's topic on The Sun Magazine is Choosing Sides. Luckily I don't really have anything to write about on that subject. When have you had to choose sides? What did you end up doing?

Crush

2009-07-10T13:04:00.004-04:00

Their wedding picture on a cake for their 30th wedding anniversary.

I grew up with the story of how my parents first met. It captivated me. “So really, your neighbours thought Dad was stealing bikes when he was just trying to see you?” I imagined snoopy neighbours peering through the cracks in their venetian blinds à là Gladys Kravitz from “Bewitched” then dialing the police station on their old-fashioned telephones. So that while the 20-year old version of my dad was standing on tip-toes trying to see over the fence, the police car would turn down the street, sirens blaring and lights flashing. Dad would turn nonchalantly and walk back to his car convincing the deputy he was simply taking a stroll down Susquehanna Avenue.

I’m sure that the real events were less tailor-made for a television episode than my imagination’s version, yet it is the story of a true crush that has endured for the last thirty-five years.

Dad had first seen Mom at the hospital. He was a construction worker with a swollen thumb because he had hit his thumb with a hammer building the local McDonald’s. (As a child, while biting into my cheeseburger, I’d look up at the ceiling and wonder which nail had brought my parents together, hence bringing me into existence). His boss insisted he go to the hospital even though Dad felt it was way too minor for the emergency room.

The sixteen-year-old that checked him into the hospital was my mother doing her duty as a “glorified candy-striper,” as she calls it. Dad was immediately struck by her round eyes, long, light-brown hair, and fair skin sprinkled with freckles. As he returned to his plastic chair in the waiting room, he sighed. His eyes never left her as she admitted other patients. She seemed so patient with those unfortunate to find themselves in the ER. Before the nurse came to lead him to the doctor, my dad made sure to catch one vital piece of information: her name. Her nametag mysteriously read: “M. Rebuck.”

The next day, sitting on the porch steps of his parents’ house, watching his best friend, Joe, toss a football into the air to catch it again, he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl he’d seen the day before.

“Joe, happen to know any Rebucks?”

He looked back with raised eyebrow. “Um, sure. There was a Steve in my class in high school. But I’m guessing it’s not him that you’re wondering about”

Dad had to smile. “Well, yeah, yesterday, when I went to the hospital,” he said, all the while looking down at his bandaged thumb, “I saw a fox, a real fox, and all I know is her last name’s Rebuck and her first name starts with an M”

“You didn’t ask for her name dude? Lame.” Joe shook his head in exaggerated consternation.

“Hey, whatever. I’m sure I have a chance with this chick. More than you would, Wink,” reverting to Joe’s childhood nickname.

“Alright, alright, I’ll ask my girl. Maybe she knows your Rebuck.”

And sure enough, she did. There were Rebucks on her street and the middle kid’s name was Maryrose.

“OK, man, when I find this girl and we double date, I’ll buy you your supper.”

“For me and my girl?”

“Yeah, yeah. Sure”

He’d been back to the hospital several times during the week trying to see her again. He had nothing else to do—couldn’t work with a busted up thumb. But his efforts were fruitless. So now with the information from Joe’s girlfriend, he changed tactics, staking out her house, peering through the fence. But he never saw her and stopped going after the cop showed up.

So he went back to his old routine to the chagrin of the head nurse who was tired of seeing the love-sick young man lounging around the waiting room. One afternoon he noticed the schedule posted on the wall near the triage nurse’s station. He waited until she left her post for her five-minute break, then scanned the list for a Maryrose Rebuck. Evenings, she always works evenings, he almost clapped his hand to his forehead.

He drove home, took a shower, changed into a plaid shirt and a clean pair of bell-bottoms then returned to the hospital. His fresh face belied his sweaty palms. There she was. He waited until there was a break in the line of patients waiting to be checked-in. Then he wiped his palms on his jeans and stepped up to the counter.

“Hello, sir. What brings you to the hospital today?” She asked in her professional voice.

“You.” He immediately regretted the cheesiness of his answer.

“Excuse me, sir. I didn’t understand.”

He took a deep breath and tried again. “I came here to see you. Remember me? I was here two weeks ago with a fractured thumb.” He held it up to jog her memory.

“Sorry, I don’t seem to remember. I see so many people every day.”

“Oh, I guess so. Well, I was wondering if you’d come out to the races with me on Saturday night?”

The races! What kind of hick does he take me for! I don’t even know this guy! What a weirdo. Can’t someone normal ask me out? “Um, well, I’m busy Saturday night and really, to be honest, I don’t even know you.” She said it with a smile to not hurt his feelings.

“Oh okay. Some other time then.” He turned away dejected, but then turned back to her, “Hey, when’s your break? Then you can get to know me.”

Hmm…this guy’s perseverant at least. “Well in fifteen minutes I have a five minute break. Wait for me outside.” She’d noticed the disapproving look of the head nurse during the short exchange.

Great, a chance! “Okay sure. No problem. See you in fifteen.” Shoot, did I just sound like a dimwit?

Five minutes didn’t allow for much “getting-to-know-each-other” time, but Mom agreed to talk to him the next day during her break. It went on like that in five-minute snippets for over a week. Mom was flattered by his determination to spend time with her.

She started to talk about her meetings with her sisters. “Come, on, Mar, don’t be so cruel, let him take you out. He must really like you to come every day to spend just five minutes with you,” her younger sister Ellen advised. “What do you know about it? You’re just a kid,” Mom snapped back. But she knew she was right.

She agreed to go to the races with him. Dad thought (for some odd reason) that she’d be so impressed with the speed, noise, smoke. He even installed a new stereo in his car for the outing. She wasn’t impressed, but she tried not to let on.

Two years later they got married. Five years after that, they had me, soon followed by my brother and sister.

The crush has lasted all these years. Almost thirty-five in fact.

I was recently home for a short visit and was once again taken aback by their love for each other. Saturday morning they ate breakfast together, talking over the day’s plans while skimming the newspaper.

It was a rare Saturday when Mom had to work, so after breakfast, she went outside to start up her motorcycle. I was sitting on the living room couch when I hear my dad humming a song. How fun! A man humming at breakfast!

When Mom comes back inside, Dad goes downstairs to meet her to say good-bye. They kiss and Dad says “I love you.” Mom answers, “I love you too.” Then she says “Have a nice day.” Dad’s answer shows just how much he still has a crush on Mom. “Yeah, alright. But I won’t, because you won’t be here.”

From a writing prompt in The Sun.

Hopkins

2009-07-04T12:28:00.004-04:00

So what AM I working on this summer?

I've been taking notes on all of Gerard Manley Hopkins's poems and fragments of poems to work out what his main preoccupations were when writing. I am taking into account recurring subjects (birds, trees, natural beauty), his main objectives (praising God, reflecting on God's creative power, despair when feeling separated from God), as well as how the rhymes and rhythms he chose add to the meaning he was trying to portray. He was a very innovative poet, inventing words for his poems, and concocting new poetic theories to master his art.

The BBC has done an excellent job of making his life and work very accessible.

A short biography

One of his poems, Inversnaid, is well explained. You can get a sense of some of the unusual vocabulary that he uses. Words like "darksome," "twindle," "heathpacks" especially interest me because he invented them. Were you able to understand their meaning before reading the definition? There is even a video with the poem being read aloud.

I've been busy studying and reading, so I haven't had as much time to update this blog as much as I would have liked. I would love to include your comments, ideas, inspirations.

The Poems of Gerard Manly Hopkins

Wedding Reflections

2009-06-22T13:07:00.003-04:00

Last weekend, while I was in Pennsylvania visiting my family, we were able to pull off a shower for my sister. She's getting married in August. Since she knew that we'd have the shower during my visit (and because she's super smart), I didn't think we'd be able to surprise her. And she didn't either! An hour before the shower she told her fiancé that we wouldn't be able to trick her. But we did! And had a great time!

The wedding preparations remind me of this poem I wrote several years ago.

Wedding Reception

Lavender petals

strewn across the ballroom floor

Deluge of light-

startling couples from their oblivious embraces.

Lingering,

then beginning to stream

underneath the exit signs

Until there's only me and you...

Alone.

Whirling, Twirling,

beneath the disco ball

Lost in this eternal spell.

I'm working on a longer post about "Crushes" as promised, which is why I haven't posted much recently. Hopefully I'll finish it this week.

Exercise

2009-06-05T12:37:00.002-04:00

Why I don't exercise:

Treadmills were invented in 1822 as a punishment for prisoners!

Cherishing Carefree

2009-06-03T19:01:00.002-04:00

Written August 9, 2001

Soaring past speed limit signs along route 80

Stretching towards the Lycoming mall

We three, momentarily oblivious to our heartaches.

Hair tangled by the fingers of the wind,

Throats raw from belting "Strawberry Wine,"

A song we were too naïve to understand

Only longing to be held under a 'hot July Moon'

while we were still seventeen.

Heads thrown back,

    Creases beside our eyes,

    Our guts sore from shaking,

    As reflections on our past renew our faith in laughter.

This, this is a day to capture in the glass jar of precious memories.

Stored away for a lifetime.

Monthly Topic: Crushes

2009-05-31T12:29:00.006-04:00

Last month I wrote about "Moving In," the topic of the Sun Magazine's Readers Write section.

This month's topic is Crushes. Fun! Write a little story, true or fiction, about a crush and then send it to me (sarah at productionmurray dot com). I'll put up my contribution later this week.

Check out The Sun here:

Jonquière

2009-05-28T12:27:00.002-04:00

The town from the autoroute

looks like a pincushion.

The wooden poles,

holding the lifelines that enter the veins of the village,

stick up between the squatting houses.

Erected in the ground,

frozen,

the poles cannot sway in the screaming wind.

The men of the village,

too are pinned to the ground,

working night shift at the aluminum plant,

while their wives get pedicures

and shop at the local strip mall.

Anchored to this life,

generation after generation,

like paper dolls-clothes pinned on.

The poles stand silent,

their glory ravished,

ugly oval blemishes

where their vibrant leaves and branches

were ripped from their torsos.

My Region

2009-05-26T11:07:00.007-04:00

My region. The familiar

tastes, jobs, faces, and tree-line.

My region.

The tilting of an eyebrow tells all we need to know.

That sense of “us.” This is my region.

Us. The restaurant in the gas station.

Ply-wood cabins on frozen ice.

Us. Accent and the turning of phrases, so that wherever I go, I am known as “us.”

Back to

my region

Happy to Live in Québec

2009-05-24T08:32:00.002-04:00

When Americans go on and on about how good I have it as a Canadian resident, I usually remind them of the downsides. Long waits at the doctor's offices. Shoddy service in hospitals. Lack of specialists for most diseases and conditions......etc..... But then I was reminded this week about just how good I, and all Canadians, do have it when it comes to health care.

My cousin's husband, Ben, found out he has leukemia. They were just getting by as things were, but now there's no insurance, no job, no coverage. His job at a garage didn't provide benefits. My cousin, Maria, stays home with their two toddlers and takes night classes to become a paralegal. Even if she were to get a job to try to pay for his treatments, she would have to pay for day care which would be a large percentage of her wages. And then who would drive Ben to his doctor's appointments? It seems like a dead end. Of course the hospital can't refuse to treat him even without insurance, but it will leave them in tremendous debt. How much? I can't begin to imagine.

So I thought, how much would it cost if my husband had leukemia here in Quebec? Treatments= $0. We bought an additional insurance for about $7/month that covers all expenses incurred by a hospital stay (gas, parking (the parking lots at hospitals aren't free here), a private room (the rooms usually have several people of both sexes), $50/day, and food). And if we had children, it would cost $7 a day in Quebec's government-subsidized day care. So for $7 a month and $7 a day (if we had children), we would be very comfortable. Sure, we pay a lot in taxes, but when the unexpected happens, it is appreciated to have our basic needs covered. Merci Québec!

Update: Ben's in the hospital and will be for at least another week. He's very sick. The hospital is helping them apply for Medicaid and even if they don't recieve it, the hospital will take on their case as charity. So, it will be covered, but not without paperwork, headaches, and worries.

Words transformed into art

2009-05-19T19:58:00.000-04:00

The American artist Brian Dettmer transforms dusty encyclopedias and dictionaries into 3-D art. He cuts into the pages, performs "an autopsy" in his words, revealing the hidden sculpture. The words and graphics are in their original places. Amazing!

Yard Sale Day!

2009-05-16T20:35:00.001-04:00

Inspired by Maira Kelman

I love it! The whole town outside, meeting each other, bargaining with each other, SMILING!

And we got some great deals too...
We've already used this one:
Mmmm...Yum...

Then I got this cute black dress for $2! I can't wait to wear it.
And I got what I was really looking for...a bike. It's so comfortable.

A lovely day.

2009-05-16T13:14:00.000-04:00

Maira Kalman's blog on the NY Times blog is breathtaking. Words and art blending together to make poetry. I'm so inspired by her work and hope to add some similar work to this site. Do you have anything to share with us? Email me at sarmurr1 @ gmail. com

Time Traveler

2009-05-15T11:44:00.001-04:00

I spun around as fast as I could. Like an erratic top. My arms flung wide, my feet stomping, faster faster. I figured that if I spun faster than the speed of time I could visit a bygone era. That's how Doc sent Michael J. Fox back to see his parents as horny teenagers, right? While turning, I thought of Abraham Lincoln, so I'd be transported to Ante-Bellum America, to meet the Great Liberator. Even President Reagan was not quite as grand as Lincoln. I kept my eyes open as I spun; the blurry forms of kids playing four-square, a girl upside down on the monkey bars, a boy jumping rope, a makeshift soccer game, a race between pals made me think that I must be approaching the speed of time. Colors interwoven. But just before I could reach the speed when time stops and then reverses, I slowed, then stopped. The blurry forms continued to pass wildly for a moment. The dizzying effect convinced me that I had been within reach of Lincoln's welcoming hand. When I had recovered from the light-headedness, I tried again. Maybe this time.

Words as Art

2009-05-13T19:50:00.000-04:00

Steven Paul Jobs by dylanroscover

Visit the site to see this encouraging, beautiful work of art magnified.

Moving In

2009-05-12T22:20:00.003-04:00

As mentioned, for a fun exercise I try to write according to The Sun Magazine's Readers Write monthly topics. The topic in this month's edition is Moving In. Here goes:

Finally in Florida, far from the snow and chilling wind of central Pennsylvania. She had dreamed of this home, complete with the palm trees which seemed to bow before her. And now she owned it. Her only child had married young, thankfully, allowing her the freedom to move south. The house was perfect, except that it was a dull grey colour. Grey is a colour for a Pennsylvanian house, not for a house facing the sunrises of the Atlantic. Pink, she decided. Pink stucco. It was 1963 and pink stucco was all the rage.

She called the painters while her husband was at work. He didn't seem to understand just how very close the house was to fulfilling her dreams, simply a coat or two of pink paint. The "just-one-more-thing-until-it's-perfect" argument had worked for the cobblestone walkway, the sodded yard, the chandelier, but he put his foot down at pink walls. "Pink walls, he had said, PINK?" his face turning that very shade. She had only nodded and turned on her heel.

That evening, she stood at the door peering through the glass, waiting for his reaction. When he stepped out of the drab brown sedan, dressed in a tidy grey suit with matching hat, she knew she had made a mistake. He stumbled and swayed, like when he was drunk. And he stuttered, another of his "symptoms." "Wha, wha, what is this, this, this mess, these....walls. And who, who is going to to pay?" His hands lifted up to the heavens. "Grace! Get out here Grace!" he screamed, his face passing from pink to bright red. She opened the door with false confidence. Can't show regret. Then he'd get the upper hand in this house and we can't have that now, can we? "Yes dear?" she answered sweetly, "what is it my dear?" Infuriating woman! A growl of rage poured from his mouth, his only answer. Then tottering, he tumbled to the dark asphalt, his hat spinning off his balding head. She turned to go into the house. What will our new neighbours think of his antics? What exaggeration! All this over paint colour!, she thought while she scanned the neighbours' windows see if any happened to be watching.

Then she heard a slight murmur. She turned to her husband and knelt beside him. "Howard? Hap, dear?" No response. That's when she ran inside her pink stuccoed dream home to call 911.

A stroke they told her. Too much stress, they said, with the move, the house, your ridiculous desires she imagined them saying. The paint barely dry and she was driving the sedan north to Pennsylvania. Packed full with all she could salvage: photo albums, dishes, clothes, tablecloths, a house plant, but had to leave the new furniture, the shiny kitchen appliances, the ocean. North to her daughter's house. A temporary arrangement. "As soon as Hap gets better," she promised her daughter, her namesake Grace. "OK Mom, as long as needs be. The boys can share a room and you can have the back bedroom," knowing that her mother really meant "as soon as he dies."
Her eldest grandson, ten years old, tore off his posters of Mickey Mantle and retaped them onto his younger brother's walls. It was HER room now. Hap couldn't climb the stairs, so he slept in the living room behind a sheet.
Ten years later Hap died. She didn't leave as promised but stayed in the room. She couldn't imagine moving back to Florida now, at fifty years old and alone. Plus without a house payment, she could spend his pension as she wished. It would last for years. Good thing too, because she, my great-grandmother, is still alive at ninety-six years of age. And she's still living in the back bedroom.

Subscribe to The Sun:

Inc.

2009-05-12T15:37:00.001-04:00

Incorporated. You have to be more than one entity to be incorporated. Community is what I long for. A community of writers expressing themselves. This blog will keep me writing, editing, developing ideas and hopefully it will do the same for you.

I hope for honest feedback on what I have written to make me a better writer and hopefully other writers (a good portion of the literate West) will share what they have written.

There will be prose. I will summarize some of the essays I've written for class, so that all that time and research does not go to waste. Additionally, the Readers Write section of The Sun Magazine, a magazine devoted to publishing outstanding poetry and prose, has inspired me to write monthly on the designated topic. For instance for this month (May 2009) the theme is Moving In. Read what other amateur writers have written. And then join in!*

And there will be poetry. You know those break-up poems scribbled in a journal somewhere? Tear them out and share that emotion. Hey, it'll be cathergic. I'll do the same.

Hope to publish some of that poetry someday? I will research the major literary journals, indicate the style they most often publish, and their guidelines. Hopefully it will be a handy resource for the writing community.

My hope for this blog is that it will become not just my own meanderings, but yours as well!

* I will only publish what I do not expect to submit for formal publication, so that it is applicable for publication. Only send me what you will not submit for publishing.