Author Archives: Autumn

Thoughts

If I were a mage, there are two things I’d invent immediately.

One: Self-cleaning dishes. Coming home after a week’s vacation to a sink of dirty dishes is bad. I don’t not enjoy washing dishes, I dislike having to wash them.

Two: Self-cleaning clothes. Doing laundry is expensive and time-consuming. Worse, though, is the Eternal Laundry Basket Curse all my clothes seem to be laden with: Where’s my brown shirt? Where are my jeans? Wait, I know – the laundry basket, because when I finally washed them, I didn’t have the energy to put them away in drawers where they’re supposed to go. At least they’re folded.

I found a copy of Bridget Jones’s Diary in a second-hand bookshop yesterday, started reading it on the way home, and finished it yesterday mid-afternoon. Brilliant. Now I have to see the movie, because in the book Bridget suggests doing a TV journalism piece on the off-screen romance between Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, the stars of the BBC Pride & Predjudice, and of course, Colin Firth is in the movie version of BJD, playing another Mr. Darcy. Look! Inter-media reference! I love it!

And for those who have not heard the news, we have the new car; the albatross is no longer in our possession!

Surprise Novel Attack

I’m not quite sure what I expected, but my triumphant return to creative writing wasn’t supposed to creep up on me like this.

Out of the blue yesterday afternoon, the words “What makes a great Canadian novel?” floated through my mind, and all of a sudden I was scrambling for my laptop. Four hours later, I had eight pages of something new on my screen. I don’t know what it is yet – a long short story, a novella, the seeds of something larger; I was too amazed to think that far ahead.

I used to write constantly. I’d hear a bit of dialogue, or get a flash of a visual, and away I’d go. I would have to explain the context to myself, come up with where it had come from, where it was going. I loved to write. I wrote on buses, in the back of history classes, in the backyard, in the middle of the night when I woke up.

I lost it, though, about eight years ago. I might connect it to several things: an increase in theatre, the end of my BA and the beginning of my MA, more hours at work, taking up the cello. The end result, though, was less and less words on paper that had nothign to do with Browning, Dickens, or Byatt. My creativity was being funneled into a variety of different places instead. I tried to force myself back into it about five years ago, but it was difficult, and I’m not sure when I stopped.

All I know is, I miss it. I miss having that bubbling idea surfacing and demanding a context. I miss the excitement of discovering characters, finding out what happens next in their lives.

Ceri and I made a deal: a certain amount of pages and hours spent writing per week, to be reported at a weekly coffee date. Perhaps years of MA-ing have convinced me that I’m not a creative writer any longer, for I look at half-finished stories left languishing for half a decade and I can see that they’re good, but I can’t finish them. Instead, I produce non-fiction, which is solid, but doesn’t nourish the soul in the same fashion.

Now, however, I remember. I remember the glee with which I reach for paper and pen. Part of me watches in astonishment as the words roll onto the screen. It’s the permission I give myself to drop what I’m doing and leap for the notebook, assuring the little creative spark left in my brain that it can come up with ideas, it’s more than welcome to, and look how important I think it is, I’m ceasing all activity and paying attention to it, the dear thing, because what it has to say to me is important.

I can’t stop thinking about my characters. Everything I see, everything I think, becomes a part of their world too. How would they act in this situation? What would they say? How would it resonate with their particular pasts, and their psyches?

I’m excited again, which is thrilling in and of itself. I’m excited about the feeling, the product, the rediscovered ability, the passion.

I think I’ll buy a new pen today.

Bringing The Past To Life

My father took me to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton this afternoon. He volunteers there now that he’s not flying, and he makes a terrific tour guide: he paced everything well and gave me a wonderful range of information on each craft. There are over forty planes in the collection, housed in a wonderful new delta-shaped hangar, and every single one of them flies (except for the two wired up, and the fiberglass reconstructed craft that was destroyed in the fire that burned down the original hangar).

There are several bright yellow trainers (my favourites!) spanning several years: Finches, Moths, Harvards; there are bombers, recon craft and others. Every once in a while Dad would connect the craft to something I would recognise from his own history: “This is the one I flew in Portage-La-Prairie; this is the one I would fly up from Summerside to see your mother in Montreal.” I had no idea he had trained on so many warplanes.

The trip was fascinating, but unfortunately what I’ll remember the most is the Lancaster. The Lancaster is one of the Heritage Museum’s pride and joys; fully restored, it flies for display several times each year, and for a modest fee of $1000 (gulp!) will take passengers for a half-hour ride. It’s a beautiful aircraft. It was on the tarmac today along with four or five trainers doing passenger tours, as well as an F-5, a DC-3 and a couple of others odds and ends. We paused by the open hangar door to watch it taxi in, guided by the ground crew, and everything seemed just fine right up until a surreal moment where everyone watched without comprehending what was truly happening. Rather than completing the slow and graceful arc into the open area to taxi to a stop, the Lancaster came too close to the parked DC-3, and inexorably, like a bad dream, the right-most prop hacked into the left wing of the DC-3.

We stood in the hangar door and stared. Planes don’t do that. The surreal moment hung there as two gigantic aircraft attempted to occupy the same place. Then the props cut out on the Lancaster and it stopped dead, ground crews were running out, and the noise that I hadn’t truly heard over the sound of the engines ceased. There was debris on the runway, and a sense of numb horror in the air.

My father had spent the last hour or so detailing the expense and effort that goes into restoring these aircraft, and I had taken it all to heart. I admire any sort of dedicated restoration, and to keep an outdated piece of machinery in flying trim is a particularly impressive work. Many of the craft in the museum hangar have been salvaged from barns or fields, rusted and broken; some have been pieced together from three, five, six other craft. Apart from three paid mechanics and a cleaning staff, everyone involved in the Museum work is a volunteer, which means the pilots, the interpreters, and the restoration crews do it out of love for the aircraft and the history.

The horror I felt watching the Lancaster’s prop destroy the wing of the DC-3 was partially based on the knowledge of the expense incurred and the historic memorabilia damaged, partially on the despair of the men and women who had invested so many hours of maintenance and pride into the two craft, and partially on my empathy for the pilots, fighting a huge craft weighing several tons as it just didn’t make the turn, taking the responsibility for the result on their shoulders. The latter was heightened later on when while my father and I were having lunch, the co-pilot of the Lancaster came in with an accident report to fill out, and that disconnected air that someone dealing with shock displays. He was an old piloting friend of my father’s who sat with us as he filled in his report (although he said that it was impossible to reconstruct what had gone wrong), and we watched as the Lancaster was finally pushed back away from the DC-3 and examined. The damage to the Lancaster appears to be minimal; the DC-3, on the other hand, might lose the wing panel, which is removable thanks to a couple of hundred bolts. Depending on the extent of the damage, it will be either restored, or replaced if a panel can be found elsewhere.

The Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum is one of those places I truly admire, making an attempt to preserve history for future generations. The memorabilia they house (crafts and gear, medals, uniforms, communications) is evidence of another time that wasn’t so long ago. In the past century, our rate of development has shot through the roof; more progress has been made in the last hundred years than in two to three centuries previous. We go so fast that we lose track of how we got here. When I tour places like this, I am simultaneously amazed at how much I know, and always dejected at how much I still have to learn. Which is why I admire people like my father, donating time to teach people about where they came from, sharing their knowledge.

The entire staff of the Museum deserve a tip of the hat for their work, past, present and future. I’ll be back again; and I know that after many long, expensive hours of reconstruction, maintenance, and finishing, I’ll see the DC-3 and the Lancaster fly again. Because that’s what they do; they bring the past back to life. And every one of them should be honoured for it.

Troll-Provoked Thoughts

Someone left a holier-than-thou comment on the last post and it got me thinking.

With all the crap going on in the world, if we stopped to think about every morally outrageous act � the war crimes, the abuse, the murder, the rape � and to get worked up about every single one of them, it would be as useless as ignoring it all.

How do you prioritize between evil? How do you say, �This man shooting this man is more evil than this woman abusing this boy?� There is no way to put a value on heinous acts. Each act is freshly evil.

Yet in our society, the evil acts conglomerate into a numbing mass. We hear of murder done daily, of fresh horrors in overseas wars. Have we not become desensitized?

And if so, if a single act � a particular, not-necessarily-earthshattering act � gets past the numbness, and speaks to you; if it pricks a heart jaded by everyday acts of evil� how can this be valued at less than if a heart is pricked by a bomb dropped on a city?

By reacting to one, we react to them all. We choose to stand up and say, �This violence committed is wrong�; we are horrified, outraged, saddened, turned to despair, angered, spurred to action on some level.

Who among us has the right to judge if the death of a woman, man, child or animal is more or less important than another? Who are we to say that deforestation, poisoning of crops, or salting of earth deserves less righteous fury than a capsized ferry, a leaking oil tanker?

God cares for all equally. Man, on the other hand, has spent years hacking out a hierarchy where the Earth and Her creatures rank far below us. To me, an animal is as a child. If I am horrified at an animal abused, I am extending that horror to the abuse of all creatures on this Earth. Which includes little girls raped and murdered, elderly men stabbed to death in their apartments, little boys sexually abused by their baseball coaches, and women shot and killed while jogging.

It�s just a pity that compassion doesn�t seem to flow the other way very often.

Ephemera

Time to lighten up a bit. I can’t be an angst-ridden intellectual 24/7, after all.

I promised myself I would stop wasting space on these, but I found this and I just had to share it in light of how amusing my life can be:

Disney Princesses
Which of the Disney Princesses are you?

Apparently, You are a true bookworm and dream of a life better than the simple, quiet one you lead now. Your good looks can attract the town jerks, but you manage to ignore them most of the time. Sometimes you feel like you’re surrounded by idiots. So what are you waiting for? You don’t need your father to be kidnapped to get out and see the world. Although you can be stubborn, you’re also very compassionate and see beyond people’s fa�ades.

And I thought this would lighten things up? “Sometimes you feel like you’re surrounded by idiots” is just a colloquial way of paraphrasing my last two days’ worth of blogging on the devaluing of the intellectual in today’s society. My life, I tell you, is a comedy.

Also amusing: in flipping through the other princess descriptions, I found this in Esmeralda’s paragraph: Luckily you don’t die at the end of the Disney movie, although in the book you’re hanged.

Losing Literacy

My poor book club witnessed a wide range of my emotions last night, from despair through righteous fury in our discussion of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 last night. We talked for quite a while about a society that is losing its ability to read (one theory that arose was connected to scientific tests being done which are suggesting that the physical act of reading text is an increasing effort for the evolving human brain, as opposed to pictograms or other forms of communication, which was quite interesting). Naturally, that led to talking about the educational system repeatedly dropping its standards. Education is expensive; failing a student means you have to pay for a year of that student’s education twice; and heaven forbid we discourage their efforts by negative reinforcement. No, no, we must empower them instead by passing them despite their lack of skills necessary to acquiring the next set of skills, which in turn undermines the next level, and so forth. Why is it a crime to do this with faulty screws on an assembly line of, say, airplane engines, but not with the human mind in an educational system?

Today I discovered an article in the Times Online (that’s the UK times, not the NY Times) that addresses the same problem. The author of the piece had agreed to teach a journalism course, and began by asking the students which news programmes they watched. They couldn’t answer. Nor could they name newspapers that they read regularly. These were journalism students, who should be studying the medium to which they aspire. Or, if not studying, then at least aware of, exposed to. One assumes that they must have heard about journalism somewhere!

Was it not reasonable to expect undergraduates who had signed up for a three-year media degree (encompassing subjects ranging from print journalism and website design to video production and broadcast news) to have more than a passing interest in the news agenda?

Apparently, yes.

�Many of the students I teach have basic language and writing problems which have not been addressed at school or by the university,� says a lecturer in broadcast journalism at another university.

Foreign students paying to attend media courses are being misled by universities, says the departmental head, who is obliged to take a significant percentage of them each year. �In my view, universities that take students who don�t speak English to a good standard are taking money under false pretences,� he says.

Foreign students? At least they have the excuse of a language barrier. How about the local students who can’t write an essay, because they’ve never been taught how, in all their years of schooling?

An interesting point came up in the discussion last night. Once education became compulsory, it began communicating ideas and analytical methods to more people than ever before. Suddenly there were more educated people, bending class boundaries, flooding professional career positions. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, educational standards have been lowered alarmingly, perhaps in response to that flood of educated persons. Is society top-heavy with thinkers, who can so easily become agitators? The paranoid side of me which reads too much science fiction and dystopic novels wonders if the lowest common denominator has become the measuring stick for us all in order to keep better control over society. The point was made last night that time and again in various societies, the intelligensia has become the ruling class, and anyone of promise is usually plucked out of the masses to either be locked away, terminated, or to become part of the system of government. Which means, as soon as a government educates its citizens, they are in immediate danger. (And you may choose who I mean by �they� � the government, or the people it has educated. Or both.)

Bleak.

It returns to the question which crops up every once in a while: what purpose do artists serve? The philosophers, the writers, the painters – what function do they serve in society? Granted, yes, entertainment is one of their functions, but by no means their primary one. Artists are the conscience of a culture; they question, they compare, they cast issues in a different light, they challenge and they overturn… so long as they are free to do so.

Creative writers enjoyed great prestige in both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union because of literature’s unique role as a sounding board for deeper political and social issues. Vladimir Lenin believed that literature and art could be exploited for ideological and political as well as educational purposes. As a result, the party rapidly established control over print and electronic media, book publishing and distribution, bookstores and libraries, and it created or abolished newspapers and periodicals at will. – from the Library of Congress’ Russian Archives: Attacks on Intelligensia: Censorship

With the intelligensia on your side, your regime will be quickly accepted. Having artists on staff (or the patrons who fund that art on your side) to uphold the current status quo is a clever move. It leaves the artist open to accusations of not producing “real” art, however – art produced freely and without allegiance. Defining that state is problematic, as artists throughout the ages are usually at the mercy of some sort of patron, or at least those clients for whom s/he produces work. Ideally, however, freed of the capitalist imperative (ha ha ha), an artist has the right � perhaps even the duty � to respond to the ideas of the day, to discuss, to question, and to push the envelope ever further. Building a better mousetrap may have gotten us to where we are today technologically, but it has been the philosophers who have made us, morally and ethically, the thinking and feeling human beings we are presently. (Interestingly enough, they used to be one and the same. Leonardo da Vinci, anyone?)

So where are today’s artists? The one who are to serve as our moral compasses? Probably at the bottom of a slush pile in a publisher’s office. Turned away from a film production company because their idea “just wouldn’t sell”. Check out this rant on the current state of art prostituting for the state entitled No Baudelaires in Babylon: Tom Bradley’s Comments at the Paris Sorbonne International Conference on Electronic Literature. Wicked and grating and not for the faint of heart.

Perhaps my frustration stems from the apparent devaluing of the intellectual aspect of our culture in favour of speed and efficiency. There must be some way the two can co-exist instead of one triumphing at the expense of the other. Maybe I�m too idealistic (as I was accused of being by one of my thesis examiners), but I believe that the solution lies in an equal attention to mind, body and soul. Capitalism doesn�t have to exist in an intellectual and aesthetic vacuum. I freely admit that new methods of communication and entertainment can have value; I just don�t think they should be replacing the older methods. Such a replacement limits access to the valuable older works (be they film, text, or musical), thereby cutting off generations from their heritage. Everyone should have access to the works of the world, modern and ancient, whether they want it or not. The option should exist.

See what happens? Give me free time and I get restless and start rabble-rousing, exhorting people to think. Next thing you know, I�ll vanish � for my own good, of course, and to keep the rest of you nice and safe�

A Positive EI Experience?

Well. That was anti-climactic.

I just came back from the EI office. Having heard horror stories, I was expecting a dark, crowded, dour office with hard wooden chairs and evil civil servants looking down their noses at me because I was no longer one of society’s beneficial contributors. Evidently, I read too much Dickens (or Lemony Snicket). Instead, I walked into a bright, open office, waited in a line of four people to get to the front desk, told the nice gentleman who served me in the language of my choice that I had applied on-line but was here to drop off my Record of Employment, where did I need to go? He smiled at me and said I didn’t need to go anywhere or see anyone, because he could take it. Seeing by the print-outs in my hand that I had obtained a confirmation number from the on-line application (I’m so prepared), he told me that I’d be receiving further instructions in the mail. I blinked, and said, “That’s all?” “Yes, he said, smiling again and holding out his hand for my ROE. “Can I just make a copy of this, then?” I said, still stunned. He even directed me to a (free) photocopier, then gestured me out of line again when I returned to take the ROE with another friendly smile.

And I walked out five minutes after I’d walked in. It would have been sooner if I’d thought ahead and had already made the copy of my ROE. My husband couldn’t stop shaking his head with a grin; he claims that the ease of the whole exercise further underscores the fact that this was the right decision.