Monthly Archives: July 2002

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.

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I

am

sickened.

This man will, Gods willing, suffer the worst backlash of karma I could wish the universe to boomerang at someone.

Oh, Sekhmet? Mighty lion-headed warrior goddess, born of the fire of Ra’s eyes to be a creature of vengeance; you who protect the good and annihilate the wicked… just step this way, please…

In Which She Muses About Ballet

Wandering through one of my favourite second-hand bookstores here in Oakville, I found a copy of Karen Kain’s Movement Never Lies: An Autobiography for only twenty dollars. Needless to say, although I walked away from it virtuously, I stopped by again later in the afternoon to take it home with me. Karen Kain was a goddess to me when I was a child. I’d borrowed this autobiography from a friend of my mother’s when it was released a few years ago, but when I saw it on the shelf, I knew I had to own my own copy.

I danced for seven years as a child. I wasn’t obsessed with the ballerina stereotype, the way some girls are; it might have had something to do with how much I disliked the colour pink. No, what I loved was the physical expression of dance. I could use my body, my awkward clay, my shy hands, to tell a story. I forgot that I was shy when I danced. I could be graceful, and un-self-conscious, and light.

It didn’t hurt that I was naturally very flexible. Exercises that others had to fight to achieve were second-nature for me. Music, too, was a part of me without effort; others had to struggle to internalise music in order to fuel the dancing, but music has always been a language I have been able to hear and understand without difficulty. I was not, as you might guess, a favourite of my dancemates, just as I wasn’t popular among children in regular classes – too quick, too smart, too easy.

My mother took me to see a ballet at Place Des Arts as often as she could, usually once a season. I have had the excellent fortune to have seen the Kirov ballet do Cinderella; I saw the National Ballet of Canada do their celebrated Giselle and Romeo and Juliet, among several other ballets. We saw a lot of theatre, too. My mother has always been very determined that I would be exposed to the same kinds of culture that she had been exposed to as a child. Her father would always take the children to see the new Rogers and Hammerstein musical as it came through town, and one of my mother�s fondest memories was going into the city to see Romeo and Juliet with her older sister. She passed that appreciation of art on to me, and I expanded into opera as well, which I adore.

I began dancing at six. After a year, the National Ballet School recruiters were coming through town, and my teacher requested that I be allowed to audition. At the time I didn’t understand what an acceptance into the National Ballet training program would entail. Yes, I would be able to train to be a dancer; no, I truly had no concept of the discipline, the homesickness, the pain, the chances of failure, the depression. My mother, knowing perfectly well the horrors that children go through at ballet school, refused to allow the audition. I was disappointed, of course, but at seven, these losses come and go, and are easily forgotten.

I danced until I was just about thirteen. At thirteen, we were considered old enough and formed to a level where we could begin pointe work. This is what every woman who has ever imagined herself in place of a ballet dancer moving gracefully across the stage dreams of: the elegant long line of leg and arm, the ethereal illusion of floating, of weightlessness created by balancing on her toes. A woman en pointe possesses an ultimate secret femininity. Part of me yearned for that; part of me yearned for the slow, controlled moves that pointe work requires. Another part of me eagerly anticipated harder work: exercises, developing a new centre of gravity, working different muscles. Going en pointe was a rite of passage from child to adult.

I would have kept on dancing but for the fact that my teacher sat me down and explained that although the next step was to move on to dancing en pointe, there would not be enough students to fill the class. I and my sole remaining classmate would have to be put back a year, repeat what we had just learned, and then go en pointe two years from now with a full group.

I was crushed, and affronted, and insulted. Repeat a year when I had been so successful? Be held back to dance with people a year younger? Did she not understand what going en pointe meant to me? Had I not paid my dues, put in seven years of work to reach this moment?

Being a few weeks shy of thirteen, however, and still shy, I felt my eyes sting with tears and said little. And I just didn’t go back in the fall.

I regret it immensely now, and I have for about a decade. At thirty-one, you can see that a year – a single year of evening classes once or twice a week – forty-odd hours of extra work is nothing. At thirteen, though, it’s a lifetime.

I tried to go back when I was twenty-three. I called a dance school and they invited me to an evening class to try it out before I registered. I was terrified, but I went. The teacher was wonderful, and had I tried a class early in the session I might have registered with them and still be dancing today. The class I audited, however, was near the end of the term, and the dozen women in the group all knew the sequences the teacher was calling out. I tripped; I stumbled. I couldn’t recognise what the teacher was calling for next. I got in people’s ways. At the end of the class I avoided the women as they cooled down, skulked into the changing room to pick up my bag, pulled my coat on over my dance clothes without changing, and slipped out, my eyes burning again with tears.

And again, I never went back.

So re-reading Movement Never Lies makes me think about a lot of things. I wonder what might have happened if that audition had gone through. I look at Karen Kain’s life and although at times it was glamorous, like any kind of theatre, the effortless and natural illusion presented to the audience covers a community clinging to sanity by the skin of its teeth, performing despite sprains, back spasms, bitter and violent fights with a co-star, touring conditions that would horrify rats, and the artificial society that never quite fits into the real world. I deeply admire any man or woman who has the physical strength and mental and emotional endurance to commit to a life of dance. Had I kept on dancing, my knee and back problems might never have existed � or I might have been crippled by them. The Might-Have-Been game shoes no horses (to mix metaphors); I do my best not to play it. Dance formed my body and my love of theatre, and for that, I’m thankful.

Seven years of dance when you’re in such a formative stage leaves its mark; it is a part of me now that I could not shed if I so desired. I am complimented on my movements, both on-stage and off. I am usually quite aware of my body and how it is reaching, stretching. It is now natural for me to stand just so, legs turned out, usually with one foot slightly in front, heel of one nestles into the arch of the other. Arm movements always lead with the hand, thumb underneath the palm. My pelvis is tucked underneath my torso � and if I catch myself not doing it, I correct myself without thinking. I rarely stand face on to anyone or anything; three-quarter front was drilled into me as being more aesthetically pleasing. If I’m sitting, I sit on an angle, or at the very least turn my head slightly. And when a man I dated for a time welcomed me into his circle of friends, the sign of acceptance was being given a mock Native American name.

He named me Walks With Grace.

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I have had the most marvellous birthday weekend.

My birthdays tend to be hit or miss. This year, I�ve discovered a solution: plan things all through the weekend so everyone gets a chance to see me at least once, and I get to do all sorts of stuff I find enjoyable. Why haven�t I thought of this before?

Friday night was spent dining on gazpacho and home-made oatmeal whole wheat bread with good friends. Saturday we had a handful of people over to read A Midsummer Night�s Dream, which, to my delight, was such a success that as soon as we ended, someone asked, �Can we do another one?�. Saturday I also saw three films I�d never seen before: Zeffirelli�s Romeo and Juliet (and Olivia was indeed divine!); Moulin Rouge (which was absolutely spectacular, but then I love the theatre, and this was a synthesis of theatrical spectacle and cutting-edge film); and The Matrix (yes, I worked at a science-fiction bookstore when it came out, and became so turned off by every customer coming in and raving about it that I didn�t see it in theatres, and was never really in the mood to watch it when we got it on DVD). Sunday I shopped, and with some birthday money acquired an elegantly stunning linen and brocade dress in black and purple for practically nothing, and a pair of leather arm bracers to serve as arm guards with my husband�s birthday present, a 35 # bow. And then, Monday night we did the cider and baked Brie thing at Hurley�s, where people gave me a group present: the music stand that was the subject of much comment here over a month ago: a fold-out music stand that can hold (as I discovered when I got home) five sheets of music. I�ll never have to turn pages again! Coming home, I found one last present had been left for me: a hardbound double volume set of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories, which I�d been seeking without much luck.

I haven�t had so much fun in ages! I should have a birthday every month!

Actually, I think I�m just relaxing enough to enjoy life again. It�s awfully nice not to be wound up, and to be able to sit back and appreciate friends, art, and literature again. I�m rediscovering how much I love art and culture, how hungrily I reach for intellectual exercise now that I have the room to do so. I�m rediscovering my analytical skills as well (I am shocked to see how much they have truly devalued, so I�m exercising them and bringing them back up to scratch!), mainly through rants on the state of culture here (you lucky readers, you), and, um, well, that book of alternative religion that MLG told me to write last summer over lunch one day. I deliberately didn�t sit down at the computer all weekend; I just wanted to live, instead of writing or thinking about living.

I�m also preparing to visit my parents for a week, taking the train up to Toronto tomorrow for a week of quiet and my mother�s home-cooked meals, so if I appear unreachable, that�s the reason why. Genteel teas; a visit to the ROM; lots of napping and reading and writing, with less distractions � bliss!

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Degree: 1: A receipt for tuition, suitable for framing. 2: Some piece of paper that has absolutely no relevance to what one does after obtaining such. 3: Something one may not get if one fails math and/or has to take entirely too much math to obtain it.

This is from Kat’s list of alternate math definitions. Check them all out here. More math-related gems:

Absolut Value: The price of a bottle of vodka. The difference between this value and one’s disposable income determines how trashed one can get after the math exam.

Encryption: Step following mummification.

Harmonic Number: Opus of a given musical work.

Harmonic Series: Orchestra programs. Inevitably including Beethoven’s 5th, the New World Symphony, the 1812 Overture, and/or another indistinguishable Haydn symphony, every stinking season, season after season after… ahem.

Nonagon: Everything’s here.

Proof: 1: It was in the pudding. And *then* the dog ate it. 2: It’s in the alcohol. Pass the Absolut.

Proof by Cases: Figuring that if one gets exceptionally drunk, one’s solutions will make more sense.

Ray: A drop of golden sun… Mi: a name… hey, why isn’t anyone else singing?

Tangent: One of those weird hybrid citrus fruits, most likely.

It was a nice start to the day. I guess you just had to be there.