“Don’t you love higher book learnin’?”
“Is this that?”
-some conversation with Jane, circa 2007
It was a Saturday night, the sky overhead was clear of any cloud, the stars as clean and bright as if they were no more distant than the next barbed-wire fence post standing up above the barrow ditch running beside the narrow blacktop highway, everything all around him distinct and unhidden. He loved how it all looked, except he would never have said it in that way. He might have said that this was just how it was supposed to look, out on the high plains at the end of winter, on a clear fresh night.
-Kent Haruf, Eventide
http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/06/16/ignatieff-v-harper-the-bout-to-knock-the-other-guy-out/
When it comes to things that I like, I can be obsessive. Junior high (all of it) was a vivid example of this. Generally, however, I like to think that now that I have reached a more mature stage in my life (don’t ask me how I know) I can keep my compulsions under control. There are two jarring exceptions to this perhaps fanciful perception. One is books, the other is knitting. When I am really involved in a project, be it a good yarn or the other kind of good yarn, it is upsetting if it stretches over more than two days. I want to know then ending! I want a finished product! Not everything affects me this way. I can have six books and two knitting projects on the go and not even think about them. But then there are the other times.
I think that what I’m here to confess is that I’ve been doing this recently more than I should: up until three in the morning, bleary-eyed and unsure of what reality really is. Reading over 500 pages in less than 24 hours, like someone who lined up all night to get the new Harry Potter book on the first day. Forgetting to move until my legs fall asleep and I’m forced to adjust. Eating whatever is in the fridge with little consideration for taste because grocery shopping means too much time away. These things aside, it isn’t the reading or the knitting that is the problem. It is the hangover, the recovery period. That is what I am currently mired in. When I resurface back in reality, it is difficult to get my bearings, uncramp my fingers, uncross my eyes. Also, I know that I don’t really want to be back in reality quite yet, so I go looking for another hit. Mercifully, I am relatively broke right now, so I’m not knitting as much as I would. Books, however, are another matter; I have a solid supply stored in my not-bookcase, in my office, on my dresser, and I also have many wonderful, trusting friends, ready to thrust their favourites between my cold little fingers. It hurts so good, but I’m really trying to finish a class and also a degree.
These are the very best and very worst kinds of friends. The other kind of friends I like are the kind with aspirin.
I feel like a fangirl for uploading two videos of The Mountain Goats in a short period of time, but I can’t stop liking this song. John Darnielle does fabulous things with (and for) the English language. I think that what I like most about him, however, is that though the majority of his songs are not autobiographical, if there were an encyclopedia entry entitled “Sing it Like You Mean it”, you would find his name beside it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPy_fiv3sAw&fmt=18
Kait and I are roadtripping to Bellingham for a Gregory Alan Isakov concert this weekend! It will have to be a very quick trip, but go to his MySpace page and listen to That Moon Song. You’ll understand why we’re doing it.
Filed under: living
I came back to my regular abode last week after over a month away in various cities, sleeping on various beds, and in my absence the garden had exploded. What was tentative became tentacles, green raspberries bunched fetal on the vine. G. brings in handfuls of spinach, kale, radishes; Rapunzel’s parents are due over the hedge any time now in search of satiation. A fence was built between us and the neighbours while I was away to keep the deer from eating the roses, but tonight we found that they can shuffle under on their knees.
(As for my room, my bed was creased and rumpled in exactly the same way. Everything was covered in a fine layer of drywall dust from the renovation of the laundry room, and I excavated with the vacuum cleaner before moving back in.)
The first round of flowers has wilted and fallen – the cherry blossoms, the dogwood, the lilacs, the magnolias. Up come the poppies, the foxglove (digitalis), the intoxicating and deadly. The poppies are bigger than my hands and colours that you find on the inside of your body, big black pearls on the inside, the foxglove blooms in an upward stroke. These aren’t flowers to pause to inhale. These flowers have bits of night inside of them, bits of bone.
Tonight while the sun sent horizontal shadows throught the kitchen window, G. came inside clutching kale and proceeded to deal it out on the kitchen counter (one frilly for you, one frilly for me, one big for you, one big for me) for our respective vegetable needs. The first kale I ever ate was dark and violet veined, but this kale has no hint of purple. I ran tap water over the leaves and they didn’t get wet, the water just pooled and dribbled away as though it were a moth’s wing. For some reason I thought of some line from T.S. Eliot: some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing. I realise it’s only kale.
I ripped the kale into little bits with my fingers to put in a stirfry. I wanted something that came out dyed and tasting dark, so this stirfry consisted of kale, eggplant, zucchini and portabello mushrooms, among other things. Some days I have the feeling that everything is written on my skin: all of my indiscretions, every sharp thought or careless word. I have the feeling that I dwell in these things, not that they dwell in me. I don’t know how to deal with this, how to incorporate this collection of acts into my life (that is, learn from it) or rid myself of it. I just know how to think about them, while my fingers are busy ripping kale in late-evening sunlight.
When I went to take the compost out, there was a dog that looked like a wolf standing in the middle of the garden, still and lost. She would only sniff my hand from a distance and just watched me with wintery white-blue eyes while I stepped around her and over the peas to chuck a container full of vegetable matter into the bin. It turns out that she was the neighbour’s dog, her own yard was only a few feet away from where we found her, but she was frozen outside of her own environment.
After supper I had a stroopwafel (as long as there are people in my life who bring me stroopwafels, I shall never be lonely) and went for a walk, down to the beach to watch all of the lights come on. Now the sun is away, and the house smells like ginger from my supper and the Mexican hotsauce that G. is making. The cats talk to her and she talks back to them.
Filed under: Reading
His hands fell still. “Pegge, there is a bee on my sleeve.”
“It thinks you are a flower. Be quiet and it will go away.”
An anxious minute passed. “I am being quiet, but it is still hovering.”
“There it goes. You are all right now.”
-Mary Novik, from the novel Conceit
In order to obtain the promised funding for my recent trip to NYC, I needed to justify my gallivanting about to the Department of Graduate Studies with cold, hard evidence in the form of boarding passes, an expense report and a written report about the value of this adventure to my research. Today, they accepted my evidence and I received the full amount of the grant. To celebrate, I am posting here the account of my trip to New York City that I submitted. Do excuse abruptness where you can; I tried to keep it under a thousand words. Other things to watch out for are abuse of commas, needless repetition and being hoity-toity. Also keep in mind that the best parts are, unfortunately, not included in this summary (hint: some rather salty jokes). Pertinent links can be found at the bottom.
—
This is a terrible picture of the side of Carnegie hall and the giant tower that rests atop it.
Research Summary: New York City and Pierre Boulez
My recent experience in New York City proved to be invaluable to my current research. Thanks to the $300.00 grant allotted me by the Department of Graduate Studies, I was able to travel to the east coast of the United States and partake in three separate events, all of which I will use in my current graduate project or in my graduate research in the very near future.
The primary reason for my visit was a series of concerts taking place at Carnegie hall, performed by the Straatskapelle Berlin and conducted alternately by Pierre Boulez and Daniel Barenboim. The stuff of these concerts was Gustav Mahler’s entire symphonic oeuvre, and the program each night was fleshed out by various shorter pieces, also composed by Mahler – his lieder, for instance. As my research deals directly with Pierre Boulez both as a composer and a conductor or interpreter of music I chose to attend at a time when my Boulez would be captaining the orchestra. I had originally planned to see the concert on the 8th of May, but these tickets were sold out by the time I received confirmation of the grant, which is why originally submitted dates of May 7-10 were changed to May 8-11.
The whole experience of the concert was extremely rich and informative: the pre-concert talk dealt with Mahler as a conductor, as he had at one time before his death lived in New York City and conducted various orchestras, and also Boulez and Barenboim in their interpretations. In addition, Carnegie Hall’s programs included a wealth of reading material, most helpfully full essays by Boulez, Barenboim, and various critics. Boulez’s essay in particular is of great interest to me. In his typically pugilistic prose, he takes on critics who accuse Mahler of nostalgia, sentimentalism, and privileging form over content. Boulez examines Mahler from his own modernist stance, not to absolve him but instead to provoke a more nuanced listening. The resonances in that essay, entitled “Mahler Today” and another essay that is currently pivotal to my project, entitled “’Unbounded Visions’: Boulez, Mallarmé and Modern Classicism,” by Arnold Whitall, are striking and have provided me with helpful examples and new directions in my research.
Of course, the final piece of this puzzle is the experience of seeing Boulez himself conduct an orchestra; a man who composed “open” works which left many interpretative decisions up to the discretion of the conductor. His interpretations were praised as “masterly, turning that huge and unwieldy first movement into a model of symphonic logic” by reviewer James Oestreich. He continued, “The climaxes seemed all the more powerful for being meticulously prepared as part of a measured whole.”[1] The economy of Boulez’s gestures in directing such an expansive composition recalls his direction of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, in which, apart from a number of unconventional gestures, his movements were spare and without drama. Boulez’s control is exercised through precise planning and clearly made choices, and this is as evident when he is conducting another composer’s works as it is when he presents his own more open compositions. The performance of the Fourth Symphony under his baton was hailed by the reviewer as the best yet of that particular series of concerts, and the entire experience proved to be very pertinent to the research that I am conducting.
I could stop there, as this experience alone was well worth the trip, but I feel that it is incumbent on me to account for the remainder of the trip – my second day in the city – as it was equally as rewarding as the experience of seeing Pierre Boulez conduct Mahler. The first was a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA, where I had the opportunity to see works by the artist Öyvind Fahlström, a Swedist artist directly influenced by Mallarmé (the author who constitutes the other important aspect of my Master’s project) and an entire exhibit by the South American artists Léon Ferrari and Mira Schendel[2]. Both of these artists create words as images, exploring words and their (col)location and (dis)position on the page and what effect that has on meaning and on the observer. Because I am not a visual artist or an art historian, I don’t feel that I can properly analyse the works that I saw, but only wish to note that they enriched my perspective on the kinds of poetry that Mallarmé was creating: beyond calligrammes, words for him represented independent objects that demanded their own space in which to resonate a significance. This is echoed both directly and indirectly in later 20th century visual artists. While my work deals with Mallarmé’s influence on musicians and in the field of music, I would be remiss if I excluded perspectives on further visual or literary influences.
Finally, on Sunday evening, I was also fortunate enough to be able to attend the east coast premiere of Arvo Pärt’s new Symphony, his fourth, subtitled ‘Los Angeles’ and dedicated to Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Pärt’s music and the musical genre of Holy Minimalism more generally has been an academic side project of mine for about a year now, and shortly before going to New York, I was able to travel to Lethbridge, Alberta, to present a paper on one of Pärt’s best-known pieces of music, ‘Fratres.’ While Pärt and his music are not obviously linked to my work in the French department, my MA research combines questions of musical meaning and literary significance. The ideas of symbolism, modernism, minimalism and postmodernism, explored in Mallarmé, Boulez and Pärt in a myriad of ways, are not separate questions; they all influence aspects of my research. These domains are linked and are thus relevant to the subject. I should also mention that I am not claiming the visit to MoMA or the Pärt concert in my expense report.
As I have nearly reached a thousand words, I won’t continue but to say that this trip was informative, stimulating, and very helpful to my current project, and I am grateful to the Department of Graduate Studies for helping me to finance this opportunity.
[1] James Oestreich, “The Demands of Mahler’s Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies,” New York Times 10 May 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/arts/music/11boul.html> 11 May 2009.
[2] Please see: http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/299
and:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_Pärt
These would be:
- spaghetti (half wet)
- lentil soup
- chick peas in water
- metal kettles
Typically I am not someone who revels in hot weather. I like to find a basement, a bag full of ice, a book, and hide until the part where the thunderstorm starts (I mean in Edmonton). I don’t like feeling overwarm.
That said, I don’t know whether it is the weather that has changed or my attitude, the past few days. The days I will still complain, a little, because the sun scours you raw and then you sweat salt out of your crying pores. But the night. It is the night that takes shape. All the light, the last sunlight, the porch lights, the kitchen light sneaking into the living room, the street lights, sodium orange, all the lights in the night radiate, encapsulate their space. You make some tea, because it has cooled just enough to allow you to want hot. Everything that was sticking comes unstuck, plants breathe off the smell of water.
It is this that I can’t get enough of. You go swimming at twilight to cool down and then cycle home, back up the hill with wet hair, and the smell of overripe lilacs is still in the air. When you take away the people, the social issues, the department politics, the deadlines, you are left with this night. It reminds me of walking barefoot on the street where I grew up in Sherwood Park late at night, of walking home from a friend’s house in Brussels, past the ponds, of the air outside certain airports before you fly home, of Uncas School and the Perseid meteor shower, of watching 4th of July fireworks across the strait from my apartment lawn two years ago, of being surprised at how warm the air was when Jack and I walked out of Carnegie hall after seeing Pierre Boulez conduct.
What I’m trying to say is, there are nights, and then there are Nights.
I am enjoying school in this weather very much, as it gives direction to the days. I want to say things, even vague things, about the project that I am working on here, but don’t quite yet know how. Out of the things I read last semester were La ville parjure, ou le reveil des Erinyes by Hélène Cixous and Juste la fin du monde by Jean-Luc Lagarce; as for this semester, progress is slow, but relatively steady. I think I am mostly too content to move too quickly. Reading three pages of an article by Yves Bonnefoy took about 30 minutes today, not because they were difficult, but because they were tasty. I am too distractable, with too many books on the go and too many knitting projects in by bag. I get all kinds of threads tangled up.
My heart is busting from enthusiastic overuse.
Summer in the city.
Thought Trafficking 