Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 115

commute

The Monday commute/
the bio bus heading east /
clanging bike locks west/
the city steams, reluctant/
to work away the summer 

#tanka

Please follow my new Twitter feed, "the micro city"

Tiresias

A closed wooden door,/

face veiled by lace, with hair/

and beard of ivy/

#haiku

 

Inspired by my months of writing micropoems (Jan 2011, April 2010, April 2009) and by Dave's Morning Porch, Jean's Trail  Mix, Fiona's small stones, as well as by the ongoing work of the Urban Sketchers, I'm giving some thought to writing them more often and more intentionally, under the heading "The Micro City," but with a twist: some of the posts would be drawings of urban microcosms. I don't want to commit to keeping up another blog, and definitely not a daily one, and I don't want to divert my energy from this one. But I like the name and wonder if it might attract some readers who don't want to wade through the typically long posts that Cassandra is apt to write. I also like the focus on small observations in an urban environment; urban haiku, so to speak, is different at times from its nature-inspired parent but no less concentrated, and certainly doesn't need to be negative; there's abundant beauty and fascination in the city. I see it as a kind of poetic version of street photography that may encourage other city dwellers to look around themselves a bit more closely.

So far as micropoetry poetry/haiku readers on Twitter and FB go, I think these are different audiences from the blog; a discussion on Dave's FB page indicates that might be the case. Maybe it should be a shadow blog that extracts just the Micro City posts and keeps them in one place. Any thoughts or ideas?

A Morning

We woke early and rode up to the studio through quiet, nearly empty streets, past the neat piles of odd lumber, old shelves, and other debris left over from Moving Day; past the bright red blooms of bee balm and the deep purple of old-fashioned clematis, those botanical markers placing us firmly into July; past yesterday's ladder left against an old brick facade being stripped of its paint; past cats poised against lace-curtained windows, and small eager dogs tugging their sleepy owners on their leashes.

The air was cool, not yet seventy degrees, the sun still remote behind veils of clouds hanging over the St.  Lawrence. Nothing was open yet, not even the breakfast places with their flats of eggs and soft loaves waiting to be transformed into pain doré, or the garderies for children not yet arrived, their walls painted in primary colors with pictures of smiling suns and flowers that seem incongruous except during bright daylight. The beer trucks were not yet making their early-morning deliveries to the depanneurs; the police not yet circulating surreptitiously through the alleys to enforce the latest changes to the traffic plan.

My bicycle whirred through the intersections as each red light changed to green just before my arrival, as if invisible doors were swinging open ahead of me. Lock and basket clanked as I rode around bits of shattered glass and the inevitable potholes, leftovers from winter that may or may not be mended before autumn, and I never had to put a foot down until arriving at the corner of de Bordeaux and St. Joseph where, suddenly, traffic streamed into the city from the east. But on the other side the canopy of green trees and quiet neighborhoods enclosed us again: a few men in the park chatting while their dogs sniffed each other and feigned an argument; a pink-haired girl proudly covered with tattoos; and two squirrels atop a small paper bag in the middle of the street, their mouths stuffed with frites.

Cat

I've always found cats hard to draw, and because of her markings that seem to obscure and complicate the shapes underneath, Manon seems particularly so. This is the first I've done of her that feels at all satisfactory - of course it helps that she was fast asleep!

Market Day

Just in case you were feeling hungry.

The thing in the foreground is a pizza-like bread, not really pizza, not really foccacia, from Première Moisson at Marché Jean-Talon. They were just bringing it out from the oven when I arrived. And were giving free samples of another daily special - a coconut/apricot sweet bread.

This photo was actually taken yesterday; tonight I'm cooking the courgettes and some cauliflower, and we'll have a big salad, and a small amount of some sort of meat or fish. The breads, and peaches and apricots have disappeared.

Genius loci

Gustave Courbet, 1849

"Genius loci, the spirit of place, which, like an unbidden bolt of recognition, transforms a landscape, a street corner into 'inscape,' into a reorientation of awareness. Snow was blowing and drifting in a white fog. The rural road simply vanished. My wife, whose sagacity of heart, radiant good sense and unspoken perceptions are incomparable, drove parallel with what we could make out of fence posts. At moments even these blanked out in a white tumult. Suddenly the February blizzard cleared. A cold brilliance washed the air. We edged the car across the fields back to a paved road and into woods. A gently tortuous descent led from the plateau. On either side, like scarred walls, towered the cliffs painted time and time again by Courbet in this corner of the Franche-Comté. A breach opened in the larch, pale birch and black pine. Zara and I stopped breathless. Below us, in the perfectly rounded cusp of the hills, traversed by a stream whose crystal voices reached us even far above, lay a hamlet. Its rust-coloured and snow-blown roofs, squat church-tower and two small chateaux -- the one ramshackled and Second Empire, the other a pure marvel of a seventeenth-eighteenth century logis and circular donjon -- composed a compact, earth-bound yet also mirage-like ensemble. We were struck mute with wonder. The church tower rang its hour as we crossed the low stone bridge, its querulous chime somehow answered by the toss of silver-white and green-ochre (Courbet's palette) of water across lustrous stones. I knew at once that there would be for me no greater perfection anywhere, that I had stumbled on home."

George Steiner, Errata (1997)

Apparently, Errata is not a typical book by Steiner; it's the closest he comes to memoir and autobiography. Within this book, even this chapter doesn't seem typical because here he stops being a critic or professor, and edges toward pure writing, some of which is very beautiful. I recently finished "The Death of Tragedy" -- which came out of his doctoral thesis -- and am now halfway through this one, written quite late in his long and still-continuing life. Steiner can be maddening, as all brilliant people sometimes are, and he is also flamboyant -- a criticism that was penned on one of his first papers at university. But he shares a concern for philosophy, the art and creativity, and the classics -- for humanism in general -- and writes about those things very well indeed.

I've been amused that since writing the title of this post, this morning, I've had Anton Bruckner's "Locus iste" ("This place") stuck in my head. Steiner would probably approve, though that one's a bit of a stretch, even for him!

 

real, virtual and the thorny liminal

In which we muse about summer, long weekends, friends, place, social networks and blogging...

A lazy holiday weekend; even the sun agrees. He hides behind clouds for a while, then emerges like a charismatic politician entering a room, turning the leaves from olive to bright chartreuse, only to take his leave just as suddenly. It was supposed to rain on Sunday, but instead turned very hot, the day saved by a strong breeze. I biked down to the cathedral with J., and afterward we ate lunch together in the underground. I stayed behind to shop for a new pair of sandals -- my old ones split across the sole when I began walking on them this spring -- and finally found a new pair that I hope will last as long as their predecessors. The city is full of tourists, here for the jazz festival, wandering about looking hot and happy and a bit dazed. I remember how that was.

On Friday, Canada Day, I did odds and ends around the apartment -- a general bathroom and refrigerator cleaning, some work with the plants on the terrace, some piano playing. In the afternoon a friend came over and after discussing textiles and sewing we all went out to buy sushi and beer (Canadian, of course!) and had a party on our terrace. Everyone in the city, it seemed, was either on their balcony or terrace or in one of the parks: we've all been starved for hot weather and real summer.

On Saturday we cut the hedge in front of the building, and as we worked I thought about how differently I feel now than the first few times we did this. I remember feeling shy out on the street, how difficult it was to cope with speaking French to passers-by or to our first-floor neighbor who always works with us. I felt awkward and uncomfortable, eager to please but worried about offending and making mistakes: a rookie, a freshman, an American interloper in this French neighborhood. In fact, our neighbor -- all our neighbors, actually -- have been extremely kind and welcoming, but it has taken longer, all these five years, really, to begin to feel part of a larger community within the neighborhood. Yesterday, not only did I notice how comfortable I felt being in my neighborhood, in front of my home, but one of my gardener friends came by as we were working and he ended up staying for quite a while, chatting, watering my plants, meeting our cat, talking about garden plans. A woman asked questions, which I easily understood, and I was able to answer her in French. I'm becoming, somehow, incredibly, local.

Afterward we sat on the terrace with our neighbor, talking and drinking wine, and she told us how difficult the transition had been for her when she moved, twenty-five years ago, from a big house outside Quebec City to a small Montreal apartment with her husband and young daughter. We talked about letting go of material things, about the odd sentimental attachments that had nothing to do with monetary value, about the grief and depression that follows such a life-shift. and then, about Montreal, and the way the city has seduced us, and made us its lovers. And in the cooler evening we biked to my garden to water it, and ended up sitting with two of the other gardeners, talking and telling life-stories until well after dark. People are so much less guarded here, so much more direct and honest. If you want to make friends, it's not hard.

I've been a bit less active online this spring and summer, and one of the main reasons is that I've been giving more energy to real-life relationships like these, including my relationship with this physical place. I've realized that Facebook, useful as it is for quick news, for publicity, and keeping in touch with a wide variety of acquaintences, is often unsatisfying (even depressing) for me while taking up a lot of time. And while it's definitely possible to do excellent short-form writing, designed for FB or Twitter, that's only an occasional focus. I've decided to continue my social-network presence but I don't want to be distracted from what I want to give as well as receive: genuineness, depth, and warmth. I've never had that problem with the blog or with the friendshps that have come out of it: they are real, and satisfying, and even when there isn't a mutual exchange I know that I'm holding myself to a higher standard of thought, writing, and interaction. That matters to me.

The sun goes in and out of clouds, as we all do, but watching it happen on a video is nothing like feeling it on your skin. Words, though, can make us feel just about everything. I want to feel my real life, so that that I can write about it in words.

Red Curry

How the fragrance of the newly opened tin bites my nose, how its redness dyes the coconut milk the colors of salmon, calendula, rust.

Canada Day

Kate's maple leaf hat

amuses in Ottawa --

here we eat sushi, drink Labatt's,

but the neighbor deflects

my "joyeuse fête."

 

(I haven't decided whether to do a whole month of small stones again -- but here is a first one, just in case! Happy Canada Day -- the fireworks are just starting down by the St. Lawrence, as I post this at 10:32pm)

 

E-books and Impatience

The Canadian postal strike has finally ended; yesterday we rode past a postal truck filled with packages, and today received a phone call at the studio about a package delivery at our apartment. I'd gotten used to not checking the box, actually. Except for the occasional package, most of what we get is either financial, or advertising. With the prevalence and convenience of door-to-door service of other delivery companies, the post has become increasingly irrelevant.

I was thinking of that yesterday, too, as I downloaded the Nook reader for PC, and ordered my first e-book. Yes, I'm still behind the times; I don't have a Kindle or any other kind of hand-held e-book reader but I do read everything else on my laptop, so why not a book? But the real reason was that it's not always easy to get English language books here, either in stores, by mail order, or at my preferred outlet: the library. The Bibliotheque nationale is a fabulous resource, though the majority of their holdings (including the vast majority of their fiction) are in French - it is, after all, the Quebec national library. I can use interlibrary loan to order just about anything, but it takes time and a special trip to the library. I buy some books from a used book stores, and I order some, but shipping is very expensive here, and slow, especially from the U.S.

There are a lot of good reasons why I've been stubborn about printed books, one being that by evening I am tired of looking at a screen of any kind. Another, of course, is that I'm a designer, and excellent typography and page layout matter to me. We said all the same things in the early days of website design, and I'm sure that e-books will eventually have many of the design features we've become used to on the web, and the differences will become increasingly irrelevant. As a publisher, I'm also going to have to bite the e-book bullet. The main reason, though, is that I just love printed books; I like reading that way, I like holding them and turning the physical pages, and I like having them around me. A room without bookshelves seems as bare to me as a mind devoid of literature: but what a telling remark that is! I recognize that these visible symbols are a kind of claim to intellectual status as well as a comfort, and that part of my attachment to printed books has to do with identity and pride.

I don't buy the claims that e-books are a financial advantage: that's only true if you're comparing prices for recently-published books. I found a lot of discrepancies. Yesterday, for instance, I looked at the prices for "Netherland" by Joseph O'Neill from B&N. The e-book was 11.99. paperback, 12.32. Hardcover? 2.99. And both paperback and hardcover were available in the marketplace for 1.99. Is it really worth it to me to pay $9 more for instant gratification? Uh, not exactly. On the other hand, the book I did download, "Nemesis," by Jo Nesbo, was 4.99 for the e-book and 9.03 for the paperback. I have no desire to keep that particular book on my shelf, and it's a good one to read while traveling, so the e-version makes sense. Still, I know when marketing is capitalizing on human impatience and our desire for the latest technology. I don't like being manipulated; the library and used bookstore retain their appeal.

I'm curious about your own experience: do you have an e-book reader or a way to download and read books on your computer? How many books do you download in a month? Have your book purchases gone up as a result? What do you have to say about the advantages or disadvantages of reading this way?