Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 84

February, turning a corner

Neighborhood Rink. February 5, 2013

 

"The wind moved like the wake of a massive beast through the city..."
-Seon Joon

 

At the end of January, I wrote:

The month ended with a spell of 40-degree weather blown through the dirty streets by fierce and unpredictable gusts of wind. The city looked its worst: piles of half-melted snow and ice covered with dirt and cinders vie for visual prominance with the detritus revealed underneath by their retreat. Everyone's in a bad mood, or sick -- hacking in the buses and sneezing on the streets as they pass you, merci beaucoup. The hockey rinks lay fallow, full of water reflecting the bare branches above, and ringed with people's cast-off Christmas trees. Children trudge to school, heads down, still swaddled in pink and blue snowsuits. There's no rejoicing, no unseasonable outdoor cafe-sitting as there will be in March; we all know it's a trick: real winter will be back, and soon.

It came the very next day, with the temperatures hurtling down into the single digits, and the wind, now viciously cold, chilling faces and hands the minute we stepped out the door.

There are bright spots, though, even as we hunker down for the final long slog through the next six or eight weeks, the long days of Lent, the inevitable winter storms. Florist windows are full of creative arrangements: tightly packed red roses in unusual vases, the first sight of primroses and daffodils. Ash Wednesday is right around the corner, but that means Easter will be early this year. This week's thaw finally melted through the thick, treacherous sidewalk ice, sothat there are long bare stretches of pavement, making the walking much easier. I sent in my annual garden inscription, and got a note from the chairman of our jardin communautaire: it won't be that long before the sap starts running in the maples, and it will be time to start seeds, place orders, and think about growing things again.

In spite of the ridiculous length of Canadian winters, I always feel like we've cleared a hurdle when January is finally over. It always feels like a long month, and a rather grim one. This past Sunday was Candlemas, that ancient pagan holiday appropriated by the early British Christians; we blessed the year's liturgical candles, and gave thanks for the light, and - with the groundhogs - took a symbolic step toward spring. For the first time in ages, I left the cathedral after Evensong in brightness rather than gloom, and the light in the sky lasted all the way home.

Aspens near Hjalmsstaoaa, Iceland

Finished this morning; some details below. Now on to the next subject, which will probably be something from Quebec.

Escaping to Istanbul

We all seem to have our "escape" genres - the books we turn to when we just want to lose ourselves in a story. For some it's sci-fi, or fantasy, or romance, or horror. For me it's thrillers - not murder mysteries so much as international espionage, set in places I either know well, or have never been, often with some sort of historical interest. (No, in case you're wondering, I've never read anything by Gérard de Villiers, perhaps I should!)

I like to listen to audio books while I'm walking, or riding the metro, or exercising on the boring elliptical in the basement. My most recent was Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon, a story of spies, counter-spies, politics and personal relationships, set in Istanbul at the end of WWII. The title refers to the passage of boatloads of Jews, released from concentration camps in Eastern Europe, through Istanbul on their way to Palestine. Both money and information change hands, in this case putting American, British, Russian, Romanian, and Turkish interests on a collision course.

Contributing to this book's appeal for me was Jeffrey Mays' mesmerizing reading performance, which brought the characters and their dialogue to life in a way I simply wouldn't have appreciated as much if reading a printed copy. I thought his subtle command of accents, and sensitive portrayal of both male and female characters, was a tour-de-force.

Joseph Kanon tells a good story, and even if some of the plot is predictable, the characters are well-written, believable, and multidimensional. One of the major highlights of the book is its setting, with the city of Istanbul and the Bosphorus evocatively described by someone who obviously knows and loves them well. (Readers of this blog already know my affection for Orhan Pamuk, who has written some pretty suspenseful novels himself, but I've always had a desire to go to Istanbul, and this book increased that yearning.)

Kanon is sometimes compared to Graham Greene, and I can see why; this book is not merely a thriller, but an exploration of complicated moral issues in a way that Greene, I think, would have appreciated. The relationship between a man and three women - the protagonist's wife, confined to a mental institution; the prostitute he visits on Thursday afternoons; and the wife of a high-level American consul -- is set inside the larger story of espionage, itself complicated by personal relationships between various characters who have to balance their allegiance to particular causes with actual friendships. Nothing is black-and-white in this place where the fall of the Ottoman empire is a recent, stinging memory, but international politics and power still collide.

Some days after finishing the book, I found myself troubled by the fact that books like this hinge on the consequences of atrocities, especially, here, a particularly horrible massacre that occured in a Romanian concentration camp. There's a learning aspect, for sure; I've always felt that novels and films had tremendous power to educate and to influence, as well as to misinform and manipulate our emotions and opinions. And yet, I didn't think about that very much as I was listening to the story; I was detached from the actual events. It's another moral issue, isn't it - the use of war, genocide, and violence, as well as more individual and personal crimes, to entertain, and to profit? I find this the most problematic in movies, but I never really thought about it in terms of fiction, especially literary fiction. But as in Graham Greene, the subtlety of Kanon's presentation of moral questions and gray areas suggests to me that he may have thought about it himself. I think it would be a mistake to read Istanbul Passage as a story only, without considering the questions it raises: how people use each other; the limits of friendship; the cost of betrayal; the way ordinary people become pawns of those with greater power, forced to make decisions they never would have made; and the stories we tell ourselves afterward, to make it all go down more easily.

 

 

Annals of Bookmaking II

Before we leave the subject, here are a couple of other books, one recent and one (above) that I made quite a while ago but have never photographed. This one has a Japanese stab binding in heavy natural linen. It's a scrapbook, about 8 inches wide: each sheet has a folded edge that's unseen but held by the binding; this extra thickness allows the user to add pasted material to the sheets in the scrapbook without causing the book to bulge. Very retro, those colors!

The book below is another small notebook that I made last week. This one has an ultrasuede binding - a material that I find works remarkably well, and comes in great colors.

Annals of Bookmaking

Last week my studio was taken over by grey Davey board, linen threads, linen tapes and beeswax; paper, paint and relief-blocks; glue and glue-brushes and leather and many sheets of waxed paper; my Chinese chop and its porcelain pot of ink. The big bookpress was pressed repeatedly into service. I finished one small book that I'd already sewn but not covered, and made another one from scratch - a late Christmas gift for a close friend. Now that I've given it to her, I can share some of the process here with you. (It also gave me a chance to try out the close-up features of my new camera.)

The signatures, sewn on linen tapes, covered by a coarse linen mull, set between the cover boards.

The mull is glued to the inside of the cover boards, and then the tapes glued over the mull. The first page of the first and last signatures will be pasted over the tapes and mull, forming a strong hinge.

At this stage it starts to look like a book!

Printing the cover papers on a hand-painted base. I made four different sheets, different designs in the same basic colorway, and chose this one for this particular book. Unfortunately I didn't take any other photos of the process, but here are some pictures of the finished book, which is about 5 inches long by 4 1/2 inches high.

I love the fussiness of bookmaking -- it's probably perfect for a Virgo perfectionist like me. The binding process is very exacting, but there are a lot of creative decisions to be made along the way, and I especially enjoy making the cover papers. Parts of the process are meditative -- the sewing of the signatures, and sanding the edges of the cover boards, for instance -- and require a lot of patience. Other steps have to be carefully prepared and planned, and then executed very quickly. It's only through practice that you learn how to do that, and believe me, I've irreparably screwed up hours and hours of work at the very last minute! This one worked out pretty well, and I was grateful for that. Sometimes I realize I've been holding my breath for a long time, when doing the final gluing, for instance! That part can be pretty tense.

All the materials involved are tactile, special, and many have been used for centuries; for the same reasons that I like calligraphy, I enjoy this process and the feeling of being connected to so many anonymous, careful scribes and binders who have gone before. The Chinese signature chop was a gift from my pen-pal friend in Beijing; it's carved out of alabaster. She told me that the characters are a phoenetic representation of my name. I only seem to use it for bookmaking, where it feels appropriate, and it seems like it adds a special finishing touch.

I told the recipient of this book that she had to use it, it was meant to be written in! And today I was very happy to get a note from her saying she had written a short poem and some reflections in it this morning. Books should live.

La chauve-souris

Underground is the place to be, these ultra-cold days in Montreal. I took this photo on the platform at the Berri-UQAM station a few days ago, and only later realized it contained a visual pun.

The poster on the left is for an Opera de Montréal performance of La Chauve-souris, literally, "the bald mouse," or "The Bat" in French, which is Strauss' famous opera, "Die Fledermaus."

But, after all, we're underground, so les chauve-souris are to be expected, yes?

ABC : MTL

It hasn't been that easy for us as artists to move into an entirely new city and new country, where we had no contacts and no history; we left all of that -- a whole lifetime of work, really-- behind in the U.S.  Making friends has been quite easy,
but finding our way in the art scene has not, except for my music. Being
included in an exhibition like ABC : MTL has not only been a good experience for J. as an artist, but it's also made him feel more integrated and accepted as participants in the artistic life of the city we've chosen to call home.

There's a comprehensive review of the ABC :MTL show at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in the January issue of Canadian Architect magazine, including a double-page spread of Jonathan's photograph that was included in the show (p.32-33) In her thoughtful review, Louise Pelletier writes:

"Some of the most
successful pieces, however, invite a different kind of participation." They create new places for poetic inhabitation through representing very real conditions. Jonathan Sa'adah's panoramic The Tunnel of Death, for instance, offers an improbable view of the intersection between d'Iberville and Boulevard Saint-Joseph, capturing the complex motions and coexistence of infinite trajectories that share a common space of circulation while inviting the viewer to reflect on the nature of urban space."

Pelletier liked the show, which had as its premise the presentation of a creative, unusual self-autoportrait of the city, and its democratic, open process of inviting proposals from artists, architects, and citizens. She felt the curators had been less sucessful, however, in their stated goal of engaging viewers in dialogue about the future of the city, particularly in addressing some of the problems brought up by the participating artists. I would agree.

However, it's been a very good experience; it was great for him to have a ten-foot print of his work shown in such a public, high-profile venue; he was part of a video interview (2:07) (see image above, or click link to watch the video) with the artists shown at the museum and on the web, and he gave a talk along with several others artists last weekend, quite well-attended in spite of the bad weather. All his interactions with the staff and curators have been very positive and professional; it's been good.

 

jonzfoto

J. at MoMa, 2007

Perhaps it's ironic -- it's certainly poetic, as The Cassandra Pages enters its tenth year --  my partner and husband, the infamous J., has just started his own blog, as part of his professional website. Jonathan has patiently endured and supported my blogging obsession for a decade, and I'm happy to share a link to his new site, and encourage you to take a look.

Iceland, 2011.

As some of you know, Jonathan is a very fine professional photographer. The blog is built around his personal photos, but it's not a photo blog exclusively - he's using each one (they'll be published about once a week, he says) to explore and write about a particular subject. He has an unusual and creative way of looking at things, so it should be pretty interesting.

As for me, I'm reminded of a recurrent line in the book I'm reading now, a international espionage thriller called Istanbul Passage, by Joseph Kanon, where the Romanian spy keeps saying, "Turn the chess board. The game always looks different from the other side." Jonathan has always quipped that he reads my blog to find out what's happening in our life, but I will no doubt be rewarded with a different view of the same thing, from his perspective!

Montreal, 2012

Amour: Thinking Ahead, Uncomfortably

For weeks now, I've been hearing and reading about Amour, the much-discussed film by Michael Haneke, especially with my friend Teju Cole, who wrote a review of it for the New Yorker blog. Early yesterday morning I took this photograph for him; the feeling of the image seems to express some of my own trepidation about seeing the film, which is no doubt inextricably tied up in my own feelings about age itself, and particularly about facing old age with a lifelong, beloved partner.

Whether I'll actually go see the movie is still up in the air. I find that I have problems with its premise - a kind of "what-if" scenario designed perhaps to make us think, perhaps to shock, perhaps to manipulate our shared anxiety, with its depiction of a potential reality. What is amour, actually -- what is love, at these extremes?

For me, having helped care for elderly loved ones, it wouldn't, couldn't end this way, nor would I want it to end that way for me. A different path is understandable, perhaps. I felt that these end-times were sacred, and very much a part of the long lives I had been part of. The medical care did a great deal to alleviate pain and suffering; perhaps I have too much faith in it, but that's still what I observed. We'd want to try to be faithful right up to the end -- that's what we promised -- though there's no black-and-white answer, beforehand, to what one would want, or do, only the grey of a cold morning.

Have you seen the film? What did you think?

(here's a very different take on the film, also on the New Yorker blog, by Richard Brody.)

Self-Portrait in a Blade

The Cassandra Pages will be ten years old in March, 2013. That is a lot of words, a lot of photos, a lot of comments, and a lot of time. Perhaps it's not surprising that I'm feeling like I have nothing new to say these days! However, I've been curious to look back at what, and how, I was writing then, in 2002 and 2003. Over the next months I may post some things from the archives, and from my personal journals.

Here's one, written on December 10, 2003, with a photo taken today. Not long ago, I gave the mezzaluna, that shiny, dangerous, double half moon, to a friend and excellent cook here in Montreal, who, so far as I know, hasn't repeated my mistake.

---------------
Mezzaluna

"When
he seats himself at the little writing-desk before the window looking over Bristol harbour, his hand
feels as clumsy and the pen as foreign an instrument as ever before."

I cut myself yesterday on the mezzaluna. We don’t use it often, this
sleek kitchen weapon with its ebony knobs and stainless steel blades. I’d taken
it out of the back of a drawer in order to chop a bunch of cilantro, and as I
pried the hard black plastic guard off the curved double rocker-blades I said
to myself, this is a dangerous thing, and just then my little finger came up
along the back blade, just so, more swiftly than a thought. At first I couldn’t
tell if it was a deep cut or shallow, only that it was clean and bloodless and
a quarter of an inch long. I waited, staring, in that shocked space after a
sudden injury, and then ran my finger under cold water. Stinging, then nothing.
I began chopping the cilantro, and then a large drop of dark red formed and I
instinctively raised it to my lips. It wasn’t deep, this cut. I was lucky.

Later in the afternoon I stopped working
for a while and read J. M. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize address. Somewhere around the
third or fourth paragraph, another blade descended. This one was radical,
entirely bloodless. It sliced through rosy pride and accomplishment, and then
through the fat yellow layers of self-doubt and apathy, right down to the
white-blue bone. I’m not finished with you yet, it said. I’m not after bone,
but marrow.

There’s always something to write about in
the back of a drawer, and always better writing out there, waiting to cut us
open, to reveal more of the stuff of which we’re made. We can squirm at the
last minute, letting the blade stop in those middle layers, or give ourselves
up to the knife, rejoicing in language used so well it leaves us panting, avid.

"All
of this news of Lincolnshire
his man writes in a neat, quick hand, with quills that he sharpens with his
little pen-knife each day before a new bout with the page."

(The two quotes are by Coetzee, from his Nobel address.)