Paul Vitols's Blog, page 34

the science of story

The writer receives the commandment: "Know thy genre." According to Robert McKee, it's not possible to do a competent job of writing a screenplay (or, I would suppose, any other kind of dramatic work) without a deep understanding of the genre one is writing in. He says that audiences have strong genre expectations, even if these are unconscious, and that these must not be frustrated without good reason, or the writer and producer face failure. If you're writing, say, a mystery or a Western, what basic plot choices are open to you? What events should happen in the story, and when? According to McKee, these choices are controlled by genre, and the writer is ignorant of them at his peril.

As I discussed in my blog post of 14 July 2011, this commandment sent me on a quest to discover and elucidate the genre of my own work, The Mission. I decided that my genre was epic, and I proceeded to learn all I could about that genre.

As I mentioned in that post, I discovered that the word genre is used in many different ways, and I decided that I would focus on what I am calling story genre as opposed to literary genre. For the same story can be told in different forms, such as print, stage play, film, and comic book, each of which can be regarded as a separate genre, according to a different definition. So the question for me was: What exactly is an epic story?

Before long I was faced with a more basic question: What exactly is a story, anyway? Before looking into the specifics of a certain type of story, I felt I needed to know what a story is. From my set of notes from a McKee workshop on screenwriting, two definitions are offered:

1) A story is about why people do the things they do.

Interesting, but a bit high-level for me. Here is the other:

2) A story is a series of events selected from the life histories of the characters and composed in a strategic sequence specifically in order to arouse emotions and communicate a particular view of the world.

Ah, much more meaty. I like this definition, but I found that for my purposes of studying story, it was still not explicit enough. For one thing, a story is not "a series of events", but a telling of a series of events. I did some thinking and writing, and in time came up with my own short tentative definition:

A story is an account of a problem and its attempted solution.

It's short, but it's still not clear unless we know exactly what an account and a problem are. So I defined those. I'll start with problem:

the experience, by a free agent, of both a need and an obstacle to its satisfaction

Next, a definition of account:

a depiction of characters, situations, and events presented in such a way as to evoke strongly some combination of emotional response, intellectual insight, and aesthetic pleasure

So far, these definitions have withstood the tests I've given them. I still believe that a story is necessarily about a problem. Our interest is aroused by problems and how people try to solve them. Our own lives are filled with problems and we relate to the feelings and issues they raise. Shared problems create a strong sense of fellow feeling.

Compare these two accounts:

Paul left his house and walked up the street. Turning left, he proceeded uphill, past some quiet Craftsmen houses and on past the renovated elementary school. Turning back down to his own street, he returned home.

Now try this one:

Paul left his house and walked up the street. Turning left, he proceeded uphill, where some movement an a ditch caught his eye. Crossing the street to look more closely, he saw a newborn infant in a carrying basket. Paul looked around, but saw no one else nearby.

The second account is the beginning of a story, for in it Paul is suddenly presented with a problem. Even if it's not easy to exactly state what the problem is, we sense it. At the least, it seems likely that Paul can't walk on without figuring out what is to become of the baby. He may have to take it home with him in order to get this sorted out. If we've gone to the trouble of reading the opening, we have at least a mild curiosity about how the situation turns out.

This of course is only a beginning. Before I could proceed with my study of story genre I would have to know more about what a story is. What are the parts of a story? I did some analysis and have come up with my own list of what the parts of a story are—but I'll leave that for a future post.

sketchbook: Saturday 8 October 2011

SAT 8 OCT 2011 ca. 1:45 pm LONSDALE & 1st ST.

The fall sunshine is faint but hot: some shadows are vague and smoky; others are crisp, like the shadow of my pen-tip on this cream-colored paper. It has just waxed stronger, and now fainter again.

I sit on the concrete lip of a planter overflowing with rhododendron, in a kind of stall made by two sidewalk signs standing on the brick paving-stones radiating from a center in front of Waves Coffee: to my left a blackboardlike sign advertising The kat walk: Hair, Nails, Skin; to my right, Colette's Frocks, with the black-and-white image of a 1940s pinup girl reclining on a background of pink houndstooth fabric.

The intersection is busy with both cars and pedestrians. There is the surging of car engines shooting up the hill of Lonsdale, and the tootling of electric-guitar notes from a sidewalk musician up the street. Trees, maybe maples, stand at the edge of the road and rise from the divider at the center of Lonsdale; they have the faint blush of early fall, and a few leaves lie on the bricks amid cigarette butts, a paper plate, and some words written boldly in yellow chalk: THANKSGIVING FLOWERS @ Bella Doni, with an arrow pointing up 1st St.

Two cyclists whiz down Lonsdale in identical white jackets and silver helmets. An old man all in black treads downhill, pushing a four-wheeled walker. A woman walks toward me across Lonsdale, pink shirt, gray plaid jacket, dyed red hair; she has to proceed slowly because cars do not stop for the zebra crossing; she steps in front of a yellow cab that reluctantly stops a meter away. A loud diesel pickup truck roars by sounding like a much bigger vehicle under heavy load. Young woman in black walking a tiny jingling dog. A thin man has his animated young son by the hand, the boy talking nonstop, his plaid shirt flapping. White-haired man walks by, slowed by the two heavy bags he carries. Young couple stops so the woman can fiddle with her phone. Brisk-paced man in a moss-green sweater. A persistent wasp keeps returning to hover around my eyeglasses and jean jacket.

Now the sky grows more full of clouds; shadows are faint, barely perceptible. A bus thunders through the intersection and pulls into its stop below 1st, signals flashing brightly. The sun has become a bleary zone of nuclear white beyond the tattered leaves of a tree and the motionless stoop of a streetlamp. And the amplified guitar riffs burble on below the rough breath of traffic.

sketchbook: Thursday 6 October 2011

THU 6 OCT 2011 2:15 pm MY LIVING ROOM

An autumnal dimness has settled over the house, and a near-quiet, except for the tumbling thrum of the dryer upstairs and the occasional sigh of a passing car. There is also the faint, patient ticking of the battery-powered clock hanging high on the wall over the pine entertainment unit. The clock plods on, one tick at a time, destination nowhere.

Outside, beyond the horizontal stripes of the venetian blinds, all is still. There is more movement in the corner of my eye from the stirring of the ratty bouquet of peacock feathers standing from the great vase under the window: the baseboard heater sends a column of warm air upward. But outside; that listlessness of still air under an overcast like a great tent of gray canvas, glowing a little more brightly here and there from unseen sources of light beyond. Each little leaf of the Japanese maple tree growing past and around the back deck hangs perfectly still.

Here inside all is still too: a theater-set after everyone has left, awaiting tomorrow's performance: overstuffed furniture of maroon leather, pine tables from Ikea, gray carpet.

The dryer still goes, a slightly high-pitched, wavering sound (near 440 Hz, as I know from its interference when I'm trying to tune my guitar) like the engine of a ship making its way across a wide expanse of waves that keep shifting, never the same, tugging the ship minutely and ceaselessly.

Paul buys a book

Certain recurring questions crop up in my mind and my life. When a question arises, I tend to spend some effort trying to investigate it, and do this until the next question arises, at which time my attention turns to it and away from the previous question, which then lies dormant until the next time it arises in my mind.

One of these recurring questions has to do with rights—those moral or political or legal entities that we are supposed to have. What are rights exactly? How are they determined? How do they work?

As far as I can recall, this question first arose for me in connection with my interest in environmentalism. I had come across an interesting and even, for me, exciting book called The Commonwealth of Life by Peter G. Brown, a professor at McGill. In it he proposes (as I recall) revamping our political structures and economic thinking to accommodate the idea that nonhuman creatures have rights, and that future beings have rights as well, and all of these should be respected. We, humanity, are not the masters of nature, but parts of it, and should orient our thinking accordingly.

I was immediately attracted to this idea, for one thing because it made a definite step in a direction I had already thought was necessary: to amend our political and economic thinking in response to the changed environmental conditions in which we live, and applying our increased scientific understanding of the environment. I wanted to study his ideas and develop a criticism of them, with the intent not of tearing them down, but of strengthening them. What are the weak points of this project that hostile critics might attack, and how might these points be reinforced and defended?

It seemed clear that the issue of rights was central. It's a term we often use, but do we know what it really means? Do I know what it means?

Since then (February 2008) I have made intermittent efforts to investigate what rights are. I have bought books such as Human Rights: A Very Short Introduction by Andrew Clapham and Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice by Jack Donnelly and Two Treatises of Government by John Locke, and also read some essays by Mortimer J. Adler. The question to me is deep and unclear, and involves other important and controversial ideas such as those of equality and justice. And, as with so much else I do, I push against the question for a while and then my attention switches elsewhere, to push against something else.

The question about rights arose again recently for me, but I can't remember exactly why. The most likely trigger will have been reading The Idea of Justice by Otto A. Bird, an excellent little book published under the auspices of The Institute for Philosophical Research, Mortimer Adler's philosophical think tank, in 1967. But it might also have been reading a letter to the editor of The North Shore News or an online article. Possibly it was from thinking about the controversy around gay marriage, which is usually supported with an argument about rights. Anyway, the question surfaced again in my mind and I wanted to know more.

I remembered the phrase "rights talk", and that this had been coined by an American writer who was criticizing all the appeals to "rights" being made by people in all kinds of situations. I did an online search and found that there is a book called Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse by a Mary Ann Glendon. I popped open a sample of the book and found that the author begins with a discussion of Alexis de Tocqueville's journey through the United States in 1831, which finally resulted in the publication of his famous book Democracy in America.

This in turn reminded me of being in a Chapters-Indigo bookstore a couple of years ago, perusing the political science section, and picking up a copy of the Penguin edition of Democracy in America. I was very attracted to the book, which in pocketbook format was relatively cheap, but it was big and not on the point of any of the things I was researching at the time, so I put it back down.

Now, although the opening of Glendon's book read well and was also attractive to me, I was interested in checking in with her opening source, Alexis de Tocqueville. So I did another online search, and found there was a copy of the book supposedly sitting at the Chapters-Indigo store at Park Royal. Kimmie and I were doing a quick shopping trip out there last night, I so made a point of stopping by the store. They indeed had the book, so I bought it (about $16—more than what they charge for it online, grr). I brought it home and started reading the introduction. Fascinating guy, de Tocqueville, and, I sense, even a kind of kindred spirit.

But there you have it: how one book—my latest—has made its way into my library. Each one has its own story for how it came to be recruited on to my team.

the artist and his doubts

In my life I have struggled to come to terms with the role and value of the writer—the creative artist generally—in the world. I've always had a strong creative urge that demanded expression, but when I got to be a certain age, probably about 20, I also became concerned with living seriously. I wanted to address myself to the important things in life, if I could discover what those were. I didn't want to waste my time or waste other people's time. And as part of this I came to worry that the whole enterprise of storytelling, of "entertainment" in general, was a big waste of time. I worried that I, and most other people, turned to amusements like entertainment in order to avoid the important issues of our lives. This worry created considerable conflict within me and has hampered and compromised my creative efforts; and I can't say that I'm entirely free of it even today.

One of the messages that has come down the ages though is that when you need spiritual help, it has a way of arriving, and it helps very much to have your eyes open for this. My eyes are much more open now in this respect than they've ever been before, but even when they were just barely opening I could feel the nourishing arrival of what I would now call spiritual help. Back in 1980, when this question was causing me much distress, such help arrived in the form of Joseph Campbell's book Creative Mythology, volume 4 of his Masks of God series. Impatient to get to the end, I bought and read that volume first, and only acquired the other ones later. I only barely understood what I was reading, but it was a pitcher of cool water for my thirst.

Early in 1979, while on a road trip in Europe with my friend Tim, I had discovered Alan Watts's book The Way of Zen in an English bookstore in Rome under circumstances that felt providential. And when I read that book I gained clarity about my inner conflict: I recognized that my struggle was a specifically spiritual one, and that my feelings of not wanting to waste my life were exactly my desire to live spiritually, whatever that might mean. Watts's book led me to believe that a spiritual life, for me, must be, in some way, a Buddhist life, since I felt that he showed that the Buddhist path is the one that addresses the problem of meaningfulness most directly. And indeed, I did eventually take refuge and become a Buddhist.

But in 1980 that was still seven years away. At that time it felt like an impossible dream. What was I going to do? Run away to Japan and try to get into a Zen monastery? Did I have that kind of conviction? That kind of courage? No. And what about my creative and artistic aspirations? Wouldn't those have to be discarded in a life of austerity, meditation, and simple manual chores? I didn't want to give up that part of myself, which felt central to my being. Was I born to be a frivolous entertainer, providing a few laughs to others involved in more worthwhile pursuits?

The writing of Joseph Campbell was a strong corrective to that way of thinking. Not only did he see creative art as an expression of the spirit in man, but he showed how all the great spiritual traditions—including Buddhism—were themselves, in their expressed form, works of art. We know the teachings of the Buddha and Jesus first of all as stories; to us they are literary characters; and their stories conform to the primordial story of the hero's journey, which Campbell, adapting a term from James Joyce, called the "monomyth." The important point is not that religion is "reduced" to storytelling, but that religions, in all their profundity and saving power, are products of the expressive nature of man in the same way that his other works of art are. Before there can be priests there must be poets, and the poet is actually closer to the gods in that he is the one who first makes their presence and their message known. A religion is, in a sense, a story that has been turned into an institution.

I could not have expressed any of these ideas in this way in 1980. All I knew then was that Joseph Campbell's writing inspired me and made me feel that the adventure of my life, as it was, was important. The question of the relationship of art and spirit was still hard and dark, and it remained for me to struggle with alone, but I had received an inkling that the answers were there for me to find, to work out.

I'm still working them out. But my conviction in the importance of the artist's role is stronger now than it's ever been. It is a conviction that has been continually tested in my life, and many times have I stumbled and wavered in my conviction. No doubt I will continue to do so. But I don't think I will ever feel that in wrestling with this issue that I have wasted my life. Rather, I see my challenge as being one of living that conviction, even if I don't always feel it 100%.

For a thought has just occurred to me: that a real, living conviction is exactly one that is shot through with doubt. Doubt is the irritant that builds the pearl. The one without doubt is the fanatic, who seeks through extreme, damaging, and irrevocable acts to reassure himself. By contrast, you have nothing to fear from the doubting man, whose very condition schools him to be flexible, humble, and compassionate.

I remember reading, in the Neotraditionalist works, which are intent upon urging us to return to the great traditional religions, the phrase "the corrosive poison of doubt". But doubt is not something to deplore or fear. It might be our greatest tonic, the Kool-Aid we all need to drink.

The Ages of Gold by Timothy Green

The Ages of Gold by Timothy Green

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As I type these words on the morning of Saturday 24 September 2011, the price of gold rests at $1,657.20 an ounce after having tumbled about $150 in the past week during a collapse in stock-market prices worldwide. Online "morning after" articles contain quotes from traumatized and chastened investors, including gold investors. But for my part, everything that I've read over the past 10 years or so leads me to believe that gold will soon resume its upward march in price. The gold market, as Timothy Green shows in his authoritative history The Ages of Gold, has existed for at least 5,000 years. The market has changed its form continually as human society and institutions have changed, but it is bigger and more pervasive today than it has ever been.

I first read about this book in 2010 in an online article by Adrian Ash of BullionVault.com. Having read an earlier work by Green, The New World of Gold, I felt encouraged to plunk down the relatively high price for this new work. It's a weighty hardback printed on heavy, glossy paper, and contains a couple of dozen color plates of gold artifacts. It was available only direct from the publisher, GFMS Limited, a London-based metals research consultancy, and I had to fill out an online form in order to buy it, including, as I recall, a required field stating what company I was with (had to make one up). Doing a search on BookFinder.com, I see that used copies are available now, but the cheapest one today is Cdn$82.35. It seems to be aimed only at those who have a serious, probably professional, interest in gold.

I can say this: it amply repays such interest. Timothy Green has been a student of and writer on the world gold market since the 1960s. In The Ages of Gold he supplements his own knowledge of the 20th- and 21st-century trade with historical research spanning the entire length of human civilization. He scoured the world, visiting museums, talking to archaeologists, goldsmiths, and historians, and he compiled a bibliography of hundreds of texts in preparing this work. It represents a culminating achievement of a career devoted to investigating humanity's passion for element 79.

The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 concerns the ancient world, 4000-1 BC; Part 2 is entitled "Empires AD 1-1200″; Part 3 is called "New Horizons 1200-1700″; and Part 4 is called "Gold standard: whence it came, where it went: 1700-2000″. The different focus of each part reflects how humanity's relationship with gold has changed over time. Very roughly, Part 1 tells how gold changed gradually from a metal sought purely for its beauty and ornamental value to one that became itself a standard of value, notably with the invention of coinage in Lydia in the 6th century BC. Part 2 shows the role that gold (and silver) played in the building of empires, financing war and conquest. Part 3 looks at how gold contributed to the establishment of modern trade, finance, and banking. And finally, Part 4 is about the unplanned rise of the modern gold standard and its equally unplanned collapse in the 20th century.

Green writes with authority about every aspect of our relationship with gold: how it is (and was) mined, refined, worked, traded, stored, and coined. He knows this stuff and he knows the people who handle it, from Swiss bankers to South African miners to Arab smugglers to Vietnamese traders. He seems equally at home talking about the techniques of ancient goldsmiths and about intricacies of bimetallism in the monetary gyrations of modern Europe.

My own interest in gold is mainly as a monetary metal, so I found myself a bit less keen on the earlier parts of the book in so far as they dwelt on the details of smithing and of particular famous works of gold from the ancient world. But I was careful to read every word so that I would have the fullest possible context for appreciating Part 4 about the gold standard. It was well worth it, for Timothy Green gives the best account of the gold standard that I have come across—and I've been looking.

He shows how much that we associate with the gold standard arose by accident or caprice. The standard itself arose accidentally in Britain in the early 18th century when the government, in trying to fix the prices of gold and silver, caused silver to flow out of the country to India and China. Britain continued to regard itself as on a sterling standard long after silver had been replaced by gold as the main circulating currency. Only belatedly did they recognize the change and formally adopt gold as the basis of the pound.

The $35 price of gold that prevailed for much of the 20th century was chosen arbitrarily by Franklin Roosevelt on 31 January 1934 at one of his breakfast meetings with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morganthau. Roosevelt had criminalized the private ownership of gold in America as almost his first act on taking office, and each day picked a price for it from a range suggested by Morganthau. In Green's words, "This official price was to last until 1968 for the open market and until 1971 for inter-central bank dealings."

I have read several accounts of how the gold standard staggered and then collapsed in the 20th century, but Green's is the clearest and best. My only criticism of it is that he seems to regard the government monopoly of money and coinage as natural and normal, and to perceive the actions of the free market as disruptive. My ideal would be an account of the gold standard written by someone with Green's depth of knowledge of gold, but from a free-market point of view.

Another criticism is that the book contains some typos and other copyediting errors. It's a bit disappointing in a book of this size, authority, and expense.

But those are relative quibbles. This is a terrific book. The color plates of gold artifacts, from statues to necklaces to coins, are gorgeous. It's important to note that the book is not about gold itself so much as about our relationship with it. But this is as it should be, unless you happen to be a metallurgist who's looking for more about the physical properties of the metal itself.

Over all, if you're interested in gold, then you need to read this book. And the more interested you are, the more you need to read it.

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truth and fiction

The man crossed the street.

Question: is the above sentence fiction or nonfiction?

There's no way of knowing, is there. Which man? Which street? When? We'd need to know these things before hazarding an answer.

Bob Carlson crossed 5th Avenue and entered the office building by a side door.

What about this sentence—fiction or nonfiction?

We still don't know enough. There is no doubt a real Bob Carlson—many of them—and one or more of them have almost certainly crossed a 5th Avenue somewhere at some time, and one of them might have then entered an office building by a side door. I personally don't know of any, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. The reference to "the" office building implies that a particular office building is meant, but we don't know which one. We need more context to decide.

Here's what Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (tenth edition) says under its entry for fiction:

1a: something invented by the imagination or feigned; specifically: an invented story

John Ayto's Dictionary of Word Origins says that

The word comes via Old French from Latin fictio, a derivative of the verb fingere "make, shape," from which English also gets effigy, faint, feign, figure, and figment.

Interestingly, Webster's also connects fiction etymologically with our word dough, as something that is kneaded and shaped.

If fiction is "an invented story," that pushes the question back to: what is a story? Here Webster's gives, as its first and "archaic" sense, "history." Sense 2a is "an account of incidents or events."

The Dictionary of Word Origins has this entry for story:

Story comes via Anglo-Norman estorie from Latin historia "account of events, narrative, history" (source also of English history and storey). It originally retained the senses "factual account of past events" and "past events in general," but since the 17th century these have gradually been taken over by history, and the use of story has been concentrated more on "fictional narratives."

But if story and history both come from the same Latin word, historia, what does the Dictionary of Word Origins have to say about history?

Etymologically, history denotes simply "knowledge"; its much more specific modern meaning is a secondary development. Its story begins with Greek histor "learned man," a descendant of Indo-European *wid- "know, see," which also produced English wit and Latin videre "see." From histor was derived historia "knowledge obtained by enquiry," hence "written account of one's enquiries, narrative, history." English acquired it via Latin historia, and at first used it for "fictional narrative" as well as "account of actual events in the past" (a sense now restricted to story, essentially the same word but acquired via Anglo-Norman).

So our words story and history have only become distinguished from each other relatively recently. In a sense, our ideas of fiction and nonfiction have become differentiated from a single source, like a cell dividing.

Here is what Mortimer J. Adler has to say in his essay on History in volume 1 of the Syntopicon from The Britannica Great Books of the Western World (compressed):

Since he is both an investigator and a storyteller, the historian stands comparison with the scientist in one respect and with the poet in another. The special character of history as a kind of knowledge distinct from science or philosophy seems clear from its object—the singular or unique events of the past. The historian uses particulars directly observed by himself or testifed to by others as the basis for circumstantial inference to matters which cannot be established by direct evidence.

The contrast between history and science is formulated in Aristotle's statement concerning poetry, that it is "more philosophical than history, because poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular."

Unlike poetry, history and science are alike in that they both attempt to prove what they say. But in distinction from science or philosophy, history resembles poetry, especially the great epic and dramatic poems, in being narrative literature.

And yet fictional stories too require "proof" in a sense, according to Robert McKee. Even when we know a story to be fictional, we need to "believe" it in the sense of finding it plausible. As Aristotle says in his Poetics, the chain of events called a plot needs to seem either necessary or probable, or the plot will not produce its intended effects on us. The dramatic storyteller needs to persuade us of the plausibility of his account just as the historian does.

Back in 1980, when I was 21, I had decided that I wanted to be a writer of serious fiction, and I had also awakened to a deep desire to learn the truth of life—the deepest spiritual truth I could find. I wanted to believe that these two desires were somehow linked, and I set out to try to prove it by writing an essay which I was going to call "Truth and Fiction". I remember sitting at the drawing-board that I then used as a writing-desk and writing the title on a sheet of ruled looseleaf paper, then struggling through another paragraph or so. I sat there looking at it, then I gave up; I just didn't know what I was talking about.

In some sense I've been working on that problem ever since. At least I can now offer some comfort to my 21-year-old self, put my arm around him and tell him, "Friend—it's not an easy question." Now, at age 52, I'm in a much better position to tackle it. For one thing, I don't expect to resolve it. Rather, I expect to experience only the pleasure of discovering and relating the ideas involved, and of setting them into a pattern that works for the projects I intend to do.

But my intuition is that this fuzziness of the boundary between fiction and nonfiction is telling us something profound about our relationship with reality. We experience our dreams as stories, and we experience our lives as stories. So the power of storytelling is, I suspect, the first power of the gods, who give skilled shape to this dough we call reality.

sketchbook: Tuesday 20 September 2011

TUE 20 SEP 2011 2:25 pm LIBRARY PLAZA NORTH VANCOUVER

Sunshine on the concrete plaza. Water splashes in the fountain behind me and burbles up from the crater cut in the gray stone block beside me, rough as a meteorite. There is a diesel-engine surge from the telescoping crane behind the flatbed truck parked on the plaza. A blonde girl in a bright yellow hardhat drags away the fluorescent-orange plastic stanchions that ring the truck. Another woman has just called her name: "Anna!" They're loading them into a new white Ford pickup to my right: Mar-Tech Traffic Control Ltd. Now it's started up, growling gruffly, driver's door standing open, ready to go.

Three flagpoles stand before me on cylindrical concrete bases. The central one is tallest: the Canada flag. Sunrise flag of B.C. to the left, white civic flag of 3-masted ship on waves to the right: City of North Vancouver. They stand guard to the flat plaza directly before the green glass of the 3-story library: a brand-new snap-together toy.

Not many people, but a steady traffic of individuals: old man in ballcap on an electric wheelchair of candy-apple red; Chinese woman sauntering in a soft white sunhat; middle-aged Iranian man walking with a slight stoop, in black sweater and shades. Old woman pushing a 4-wheeled walker/seat; another man in shirtsleeves and a panama hat; young man in T-shirt with rucksack slung over one shoulder.

Both engines are still idling.

The shadow of a bird flapping its wings passes over the plaza.

A sharp double-honk from the pickup, and now the insistent beep of its backup alarm as it creeps backward into the alley.

Beyond the plaza and the trees: pale misty blue-white: a gap where the sea lies off West Van.

sketchbook: Saturday 17 September 2011

SAT 17 SEP 2011 ca. 1:15 pm NORTH VANCOUVER CITY LIBRARY

I'm on the main floor on a ketchup-colored upholstered bench, a curve that arcs through 120°. The corresponding bench opposite me, which also has an upholstered back, supports an older Iranian man, wispy gray hair trailing across his scalp as he bends over a form he's completing on the donut-shaped maple table. The table is only shin-height so he has to bend far.

Turns out he's completing it for a friend, another bald Iranian man, who has just returned and accepted the form with a "thank you" in English, although their other quiet words have been spoken in Farsi. And now they've both gone, leaving that bench vacant.

Just for a moment: a woman in dark jeans and dark denim jacket has just plunked onto it heavily to sample a book from the "new arrivals" shelves that curve around us. She is maybe my age. She cocks her head far to the left to rest it on her left hand, elbow propped on the back of the bench. She is blonde, her hair is bundled into a careless ponytail and her face does not appear to be made up. She has stopped flipping languidly through the pages and reads a passage more intently.

It's still a new building. This floor is an expanse of slate tiles, interrupted by a concrete pillar and a few steel counters that support the catalogue stations. Above us is a dropped ceiling of illuminated acoustic tile; over the main concourse is another dropped ceiling of cedar laths. Exposed HVAC ducts march in straight lines along the ceiling, knowing where they're bound.

A redhaired librarian reshelves books nearby: black sweater, blue jeans, glasses.

There is a hush: not many people. Querulous voices of little children. The plastic click-clack of DVD boxes being handled and fed into the Returns self-actuating conveyor belt. The whir of the self-opening sliding front door.

Now the book-browsing woman has returned her book to the shelf and makes her way quietly upstairs, looking around her as she goes.

Sketchbook: Saturday 17 September 2011

SAT 17 SEP 2011 ca. 1:15 pm NORTH VANCOUVER CITY LIBRARY

I'm on the main floor on a ketchup-colored upholstered bench, a curve that arcs through 120°. The corresponding bench opposite me, which also has an upholstered back, supports an older Iranian man, wispy gray hair trailing across his scalp as he bends over a form he's completing on the donut-shaped maple table. The table is only shin-height so he has to bend far.

Turns out he's completing it for a friend, another bald Iranian man, who has just returned and accepted the form with a "thank you" in English, although their other quiet words have been spoken in Farsi. And now they've both gone, leaving that bench vacant.

Just for a moment: a woman in dark jeans and dark denim jacket has just plunked onto it heavily to sample a book from the "new arrivals" shelves that curve around us. She is maybe my age. She cocks her head far to the left to rest it on her left hand, elbow propped on the back of the bench. She is blonde, her hair is bundled into a careless ponytail and her face does not appear to be made up. She has stopped flipping languidly through the pages and reads a passage more intently.

It's still a new building. This floor is an expanse of slate tiles, interrupted by a concrete pillar and a few steel counters that support the catalogue stations. Above us is a dropped ceiling of illuminated acoustic tile; over the main concourse is another dropped ceiling of cedar laths. Exposed HVAC ducts march in straight lines along the ceiling, knowing where they're bound.

A redhaired librarian reshelves books nearby: black sweater, blue jeans, glasses.

There is a hush: not many people. Querulous voices of little children. The plastic click-clack of DVD boxes being handled and fed into the Returns self-actuating conveyor belt. The whir of the self-opening sliding front door.

Now the book-browsing woman has returned her book to the shelf and makes her way quietly upstairs, looking around her as she goes.