I couldn’t agree more with Vanessa. Dr. Cornett is nothing short of an amazing academic, activist and, perhaps most importantly, a truly inspired teacher wholly dedicated to the art of sharing, experiencing and expanding the boundaries of our understanding of the human condition through engaging in real dialogue, which he masterfully yet unobtrusively facilitates. He is not so concerned with finding answers as with probing to understand what makes us who we are, bridging the arts, religion and social and political sciences in a way that seems perfectly natural, yet which I haven’t seen done before. Through exhaustive study, observation and asking questions, his students, as well as the guest speaker and everyone else present in the class, gain new insights and perspectives by the end, and it’s always a highly stimulating and often unexpected experience. I’ve seen how Dr. Cornett works tirelessly to secure the distinguished people he wants as invited guests to the class, and he almost always gets his way! I have had the privilege to collaborate with Dr. Cornett in his former classes at McGill on several occasions, and it was always a truly enlightening experience; not only from the way he organizes and directs the class, but also from the acute and often profound observations of his students, who seem to understand the connections among apparently different disciplines better than the so-called “experts,” who are often too entrenched in their own points of view to be open to this kind of thinking. Dr. Cornett seems to attract students who really want to dig a little deeper into what makes artists, writers and politicians tick, and I gained great insights both as a guest speaker and by auditing some of his “unplugged” and “dialogic” sessions, which Dr. Cornett often graciously invited me to attend.

In his McGill classes there was no territory he was afraid to broach or tread, and this uncompromising attitude toward learning and knowledge ultimately cost him his job there. One of the last classes with Dr. Cornett I attended at McGill featured a panel of prominent Jewish and Palestinian authors, religious leaders and military officers, and as you can imagine, there were some sparks that flew, both among the panel and with the students. But despite the palpable passion in the hall, all was nevertheless quite civil and overall respectful, and it’s the dialogue that prevailed. Debate is normally contentious – that’s why it’s called debate – and particularly about a subject that both sides feel so strongly about, which was Israeli-Palestinian relations. I felt I had a clearer understanding of what the divide is and why it is so difficult to overcome, and I’ve been interested in this subject for much of my life. Such a free and unhinged discussion is rarely seen, except perhaps on BBC’s “The Doha Debates”, and is sadly even rarer in classrooms. Unfortunately, it seems that it was also too much for the administration of McGill, and Dr. Cornett was soon summarily dismissed, without explanation. I’d also like to mention that his dialogic session with former Prime Minister Paul Martin was also very enlightening, with an international student audience asking pointed questions of the former PM that he was clearly not expecting, yet he seemed to be answering them as best he could, apparently ready for the challenge. It focused on his current work in Africa, and with some some African students in the class, there were questions about cultural issues I was hearing about for the first time. I felt I was part of a frank and enlightening discussion on the challenges facing the African continent and how it relates to the rest of the world, as well as getting a more human insight into a man I had previously thought of as a two-dimensional political cardboard cutout, which is pretty much all one gets from the media. It’s often the same thing with the renowned actors, writers, musicians, artists and dancers he invites to the class, who inevitably show a side of themselves not perceptible from normal media interviews. The gift of being a subject of Dr. Cornett’s classes is that I got to share my own personal experiences with music and my career with a group of people who were keenly interested in knowing what it’s like to do what I do, and, having heard nearly all of my recordings, had incredible insights into my music I’d never before considered, but which seemed highly relevant. I got real feedback on how my music affected them, how they experienced it, how they related it to their world, and this is something truly invaluable for any artist.

Although Dr. Cornett is no longer at McGill, he is back in full force with his dialogic sessions, now open to all the public, something we can now all benefit from. And I strongly suggest you that you do.

Matt Herskowitz

I had the honour of attending one of Dr. Cornett’s “Dialogic Sessions” with my feature documentary, Scared Sacred. He gathered together a panel of guests who spoke to the themes of the film – ranging from the Dalai Lama’s translator, to a survivor of the war in Bosnia. It was the most profound exploration of my work I have experienced. The engagement of the students with the film, the guests and myself, was absolutely outstanding, and the depth of learning was deep and meaningful. I have never before or since witnessed such an incredible teaching style. I look forward to seeing this film!

Howdy!

Does anyone know what publications he has written for? I can’t find ‘em using Google.

Thanks

Norman, like so many of my artist friends who have met and chatted with you at various vernissages, I look forward to seeing the documentary by Alanis Obsawin.

Perhaps we could arrange a screening in a Montréal gallery this summer.

When I first met you I had no knowledge of the controversial and obviously exciting teaching classes that you had created. But I was very impressed by your ‘eye’ for and interest in contemporary art. Especially your ability to draw out ‘visual text’ from the artist. You do get them talking about their art in a positive and professional way. I’ll pass the word about the film and if you need any help with anything … just let me know.
Patricia

this is a welcome documentary !!
Dr Cornett we applaud you for holding safe a place for creative thought. This is the way the world changes; a brave person bangs at the door of ignorance and that allows it to fall away for the next generation if they choose to take the mantel.
Thank you Dr Cornett for being such a champion.
Margie Gillis

J’ai le plaisir de vous annoncer à l’avance que le documentaire sur le professeur Cornett, réalisé par Alanis Obomsawin, sera présenté dans le cadre du Festival Présence autochtone en juin 2009 ici à Montréal: http://www.nativelynx.qc.ca (le programme n’est pas encore sur le site internet mais le sera d’ici la fin du mois de mai)!
Meilleurs voeux de succès au Professeur!

I had the pleasure of meeting Norman Cornett in Montreal when we presented “Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World.” The discussion that followed was deeper and broader than any that I’ve experienced following a screening. I look forward to seeing this film. I hope it will be shown in New Mexico.

I met Dr. Norman Cornett on the occasion of the “dialogic” sessions on two novels: Neil Bissoondath’s “The Soul of All Great Designs” and Priscilla Uppal’s “To Whom It May Concern.” On both occasions, the advertisements described Dr. Cornett as a moderator or a facilitator. After attending the sessions, participating in the discussions and understanding the important role played by Dr. Cornett, I realized that the terms “facilitator” or “moderator” do not come close to describing the important educational role Dr. Cornett assumed on both occasions. Using seemingly unorthodox but highly imaginative means, he succeeded in creating an atmosphere of mutual trust where learning became a delightful experience. Unfortunately, innovation most often is met with opposition; this is what we learn from the sad story of his dismissal. One feels sorry for so many potential students that could have benefited from his teaching. Luckily, his “dialogic” sessions continue to do exactly that. And this, I’m sure, is much more gratifying, because the appreciation comes with no strings attached; it’s sincerely felt and honestly conceived by all participants. With no flattery intended, thumbs up, Dr. Cornett! Keep on crossing boundaries, promoting understanding, and connecting free spirits!

Having been a dialogic partner as well as observer of several of Dr. Cornett’s dialogic sessions, I experienced an unprecedented forum of learning. The ambiance allows for challenging and sometimes controversial topics to be presented in a way that is both unvarnished and respectful. Dr. Cornett establishes the tone, keeps the conversation moving and often poignant, and brings diverse and passionately held views to the fore. For this to work, Dr. Cornett’s masterful skills as a facilitator are employed to maintain academic balance, professional respect and integrity. The result is that real learning takes place – not just reinforcement of previously held notions or the rehashing of institutional answers. My hope is that McGill’s dismissal of this distinguished professor will prove a gain for the world as dialogic sessions emerge to an international level though blogs such as this.

I want to add my voice to all those who admire Dr. Cornett’s approach to dialogue and conflict. You are a great inspiration for many of us, Dr. Cornett.

I am a former student of Dr. Cornett and have nothing but great things to say about this man. I can only suppose that he has developed a “teaching gene” in his DNA since he is a gift to the academic world…this man was born to teach! Whether it be in the political or scientific spheres, there is an apparent break in dialogue. The News seems to be based more on extreme emotional stimulus than anything else and the scientific community is rapidly forgetting its noble tradition and becoming a field of technicians and robots. We need Dr. Cornett! We need his dialogue, openess and his human approach.

I’ve attended a number of Dr. Cornett’s Dialogic Sessions, it was always an amazing and humbling experience. He also used my first film “Once a Nazi…” as the subject of one of the sessions. The way in which his students interacted with the chosen works made me resent the education that i received. I know it was an incredible amount of work for them but based on the film that i saw when it premiered at Hot Docs, most of the students eventually understood the method in his madness.

Regarding the film, it was a beautiful homage to Dr. Cornett’s teaching methods and well deserved. I found myself wishing the film would have spent more time on the crux of the issue. Why such a fantastic professor could be dismissed outright with zero accountability on the part of McGill. The way they went about things was shameful. A very unfortunate turn of events for possibly the most dedicated professor i have ever come upon.
Thank you Dr. Cornett for the gargantuan efforts you have always and still apply to your teaching.

Please accept, dear Alanis, my sincere congratulations for producing the documentary about Professor Norman Cornett. And my thanks as well, because in unfortunate situations like his at McGill, most of us would simply look the other way. It is so easy to do so.

I have been a gallerist for the past thirty years and have worked with artists, writers and thinkers. This has been one of the great privileges of my life. My first encounter with one of Professor Cornett’s classes was an extraordinary experience; it shattered some of the taboos that surround the world of art dealing. In my field the key to being a merchant, a dealer, a gallerist, not only of art but also of hopes and dreams, is learning how to communicate and bridge ideas, to explore a myriad of thoughts.

Professor Cornett does all this from his perspective as an intellectual. What is his secret? I think it lies in Canadian generosity and openness. He trusts ephemeral ideas; he can see where an artist is going; he understands artistic idealism. I have witnessed him communicating and engaging with artists about the substance and the content and the means of their expression. He can grasp their raison d’être. He can translate the metaphysical thinking of an artist into a clear concept, a precise understanding of the object and imagery in question. He thus becomes an invaluable bridge between artist and audience.

Needless to say, people with this talent, people who push their students to think as broadly, stir up opposition, even fear.

Those of us in the field of the arts call such people Artists of the Cutting Edge. They are unique, they are thoughtful, and stoning them is not an option. I am privileged to be able to communicate with Professor Cornett as a companion in my field and a friend of the artists.

SALUT, Professor Cornett!

Samuel Lallouz Directeur, Galerie Samuel Lallouz

Dr. Cornett and I met one Sunday morning at the Church of Saint Andrew and Saint Paul on Sherbrooke Street West. I had been the preacher that morning; I don’t know what in my sermon made him approach me after the service. But within minutes, I was hooked. There is an unusual mind, I thought, that I had better connect with for my own development. I attended and also participated in some sessions in one of the theatres in Pollock Hall – always jammed with people and always too short to delve into the depths of what Dr. Cornett raised up for collegial but tough discussion. And how his students got involved! Wow! The impression he left on me is as strong today as when I still lived in Montreal.

May the support he has in Montreal and elsewhere – and how widespread it is may be seen from the preceding comments – continue so that many others may come to learn the difference between “right” answers and “honest” ones.

Martin Rumscheidt

J’ai rencontré Dr. Cornett à quelques reprises lors de vernissages. C’est un homme exceptionnel. Félicitation pour ce documentaire.

I do not know Dr. Cornett as a teacher but only as a passionate art viewer and writer. He studiously observes every artist’s work and reads deeply into the intention of the artist, regardless of discipline, style or medium. His powers of observation and skill at writing make him one of visual art’s valuable assets here in Montreal.

At one of my exhibitions there was a man who I met once and never forgot.

Not knowing who he was, I found his questions and the things he said triggering my interest, making me realise that this was different from the many approaches that I, as the exhibiting painter, forget (or prefer to forget) later. He invited me to be the guest speaker to his Dialogic Session at McGill University, which I didn’t attend, simply because I was too shy to accept it then. That was in 2005. The person I met was Dr. Norman Cornett.

Recently, I’ve been knee deep in a project that involves art in the form of poetry and painting, and need a bit of advice in regards to how to realise it, and interesting enough it is Dr. Cornett that came to my mind, as the one person I met years ago, who has struck me as a singular personality in the world of art in Montreal. What is even more interesting is the timing. I get to meet him at a time when I can give back a drop of attention to his work, which is something I so look forward to know more about.

I do thank Alanis Obomsawin, the director of the documentary “Since when do we divorce the right answer from an honest answer?” and the NFB, to give us this chance.

Le docteur Cornett vient régulièrement voir les expositions que nous organisons au musée. Il est en fait un des rares historiens de l’art de Montréal à savoir que nous existons et, je l’espère, à s’intéresser et apprécier les efforts que nous faisons pour diffuser l’art et les métiers d’art. C’est toujours un plaisir de parler avec lui et j’ai très hâte de voir le documentaire afin d’apprendre à mieux le connaître.

Pierre Wilson, directeur Musée des maîtres et artisans du QUébec

It has been a great pleasure to work with Professor Cornett. I was thrilled last year when he accepted to write a text for my first art catalogue. But I was completely impressed when I observed him dive whole heartedly into the project; visiting my studio numerous times, busing through the sweltering summer heat from the other side of town and sitting for an hour at a time in silence with the art, as he filled page after page with notes. Unfortunately, the summer humidity in my studio was so unbearable that some could have considered having to sit in such a context, and actually concentrate, a form of Chinese torture. But Professor Cornett kept on returning to study the works with enthusiasm.

Some time later we met up and he showed me all of the notes he had accumulated and I was amazed to find what looked like enough material for a book. I was truly taken aback by the amount of notes he had collected, especially as all of this was to be condensed into 550 words, which he did masterfully.

I slowly realized how each word, each comma, each thought was weight and measured with such attention and sensitive sincerity. His text is an art piece of it’s own, and it is an honor to have it in my first catalogue, ‘Remains of a Drunken Ship’.

Thank you Professor Cornett for your belief and your vision. I look forward to viewing your film next week. I have no doubt it will be fascinating and inspiring.

I had the great pleasure of meeting Dr. Cornett some years back after moving from NYC to Montreal. I would meet him at art openings throughout the city and what struck me most is his openness and passion for art. From the music, spoken word, visual arts and film Dr.Cornett is always on topic. He relates the arts to everyone and allows artistic expression to be the common denominator for all. His pleasant manner and willingness to listen to artist, as he did with myself on several occasions created a stimulating position and open up room for further dialogue. I look forward to seeing Dr. Cornett and celebrate his successes as he celebrates us.
Thanks,
Frank Caracciolo

Hi,Dr.Cornett, Congrats!

I have just returned from the screening of Alanis Obomsawin’s documentary on Dr Cornett feeling all at once elated and energized and at the same time, full of the rage of having witnessed a huge sense of injustice. I met Dr Cornett briefly at Espace Pink when he expressed interest in a book I had recently written and produced. He seemed like something of an enigma, so I googled his name the next day. The article I found gave only a small indication of the depth and breadth and generosity of his teaching approach. I was truly inspired and elevated tonight, on one hand. On the other, I was left raging over the means by which he was fired. This was a purely cowardly act, but strangely that does not come as a surprise to me. I believe Dr Cornett’s approach must have been deeply threatening not only to the structure of the University, but to its professors as well. The quest to find out the truth or to make McGill accountable, I believe, is a waste of precious time. Their behavior has been completely lacking in integrity and is totally shameful.
Sincerely,
Arlene Havrot-Landry

There are a number of things that make Dr. Cornett’s dialogic philosophy of education as extraordinary as it is unique. The first is the way he banishes fear from the classroom. In most discussion settings, people are often unable to communicate their honest impressions, either because the strictures of the response format inhibit the flow of their creativity or because they believe their opinions will embarrass them in front of their peers. By making honesty the first and only criteria for his “reflections”, Dr. Cornett ensures at a single stroke the robustness of the debate in the learning communities he helms. This principal of honesty also ensures that he remains a vigorous, but completely impartial, moderator, a tremendous asset in dealing with the often controversial topics from which he steadfastly refuses to shy away.
These topics are always absolutely fascinating, especially because they usually blend subjects together in striking new ways. For instance, I had the privilege of being part of sessions on the intersection between music and palliative care and on the role of the media in the Rwanda genocide. Unfailingly, Dr. Cornett’s subjects are not merely a stimulus for the imagination, but also a call to consider the social implications of the topic and to assume a sense of civic duty in relation to those implications.
The third and most distinguishing attraction of this kind of learning lies in the sort of people who populate Dr. Cornett’s sessions. Extraordinary education attracts extraordinary individuals and the students who choose to participate in these sessions put a premium on innovation and unorthodox thinking. The creativity that they bring with them invariably makes for lively, unbridled discussion and the sense of intellectual freedom and excitement fostered in such an environment rubs indelibly off on the experts Dr. Cornett brings in as dialogue partners. Whether those experts are Prime Ministers or visual artists, Supreme Court Justices or documentarians, they quickly realize that there is a special atmosphere of openness pervading the classroom and consequently they become energized by it, freely proffering their accumulated wisdom to the minds who are most hungry for it.
At the confluence of these factors, then, is a community of excellence, wherein Dr. Cornett’s radical departure from the formalities of higher education have indeed taken education higher. Students come with greater enthusiasm, they work harder, they think laterally, they interact with individuals at the very forefront of their respective fields, they imbibe a commitment to making a better world, and through this journey they expand their own vision of who they are. What is such a process if not the very essence of education?
We should consider ourselves privileged to have Dr. Cornett’s sessions taking place in our community and I encourage everyone to avail themselves of the opportunity to be part of his upcoming series on jazz and the visual arts, entitled “Body and Soul”. Information can be found at http://www.creativeboost.ca/.

I had seen Norman Cornett at many of the gallery openings over the past ten years but had never connected other than when he would introduce himself and ask me about some of my works in different exhibitions.

In September 2008, Darren Ell asked me to invite Dr Cornett to be on his thesis jury for ‘Haiti: Rembobiner / Rewind’.

Mr. Ell’s work has always been very political, often taking opposing views to the ones presented by the Canadian Government and the Canadian Press. Dr. Norman Cornett was the perfect match as the ‘external evaluator on the five-member jury. He arrived totally prepared. He had received and reviewed all the material and then forwarded the images to contacts within the Haitian press and government. He had printed responses and printed ‘non-responses’ to the work. His concerns and questions took the dialogue to different places than with the rest of us. His viewpoints and questions made for a much fuller examination of Mr. Ell’s work.

Now we greet each other as he is winding his way through the Belgo Building. the Parisian Laundry and a host of other venues in Montreal. I am usually there to support one more of Concordia’s students in exhibition.

Norman Cornett is an arduous critic, a strong resource and a perfect gem.

Evergon

During one of the sessions of Body and Soul, after watching a clip from the movie “Dead Poets Society,” a fellow Body-and-Souler asked Dr. Cornett whether he identified with the character of Robin Williams (John Keating) or the character of Ethan Hawke (Todd Anderson). His answer was most informative. As expected of a teacher, he chose John Keating’s character, but then, to everyone’s surprise, borrowed the pen-name Todd Anderson. The choice of name reveals Dr. Cornett’s philosophy of education that can be summarized through the words of John Keating from “Dead Poets Society” – “… the idea of education … [is] to learn to think for yourself,” even if “the herd” may think it’s “bad.”
In the course of two wonderful weeks the group explored creativity in the most inspiriting manner – “uncensored, unedited, unplugged,” to borrow Dr. Cornett’s favourite descriptions for the “dialogic” sessions. The experience was overwhelming, if a bit surprising in the beginning. Every one of us, at the end of the two weeks, discovered a certain bent, ability, gift, talent that was not known before the start of the course. The “One-on-One” meetings with such artists as Branford Marsalis, Christine Jensen, Ingrid Jensen, Andrew Paul MacDonald, Frederic Back, Sue Adams, and Susie Arioli confirmed the value of Cornett’s philosophy of education: true creativity flourishes in an atmosphere of total freedom, unrestricted , uncensored, unplugged.
One has to agree with John Keating in “Dead Poets Society” – “No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.” And this is what Dr. Cornett’s “Body and Soul” succeeded in doing. Thank you, Dr. Cornett, for allowing us to participate in this change.
Anait Brutian

As an intern at Creative Boost I had the pleasure to work with Professor Norman Cornett. At the moment I am working very close with him, as his next series, ‘Streams of Consciousness’, http://www.creativeboost.ca/lit_eng.html , will start soon.

My internship is over in less than a week, and I will go back to Germany/France. Therefore I wanted to leave a short message on that blog – unrestricted , uncensored, unplugged.

What I really felt during my internship, is that Professor Norman Cornett is now leaving McGill behind to fully concentrate on his series at Creative Boost. I am really happy for him that he now has a place where he can teach and that people are interested in attending his series.

If you want to attend any of his series, just check out the EVENTS section on our website http://www.creativeboost.ca/ . ‘Body&Soul’ was just the beginning, so be prepared for other new interesting series at Creative Boost with Professor Norman Cornett!

Theophil / Samson

As a former student of, or should I say “partner in dialogue” with Dr. Cornett, or Mary Sue as we knew him, I wanted to share a few thoughts about Dr. Cornett, Alanis Obamsawin’s film, and my Alma Mater, McGill.

I share the opinions that many have already expressed here: the film was compelling, Dr. Cornett’s classes were inspiring and challenging, and it is a real shame that McGill has pushed him out.

However, my bone of contention with McGill’s decision to remove him wasn’t really about the quality or not of Dr. Cornett’s classes.

My concern? If universities do not themselves provide a space for pedagogical deconstruction and experimentation, then who will?

Dr. Cornett played a vital role at McGill by challenging the university itself. It is a real shame that he was not cherished.

Touchingly, as we learn through Ms. Obomsawin’s film, Dr. Cornett is compelled to teach through dialogue, and he is very much in dialogue with all of us here.

I remain his student.

I was privileged to take Dr. Cornett’s class during my years at McGill. Little did I know what kind of class it was going to be like! In every lecture, I was in awe of his knowledge not to mention rich content of the course, but I was most surprised and touched by his enthusiasm, the heart and soul that Dr. Cornett had put into each of his students. He, as a professor always put his students’ interest first. In each dialogic session, he became the most energetic student himself! I’ve never had any teacher like him, nor do I think I will have another chance like that in my lifetime! As a person who’s continuing studies in Education, he is a definitely someone I would like to emulate.
Through his class, I had a chance to think about what is important in life and about who we are, who I was. I think even though it’s a basic question, not many of us encounter that in the course of our education. I’m very thankful that I had this chance. Thank you Dr. Cornett for your heart and passion that truly shed a different light on me.

Not only does Dr. Cornett expand our minds but our hearts as well. So many pieces of music, litterature, sculptures or poems that Dr. Cornett, with such kindness, introduced me to that I didn’t like at first (understood? took time to understand?) but grew so fond of.
My last “coups de coeur”: Rawi Hage and Hans Tutschku. Holes made on my shield. Message reçu.

As an invited artist to this series I would like to give you my impressions of last weeks meeting with the group. Dr. Cornett did not tell me details beforehand on how he would proceed with the group in my sound installation AILLEUR-INTÉRIEUR. When I entered the gallery and saw the video about the blindfolded members listening in the church Gesù, I tried to imagine the type of experience I would have made in their place.
Dr. Cornett red excerpts of their impressions, written after 1 hour listening. I was amazed by the richness of the comments and their openness to share their most private emotions. This act is very close to what I’m feeling while creating. To some extend the barrier between artist and public got erased that evening. Everybody was contributing his/her sensibilities and I learned a lot. Thanks for this unique opportunity.
Hans Tutschku

I always wanted to take a writing course, but never had much opportunities or time.
By checking online I was reading about a course called “Stream of consciousness” and it was starting in a couple of weeks.
I got fascinated by the title itself and the short explanation of it.
Then, digging a little deeper, I was reading about the method of Dr. Cornett.
Well, the only thing left to do was to experience myself this method, so I started following his classes.

So far.. so good! I’m enjoying my time there and Dr. Cornett is very dedicated and helpful.
Every lesson is a not only a great opportunity to meet artist and get in touch with their works, but also to discover our approach to arts, by letting ourselves go and follow the streams of our creativity.

Is about experiencing, sharing, teaching and learning. And that is a lot!
Thank you.

I can’t believe it, Dr. Cornett, you made me write a poem! Et pas même dans ma langue maternelle, ni même dans ma langue seconde. Just because of the method you use and the confidence you inspire! Let’s try to guive an example.

First, you make us comment two very difficult poems. At first sight, I have no reaction. Some parts I understand, some are completely out of comprehension. The whole makes no meaning whatsoever to me. Poetry is boring. I don’t feel like making any effort to sympathise (taking the time?) .

Then you ask us to buy the book. It is Erin Moure’s O Cadoiro. Already it starts to make sense. We understand there is a research, a soul behind it. We start to appreciate.
As hours, nights go by I get really involved: the emphasis on the words put seperately here and there attract me; the distribution of the sentences (not in a single line like in prose but in seperate lines, putting in evidence every word as well as the sentence as a whole); the place of dots and comas (again attracting your attention to every bit of what is said). I am now in the company of the author. She is my friend, my alter ego.

When time arrives to write my comments, to my surprise I start to imitate Erin Moure and it comes out in the form of a poem.
There is no pretention in it and it is not a great poem.
I couldn’t care less. What is important for me is that I instinctively felt like trying a new form of expression in a language strange to me.
The Rei Dom Dinis won’t scorn me!

Speaking about making holes in our shield as Hans Tutschku so interestingly explained to us!

Bonjour Carole K.

Je suis sortie décontenancée de cette rencontre avec Erin Moure.
- Ce chewing gum d’abord. René Dumont, l’agronome français, trompait son attente devant le public en épluchant une orange. Question de sensibilité.
- Déçue aussi de ses réponses évasives quant à l’intérêt de son oeuvre:
Question: why did you chose Galician poems?
Réponse: They are so interesting
Question: Quel rapport entretenez-vous avec ces poèmes?
Réponse: Je suis comme tout le monde. J’aime par exemple ce qui se dit sur “la mère”… (Ça, “la¨réponse? Mais alors pourquoi avoir été chercher si loin et avoir appris une langue pour ça?).
Bien sûr, il y a eu des bribes de réponse de ci de là. Enfin, comme l’a dit Rawi Hage, on ne doit pas tout à ses lecteurs. Bon, acceptons.
Questions de ma part sur l’écriture elle même, la disposition des phrases, des mots, des virgules.
Réponse: (je ne m’en souviens même plus!).

Peut-être n’ai-je pas su m’exprimer ( et est-ce que je savais ce que je voulais exactement?).
Peut-être fait-elle partie de ces artistes qui disent: ne me demandez pas ce que j’écris -je peins etc…- regardez ce que je fais.

J’aurais aussi aimé qu’elle lise mon “poème” pour qu’on puisse en parler. Pour une raison ou pour une autre cela ne s’est pas présenté.
J’aurais aimé pousser la question du langage poétique que j’avais découvert grâce à elle.
Telle la petite fille que j’ai été, avec ses grenouilles dans la main, et que sa mère n’a même pas regardées. (Mais au moins je n’ai pas souffert d’asthme).

À part ça Madame Moure a dit des choses intéressantes (et d’autres moins).
J’ai aussi remarqué l’expression de son visage et son expression corporelle pendant qu’elle vous écoutait lire les textes des Streamnicks (quel contenu, quelle maîtrise de la langue anglaise!). On aurait dit deux personnes différentes, celle du début et celle du partage.

Je ne regrette pas d’y être allée. Je vais continuer à relire O Cadoiro. Cela m’a ouvert des horizons. M’y mettrai-je?

Madame miel

Film Against, Fascism, Film is With Cornett
Canada, according to the U.N. is one of the five highest levels o life in the world. Among all the rights that countries have is the right of education, and the concept of education in a development country as Canada, is quite different than instruction, and what makes the difference, is the fact of teaching the students “ to think”. Is the difference among a University, and a Technic school.
In Mexico, an underdeveloped country, nevertheless the terrible problems of violence, we have not only one of the eldest Universities of America, but one of the most recognized one, the National Autonomous University, recently recognized with the Prince of Asturias Prize of Spain; the prize shows that where even in the 3rd. word – it’s hard to say, but is true- is impossible to think not to give academic freedom, in a faculty as important for the human development, as religion studies, and in Mexico, we do have it.
Mc Gill, in Quebec, has done an unthinkable mistake, avoiding the right of “teaching students to think” by separating Dr. Cornett from his subject – even with the disagreement publicly expressed by thousands; textually thousands – of students.
Then …what is the difference with a totalitarians regime, that avoids the human rights of citizens, and Mc Gill, attitude, of restricting the right of his students to education?
This question that Mc Gill, refuses to answer – quite a paradox- is answered by another question, expressed by contemporary conscious film directors, as Laurent Cantet in his film “Entre murs” –awarded with Cannes Golden Palm in 2008- about the meaning of now days education in France, or in Almodovar´s “Bad education”, about complicity between fascism and religion in Spain. Certainly, Alanis Obomsawin´s documentary “Professor Cornett”, is a real document that according to rights of society, will not allow, never, ever, forget this shameful event in Quebec and Canada´s education. This documentary is awareness.
Mc Gill intolerant attitude, is not far from Spain’s fascism, when one 12 of October 1936, Nobel’s Prize, Miguel de Unamuno, said to fascist Millan Astray: “Impose by the force, cannot convince” “Universities are sacred temples, and teachers are the priests”; Millan Astray, without any argument, simple said: “Death to intelligence, long life, to death”.
Under Mc Gill fascist attitude, that also reminds when Nazis burned the books, not only repressing the Jews, but the freedom of thinking, is an alert to a covered hypocrite fascism, that a developed countries as Canada, and less a province, witch such a free spirit, as Quebec cannot allow.
Cornett is not alone, and his is not only with the right and reason as a companies, he is supported day by day by more people, conscious of the importance of the right of education.
Leopoldo Soto
México D.F. October the 5th 2009.

Last evening I watched the film on Dr. Cornett at the NFB with great interest, as well as rising outrage & sadness – sadness both for potential McGill students who will never get introduced to Dr. Cornett’s fine methods of inspirational teaching, & for Dr. Cornett himself, a born teacher if ever there was one, now in the difficult position of having no secure place to practise his vocation. The film filled me in on what has been going on for Dr. Cornett over the last few years (injustice), as well as giving me background on the Dr.’s professional & personal life (facinating). As an attendee of Dr. Cornett’s present series of classes entitled Streams of Consciousness, I’ve become a firm believer in the worth of the Dr.’s dialogic, experiential approach, how it opens up a place in participants not normally of access in more conventional classrooms. The question is not whether EVERYONE should be teaching this way, but rather: do such methods enhance learning for those who are introduced to them – the latter I can answer with a resounding YESSSSSSSSSSSS. The writing of reflections in dialogue with various artistic works, with the idea that you do so uncencored & honestly, produces thought & feeling the writer is often unaware he/she has within him/her, ignited by the permission to say anything & everything that comes to mind, not worrying about judgement. As I said in a previous comment, the dialogues with the artists that occur later seem as opening for said artists as for class participants. Dr. Cornett talks about the child within, the artist within each & everyone of us, & these are not some sort of empty or overly optimistic suggestions – the child & the artist come to life in the course, &, might I add, the honest adult also comes to life. Querying one’s reactions to works of art in the rawest way possible engenders the possibilities of personal growth & also of expanded consciousness – perhaps the two are the same thing on a certain level.

Dr. Cornett – I’m so glad I found you. Hoping for better things to come for you – thanks – djuana

(p.s. I wholeheartedly endorse the film, think it’s a must see for anyone interested in art, politics, education – a huge thanks to the film-maker…)

J’ai visionné avec beaucoup de plaisir le merveilleux documentaire de Madame Obamsawin (mille bravos, madame Obamsawin) au sujet du Dr Cornett. En tant qu’enseignant j’ai pu y trouver toute l’admiration possibe et toute la stimulation possible pour le plus beau métier du monde : enseigner.

Je fus cependant un peu desarçonné par la table ronde qui a suivi. Monsieur Chénier, responsable des communications internes pour le Réseau des écoles plubliques alternatives (RÉPAQ) tentant de récupérer le travail extraordinaire du Dr Cornett dans les réformes du ministère de l’éducation, me semblait tout à fait anti-thétiques (je ne vois pas ce qu’il y a d’alternatif à suivre les dictats de l’institution gouvernementale). Étant donné que les réformes du ministère de l’éducation tournent autour de ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler “L’approche par compétences”, principalement orientées sur la tâche à acconplir, il y a lieu de se demander quelle compétence le Dr Cornett tente de promouvoir, et comment il entend l’évaluer.
Mon expérience avec les divers comités du ministère de l’éducation ou on tente de construire des objectifs de formation orientés par le marché du travail me rendent perplexes quant à la possibilité d’inclure le travail du Dr Cornett dans cette logique. J’enseigne au cégep. Et si je m’aventurais à enseigner comme le fait le bon docteur, le ministère de l’éducation serait très insatisfait et mon cégep tenterait de me faire perdre mon emploi. Heureusement je suis syndiqué. Mais s’il était possible de montrer que je n’enseigne pas la compétence exigée je pourrais perdre mon emploi tout de même, même si les étudiants apprécient ce que je fais.

La méthode, la passion, le génie du Dr Cornett sont précisément hors ministère, hors institution hors “compétence”. C’est la merveille qu’il est. Tenter de le récupérer dans une logique ministérielle d’approche par compétence est une aberration incompréhensible pour moi.
Yves

Yves,

À vous lire, je fais partie des supporteurs du MELS pour sa Réforme. Je fais donc partie du club des mal-cités puisqu’en aucun moment, je n’ai, pendant cette table-ronde, vanté cette Réforme. Bien au contraire. Je disais que le MELS de 1997 a voulu imiter les écoles alternatives mais sans réunir toutes les conditions qui assurent le succès de ces écoles, entre autres la participation des parents et le centrage sur le projet personnel de l’enfant. C’est une réforme bâclée parce qu’elle ne part pas de la base qui n’est pas rendue là. C’est une réforme de fonctionnaires éloignés de la réalité. Faut-il que je beurre plus épais pour vous faire comprendre?

Pierre,

Désolé de vous avoir mal compris. Sans doute ai-je été induit en erreur par l’utilisation du vocabulaire qui accompagne la réforme. Enseignement centré sur l’enseignant versus enseignement centré sur l’étudiant (excusez moi je voulais dire l’apprenant), etc. Ce vocabulaire est en général très dénigrant à l’égard de ceux qui enseignaient « avant » la réforme (et qui osent continuer à le faire de la même façon) et tend à mettre toute la faute des échecs sur l’incompétence supposée des enseignants. Qui veut noyer son chien l’accuse de la rage. Pour ce qui est de beurrer épais, je peux vous dire que depuis plus de dix ans déjà on nous l’a beurrée épaisse la réforme dans les cégeps.
J’apprécie le fait que vous considérez cette réforme bâclée, mais je crois que vous en approuvez l’idée. Je suis aussi conscient que vous la considérez que « la base n’est pas encore rendue là », ce qui suggère qu’elle pourrait s’y rendre. J’ai des doutes. À mon sens, et je peux certainement me tromper, l’esprit de la réforme, que vous associez à une imitation des écoles alternatives, ne peut pas s’appliquer à grande échelle parce que les écoles alternatives visent un type particulier d’élèves dont les parents sont très impliqués. Il faut aussi des étudiants motivés, indépendants, en fait des caractéristiques particulières qui ne seront jamais celles de tous.
Je crois qu’il faut plutôt viser dans les institutions publiques qui ne sélectionnent pas leurs élèves la plus grande variété de méthodes, incluant des cours magistraux où l’enseignant « centré sur lui-même verse un contenu dans les urnes béates qui sont devant lui ». Les élèves sont différents les uns des autres et une même méthode ne peut s’appliquer à tous. C’est aussi pourquoi il est important que le Dr Cornett puisse continuer à enseigner, non pas parce que tous devraient enseigner comme lui, mais parce qu’il ajoute de façon tout-à-fait unique à la multiplicité.
Je suis aussi conscient que les méthodes pédagogiques sont variées dans les écoles alternatives. Et je crois que nous serions d’accord sur bien des points si on pouvait éviter le dénigrement de ce qui fait autrement.
Il est remarquable que le bon docteur (c’est le surnom que j’aime donner au Dr Cornett) n’a jamais, à ma connaissance, dit un seul mot de dénigrement à l’égard de ses collègues, et qu’il n’a jamais dit non plus que tous devraient enseigner comme il le fait.
Mais sans doute sont-ce là mes démons et mes préjugés, et une certaine fatigue face à un dénigrement constant de notre travail. Heureusement, c’est pour mes étudiants que je travaille.

Small poem (for Andrew Paul MacDonald)…

You’re always trying to get me
to get in rogue tune.

After music, more music but especially
the lit up criss-crossing
a place in the percussive, in instrumentation
that is emotion going for voice
recognizing, hovering.

I saw/heard
what there was for me to see/hear,
not all there was to see,
an imagining grounded,
garden but that’s sly,
not at all in mid air yet
there I was, mid air, stretching.

The music that is run-on
like a coming to unanchored,
impressions hunkering down.

Next view, the palatable clever
without dismissal of the body,
large song in a smallish
bit of enjoining.

I had appetite, I was wistful,
the music turning into me
& what would I find cleaved,
music on the marbling rise,
as many chances to envision
as to imbibe?

Andrew Paul MacDonald was the artist guest at our Streams of Consciousness session last Saturday, a composer of a plethora of types of music. We discussed two pieces in particular, one (a short astounding piece) that fused Western music with Eastern music, another a piece of contemporary chamber music (longer, alive throughout). A subject that came up during the session had to do with the difference between computer-assisted composition, & composition done with the paper & pen approach. From Andrew’s point of view, as he articulated in a note to us via Dr. Cornett, the age old approach to composition has advantages in the area of what happens when you’ve time to think re compositional elements, as well as how the composer is more in control – for the better – when he/she does not have to depend on (quote) “some potentially insensitive programmer decid[ing] for [him]!” Interesting – when I got home after the session on CBC radio there was an interview with the writer John Irving very much in sync with the idea of the slow approach assisting in composition, in this case literary – to wit, Irving said that though he is a very good typist & uses a computer, he writes in longhand, & this because he finds the way the computer goes doesn’t leave him enough time to think through what he wants to think through – he eventually puts his work on the computer, but for the reason suggested never composes on computer. I know this is different from what Mr. MacDonald talks about, but nevertheless I see overlap. Both of these artists find what they do needs time & musing in a way that the computer, for them, doesn’t allow for. I find this interesting…

Me? I write a lot on the computer, it is definitely something that effects what gets written, what the editing process is constituted by, how the pieces keep morphing. Nevertheless, I’ve no doubt the slow method, be it music or literary art, produces great stuff, just not so sure that it is the absolute in approach…

Andrew I so enjoyed your visit to the group, not to mention the pieces by you that we dialogued about – huge thanks – djuanaxx

Djuana: Thanks for the poem! and your insightful comments. Dr. Cornett suggested I post my remarks about “the age old approach to composition” mentioned above.

“Regarding the subject of computer-assisted composition, please relate the following to the participants: I’ve heard many examples of such, but have yet to experience one in which the elements of counterpoint, chord spacing and voicing, timbre, articulation, dynamics and formal design come even close to that achieved with the good old-fashioned pen and paper approach. Why? Well, when you slow down the compositional process, you have time to consider all of these, to use your own intelligence and musical experience to make such important decisions. In fact, with some of the programs with pre-fab elements, you can’t even open up the element to customize it. What kind of composition is that? I’d rather quit!  As a composer I must have control over everything that goes into a piece.  After I’ve written it, the performers can interpret what I’ve composed as they see fit, and I appreciate that, but I do have the final say—it is, in fact, my composition. If it’s electro-acoustic music without performers and put directly into a recorded state, I still want to be able to decide the details of these elements, and not have some potentially insensitive programmer decide for me! The computer, in fact, provides many ready-made musical packets that greatly speed up the compositional process in order to facilitate the production of large amounts of music. But really, do we want lots of mediocre music, or less music of much higher quality? It costs more for quality, but indeed, that’s why!”

A long overdue response to Evergon’s comment (number 48 above). Dr. Cornett sat on my MFA thesis committee in 2008 and it was truly a fascinating experience. As Evergon pointed out, my work crosses lines between the Fine Arts and the traditions of documentary and journalism. Dr. Cornett brought a fresh, deeply curious, direct and challenging presence to the committee. I have since come to know him better, as well as his struggle. The NFB documentary gave me a first-hand look at what he did in the classroom, as well as offering me a view of students’ responses to him. I was moved and inspired by the film and by his work. Dr. Cornett’s work is that of a real-world Dead Poet’s Society. Such dedication, belief in the promise of education, and such an uncynical attitude, all of this is hard to find. As an educator myself, it inspired me to do better.

Cette rencontre avec M. Charles Elisson a été un moment de pur bonheur. Quel communicateur et quel pédagogue merveilleux. Merci au Dr. Cornett d’être l’artisan de rencontre de cette qualité.

I’m glad Djuana wrote at length about her reaction to I&I. I’m not sure whether I agree entirely, but that is beside the point. Nobody should feel that their voice cannot be heard. That is true of the streamniks. It is also a central theme of I&I, and Clarke’s previous books, which try (and we can discuss with what success, and whether with appropriate means) to recover the voices of murderers, poor black folk, hopeful and vulnerable young women. Thanks, Djuana. You have been heard, It may take a while to digest. Burgoo

Professor Norman Cornett in ‘dialogue’ with poet Pierre Nepveu,three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award:

Tuesday,24November2009

18h00-20h00 at Galerie Samuel Lallouz,

1434 Sherbrooke St. W.

Cost:$25,$20[students,seniors]

Tel. [514]849-5844 reception@galeriesamuellallouz.com

Saturday,28November2009

Kamila Wozniakowska discusses her exhibit AFTER REVOLUTION with Professor Norman Cornett,

13h00-15h00 Galerie Eric Devlin

3550 St-Jacques Street

Cost:$25,$20[students,seniors]

Tel. [514]256-2483 or dr.n.farrellc@gmail.com

Like a Calder mobile, the poems are not so much shapes in themselves as intricate arabesques of passing lives, lignes aëriennes.

See my takeoff on Nepveu’s Mirabel in this multimedia Google doc:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgx6mzzj_246c9wfkpg4

Inspired by the poem“Illusions” in Pierre Nepveu’s “Mirabel“which includes the line

“I think without words”

Words are agents dispatched by the Wizard
to keep us here, now, “real”.
To keep us entertained and distracted
– all for his amusement.

Words limit as much as they illuminate,
like coins showing faces and hiding tails.

Words can describe the world,
– or create it.
But create it in its own image.

“In the beginning, there was the word”

“And the word became flesh”

And the Wizard laughs …
… it’s all illusion.

Revolutionist (small poem for visual artist Kamilla W.)

“I wake to see my story convulsing beside me.
Someone has stuck a fork in the moon’s eye.”
John Amen

Say what is right about, wrong about these pictures.
My hope like a hanger fights back hard, recognizes
the recurrent, let’s bloodletting drift away
as though cruelty is the inevitable dark mass –
tell me, don’t flinch, I won’t flinch either breathing
in & out, in & in, out & then a gasp.

Etchings like what you do with fungi toes half sliced
& it’s the credulous has you querying a depth
of the all too human reaching for pitchforks
& the weak, the weak in childish britches
sometime a century ago, all warring,
stern, mechanized, believing –

tell me again about
all these men I see
desperate to be believed
accurate – torment & there it is –
the scraping away of live skin, a dream
darker than the worst punishment,
the slippery slope of paring down.

In the artwork we have men – hard to say
it’s not important they’re almost all men
regardless of sexless artistic intention –
in the artwork the revolutionists have
the drained faces of reverberating anger,
the straight bodies of hardy soldiering,
a bevy of dark tasks miss-believing in light.

Say what you get, what you miss in these pictures.
I look, don’t flinch, think on how revolutions fail,
holocausts open up to a stink of inhuman,
dancers dance with an appetite for winning
the wrong things – energy dips & darts
next to the next horror, the ones thinking otherwise
failing to say…

Photos of the dialogue with Dr Cornett, Kamila Wozniakowska Nov 28 (with flashing-light paintings by Jean-Marie Martin) and of our previous Oct 31 visit to the galerie Eric Devlin to see Wozniakowska’s After Revolution art, can be viewed at
http://www.flickr.com/fdmillar/sets.

See Wozniakowska’s paintings at
http://images.google.ca/images?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hl=fr&source=hp&q=Kamila+Wozniakowska&btnG=Recherche+d%27images&gbv=2&aq=f&oq=)

I truly believe that art is the most efficient way to break the cultural barriers between communities.
I am attending often dr. Norman Cornett’s dialogue sessions and I think he would be a real asset to McGill University and its students.

My name is Carmen Doreal, poet and artist painter of Romanian origin, from Montreal.
I feel like living in a world which disturbs and provokes my curiosity but also inspires, especially the light I can see, the ambiance I feel, the people I meet, the stories I hear, the things I find out, the emotions I experience.

I am fascinated and often surprised by the writing as a process and by the poem as a result since it tends to be unexpected, especially when it uses double senses. For the moment, Dr Cornett and Pierre Nepveu are my beloved lectors. I love the state of mind and inner silence while walking around and waiting something to catch my eye . Being obsessed with cutting out a piece of time and afterwards contemplating the images, I enjoy to guess and to imagine what has happened short moments before and after the reading. The meaning of life we are searching for was captured in the volume of philosophical poems, “Mirabel”. The magical description of the airport full of people and stories… Just like in the real life, people are coming and leaving happy or sad, creating and chasing their dreams…
I really enjoyed “Mirabel” – the masterpiece of this special poet. Pierre Nepveu is so deep in touch with the root of this wonderful area of his childhood memories …so close connected with the problems of the population dislocated, searching for their lost identity in sweet memories, after losing their homes.
I was fascinated by this beautiful open dialogue full of meaning of life, which was a regal shared between two men with touching personality, the wonderful dr. Norman Cornett and his magical guest, Pierre Nepveu!

Carmen Doreal

29 11 2009

Montreal

Tuesday,08December 2009

Pianist Matt Herskowitz ‘dialogues’ with Professor Norman Cornett at the Conservatoire

18h00-20h00

4750 Henri Julien

Studio 1606

Cost:$25,$20[students,seniors]

tel.[514] 256-2483

I’m not the writer of #88, though I would be proud to thought so. Hope whoever did will claim authorship.

Add to #99 Kamila Wozniakowska admitted that some of her work took Goya as a staring point. See
Blind man’s buff 1788 http://www.abcgallery.com/G/goya/goya123.html
Flagellants 1812-14 http://www.abcgallery.com/G/goya/goya62.html
Saturn devouring his children 1820-23 http://eeweems.com/goya/saturn_large.html
Those who want to check the text of Nechayev’s Catechism of a Revolutionist/Revolutionary (1869) will find it (misattributed to Bakunin) at http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~kimball/Nqv.catechism.thm.htm and the context explained at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Nechayev

I heard Matt Herskowitz play yesterday evening – it was part of Dr. Cornett’s “Streams of Consciousness” dialogic series – and it was a delightful experience. A classically trained musician with immense talent in jazz improvisation, Matt is a well-rounded musician with a rare gift for interpretation that is true to the composer’s score – his performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue yesterday was a testament of his reverence for Gershwin’s music – while, at the same time, offering his own individual sensitivity to the score. His original work entitled “Jerusalem Trilogy” that will be released with Justin Time Records in the spring of 2010 was “sampled” with some analysis as to his composition methods – he explained how an original melody served to craft passages with Jewish as well as Arabic flavour. Matt’s website describes it as “21st Century Chamber Music” (http://www.mattherskowitz.com/) – an accurate categorization, indeed that does not, however, depict the musical journey one takes with this beautifully crafted work. Yesterday’s journey with Matt was two short hours long – never enough to explore the creativity of this unique artist – and it was wonderful. Thank you, Matt for the equally valuable opportunity to hear you play as well as explain your composition.

MaD Fusion – Interview with Matt Herskowitz http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujir816rawE&feature=related

The Classical Now II – da Costa and Herskowitz http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEPhpEFOvfw&feature=related

Matt Herskowitz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOY17gt4ZrM&feature=related

Matt Herskowitz – But Not For Me – George Gershwin http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90BMdjt9VEk&feature=related

Matt Herkowitz – TVJazz.tv
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-2SYZPNTv0&feature=related

Pendant des années je ne pouvais pas supporter d’entendre et ré-entendre la musique de Gershwin à cause du mauvais contexte dans lequel on nous l’impose le plus souvent (centres d’achat etc). J’ai donc hésité longuement avant d’acheter cet été le CD De Matt Herskowitz. Mais c’était le seul CD de lui présentememt disponible. Aujourd’hui je dois dire, surtout depuis la prestation de l’autre jour, que Gershwin et M. Herskovitz sont des musiciens selon mon coeur.
J’ai aussi prêté attention à “Jerusalem”, composition mi-juive mi-arabe. I strongly encourage you, Matt, to contact “Le festival du monde arabe” that runs in Montreal end of October if I remember well. If you need any further information about it I would be happy to find it for you. Music like yours is part of those things in life that make it worth living.
Thank you,
Madame miel

Terribly sorry to hear about the recent vandalizing of Galerie Samuel Lallouz. I have not seen it myself. We owe him much gratitude for so graciously hosting our meetings. Let us know if/how we can help.

Je regrette beaucoup que la Galerie Samuel Lalouz aie été vandalisée. Nous avons peu de ces lieux de qualité dédiés à la diffusion des arts. Dommage!

I, too, am very sad to hear about the vandalizm. I enjoy that gallery, have a hard time understanding these stupid kinds of acts. Having not seen the vandalism myself, I can only hope it wasn’t too extensive? Hang in there, our thoughts are with you – thanks for how you’ve supported our little group – djuanaxx

It is indeed distressing to learn about inexplicable vandalism, particularly in the case of this very important city institution. As Burgoo offers, those of us who have benefitted from the generosity and creative thinking of Mr. Lallouz and his staff would be glad to offer any kind of meaningful support. Blue Squash.

The Man Ray-Norman McLaren-Pierre Hebert connection.
Passing through New York, I caught the Man Ray exhibit (at the Jewish Museum. must-see if in NYC. Saturdays entry is free). What an extraordinarily inventive artist! Always stretching the limits. And what do I find? In the middle section of his film Retour à la Raison (1923) http://ubu.artmob.ca/video/Ray-Man_Le-Retour-A-La-Raison_1923.mpg
precisely that experiment with inscription and erasure, directly on the film [see the middle section, made with pins, springs and found objects, foldings of the film itself) an ouverture that does not occur again until McLaren`s Blinkety Blank (1959) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw67jUMQTXs, and Pierre Hebert’s Seule la main (2009) http://www.pierrehebert.com/index.php/2009/11/13/156-mininj-eta-seule-la-main
Extraordinary (re)inventions.

I felt like a child in kindergarten who is going to be surprised over & over, always a small adventure around the next corner. What a pleasure to discover that it is our own experiences that are being asked for – not clever academic discourse. This is all about passionate, meaningful and creative learning.

Dr. Cornett’s new session, Beautiful Minds, started last Tuesday January the 12th at Galerie Lallouz. In it we were invited, one after the other, to read the same (inspiring and wonderful) text. Six different people, six different voices.
I keep wondering:
Was my voice MY OWN voice?
It certainely was. But how much? A 100%? 80%? More? Less? What do we owe to others, where is the balance?…
It will certainely be, for me, a good subject of inquiry for this new session with Dr Cornett.

Alanis Obomsawin’s film on Professor Norman Cornett’s ‘dialogic’ philosophy of education will screen at the Rendezvous du cinema quebecois on February 24, 6 pm at the Cinémathèque québécoise in the salle Fernand-Seguin, address below.

335 boulevard De Maisonneuve Est
Montreal, QC H2X 1K1
(514) 842-9763

Of course! I thought the jazz from yesterday’s session sounded familiar. It is our own Rob McFadden playing As If (track 7 on his CD Travelling in Curves – see http://travellingincurves.com/, you’ll find Rob’s leadsheet instructions to the quintet for each song. Hope we will hear more from him about the musical structure.). A google search for the lyrics was fruitless, but brought up all kinds of intense human experiences. Here is one from a woman coping with he Dad’s dementia: http://escapeartist.blog.friendster.com/
Rob also told us that Miles Davis So What had lyrics written _after_ the song (see http://www.cduniverse.com/lyrics.asp?id=123146). I went looking and found a whole bunch of other lyrics, some very scary — another set of intense experiences. Conversations, some wordless.

After yesterday’s session, I realized that the written responses we were asked to make following the reading of certain writings and the listening to a musical piece were the first time in decades that I had enjoyed writing. I felt as though my imagination, that had been locked up through all the schooling had been joyfully set free. In addition, I felt as though my senses got a “tuning up,” I felt them more attentive, keener in their listening, than I had experienced for the longest time. This course is a gift I have been longing for, not knowing where to find it.

The “male gaze” is from John Berger, Ways of Seeing. Perhaps I should have made this clear. I will add the source. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ways_of_Seeing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berger

Yesterday’s exchange of responses to a text of Brossard’s was a very rich experience – I find this in every discussion, as I hear other people’s very different responses to material – the lens through which I see or hear is broadened, can accomodate more complexity, more contradictions. If this spirit of drawing out one’s authentic response to material, as opposed to merely stuffing oneself with others’ opinions, with data – if that had only been present in education from the earliest age… I think of the ways our world would be different.

Anyone know Dr. Cornett’s email address? There’s a project called The Monkey Bible which seeks to teach science/evolution in a way that captures the imagination and acceptance of folks of faith, that is looking for Dr. Cornett’s advice and creative assistance.

Just got back from dialogic session with Nicole Brossard. It was intensely alive and stimulating. I keep thinking what a gift these sessions are! I have a desire to read Fences in Breathing again and again, as well as her other writings. Suddenly the term I use in approaching a text, “understand” seems such a thin, flimsy term – rather I think I would prefer the term “receive” – for I feel as though the dialogue with her opened up new pores of receiving, deepened and ‘complexified’ others. I get an image regarding these sessions – of a nurturing womb where the connection to one’s imagination can be reborn, the damage done by the stupidities of most of what goes by the name “education” repaired. In a way this is returning the soul to oneself. I can’t help wondering what this would do to offset the tendency to blindly, hypnotically, follow collective ways of thinking. With a well-trodden “practiced” bridge to our deeper authentic soul’s voice, would we be more likely to make decisions, vote, struggle for values from a more individual considered place? I imagine so. I so wish these principles were present at the very start of education.

STEPHANIE BOLSTER, a winner of the Governor General’s Award, discusses PAVILION with Professor Norman Cornett.

Tuesday,09February2010,18h00-20h00

galerie Samuel Lallouz,1434 Sherbrooke west

Contact:[514]849-5844 reception@galeriesamuellallouz.com

$25[all taxes included], $20[students with valid ID].

I have been accused of having a ‘literary penchant’. No no, never a penchant. Une plongée? Une aspiration — avec ou sans clôtures? Une assise?
‘Sur le plus beau trône du monde, on n’est jamais assis que sur son cul !’ (Montaigne)

Picturing

“If only portion of an object is visible, the rest must be imagined, and then an
illusion of depth is created as well as a feeling that going a little farther will
reveal all.”
From “The Woman’s Guide to the Orient”, as quoted by Stephanie Bolster

In a book of prints smooth as saucers
I look at busy Gauguins,
milk the possibility of travel
into made worlds uncovering
palpable composition.

Colour – colour & how
the brushstrokes have been
sentient somewhere else
when a moving hand, scouting eye were
at issue – now, said strokes keepers of
full impact, of scenes
from days in a life.

His brown ladies are lovely.
Floating in middle distance,
harems of trees stitching
naïve planes together; oranges
browns & reds you sink into
regreening the hive-like
fruits of his labour; soft
suggestions of getting a day right,
an odd even, a freighted grope
of otherness tamed.

How many lives, & lies of lives
does it take to grow a perspective –
how many & how so
in the layered toss
of a portrait or landscape caught
scrabbling first impressions?

Picturing a moment in a tropical clime
where intent & discovery coalesce,
the sky a marshy blue, the sand papery grey,
I get the proverb backwards musing
a word is worth a thousand pictures
if only after you’re left lit up
in erasure dark from so much
manic, triggered seeing…

I really liked the session; Ms Bolster was of such an open mind and processed the feedback from the students in such an interesting way; the one having provided the feedback could continue to learn from the response and find out even more….. A rare event; what a great two hours.

Am I suffering from the “alguidar” syndrome?

When I was a child in Portugal, my father would make us, kids, laugh to tears with this story of an english couple who, upon their arrival, fell so much in love with the country and its language that they called their first born son Alguidar (which stands for large bowl). We couldn’t of course appreciate the interesting arab origin of the word, its musicality which was common place to us and the fact that, at that time (before the plastic invasion) most of these vessels were beautiful varnished clay objects.

That was yesterday.

Today, for a few months now, we have been reading poetry in the context of the soWhatzs and Streams of Consciousness. As I said elsewhere (comments on Erin Moore’s, Nicole Brossard’s and Stephanie Bolster’s books) the poetic expression captivates me. But the english language per se, this “language that is not mine” as Nicole Brossard says, plays as important a role in this process of seduction.

Am I suffering from the “alguidar” syndrome?

A few years ago I had gone through a similar experience while listening to Loreena McKennitt’s CDs, particularly those in which she puts lyrics by well known poets into music. As we do today with the soWhatzs and did in Streams of Consciousness I religiously read the poems, word by word, several times, and savoured their substance. Already a growing attraction for the english language was surfacing.

In “The Visit” McKennitt sings one of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s lyrics. It is the sad story of a dead-pale female human shape found afloat in Camelot : “Who is this? And what is there?” wonder Arthur’s knights at the sight. There is, in this poem of incomparable beauty, a mystery, a thing of grace that instills in me a longuing for the creative impulse. Very much the same as with the poets you chose for us to read.

That’s why
I am
truly your’s

The Lady of Shalott

(No doubt the huge portrait of The Lady of Shalott by John Williams Waterhouse standing out at the MBA greatly influenced my choice. We were just a few days before the closing of the exhibition. I was suddenly feeling sad about it when you asked me which surname I was choosing as a soWhatz)

I will be adding more and clues and comments on Starnino’s poems and Greer’s sculpture on soWhatz.ning.com which you are welcome to join — rather than writing here, where I cannot control the format.

John Greer,winner of the 2009 Governor General’s Award in visual arts, discusses Apprehension, with Professor Norman Cornett.

Saturday,20February2010,13h00-15h00

galerie Samuel Lallouz,1434 Sherbrooke west

Contact:[514]849-5844 reception@galeriesamuellallouz.com

$25[all taxes included], $20[students with valid ID].

Please note that since this takes place at the site of his current exhibition, we will discuss his works in situ.

Registration in progress.

My report on what John Greer said during the dialogue last Sat are at http://sowhatz.ning.com/forum/topics/john-greer-sculptures
The current exhibition at Lallouz is by Greer’s wife Vanessa Paschakarnis, also a superb sculptor. It is called “Bêtes et Fardeaux / Beasts and Burdens” 25 Feb – 10 Apr.

Letters

“If, as Nietzsche said, we should try to live
always in expectation of some impossible grace,
well, one couldn’t do better than this place.”
Carmine Starnino

The letters & their spill of concrete, of sectioning, of a heart skimming the dominating stretch of the ancient felt new – we play witness, we try for authentic – the letters for friends trying to catch up. I am walking through foreign territory touching base as though discovering a possible new home – walking & knowing this isn’t home – rather, the sights with their frilly suggestions, their crude lost beginnings – rather the sights as wide as the richer boulevards, as slender as coming to not knowing – I am walking & stepping & listening to someone else describing where I am only in imagination.

Name, name, name – dear so & so – it is early morning, we want our walk, our breakfast – the Roman memory is as much concrete in these parts as wet & imagined. I know all the brand names like pinched smiles around every corner in certain areas of this living city – know I can’t forgo looking out across the grand elderly of suggestion & reality – I want to go to Rome – something has me there in spite of my anchored away, my North American let pass. A letter to a friend – last year when in France for the first time ever I wrote letters to friends – spiny letters, I wanted them to pattern the distance to the point of suggesting closeness – not sameness, not a Montreal/Paris medley – not Ex en Province at the base of Mont Royal – no no, but the creaturely way being away from home gets into your thoughts of where you are like Lucy in the inimitable sky with heart breaking diamonds – Montreal or Bordeaux, it’s weather that can make just existing shine – Ex en Province or Rome – cats & rats in the tumbling alleys, sideswiping the18th century gites on the outskirts ready to supplant the itch that had you wandering here in the first place.

Dear Mary, dear Norm, dear Asa: your poet friend quaking & savouring is about as lush a treasure doodler as you could hope to have – peace – there’s music in this, & a kind of juvenile maturity plucking magical partridges. Can you hear the way what’s visual, what’s thoughtful gives you license to dream. Dear friends, go on, invest in assessing horizons – invest & dream…

My thoughts on Saturday’s dialogic session with Carmine Starnino are difficult to put into words. I have difficulty explaining to myself what stirred inside me when reading “THIS WAY OUT” as well as during the dialog with the author. What I can say is that “I was very moved by something I still can’t quite figure out.” I can say that Mr. Starnino’s words, both on paper & in person, made an enormous difference in the areas of exploration and discovery. I will never look at objects quite the same way again, as I will be reminded that they might have a point of view or be given a voice of expression.

Over the course of the past six months, I’ve realized — in this Beautiful Minds Program & Streams of Consciousness– that there is a lot of beauty & wealth in literature. Although I once didn’t give much thought to poetry, I am starting to appreciate that it is a great contribution to the collective consciousness and that writers, authors, poets are an expression of the human condition seen from another perspective than mine or the “status quo”.

I will offer below some of what my thoughts were on selected readings:

PART 3

This entire section at first seems melancholic and an exercise in self-pity or something akin to that. For me it was where I felt the most connected with a pure stranger. I could sense the author’s rawness and authenticity in the words, the lines the more I went through pages 65 to 75. It is the Strangest Thing indeed. I was experiencing his experiences, from my own experiences, thinking his thoughts, playing out his actions in my mind. I have come to believe that it is a conversation of the collective, not just of one person or one set of circumstances. It is an expression of humanity’s strength, frailty, vulnerability, hopes, dreams…the stuff of live, beautifully rendered through familiar scenes (St-Viateur, Jean-Talon, North Hatley, Montreal…). I enjoyed it tremendously.

Cycles…beginnings, middles & ends – renewal, rebirth, exploration, creation, salvation?

Thank You Mr. Starnino for sharing yourself with me. I don’t know you, had never heard of you before and now I’m glad I do. You have given me the gift of your world, seen through your particular filter and I am richer for it.

DELTA HOTEL – SAINT JOHN (p. 36)

At first read, I’m reminded of my dad – a travelling salesman, who from the viewpoint of a teenager & young adult, schlepped around from city to city, prospect to client, peddling his wares all his life. His suits were several years old, but suddenly I remember how proud he was. Appearances, how he “looked” to the world was important. He was always clean shaven, wore cologne and his leather loafers were perfectly buffed – two coats of shoe shine, without fail. He looked like a smooth operator. His interior, how he felt about himself however, seemed to never quite match his exterior in my young girl’s mind.

Always on the road, one hotel bathroom looking just like ALL the others. Places where thousands of strangers “rub shoulders” with each other; people who have thoughts, feelings, concerns, hopes, dreams, projects….This time, it’ll be the BIG one, the one deal that will send me over the top. What unrealistic nonsense, so much adult bravado! Today, I’m thinking he wasn’t so wrong – sometimes you need to fake it until you make it, whatever “making it” means on a personal level. In the part where he says “I know all about the cradle-to-grave schlepp his life had become…” I wonder who HE is talking about. Is it his own dad, his brother, his cousin or maybe it’s just a caricature of some image that keeps repeating itself. Can the environment be stricken out from the man? Can one shed it like an old suit, trade the past like stocks are bought & sold on the stock exchange floor? …or is it rather a question of having it be deeply rooted inside, letting it be part of oneself without it having any specific significance at all or hold on you. I now suspect that where you end up is not necessarily a direct function of where you come from, unless you make it so & hold on to it like a treasure. Some memories or even impressions about things, people, the world, are false positive and others are true negatives

P. 14 VITA BREVIS

I’m sure it means “Short Life”. Since I’ve always been kind of curious, I’m thinking maybe there’s something else to be learned here & I looked it up. I learned that it’s part of the first two lines of an aphorism by Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates which has been rendered in many different versions.

[The] art is long,
life is short,
opportunity fleeting,
experiment dangerous,
judgement difficult.

Latin is less idiomatic, using English terms descended from the Latin:
Art [is] long,
vitality [is] brief,
occasion precipitous,
experiment perilous,
judgement difficult.
The Greek text, accordingly is generally rendered in English as:
Life is short,
[the] art long,
opportunity fleeting,
experiment dangerous,
judgement difficult.

How delightful ! Just like there are several meanings for this aphorism, there is sure to be several interpretations of Mr. Starnino’s poems from members of our BEAUTIFUL MINDS class. What opportunities for discovery; what beautiful minds we have the chance to share with.

THIS WAY OUT – page 19

Interesting title, considering that as I read it, I had an increasing sense of being confined like an ant trapped inside a sand dune – the more it digs to get out, the more it displaces sand that causes it to sink even deeper and become more trapped.

This poem paints for me a canvas that is completely foreign… an environment & way of living is so remote and foreign that I feel like I’ve isolated myself from it intentionally. I know that it does exist somewhere, I’ve heard about it, I’ve read about it, I might even have stood “shoulder to shoulder” with someone for whom this is a daily context. I hear it as resignation, desolation, but perhaps someone else reading these words imagine something completely different – I suppose if I read it 5 times, I too might get a distinct view on each reading.

The actual realization that I have that possibility suddenly makes me aware of something – maybe the author is describing something that is in fact rich and that one should purposefully experience it rather than avoiding it or pretending it might not exist or there is something wrong with it. Why be afraid of claustrophobia? of expanding how far one can stretch oneself in stepping out of the tried & true, of the known and being interested in experiencing the unknown, the unfamiliar.

“This place of sodium-lit nowhereness…” beautifully rendered, as I get all kinds of images that make me think ”yuck!!!! He’s describing something that seems so grey, vile and awful. Thank goodness I never had to or currently have to be around there. Except that what do I really know about it at the experiential level? I have a mental image, that comes from TV, but “there” is also “here” – in this city & other cities – it’s part of the fabric – inevitable movement – the flow not only of people ‘graduating’ to bigger & better spaces – ah, but only some find the way out. Somehow there is hopelessness, and also evolution at the same time.

Dr Ivar Mendez part 2

On Tuesday evening March 9 we viewed three more videos about Dr Ivar Mendez. Prof Cornett asked us to focus and retell exactly what we saw in each clip. second to reflect on it, and third to develop our own questions. As usual, these written comments were handed in anonymously, to aid dialogue with the future guest. We hope to meet him face to face on Saturday March 13.

Future Medicine showed Dr Mendez’ Halifax team telementoring — viewing and advising by TV, an operation by another team in St John NB. In a previous operation, 80% of a patient’s brain tumour had been removed, but 20% was missed or grew back. One can imagine the St John surgeon’s reactions: guilt, chagrin, fear of future consequences, shared responsibility. He appeared grim and tense. But said that he welcomed a “second opinion” of “experts on call”, equipped with data feeds and precision camera they can maneuver with a mouse or voice commands. Clearly the telecom specialist carries a great burden of responsibility too. Together, the two teams looked at the remaining tumour and decided to tie off the blood vessel at the base and remove it in one go — efficient, fast and successful. Telementoring had only been done once before, in 2002. Post-op, looking relaxed and optimistic, the St John surgeon said that others in remote areas (the boonies) — in Yellowknife, in a space station — would soon benefit from the virtual presence of experts who do such operations every day. In futuristic mode, he predicts the next step will be remotely-controlled exploration and computerized surgical instruments. This is _roboneurorobotics_.

Hunting Two Hares explores the overlaps between science and art in Dr Mendez’ work. “He who hunts two hares leaves one and loses the other” said Lafontaine, which Borodin’s mentor Dr Zinin repeated to warn that one cannot be both an artist and man of science. Ignoring this advice, Borodin went on to become both physician and composer. Mendez likewise refuses to give up one for the other, he is not an amateur artist, he has sculpted since the age of 7. there is a synergy between his art and his surgery. Both demand complete presence in the act, both involve 3D imagination. This we see confirmed in a number of his beautiful bronzes of Andean natives — a flute-player, a wood carrier (“Stamina”), an iceberg, the Japanese garden at his Bedford NS home “Oserian” (“place of peace, sanctuary” in Swahili), where he wakes at 5 am daily to meditate as the sun rises in his study window. A Tibetan prayer wheel, other artifacts from around the world, his photos of his home country in the book Bolivia. We realize that this is a man of great gifts, alert to cultural diversity and human dignity, who finds in his dual life wholeness and balance. Just like the artist, he says, the physician must take his experience and recast it in new forms.

In what follows, I have bracketed the subtexts.

Finally, Steve Murphy’s CTV Halifax interview boosts the local hero. (We had previously noticed Mendez wearing the NS tartan as a scrub cap). Mendez talks about balancing basic lab research with applied clinical work, and calls himself a “translational researcher” — constantly moving back and forth between the two, each illuminating and advancing the other. (This must make extraordinary demands on his attention and energy) yet he always seems warm, open and relaxed.
He argues that many diseases still thought “incurable” may soon be cured by current research into “brain repair” — implying various approaches that range from surgery, to deep stimulation by electrodes, to experiments that target individual cells, to stem-cell redifferentiation , and/or chemicals that promote regrowth for which the brain has a limited but demonstrable capacity. I would like to know more about this.

Murphy makes a soft lob. What about (Christian fundamentalists’) moral objections to stem cells removed from aborted fetuses? (A set-up.) The scientist-hero explains that stem cell research is crucial, and carried on around the world (if we don’t, the Chinese will make the cutting-edge discoveries), but… there is another line of _autolytic_ research, using (self-donated) stem cells from bone marrow to avoid (autoimmune) rejection. An end-run around those benighted moralists. Ethical objections trumped by ethics + science. Though I loathe the righteous bigotry of the objectors, this exchange considerably over-simplifies. But that’s TV.

Finally, Murphy asks why work here in (backward) NS when you could be top gun and earn top dollar anywhere (e.g. the US). Another set-up. Mendez beamishly says that NS has a different tradition and history. It is _collaborative_ (not shoot-em-down individualistic). That is its “competitive advantage” (cue in bagpipes, mob patriotism, fund-raisers.)

How and why has the good doctor used that word before, as is obvious? He may be a mensch (as likeable and telegenic as they come) but he is also building a facility that is costly in dollars and human skills. It would be interesting to unpack the meanings of Mendez’ response: in his team-building, fund-raising, university and corporate politics — and above all in his personal life. Involving human dignity, respect, roads not taken, balance not lost.

I attended a dialogical session today with Professor Norm Cornett and his most recent guest, Dr. Ivar Mendez. Not only did I learn fascinating aspects of Dr. Mendez’ contributions to science and art, but I have been motivated by the spirit of service of this truly great Canadian. Dr. Cornett’s method of teaching is extraordinary! I was totally engaged in the learning process, and motivated to work harder in my own endeavors to serve humanity.

I’ve heard and heard these powerful words over the past many years:

“YOU AND I WANT OUR LIVES TO MATTER. WE WANT OUR LIVES TO MAKE A REAL DIFFERENCE, TO BE OF GENUINE CONSEQUENCE IN THE WORLD. WE KNOW THAT THERE IS NO SATISFACTION IN MERELY GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS, EVEN IF THOSE MOTIONS MAKE US SUCCESSFUL, OR EVEN IF WE HAVE ARRANGED TO MAKE THOSE MOTIONS PLEASANT. WE WANT TO KNOW WE HAVE MADE SOME IMPACT ON THE WORLD. IN FACT, YOU AND I WANT TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE QUALITY OF LIFE. WE WANT TO MAKE THE WORLD WORK.”

What I heard in yesterday’s dialogue with Dr. Ivar Mendez is that he is actually walking his talk in everything he does and THAT is truly inspiring. We all have the potential to make a difference be it great or small… it’s just a question of having a commitment that is greater than our comfort or considerations. Thank You for bringing selfless service, commitment and engagement and making an impact in people’s lives.

La conscience de la corne de taureau

Les faits:

- La Galerie Samuel Lallouz présente depuis le 25 Février dernier une exposition fort belle de la sculpteure Vanessa Paschakarnis intitulée “Bêtes et fardeaux”. Troublantes têtes d’animaux en devenir, gravures, boucliers et tout particulièrement têtes cornues (série Horned Beings). L’une d’elles, sur le pas de la porte de la galerie, ne peut en aucun cas passer inaperçue aux passants de la Rue Sherbrooke tellement elle en impose par sa puissance.

- La même galerie héberge généreusement depuis quelques mois déjà le Professeur Norman Cornett et ses étudiants pour des rencontres bi-hebdomadaires. Lors de ces dernières nous approchons, de façon originale, les oeuvres d’artistes variés. Un dialogue s’ensuit. Chacun des artistes nous fait part, à sa manière, de sa recherche artistique  et partage avec nous les défis que leur impose son choix.

- Pendant que se préparait en coulisses l’exposition de Madame Paschakarnis, notre groupe des soWhatz  lisait et recevait les poètes Nicole Brossard, Stephanie Bolster et lorsque a débuté l’exposition nous accueillions le poète Carmine Starnino. Autant de défis et d’efforts partagés.

- Au même moment l’écrivain belge Amélie Nothomb, de passage au Québec, déclarait dans un quotidien montréalais: il est important pour l’écrivain de garder “la conscience de la corne de taureau”. Cette idée, tirée de la lecture d’un livre de Michel Leiris intitulé “De la littérature comme tauromachie” lui fait dire que si l’écrivain  ”n’est pas persuadé qu’il risque sa vie en écrivant, c’est que ce n’est pas intéressant”.

Ceci n’est pas une coïncidence.

Lady bee

Yesterday’s guest artist was Naim Kattan. I found the dialogue immensely enjoyable. The session had a warm intimate tone, perhaps quite fitting for the work we had been dialoguing with for the past few weeks: Farewell Babylon, Mr. Kattan’s autobiography of his childhood and youth in Iraq, as part of an ancient community of Jews dating from the 6th century BCE, a community which sadly no longer exists. Mr. Kattan is a wonderful story-teller, and I found the book impossible to put down. It is an account not only of his personal life, but of the life of his community and its relations with the Moslem and Christian communities with whom it shared this land. It was sad to hear that not only are there no more Jews left in Iraq, but that half of the Christian population, the oldest in the world, Mr. Kattan tells us, has also left. Farewell Babylon is a book not only rich in stories, but also very thought-provoking, and inspired a lively dialogue.
What I found particularly delightful was the way in which Mr. Kattan answered many of the questions posed to him, even sometimes ideological or conceptual ones, through stories, many of them personal. I am looking forward to reading more of his works, and in particular his latest book, Le Veilleur.
This was the first of Professor Cornett’s dialogic series I have attended. It opened to me a world of writers and artists that I may well have never encountered on my own. I had long wanted to find such a community and had not known how to go about it. I am very grateful to have seen the ad in The Mirror last January, just in time to register. This is a far cry from the kind of passive learning that constitutes much of education, in my experience and that of others. These series have taught me a level of engagement with material that I had not had previously. In addition, there is the constant challenge, at least for me, of overcoming the reservations in expressing one’s thoughts and feelings in response to the material we engage with. It’s hard work to get past that censor! The anonymity of our writing was helpful, as was the constant vigorous encouragement on the part of Dr. Cornett to be accepting of whatever authentic honest responses were evoked. I am very much looking forward to the beginning of the next series in mid-April. Thank you very much Dr. Cornett, for providing such a feast for the soul!

“Imagine”

That’s the low hanging fruit soon to be harvested,
the smallish ins & outs of our desire all saved up
& bursting on a sudden, coltish versions of itself
not to be blamed – to be embraced, rather,
& no frightened exodus necessary,
no raging violence in need of filtering out,
at least this is how it looks from where
we’re standing now, now turning
to let the sweetened kid in us
bite down on produce in
the blunt, unthinking garden.

All this non-judgemental scurrying, & for now
in the month of April a kind of animal vagrancy
jumping through the hoops of months yet to come,
landing near newsy daffodils not quite open, pinched
plot of ourselves involved in letting the children run free –
hopping on one foot to make a nephew grimace, hide
his puberty eyes, the beauty of early spring enhanced
by pink lens sunglasses, the unknown young mother with
two under three years in tow feeding bread to the seagulls,
the nephew cagey as he disappears into sunlight on the river, clouds
crowding the lot of us into settling for suggestion…

I woke up Wednesday at 7am, the morning after my first dialogic session with Morph and the Imaginarys, and immediately learnt Imagine on the acoustic guitar.

My mother didn’t ‘fancy’ John as much as Paul so Imagine wasn’t the most played song during my childhood; however, on turning and revealing John’s poetry at my first dialogic session, the familiarity of his words resonated warmly within my synapses as if their natural frequencies were the constituents of the C Major scale.

Imagination is what early humans used to visualize the hand axe, one of the first primitive tools, formed by napping a piece of flint. This new technology made it easier for them to access the protein rich marrow of their prey giving them an advantage over other animals.

Imagination is continually being fostered and refined for existential, survival, and many other means; I hope it is not purely in the realm of the artist, like creativity, and that it cannot be switched off.
I should have turned myself of though as I woke up my Colocs whilst playing John’s gentle call to arms.

I look forward to the next session

Had fun yesterday, made me feel like I was in Kindergarten again! We put on blindfolds & Morph led each of us by hand to a different spot on the floor of the gallery, once standing, once sitting. We were then to explore the space in front of us – which turned out to be occupied by one of the sculptures of Vanessa Paschakarnis. I enjoyed this exercise – right at the outset, the spirit of playfulness & adventure in giving oneself over to whatever was in store for us, not knowing what would be happening, remembering childhood games, and then the exercise itself of exploring the sculpture we discovered in front of us. With eyes closed, and all the focus on the sense of touch, the range of sensations, perceptions, and the fantasies and thoughts evoked by these sensations was much enlarged. The sculpture became a landscape, and the movements of the hand a choreography. I left energized by this combination of discovery, learning and playfulness that is such an integral part of these sessions.

“Imagine 2 – Metamorphoses when you’re not a goddess”

I’ve turned into lukewarm water.
This is new for me. Usually when I
transform out of the blue,
it’s into light or darkness.

I’m enjoying this at the moment,
though to be a little warmer would be nice.
I’m indifferent to thirst, I’m thirst’s
answer.

A redwing blackbird checks me out,
hovers over me, wings beating fast.
He dips in, some of me gets dispersed, flies
away with the grappling bird.

Now I’m in more than one place
at once, watery sunlight
glances off me, the ride on the bird’s tail
the quickest I’ve ever travelled un-motorized.

The bird returns to the bulk of me
which is pooled in a depression in
my neighbour’s vegetable garden.
“Dip” I encourage with a rippling mouth.

The bird dips, more of me gets dispersed,
this is exciting, I hope to continue the game all afternoon,
hope my friend lands some of me
in a reaching willow.

I barely remember what it feels like
to be flesh & bone. This un-nerves me
only momentarily. I wonder how long
before I get to be flora…

Art can be placed within a historic, cultural, spatial, temporal, and all manner of contexts. When the contexts are hidden or different, our reaction – the emotion(s) we experience from attaching a meaning to a piece – seems to change dramatically. In other words, meaning seems to be relative and not absolute.

There is of course no absolute context; we all have unique framing of a situation based on our relationship with history, culture, language and spatial/temporal positioning which manifests in our unique sensory sensitivities and cerebral chemistry. This has wonderfully complex implications for the contextual positioning of art which is just as much in the hands of the observer as for the artist or curator.

During the first few moments of communication with a piece there are a multitude of possible directions our emotions and thoughts could take. Is our stream of consciousness really one of many choices or as close as we can get to our initial reaction? In the process of putting our brain chemistry in to words (to project it on to our language and species through cultural, social, moral and many other filters and rectifiers) is there an inherent censoring or bias or loss of uniqueness from what the initial movements of the neurotransmitters represented?

Hearing and seeing: the perceiving of sound and light.

Watching, reading, and listening: the conscious act of paying thoughtful attention to sound and light.

When we observe art or nature we slide back and forth between these extremes. We all have times were we start doing the later but end up doing the former as our mind takes over, for example: we’ve all had to read pages in a book over again because a thought takes over and we lose the track of the text.

At what point on this scale is the art making the most new ‘potentially creative’ connections within our minds? At what point are we reinforcing old connections, at what point are being told what connections to make.

Is reading text limiting as we have to focus and concentrate, so our thoughts don’t have time to wonder to make new connections? Are the connections we are making just the connections the book is ‘telling’ us to make? What is the difference between connections being made for scenes we can imagine easily, a couple sitting on a dock, and scenes that we have no precedent for, such as a stomach suing the body it belongs to?

Static visual art and sculpture can give lots of time for the mind to wander off as we don’t always have to be paying close thoughtful attention and we won’t lose track the story it’s telling. Is this just reinforcing old connections?

I don’t know why I keep using the word ‘connections’. I think perhaps the creative artist needs to have lots of connections firing to keep his work new and different and so when experiencing art it is important to have it inspire new connections in the most efficient and fullest way possible.

Head with horns, multiple heads – I touched a particular piece
of Vanessa Paschakarnis’ art blindfolded, wrapped arms about it,
set a cheek to its cold surface, ran fingers over smooth polish as well as
rough craggy underside, noted with delicate touch gashes in the polished parts,
infiltrated the wend & waft sightless, turned my back to a horn, felt the prick
of the horn in my upper back, lived one piece in a way the artist most probably
never expected any stranger to live her piece, wholly tactile, wholly quiet.
The piece seen after the body scanning I did fused with the latter re how
I took it in, touch as much a part of experiencing the sculpture as seeing it was,
the patina & raggedness of surfaces remaining as part of the ambience of the experience
even with blindfold removed, even focusing visually on parts no longer touching. The sculpture
in this multi-sensual experience had me thinking of masks for some prehistoric dance/ritual
around a fire pit – a dancing ritual, quasi-religious, primitive, & yet said mask would have been
far too heavy to hold over the face of a ritual participant – understatement – nevertheless a mask,
the piece I explored tactually & afterwards visually – also sonorously during the tactile experience via
tapping the quasi-animal head, the metallic percussive sounds the piece emitted adding to the sense
of ritual I got…

The drawings of the pieces, which today the artist told us were done after the actual sculptures, as well as telling us the drawings weren’t meant to be attempts at copying the sculptures but rather being more meant to sort of further explore the themes of the sculptures – the drawings struck me as sort of like the artist not quite having wholly exhausted the sculptures themselves & thus a way of continuing interaction with said sculptures until coming to a bit of closure re them. The drawings artworks on their own,
the attention to detail in the two dimensional space for me becoming more engrossing
the longer I paid attention, the longer my poor sense of three dimensions rendered
in two dimensional form had a chance to slip inside…

This kind of work just grows & grows & grows on the viewer/tactile participant the longer
the experiment in co-habiting with pieces goes on, something true of much artwork, though not
an experience many of us get very often. Actually, though my experience I am very sure
is vastly different from the experience the artist would have had with her work from conception through
execution through musing – actually, I think the kind of exploration I got to do in this seminar\
brought me into a mindset & an emotive range closer than a more traditional experience of art
in a gallery ever could, from the messaging of material to the study of accompanying drawings to the sound
experiments – a wonderous exploration of art as material as well as art as experience & art as composite…

touch first
see after
loaded circumference
dust, polish, gong, sonorous
to the bright clash
of senses hunting,
focus bobbing,
long exactitude
small moments
of integrity, almost
passion breathing…

Thanks muchly for the work Vanessa – Atlantis xx

I’ve had lengthy conversations and have had many thoughts provoked whilst exploring the works of Vanessa Paschakarnis; to tie up these interactions by meeting the artist was wonderful.

This is the first time I have completed the dialogic approach for an artist and their works. I’m still asking myself questions such as: What extra do we get by meeting the artist? How does meeting affect the ideas and links we have formed with respect to the pieces? Does it reinforce ideas about the pieces? Does it destroy ideas? Does it form perfectly compatible new links?

A lot of what we talked about was the physical process of creating the pieces and the choice, availability and history of materials. Before meeting the artist I hadn’t really thoughts to much about these factors.

How does our ability to see how things were created affect the meaning we attach and the emotions that are evoked and the creative links that are made? Knowing this for art and knowing this for nature could be quite separate things.

Vanessa said she set out to create pieces which were “familiar but rest unknown”: these including folded bronze bells and animals’ heads with “limbs” for horns. Sometimes our reactions to the works were more predictable and sometimes utterly unpredictable. Perhaps it is her playing around with relations and tensions between the pieces and nature and between the pieces themselves that evokes so much thought.

We have been trying to open our senses when experiencing art with an aim to enhance creativity. With a piece the conversations are reflections on our own memories and then we reinforce or make new links based on these conversations.

How does this work with the artist? What do we need to get from the artist? What avenues should we be pursuing to get the most out of their time to aid our creativity. We can have a very different conversation with the artist as they are infinitely complex compared to the works they create.

I now want to re-visit my favourite artists with a sensorially alert dialogic approach: I’m not sure how that would work with the deceased Miro and Calder.

Read the text
Read the text
Read the text
Read the text
Everyone read the text together
Join the revolution (don’t forget to bring a team jacket!)

As a group do we compare to a cult? We seemingly turn the texts into grand narratives through recitals and group prayers; each new voice highlighting a new element of truth

Read the text
Read the text
Read the text
Read the text
Everyone read the text together
Join the revolution (don’t forget to bring a team jacket! Some paper and pens would be helpful too)

Undetectable

“When fear arrives, sky will calm us.
Darling, she’ll say, Do not refuse love. Death will be lonely
enough as it is.”
Priscila Uppal

There you are, nerve wracked
while I among the melodies & rhythms
climb through the brash hoops
of flight & fight response,
my indecision collared
by one unfettered who knows
better than me –

there I am tacking up a rash promise,
evening out the details that can’t witness,
stopping on a dime over indistinguishable
pattern/intention/gray room/sunspot,
anything you dismiss arranging recurrence,
anything slight as you are
halved, wistful.

There we are, on the sea-bound fauteuil,
a memorable kind of fauteuil convincing
not the sailors but the rest of us struggling
with waves & illegal pills,
jumping fish, soldier Jonah,
fear a hybrid opulence
dragging down the anchor.

I’ve been looking for a sign,
any kind of sign beyond need of further proof,
the world I love recurrently undetectable
when it comes to offering up its essence, its apologies –
looking through spiritual bifocals stronger than the view,
larger than giving up or on – looking
& watch the little fishes touching shore,
the middle distance in the view where
coping wins out, wins something to be
continued…

Thank you so much Pricila for joining us yesterday. I left the session buzzing.

Here is my stream-of-consciousness response to pg 56 to the end of the book Traumatology:

“I feel that that she has matured. She has faced problems and conflicts and from these has made resolutions and gained experience and settled down. She appreciates her privileged position and puts the problems of the world into perspective.
I’m imagining war time events, or years gone by, of films that I’ve seen. Planes flying low to do surveillance and to drop bombs. Each pilot not knowing the individual story of the lives he or she is tearing apart.
The first poem on page 56 seems to be a continuation of the hellish school and adolescence. Has she seen the rest of life as a school-like test? Constantly failing, mixing truths, and missing the point.
From lobby I feel she is becoming more at ease with the world. More confident in herself, less need to impress and succeed in the traditional fashion. Has she given up a dream though, have childhood dreams dissipated is she plodding along now?
There is a letting go of the possibility of understanding. Of noticing that the system, school or society, seems to make us think that there is some end goal and tries to make us think we have succeeded by filling in a multiple choice questionnaire correctly.
There is an accepted chaos, an irrational drive by man to gain access to find where one’s thoughts are emanating from. There is a sense that her thoughts are the truth, for her. Hers are the most important thoughts, for her.
A dislike, more than an acceptance, of the naivety of youth and the simple structure and rules that they attach to the world: a feeling of being in a superior position where words are better than videos. There is also a sadness that books are disappearing rather than a celebration of the accessibility of information these days.
There is no final goal to learning and acquiring knowledge but I feel like it would kill who she is by ending her quest. Her journey keeps changing, there is no single path, and she jumps from lane to lane, from highway to byway, challenging, questioning, and motivating herself through the fear of not learning something every day. What happens on a bad day, a non-productive, knowledge acquiring day.
Has she lost touch with her past self? Is she most receptive the greatest experiences now. Was before just a waste, was every advantage taken, which road was chosen.
As I try and read these poems I find myself reading faster and faster and firmer and perhaps angrier. I read it like a big complaint, a monologue to an audience who can’t keep still.
How did god pop into the picture?
Interview is wonderful. A playful mix of language and meaning with the loving, in my eyes at least, ending: shall I count on you? – It’s the only reason I answer. I fell like she wants to express her deeper connection with the world rather than have it reduced to a multiple questionnaire the computers answers from which give you your personality.
Pain starts again, a flirtation with death, a horrid divorce, a sad final 15 minutes and then no more.
I feel sad, uplifted, sad, uplifted and can’t really explain why. Maybe where I am right now I can meander in between the two, play in my mind with my father’s passing, play in my mind with beautiful relationship and moments and still be able to digest my dinner.
A healthy respect form nature and its complexity are powerful: Restraining yourself through trials, grounding yourself for miles…and then flying again when the volcano lets you.
I look forward to continuing my conversation with these pieces.“

What’s inside us

“Boxes everybody’s busy thinking outside of,
I’m wondering what’s inside you no one wants…”
Priscila Uppal

What’s inside us no one wants
can be monolithic, miniscule
half of a failed yesterday we rudely frame
cardboard theatrics gone tepid in the rain
the flip side of a joke disconcertingly
clean, frantic announcements
of wisdom all dead-end –
what’s inside us no one wants
wants magic in a pinch –
would do dead Anne Sexton’s
Awful rowing toward god –
won’t, simply won’t, place
square pegs in round holes
no matter harried lunacy –
no matter impinging necessity –
what’s inside us wants to dance like Elvis,
sing pitch perfect arias on the sly,
learn Hebrew backwards which is
absolutely frightening – inside
getting outside – innards & what’s
beside us piling
would-be stern boxes into
teetering towers – “see Spot salivate” –
see the towers tumble, legacy
of reaction freebasing bald query –
what’s not inside us drunk
on the “war is hell” slogan system
clogging deaf munitions – inside us
what’s inside us can’t tell truths
infallibly, has hope
in shackles, clings
& lets go – lets go
repeatedly, pockets full
of broken vows
unlucky as treacheries
that hide, hide out
because of what’s inside us…

Here is what I wrote in response to the 1st 55 pages of Dr. Priscila Uppal’s book of poetry, Traumatology: Traumatology – Priscila Uppal
Pp. 1-55
Schachar, May 1/10

I don’t like this poetry. I struggle not to just stop at this sentence, “I don’t like it, I don’t understand it, I don’t get most if it” point blank, and give in this one sentence. But I feel the challenge not to stop there, and to look more closely at what it is that makes me feel I’m on the other side of a closed impenetrable door. I don’t feel in it rhythms sounds or images that appeal to me – it feels very conceptual. I read it twice, the 2nd time out loud – but for most of these 1st 55 pages the door remained closed to me. Perhaps I don’t know how to appreciate, don’t have much feeling for what is not beautiful, or sensuous, or at least evocative of some feeling. These poems do not touch me. Even if their starting point, their theme, might be something that might resonate with me, the working of it feels so cerebral that for the most part it leaves me cold, and most of the time I don’t understand it. There are times I read poetry and don’t “understand” it – but something is evoked in me all the same – perhaps through the rhythm, the sounds, but this does not happen here for me. So many split-second images juxtaposed whose links I don’t understand.
In “Think Outside the Circle” some of the seemingly empty unwanted insides of boxes in some 21st century antique dealer’s back room in fact contain “housed railings of ballerinas in mid-plié, babies swathed in velvet, aviaries swarming with operatic birds, and underneath each lid one number to add to the lottery of King Tut’s tomb.”
How do these images relate to “what’s inside you no one wants. Perhaps it’s what’s inside almost everyone, packaged without ceremony or care…” Why these images in particular inside these discarded boxes, whose insides no one wants since they’re obsessed with thinking outside the box. And what to make of “underneath each lid one number to add to the lottery of King Tut’s tomb.” I don’t understand this image and its relation to those before it. I don’t get a sense of images built up, taking me into themselves. They feel like split-second images that hold in them, very condensed, ideas that I don’t understand. Maybe that’s it. There isn’t the building up of images – these images seem to stand for ideas that are condensed into them. I feel that nothing of me is called into play in reading these poems except the very abstract thinking part of me, grappling to understand these poems. I don’t feel the presence of mood, of sensuousness, of beauty, of rhythm that might carry me into the poems and help me approach something of an understanding. But then, I don’t like modern classical music either, so maybe my sensibilities just never made it into this age.

Dialogic Session May 1st with artist Vanessa Paschakarnis at Galerie Samuel Lallouz
I’m reflecting back on the dialogic session that I particiated in, in which artist Vanessa Paschakarnis was present with her works. I was struck by the notion of 2 solitudes, and not of the political kind. One is of the artist, alone in her studio, creating the work, all intentions entirely personal. The other is the viewer, waiting to be filled up by the experience of the work, bringing a multiplicity of experiences and interpretations in viewing it.
In bringing these 2 “solitudes” together, the question is, what can each side take back from the experience?
My initial observations were that the viewer stands the most to gain. I question whether the artist can take anything back at all. When blindfolded herself, as we were the previous week in order to experience her works, she was allowed to interact with one of her own pieces. Her response about this experience was “nice”.
The dialogic session in which I participated the previous week with the artist’s work, was an exercice in stream of consciousness writing about the works themselves. From my perspective, I didn’t find myself writing positive dialogue; rather I wrote about the internal responses of my psyche to the pieces – and they were waging an internal war with the sounds of the pieces as Dr Cornett hit their brass “horns” with a rubber mallette. What does this have to do with any of the artist’s original intentions?! I’m reminded of a university professor whose own thesis was in Post-Structuralism, which in a nutshell, posits that meaning is always in flux. It’s easy to say that my interpretation of a particular work will be different from the person sitting next to me. However, my own interpretation of the same work could be different in the context of a new timeframe. Always changing, always shifting. And what does this have to do with the artist? Following the same line of thinking, the artist is no longer “genius” or creator, but just a player in this endless cycle of shifting meanings.
Can she even participate in this dialogic session unless she agrees to be a viewer herself?
Are we as viewers expecting her to be the artist/genius and enlighten us with the true meaning? I don’t think that’s possible. Will she give us insights that enhance our own interpretations? Definitely.

re The dialogic session with Madeleine Thien on Saturday, May 15th, 2010 – email sent to Morph (Dr. Cornett) shortly after session:

“hi hi Morph!

Ouch that hurt, reading my poem – didn’t do a good job of it at all at all – was a little embarrassed, yet that is what happens sometimes…

Madeleine was charming & so astute re what she does – even though she is a researcher & a storyteller as opposed to being a poet in the strict sense, her work is poetry nevertheless, & I identified in many ways with how she deconstructed her own writing – the book is a gem even if now she’s imagining a very different book, & even if a few bones stuck out in amplified fashion in the whole – can’t think of any good novel who’s bones don’t show a little, whether they be impulsive or careful writers, careful being an adjective I’d apply to Madeleine – careful but she risks leaps. Also, she really peaked my curriousity re what the novel looked like when she had an all important meeting take place between Ani & Clara as opposed to Ani & Matthew – wanted to tell her the latter paring was pivitol in my reading, got shy, but did tell her that the book she was ghost writing in front of us would have been a different book indeed. Perhaps that was why I took Clara’s leap of faith to be marrying Matthew, taking on his pain, as opposed to Clara sending Matthew off to Ani – the latter was never supposed to happen in the beginning, so the change made how the reader took in the whole powerful in a fairly drastic way, at least for this reader. The story becomes energy shifting between what the writer intended & what the reader gets, the latter “satisfying” to me while leaving me wondering once listening to Madeleine musing on the book. As for editors, I’ve always had mixed feelings about the whole relationship re writer & editor – not to say a good editor isn’t a great participant sometimes in a midwifery sort of way, only to say if the editor is too overbearing, the baby that will result could be almost a product of a different seed than the writer had access to. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm – there is always shapeshifting, so maybe this is my own problematic take – maybe what keeps me doing poetry away from editors except every now & again, meaning sending off submissions to mags looking over my shoulder as I do so, sometimes “succeeding” in the sense of ending up being published – maybe what keeps me away has something to do with stubbornly believing in a flawed kind of authenticity…

Babble babble – suppertime – loved Madeleine, ditto her work – enjoyed today immensely – thank you – Atlantisxx”

Ships

“He knows that all one’s grief cannot stop the present, cannot change the way a life unfolds.”
Madeleine Thien

I didn’t have anything like a bag of crusts
to throw out to help grief moving forward.
There was what life was, what we wanted of life.
I had no way to take back the words that were violating cues.

You see the way a life unfolds makes remembering difficult.
I didn’t have a story that could link the evil ships.
We dropped between waves, loud waves challenged us.
I couldn’t forget what was toss up with crass lining.

It’s a black story – I’m a listener – the story has soft probability.
I didn’t get the story I was after had already proved itself.
The way a life unfolds struggles with the burden of finality expectation –
I didn’t know.

Meanwhile, the need for certainty & all that fails to encompass.
We are after frailty proving nine “inside” viewed lives.
I am remembering when the present was a gift, a given.
Time manages hallowed, we move like slingshot swimmers…

Certainty by Madeleine Thien,

My initial reaction as the book started was to dislike being pulled into the various scenes at the book’s beginning, with very little of the characters built up. I didn’t feel anything for them and didn’t feel interested in the events of their lives. I don’t usually feel this way, but here I did. Then, of course, I began to feel very much pulled in. As the book progressed, I had the sense that this novel isn’t about characters as individuals – I don’t feel they ever get built up as characters. Rather it’s certain human experiences that constitute the main protagonist. Loss, grief. Characters seem to exist primarily in relation to this theme of loss.
The sadness in this book is so quiet, so still. If it were a noisy, big sadness, dramatic, then maybe I could push it away, not let it settle under my skin. But it does, it settles deep down, where I don’t want it to be. And yet I am drawn to read the next page, and the next. The tone of sadness and subtle wistful longing seems to me to be the prevailing tone in the book, even when the passage contains nothing of loss.
I couldn’t stop after 140 pages. I needed to know how the story went on. Almost at the end, Gail is visiting Sipke. I want the book to end with her visit, then I can forestall her death. Loss is what terrifies me most.
I can’t organize my thoughts on this book. I can’t think about it. It fills me with feelings, more than just sadness, but sadness is the one I can name. I’ve finished the book. It doesn’t end with Gail. She’s really gone, as is Ani. I’d like to run from the grief I feel – not just because of the loss of Gail and Ani – but the grief and sadness of Matthew and Ani as children. The image of Matthew witnessing his father’s being shot, going back into the plantation. The author doesn’t spell out the feelings, if she had, they might be easier to push away after a while. But I feel the grief and sadness more strongly, I think, because they’re not spelled out. They’re in the lines, but in such a subtle way, that these feelings sink into spaces that I can’t eject them from. If this book had also not been written in such an exquisite finely-tuned sensitive way, (as fine as silk) it also would have been easier perhaps to push away the feelings of grief and sadness that have permeated me. But the writing is so beautiful and magical, that it draws me, and I can’t easily escape it.
I really can’t be articulate now, I can’t think thoughts, just feel feelings at the moment.
One of the questions I asked myself as I was reading the book was how on earth the author was able to describe or make the reader feel the inner states of her characters without her having experienced herself what the characters go through – so incredible is her telling. That kind of imagination feels rare. An image just came to me now – maybe it’s silly, but an image is easier for me than clear articulate thoughts. It’s as though, each state of being, inner experience of a character is like a vessel woven of many exquisitely fine silk threads, and she has been able to grasp, incredibly, each of those silk threads and make them visible to us. Something like that. How does she know each of those threads? I can’t grasp the mystery of such deep comprehensive imagination. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read. I wish I could lose that image of the boy going back to the plantation after witnessing what happened to his father – digging and digging at the tree. It haunts me.
One of the things I thought as I was reading the description of Matthew and Ani’s experiences of the war: how brutal that war becomes statistics, movements along maps, cold strategic decisions made by those in power at their safe sterile desks. What a lie. War is the story of Matthew and Ani, that unbearable pain.
I finished the book during the weekend. The sense of sadness, grief, loss is the impression that really stays with me – rather than one of hope, of recovery of the ability to feel joy.
The most poignant images for me are those of those 2 children, Matthew & Ani, of what they went through, feelings that are not described, but that permeate me all the same.
—————
How to respond to today’s dialogic session with the writer Madeleine Thien? I was surprised to see this young woman. It was hard to imagine anyone this young writing with such deep comprehension of human experience. I had expected a much older person. I don’t like writing my responses to these dialogic sessions with the guest artist. The sessions are so alive and rich, and I find it hard to write the words to describe the experience, because I am taken not only with the content of the dialogue, but also with the person, and how to write about that? I was so taken with the exquisite imagination of the writer, I suppose I didn’t quite imagine this warm engaging down-to-earth young woman who presented herself to us! I so much liked her honesty in talking to us. As she herself pointed out, she often said “I don’t know” to the questions posed to her, often in regard to the motivations behind what characters did or said. I liked that. It gave me the sense of the characters being living creatures, infused with their own autonomous spirit, independent of the writer’s control, unlike some novels I read where I feel that the characters have no autonomous life of their own, but are rather like puppets held on a string by the author. Although I don’t get a sense of the building up of characters’ personalities to be the main thing here, but rather the universal human experiences they go through, the characters do feel like they live and breathe on their own. Ms. Thien related how once she was asked questions, perhaps by her editors, about her characters, and she answered “I don’t know. They didn’t tell me!” The kind of exquisite imagination the author has remains as much a mystery to me after today’s session as before.
When Ms. Thien responded to the expression of my surprise that she was so young by saying that she was not happy with this book, felt that it was the work of a young woman, that she would have done it differently, better, had she been writing this now. Also, that she had not gone far enough with the characters, not been dramatic enough in the expression of their feelings, not enough rough edges. But as one seminar participant said – it would then have been a different book. I feel as though the characters and their experiences stay with me because of the exquisitely delicate, fine descriptions. The feelings and mood are often intimated, not spelled out, and I think that’s why the characters and their experiences continue to vibrate in me the way they do. For example, one of the most powerful scenes is that of the young boy Matthew, witnessing in hiding the murder of his father. Ms. Thien does not describe his feelings explicitly. We follow his movements, how his thoughts keep coming back to certain details of that scene, how he tries to push away these images, how “he has swallowed something wrong. Inside his skin, something that he cannot contain is pulsing and breathing, but there is no way to let it out.” We see him as he returns home, takes his bath, with the room moving in “waves above him.” The mood and feelings resonate in me all the more powerfully for not being articulated, for not being dramatized and defined. This leaves space in me for the characters and their experiences, their feelings, to vibrate in me all the more powerfully. Ms. Thien has written with a graceful delicate exquisitely sensitive touch a novel that is very powerful and deep that pulls the reader magnetically into the characters’ experiences.

Uncertainty

“We always choose in blindness, she said. We always choose looking backward.”
Madeleine Thien

We’ve had time to think in the middle of the park
walked out by the river relishing the thrash of water
picked up where we left off last year round this time
small with cheap anger, hungry to get over it.
“You are the song that invites” – that’s what you told me
kicking a stone down the blotchy paved path
that the ducks, strangely predicating, waddle over in mating season.
Food, air, a toast of cold water – the once winter-plain trees now
so beautiful it’s peculiar artifice we feel, hunkering down under them.
We’ve had time to forget about needing to ask
the wrong questions.

Hockey season is droning on & on.
I need new clothes, 8 pounds lighter than last year.
Yesterday when you phoned you said you hoped we’d come to the table
together indifferent to proving anything petty.
I’ve planned a feast for us, delicious as opposed to fancy.
I wish I’d grown up aware faltering could have so much to offer.
I’ve bought smoked salmon, dark chocolate, cinnamon candles.
If the weather holds, we’ll dine on the rusty veranda.
I have things to tell you, some not so easy, I await your voice
rising…

Ce qui m’a personnellement marquée dans cette rencontre, c’est la rencontre d’humain à humain qui s’y est déroulée. Ayant été invitée à la dernière minute, je n’avais pas lu le livre et je devrais ajouter que je ne connaissais pas Madeleine Thien. C’était aussi la première fois que j’assistais au groupe du Dr Cornett.

J’en ai été tout simplement, grandement et tendrement touchée tout à la fois. L’ouverture, la générosité, la curiosité, qui étaient palpables de part et d’autre, c’est-à-dire autant des participants que de Madame Thien, ont permis des échanges d’une profondeur et d’une honnêteté peu courantes.

Comme il a été mentionné dans un commentaire précédent, Madame Thien n’a rien prétendu autre que ce qui était et à oser répondre bien souvent par “je ne sais pas”. De la même manière, les participants exposaient leurs impressions avec une grande franchise, mais aussi toute pleine de respect, ce qui a incitait à une proximité chaleureuse et inspirante. Peu importe les gênes qui sont mentionnées après coup, ce n’est pas ce que j’en ai ressenti sur le moment.

La richesse qui m’a habité encore tout au long de la soirée subséquente, m’a profondément nourrie et m’a grandement donné le goût de récidiver.

merci à vous tous.

The characters in Certainty are so real that I wouldn’t have been surprised if they showed up at our dialogic session with Madeleine. For a week I was lost inside this book and generated so many questions about the characters that I almost forgot that this was a work of fiction and someone wrote this. I was hesitant to destruct the way the book came about, I thought would take some of the reality out of it.

I’ve been, in some sense, transported by Madeleine to North Borneo, Indonesia, Holland and back to Vancouver. I’ve been excited to explore maths, science and philosophy while still getting to grips with real human relationships. I haven’t been on many journeys like that.

The stories and interactions happen in the present and then we were whisked into the future where they happened a long time ago, and whisked back again or prior to the event, always playing with our distance from trauma and love and mourning. It is difficult to be strong and appreciate the healing of time during mourning. One reason why this book comes over as being so mature is that it was written through a mourning period yet there was a strong sense of the power of time, something which can sounds ridiculous to the individual when they are experiencing the most difficult of moments.

I’m going to look into a few things now.

Time and space, warped, folded, twisted and utterly mind blowing and infinite. I would love to be able to draw it.

I thank Madeleine for her inspiration; sorry I got lost in your book and didn’t have many questions for you.

I look forward to our continuing adventure.

How are our memories stored? How do we get them out again? Do we store something more concrete if we have an image for what we were seeing? Why does an image even help us remember, we’re not storing…I don’t even know what’s happening. The mind is so wild and complex that it seems futile to even strive to understand. I’ve been coming back to this point frequently, I think I need to actually make an effort to understand it and stop writing questions.

Two of the pieces we did in the last session were readily, for me at least, visualizable; there are precedents for viewing someone lying on a beach, or knocking on a door, or riding an elevator. The poem we read I didn’t visualise, it was a stream of statements and expressions which I didn’t feel like I linked together and if you asked me now, 2 days later, what I read, I wouldn’t be able to tell you much, perhaps a couple words at most. The two pieces from the story I remember quite well still. It’s perhaps easier to attach a meaning because they are freely envisionable, straightforward to become more emotionally evolved, like a hellish situation where you don’t know if you elevator is going down to the grave or up to something less severe.

I felt like I gave the poem a hard time as I couldn’t access it. Does that mean it’s not for me, that it will grown on me, its inner beauty will emerge after a temporal investment, something which is perhaps far more worthwhile to converse with compared to the novel passages which give all away, pretty much, with no expense to the reader. I’m not sure. What attachments are real, and what are superficial. Maybe all are superficial they just have different degrees of strength.

I left something out, uncomfortable about how to write about it – but there is a way of responding of another participant in the seminar which has a strong inspirational impact on me. It’s the person’s way of wondering, of questions, questions, of a freshness. My words feel inadequate to what the impact is on me – but I’m left with a longing to see and experience the world with such inquiring freshness and wonder. A longing for innocence after experience. As a result I find myself challenging my certainties, even in my work, more and more.

These classes are such an incredible unique gift. What had occurred to me was that they were a place where one’s very individual and idiosyncratic responses, ways of being, could be accepted and respected in a collective endeavour. Bringing the individual and collective together in this way is an ideal that is so rare, such a gift. Thank you Morph for offering these classes, in which your generosity of spirit is so much felt, and thank you participants, for being there, and allowing each of you to open up a different new corner of the world for me to experience.

I was straining to hear & didn’t take notes on yesterday’s dialogic session with Norm Sibum. There were many things he said I wanted to remember, I was impressed by his deep caring for the state of the world. I found myself wishing I could have actually read what he said (I guess I don’t absorb aurally that well). It felt different to the other dialogic sessions. Something was missing, for me. The content of the discussions was very interesting, and I’m having trouble at the moment identifying what exactly it was that I felt was missing this time. I’ll give it a try, not sure this is it: I quite enjoyed the responses to Mr. Sibum’s poetry that were read out, and perhaps I was waiting for more of a going back and forth about those reponses – many of whom I enjoyed – as a way to get into the poems and their making. Someone brought up what I had written in my initial encounter with the poetry – that I didn’t understand them & could not feel their soundscape – and his answer was that this reader was tone-deaf. As uncomfortable as it was to hear that judgment, I had to agree to myself that I don’t seem to feel the beauty of the English language, for whatever reason. However, that doesn’t hold true for me, with respect to other languages. I feel quite sensitive to the beauty of Russian, all of the Latin languages, Arabic, particularly. Which leads me to wonder what are the elements that go into (besides ones of psychological experience) particularities of sensibility to language. I know I am missing potentially rich experiences and the most I can do is keep trying to be open to what I don’t yet feel.

Initial Stream of Consciousness response to the first 35 pages of Pangborn Defence.

ok, so Ive read up to page 35 of the Pangborn Defence. I found that I read it quicker and quicker as I progresses and ultimately I was just glossing over the words. Accepting nothing was going to strike me or meaning much to me and I just wanted to finish. I’m going to give it another shot, I’m not sure how though, this might call for a new approach. Im going to get something out of these poems, there has definately been a lot of thought and knowledge and love and loss gone into them, I just need to get them out, or take my own versions of them out using the postmodern twist.

If I made a list of what stands out I would say: the conversations with the 80 year old man, how he had travelled the world miltiarily and how he was now within, in comparison, a pathetic routine that comes with old age.

Remarks about Kissenger and America, Hosers and Meridith stand out, they reappear, these must be important cross-roads for the author, everything linked back to a set of trigger words.

to be more precise: I don’t feel the beauty of English as I read it – hearing the words in my head. Spoken English is another matter: I love hearing English spoken with a variety of British accents, I love Cockney, and hearing English spoken by the Irish. So it’s more what I hear when I read English on the page. I also wonder about connection between the sounds one is drawn to and landscape. And much much more, that are unconscious associations.

THE WORLD ABOVE THE SKY – KENT STETSON
At first, I really dislike the writing style. It doesn’t convince me, feels forced. I want descriptions to be painted with nuances, with a sense of autonomous life, rather than spelled out like thoughts from the author’s mind. It all feels so distant. I’m uninvolved & fight sleep. Does the writing style, that feels distant and unconvincing and forced to me, connected with the mythic and mystical quality of the novel? The 1st 2 chapters simply don’t flow for me, with a few exceptions, for example – that wonderful description of Antonio Zeno, the sinking of the ships.
Most of the time I have trouble forming any images despite the descriptions. The sentences have a rhythm that feels like stops & starts, not enough flowing liquid moving it along. I’m not sure what creates this impression in me – all those nouns & adjectives? Heavy-handed descriptions. Not sure. I feel irritated.
I can’t follow the thread of the story either, for the 1st 2 chapters. The focus shifts to different characters, and I don’t know where I am anymore. I lose the context. Lose the thread. Don’t follow who’s on whose side. When I read this, nothing holds me and the words become just words, with little interest or meaning for me, and I fight sleep. So I start to skim.
The canoes appear, I’m involved for a bit and then lose interest again. Maybe it’s the mythic quality that makes it seem all so distant? “Morgase steadied Her Lady at the rail. Eugainia’s battered spirit rose to the flood of joy streaming round the battered vessel….” What is it that makes me feel unconvinced by these descriptions? Maybe they feel thought out, rather than painted? The descriptions, often, so far, feel to me unconvincing, as though they are imposed by the author & don’t have a life of their own (except for the ships’ sinking). “Mimkitaw’qu’sk found Eugainia. And she him.” It’s summarized briefly & explicitly, rather than painted, so that I don’t feel the process of their finding each other. I do not feel convinced by the following description of their first encounter. Maybe this style belongs to this sort of mythic telling.
But then I find myself interested in the themes, and the writing style, though I still feel somewhat irritated by it, takes backstage focus. Interesting that the author is a man, not only because of what, at least until ch. 2, I take to be the side he’s on, but also because of some of the passages – particularly the ones that I’d call the more “spiritual” (for lack of a better word), or non-rational ones, such as Garathia and Eugainia’s sea encounter. I do feel embarrassed by passages such as these, don’t particularly like the tone, which is for my taste too – what? – too spiritual? Anyway – only got to ch. 3 so far.
I’d like to take more time to look up the historical and mythic references. This theme touches me in a very personal way. I feel more connected to what I imagine to be a more archaic religious sensibility than the more recent monotheistic one.

6 Degrees of Imagination.
Kent Stetson. The World Above the Sky.
Schachar. June 4/10

I haven’t yet finished this book. I’ve only got to the end of Part II by the time of this writing. I’ve got a lot of mixed feelings about this book. My response is hurried, and doesn’t do justice to the book, but here it is anyway. I still really don’t like the writing style, still not sure how to articulate what it is that puts me off, and so I skim quickly long passages. I have little patience for the long detailed descriptive sections, and the details of the story itself. And at the same time, I wonder about the writing process and am curious about it. I am impressed by the author’s imagination – all those very details I have so little patience for – I almost get the sense of something written in an altered state of consciousness, while in a dream world. That’s the story part. But then come the spiritual lessons, the spiritual message. These feel like they come from a very different kind of consciousness. It’s as though I’m reading both a myth as well as its interpretation, its spiritual lessons, all in one. As I said, I have very mixed feelings, for some of these teachings I feel to be very valuable, while I feel irritated at the detailed passages, for example – that whole encounter between the White Wolf and Henry. Perhaps I feel a certain preachiness that disturbs me, even though the message in some of the lines feel valuable to me.
There’s a great deal to say about this book, so far. I wondered about the author’s familiarity with the first nations, the Mi Kmaq. He feels as though he has deeply integrated their view of the world. I wonder about his encounters with them, how much they’ve been a part of his life and thinking.
Also, I wonder about the Knights Templar and their worship of the feminine element. I take it there was some connection between them and one of the stages of the courtly love tradition, but I’d like to read more on this. I find this imaginary encounter between the Knights Templar and their arrival in the New World in the 14 find this imaginary encounter between the Knights Templar and their arrival in the New World in the 14th century, their encounter with the First Peoples, fascinating. Is there anything factual about that?
The worship of the incarnation of the Goddess and the search for her earthly male counterpart make me think of the Sacred Marriage Rite that was so prevalent in the Mediterranean and middle eastern region, for example in Sumer, around the 3rd millennium B.C.E. This is one of my favourite myths. I feel always so sorry about the arrival of patriarchal monotheistic religion that condemned the various practices related to this myth, for example, the condemnation of the worship of Astarte and the practice of the temple harlot-priestesses in the old testament (I forget which books). I know the goddess religions weren’t without violence, what with the castration of the male priests and even human sacrifice in some periods and places. But I am drawn to those myths, and find it hard to situate myself in the patriarchal monotheistic religions.
What it must be like to have the cosmological view of the Mi’kmaq as described in Kent Stetson’s book. What a lonely comfortless world we live in where the human being positions her/himself at the centre of the natural world. And how different to the vertical hierarchical worldview of God over humans over nature. In the teaching Keswalqw gives Henry regarding the children who were not saved from starvation, there is the sense of death and life being part of an unbroken circle, as opposed to death bringing about inexorable finality and separation and discontinuity: “Nor is there need for sorrow. Those unable to live, the old and tired…… all go to prepare a place for us who stay to walk the Earth World without them for a time…let them go. Give thanks they show the way and make the Ghost World pleasant for us.” There is the sense of such unity in that cosmological view. Not a vertical order, but more a circle embracing all of life, a sense of unity. I wish I could belong to such a world view. It would feel less lonely, more comforting I imagine. What a lonely place for humans, at the centre of the world.
I am looking forward to finishing the book and going back to read it again, not only to look up the references I’m interested in, but also to continue taking notes on the passages that strike me. The themes are so rich that the irritation with some of the writing falls into the background.

———————-
I greatly enjoyed the dialogic session with Kent Stetson. I felt the spirit of dialogue very much alive. Mr. Stetson seemed to really welcome the responses to his novel. I found it difficult to hear the negative part of my responses read aloud, cringing, and wishing I had never gone on & on about it. Mr. Stetson’s response that he wanted to have that mixture of responses, attraction and repulsion (he expressed this in different words) in the reader. And I could breathe again. Still not used to this process, all this honesty is difficult! I am still mystified by how deeply and in how much detail (even though I felt impatient at much of the detail in the book) the author could enter into that other-worldly space. He described some aspects of his creative process: How he spends the first part of the morning reading the newspaper, stretching it out as long as possible, how he strongly resists entering the work, and then finally, with great discipline, at 10:00 am sharp, beginning his writing. How he needs to protect himself and the process as he enters that “dangerous” experience. I remain as mystified as ever about a capacity for imagination that astounds me. I imagine he has to be as close to a dream state as one can be while still awake.
What interested me was that he mentioned not only his own working together of conscious and unconscious in the creation of his work, but that there is an engagement with the reader’s conscious and unconscious as well. I appreciated having this articulated.
Mr. Stetson said that his book is a spirit quest in itself. Also, it expresses an argument that he has with himself: for example, why do we have to believe in just one god? Why is there a war between the masculine and the feminine? For any one of them to rise, does the other have to decline? Can both hold the seat of power at the same time? These are vital questions, and the kind of god-image a civilization holds has extremely powerful consequences for a society. The sacred feminine is missing, and the price we pay for that is huge.
I left feeling energized at the warm openness and exciting back and forth exchange between Mr. Stetson and ourselves. I appreciated his invitation to communicate with him through his website if we had any more questions and responses. This session was one of the highlights of this particular seminar, for me.

“Dream time and reality rarely synchronize. Time, they would come to learn, had different meanings for each of them.”
Kent Stentson

So time on the fly, the butting heads of cultural differences, the sod beneath beating footfalls singing out to strangering imminence – how so, the loving & the beloved taking back the difficulty to heal the difference, sifting the warp of recognition for assurance, going roughshod over a harrowing misapprehension here, a passionate insoluble there. The book with its gloved nudging – the nudging – soldiering – getting through – getting through so simple but nevertheless darkly fragile. Here we have man & woman, earth & spirit, spillage & coming up for breath in the eternal seas of impossibility & credulous stamina. The woman loves the impetus, the man the way his hope towers, the two wordlessly framing where they want to go, to get back to. & this is centuries old – millennia old – how collision can leave you aloft in a world you didn’t know to expect – how a sudden sighting was mere ghost of a passion before you emblazoned it – this, & a breakdown of empathy, a build-up of trying harder, hard, hardest…

6 Degrees of Imagination
TENOR OF LOVE by Mary di Michele
Schachar, June 9/10
Part I
A beautiful book, so far. Sensuous, delicate, rich. I felt so identified with Rina, images and feelings so sharp I felt as though I were living it, at moments.
What I could NOT imagine, was Rina’s ability to witness at such close hand the relationship between Ada and Rico. Spiritualizing it so that she could still the carnal desires. That was the one thing I could not imagine doing, Dante or no Dante.
What a transformation. Rico starts off such a lovely charming warm innocent soul, and by the end of Part I he is a cruel narcissistic bastard. I went from identifying with Rina’s adoration to sheer hatred of him, and angry that Rina had agreed to live in that house and take care of everything, accepting pathetic crumbs. I felt such hatred, I almost disliked the book. It had carried me off into such a lovely space, I almost felt betrayed by the book (irrational, I know).
Some of the details took me back to the secret love and infatuation I had for a boy from age 10 until 19. I lived for my fantasies, imagining us in all the romantic movies I saw, making up scenarios of my own, a whole life lived inside. What weight given to every word, every gesture, obsessing over every detail, interpreting everything to suit my desires.
What a magnificent description of the relationship between the sisters. It’s such an archetypal theme, one sibling living in the shadow made by the other’s blinding light. Rina’s forbearance though, and her ability to retain her affection for her sister is almost saintly, I imagine far less commonly found.
Whenever Italian expressions were included in the dialogue, this was another key to entering right into the scenes, feeling myself right there.
I love that description of Rico, when Rina falls in love with him – Rico as music, as birdsong, as flowers, as orchids, as night bloomers opening only for the moon.” Exquisite, just exquisite. The infatuation itself is sheer delicious joy, even before it is consummated.
The description of that first picnic is so exquisite. Every moment, gesture stretched out into some kind of eternity – that magical place full of promise, anticipation, the knowing that it will all happen – before reality comes inevitably crashing in, making the delicious dreams evaporate. I wanted the dream to go on, I felt so sorry at how it ended for Rina.
I guess that narcissistic arrogance and cruelty didn’t come solely out of his fame, they must have been present as seeds from the very beginning, when he was still that innocent, charming youth.
I could go on and on about the beauty of this 1st part of the book, the phrases that strike me.
I loved the way religious symbolism kept coming into everything. The feeling of the 1st kiss being like the feeling she had for the divine during communion, that same ecstasy and awe, at another point her mouth like a cathedral, during another kiss. The whole description of that first love scene is one of the most beautiful love scenes I’ve ever read. Impossible not to feel. I like the way sex is made sacred here and how sex and religious devotion are brought together. I remember seeing sculptures of the pieta. I forget now exactly which ones. And how close to sexual ecstasy they felt. Why on earth is there this ridiculous division? One can worship whatever is God for oneself, through sex. It used to be so. It feels so false to excise that part of life and consider it unsacred. I love that sentence, with the 3rd kiss on page 32: her mouth into which he slips as the “arched cathedral dome… You cannot pray unless you go inside.”
This author brings reveals how sacred sexuality can be. And also the shadowy part of love, love as power: “Love is a glove; love is a gauntlet. It had been thrown down, and it had been picked up.”
Another sentence I loved, Ada teaching Rico and telling him “Make the wound your larynx!”
And the delightful bits of humour, Rina not understanding the word climax, although she knows more about music than Rico, puzzled, thinking he was talking about coffee, or music. And the wonderfully comic scene with the car – I wonder what it must have been like to see a car for the very first time.
I’d like to go through again, making note of all the sentences that I find striking, for example: “… the scent of those flowers was a kind of Braille through which rose could be read.” And “some jasmine too must have been releasing odour as if it were soul into the night air.” What a gorgeous image. Makes me remember also, coming back home at night, and only then smelling the jasmine that grew at the side of the apartment building. And how magical that perfume was to me.
The sensitive feeling for detail is wonderful. For example, the way one chapter ends with the brown paper bag, containing the meal Rina had prepared for him, forgotten, camouflaged on the brown wood and brown paneling. A film could be easily made of this book. Wouldn’t be surprised if that would happen, but before I saw it, I would need to get much assurance that the film has the kind of exquisite delicate poetic sensitivity this book has. I couldn’t bear Hollywood to go anywhere near it.
Anyway – could say much more but that’s it for now. I felt like I didn’t want to start Part II. I wanted to stay with Rina, wanted to see what would happen to her, wanted her to find love again, this time requited. I wanted to see her happy. I didn’t want this new person, whose name was the title of Part II to break into the book. But I’ve just started it, and whoever that 24-year old is, at the beginning of the book, I am interested in her. I just hope we get to hear about Rina before the end, and that she has found happiness and love.

June 9/10

Part II – until ch. 16:
I had glanced at the reading guide at the end of the book – noting that Dorothy was Caruso’s American wife. I then “forgot” that information as I began reading Part II. Once the spoons were asked for, and it was agreed that Dorothy could go, I “remembered” again – yes – that would be his wife. This young woman who feels herself to be such an ugly duckling, unloved, lacking grace or beauty, living in a regime of fear under The Master, her Saturnian brute of a father. I felt happy for her. Couldn’t stand any more of Bibi by then.
Something is missing for me in this 2nd part, but I don’t know if this has to do with the difference in character of Rina & Dorothy. I feel the description of Dorothy is masterful. Again – I like the delicacy of the description, she is so vividly present and alive for me. But there’s some magic missing here, so far, in this 2nd part. Is it because of the difference in personality between outgoing, charming Rina and the introverted shy Dorothy? Because Caruso is no longer that young charmer, and is by now spoilt by his fame? Dorothy picks up on that, and yet still loves him. There is something so pure about Dorothy, she couldn’t strike a false note. She sees through to the truth in people and situations. I hope it’ll work well for her.
What is it I’m missing in this 2nd part? The romantic excitement of the 1st? Not sure. It’s much more subdued. Maybe Caruso simply is no longer a romantic figure by this time.
——————————————–
June 11/10

Confession: I couldn’t stop after the 16th chapter, and read through to the end, making the reading & responses into 2 parts, instead of 3. I couldn’t rest until I saw what happened. I wanted Dorothy to be happy. I was so in the story, that I couldn’t leave it, it would be like stopping a film in the middle, or a piece of music, leaving it in mid-air. Then the energy would be stuck there, unfree for other tasks, so I finished it. The minute I read Dorothy, or the writer’s thoughts about the dark & light side happening together, I felt a dark cloud coming in to spoil the delight I had felt. Why on this earth could this young woman, who had lived such a horrid childhood, losing to insanity a mother she loved, and having to live with such a cruel brute of a father, why on this earth could she not be given more years of happiness? Redressing the injustice. Providing some balance. I wonder if the historical Dorothy had endured such a childhood. I hope it’s part of the fiction, not true. The 1st part of the book – spring, youth, promise, delight, joy – although there were dark moments, such as what happened with Ada, and Caruso’s narcissistic exploitation of Rina – the joyful moments are what stay with me. The gorgeous descriptions. The 2nd part with its more subdued writing (I picked out far fewer passages whose writing struck me) and its notes of harsh reality, cancelled out the delight I had felt. I know this attitude is wrong. The dark should not cancel out the joy, they live side by side and alternate, and one should accept that that is how it is. But I don’t feel in accordance with what I know. It’s a wonderful book, with wonderful writing and characterization –just wonderful. I just wish promise, joy, delight, didn’t so often end in darkness.
——————————————–
Very much enjoyed session with Mary di Michele. The author was very open to listening to participants’ writings, dialoguing with them, her responses involving associations that took the conversation into fields further away, for which she sometimes seemed apologetic about. But in fact I really enjoyed this associative kind of conversation. One image or thought sparking off another and another. Not a linear going back & forth. I enjoyed her openness to the whole process.
She also said something that I wonder if most other novelists would also share – that her various characters are parts of her. This makes sense to me. Even those of a different gender, since we all have both female and male within ourselves.
She mentioned some people’s reactions to Dorothy as a character that was “boring,” but then a participant spoke about her heaviness, her leadenness. That was what I felt about Dorothy. I didn’t feel her to be boring, but I think I kept waiting to see her born, those stifled and repressed movements of life inside her released into life.
We discussed the theme of interpretation, and Professor di Michele said that this book is about interpretation. I remember what Kent Stetson said about the writer’s conscious and unconscious as well as the reader’s conscious and unconscious interacting in the writing and reading. That expands the field terrifically. At what point is the reader, who is experiencing or interpreting something s/he reads picking up the unconscious contribution to the creator’s writing. Ripples that might become conscious in the reader. The unconscious is so vast, compared to conscious life. Texts, pictures, can create huge fields of associations and meanings around themselves. So at what point can one say that one is leaving the text, leaving the image? Going too far afield?
Professor di Michele considers the reader as participating creatively in the writing, saying that the reader can enter the dream as a dreamer. I feel much truth in this. Writing and then letting go of it, releasing the writing to have its own varied life amongst a world of different readers.
I would like to read her poetry, she says she comes to the novel from poetry. Because of the exquisite sensous writing, particularly of Part I of the book, I am interested in exploring her poetry.
Thank you Professor di Michele for a very rich session.

Responses to the 2nd half of Mary Di Michele’s Tenor of Love.

End of pg 226

Joe Green
The Interest in the unknown, the perhaps unattainable, the mysterious, they excite us. Familiarity and routine become old exhausted relationships with no sparkle. Perspective, what’s new, what’s old. Can we reduce everything to Joe Green?
I almost feel like we’re starting again Bibi for Ada, Dorothy for Rina, the jealous naive youth, the presumptuous elder all orbiting around a misunderstood man, a disguised fellow, a Joe green.
Dorothy strikes me as being very likeable, a brave soul, inquisitive and youthful a lover of detail. Sumptuous descriptions of fire and time as apposes to the raw, ‘tongue and teeth’, talk of Rina. She’s a real person perhaps or just ‘true’ in a deferent way. She’s an ocean and decades apart from the young Rina, a new era, a relatable lady.
——————————————-
end of book 2, pg 293.

The last 30 pages flew by. I really like this Dorothy character, she’s emotive, you’re with her, she speaks to me.
I like Rico less and less, actually I feel sorry for him. I appreciate the devotion to his singing but can’t help but feeling that he didn’t really take advantage of his fortunate position. He missed his children grow, he only spent time only enough for coffee and a couple cigarettes with his wife each day, it’s kind of sad really.
I don’t really want to write more, I want to finish the book.
——————————————-

End of book

The last few pages made me feel nauseous, I felt for Dorothy and her loss. The Italian sisters seem so far away compare to her: I seemingly read from Rina’s point of view a long time ago, they seemingly lived in a completely different era and their thoughts where polar opposites. Dorothy brought everything to life and was quite easy to relate too, her thoughts somehow seemed more reasonable more thought through for each situation even though she made difficult decisions such as to cut her father out form her life.
There’s no magical element though, it’s just real. Maybe that’s the price for staying relatively faithful to historical events. It wasn’t a particular emotional journey until Enrico’s final decline and I often felt like a distant observer.
I did enjoy it, I just felt the shackles of history pulling it back, keeping it restrained, not letting it fly. I never heard of this Enrico chap before reading this so the story’s possibilities were limitless and I was ready, I think, to be taken anywhere. Maybe that would have just made the story ridiculous and unbelievable. I don’t know.
I don’t know what to say really. It doesn’t inspire too much, I don’t have many questions, and I feel I can just leave Mr Caruso now to rest in peace. I would like to hear his voice though; I’m going to find his voice now.

6 degrees of Imagination
At some point in the middle of March I received an excited telephone call from my good friend to say she had seen the screening of the film about the teaching philosophy of Prof Norman Cornett.
A few days later I found myself, after a few Google searches and emails, at the dialogic session with Naim Kattan. I can’t remember exactly what I heard or what I asked but was struck by the openness of the conversation and it resonated with me, it excited me, it made me reflect and make links and my energy level was augmented because of it. I needed to sign up for the following series.
Over the course of the last 2 months I feel like I’ve gone through an enlightenment period, which I wish and will try and keep going as long as possible. Socrates quote sums it up, “the unreflected life is not worth living”. It’s some kind of cover up meaning of life, i.e. there isn’t one but this Socrates idea is a good place to start.
I’ve concentrated on pieces more attentively than even, I’ve written far more than ever, I’ve expressed my opinions far more than even, I’ve listen to others opinions more than ever, I’ve listened to others writings more than ever, which proved to be surprising wonderful considering they are initial reactions and streams of consciousness. Above all I’m been more emotionally involved in this class more than any other and I’ve been more emotionally involved with these artists works than any other, considering the time we put into letting the pieces speak to us. It has been a wonderful experience.
There were ups and downs, there were many questions raised for which there will never be answers, it was an incredibly stimulating environment, I can’t really ask for more.
I have so many avenues to follow up, to keep exploring, it’s exciting and intimidating, wonderful and frustrating, and it’s all the colours of the spectrum and then some. We’ve set at high bar for learning which I want to keep reaching. It bugs me now when days aren’t filled with moments which strike and surprise and challenge me.
When pool together my notes I hope to come up with something more specific.
Thank you and I look forward to the next few weeks during the jazz festival.

I was tired by 5, and even though I had been looking forward to this seminar series, and changed my work schedule for the next 2 weeks so that I could attend, I contemplated just missing today. But as I had agreed to be treasurer I had to show up. I felt so high and energized by the time I left I was worried about not being able to get to sleep. Saw the clip from the movie “Adventures in Babysitting.” The point where the kids are running away for their lives, from a mob-like group of men that seem to want to kill them. They come to a dead-end, at a tall enclosure, with the men in hot pursuit. I was sure that was it for them, and then all of a sudden, they found a doorway and dashed in. It was a blues club. The door led straight onto the stage where Albert Collins was playing and singing. They found themselves on the stage with him facing a hostile audience. They seem scared, confused, and apologize to the musician, who then gives a most unexpected answer: instead of booting them angrily off the stage, he tells them, in a threatening sounding voice, “no one leaves here without singing the blues.” The older girl doesn’t know what to do, says she can’t sing but after some protesting, finally, having no choice, goes to the mike and says her name, and introduces her – I guess – younger siblings and tells a bit of a story regarding how she came to baby sit these kids when she had planned to celebrate with her boyfriend their 1st anniversary. At each sentence Albert Collins responds with his guitar and voice, and bit by bit the children give themselves over to the blues they thought they could not sing. That moment made an impact on me – I’ve been trying to find a way to articulate it, but only get images – images of falling through a dark dismal abyss that seems to lead only into a dead space, and instead, finding oneself falling into a flower that explodes open into a new life. Albert Collins (not his name in the film, I think) took it for granted that they – so I guess everyone – has it in them to sing the blues. Anyway – it was dropping down, but instead of catastrophe, finding that one has fallen down into a flowering new life. This is the best I can do to try to articulate a moment in the film that almost brought me to tears, for the meaning it held out to me. I can’t really put words to it, so I’ll leave it there.
Didn’t like the 1st piece of music – felt too country for me. In the struggle between trying to be open to it, and wanting to simply rest in the “I don’t like this, don’t want to listen to it, don’t have to learn to like it” – I heard very little of it. But the lyrics, which we read, and of which I had heard nothing, were a different story, very very dark and sad, and too realistic a drama to be able to run from. I felt a sad & depressive feeling.
But the 2nd piece of music was absolutely thrilling, wild, ecstatic! I felt so excited by it, I didn’t want it to end. The feeling was that this music could send one over the edge, and so I wouldn’t want to listen to it alone, but would like to hear it again in the presence of others. The music felt like a drug, like trance music, very primal. I felt I could leave my normal consciousness too easily and go into an altered space, and so I tried to exert some rational control by trying to name the instruments as they were coming in. I couldn’t even try to describe it – but images that come to mind in association with it are things of certainty, safety, familiarity, the known, crashing together, exploding categories, creating a space where nothing is as I expect it, all things familiar have collided, crashed against each other, leaving a space for something new to be born afterwards. I had the sense that if I listened to that music enough perhaps some old outworn safe and rigid attitudes and categories in me that are so persistent and imprisoning might explode, combust too.
I left high. Walked home, 45-minute walk. On the way I got the film “Adventures in Babysitting” which will motivate me to finally hook up my TV and DVD player, which I have not bothered to do since moving a few months ago. And then I was thirsty and bought a drink in a plastic bottle. Once the bottle was empty, and without being aware of starting to do it, I found myself exploring the plastic bottle as a percussion instrument, seeing how many different things I could make it do – how many aspects I could play with, the different sounds as I knocked it on different parts of my hand, wrist, watch, nails, the different intensities I could play with and the different rhythms – trying to go farther afield and get away from regular beats. I had such fun for the last 20 minutes of my walk. I felt like the evening inspired me to recover a sense of play that I thought so lost & buried I wouldn’t see it again for ages yet! The composer of this piece better not be coming on July 8, which I have to miss, as it’s my mother’s birthday!

This new series with Dr Cornett, Adventures in Jazzing, takes us to the deepest roots of Jazz. How did this misery of the poorest of poor, the black slaves from New Orleans, give birth to the Blues and hence to Jazz? How did their simple music give birth to this array, to this profusion of improvisations? How do the sadest of lyrics end up in such beauty? Could the answers to these questions take us to the roots of our own selves?

Yesterday, one of our mates, a Survivor as we call ourselves, who like most of us doesn’t know too much about music, was expressing some disappointment as to her difficulty to discuss the pieces of music per se. That’s how we learned, or re-learned (there is never too much repetition for the simple truths of life) the importance of concentrating on what we know rather than on what we don’t know; be confident rather than feel miserable. Because there is always something that we can say we know. And most of the time we don’t know that we know! So, we are invited in Adventures in Jazzing, to trust our guts and… who knows where this might lead us.

Sounds simplistic? Let’s say we trust our knowledge enough so that we don’t really care so much when we have to admit that we don’t know. But how about the darker sides of our lives? How about our health, our loved ones, our finances? François Huber (1750-1831), a swiss naturalist, was blind. Still, he became one of the first scientific observers on bees. With the help and through the eyes of his wife and a servant he conducted such acute experiments that he established the truth amidst many false beliefs. He is now called the father of modern bee science. We could then also say that we don’t know that we can.

I like this idea of being a Survivor, of being surprised and surprise myself.

Forgot to mention what Storr says about right brain/left brain (though the functions aren’t so sharply divided). He relates the right brain more to melody and the emotional response to the music, while executive skills and critical analysis would be more functions of the left hemisphere, so that “parts of the brain concerned with the emotional effects of music are distinct from those which have to do with appreciation of its structure. He goes on to describe how measurements of physiological arousal in a subject were present when the subject was completely involved with the music, but were not apparent when he adopted an analytical, critical attitude. OK – back to trying to learn something about jazz!

Dr. Cornett never stops to amaze me. After four dialogic sessions over a stretch of a year and a half, and many interesting guest writers, artists, musicians, including Priscilla Uppal, Rawi Hage, Erin Moure, George Eliot Clarke, Frederic Back, Sue Adams, Branford Marsalis, Matt Herskowitz, Christine Jensen, Ingrid Jensen, Susie Arioli, Andrew Paul MacDonald, Hans Tutschku, Charles Ellison, I thought I could anticipate Dr. Cornett’s next adventure. Today’s encounter with internationally renowned electronic artist Misstress Barbara proved me wrong.
Apart from her accomplishments in DJing and electronic music, Misstress Barbara (born Barbara Bonfiglio), has now released her debut album “I’m No Human,” featuring contributions from Sam Roberts, Brazilian Girls and Bjorn Yttling. The album infuses electronic music with traditional song-writing, with an outcome that is remarkably fresh, inventive and musically satisfying. Born of “unhappy circumstances” – her father passed away on Christmas Eve in 2006 – “I’m No Human” confirms her talent as a gifted lyricist as well as a musician with an ear for the best dramatic effect.
Whereas the title song, an amazing combination of minimalist, electronic sound and “space age” singing, demonstrates her gift as an original song-writer, her cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love,” by her own admission, is an interpretation of this well-loved song. A creative artist is not bound by restrictions, much less by those limitations that call for “one and only one correct interpretation” for music or any other creative endeavour. A cover of existing material is not a sign of disrespect towards the original. Besides, modern covers follow the principles of invention/ improvisation/composition promoted by 18th-century authors on music.
Johann Mattheson in his Der vollkommene Capellmeister of 1739 wrote: “The ‘locus exemplorum’ could mean … the imitation of other composers, if only fine models are chosen and the inventions were simply imitated, not however copied and stolen. If, when all is said and done, most is fetched out of this source for invention just in the sense we take it here: such should not be censured, if only it is done with restraint. Borrowing is permissible; but one must return the thing borrowed with interest, i.e., one must so construct and develop imitations that they are prettier and better than the pieces from which they are derived” (Der vollkommene Capellmeister, Part II, Chapter 4, Paragraph 81).
Misstress Barbara’s take on Leonard Cohen’s original certainly follows Mattheson’s advice on choosing good models. Her admiration for the original is transparent and her love for it contagious. Cohen’s original “endures” the addition of new electronic sound and comes out revitalized. But so did the participants of the “dialogic” session with Misstress Barbara. Thank you, Dr. Cornett, for creating the opportunity of meeting this wonderful artist.
Anait Brutian

Nous avons rencontré hier soir Coral Egan, dont j’avais auparavant pu apprécier la belle voix sensuelle. En voyant arriver cette jeune femme blonde aux yeux clairs je me suis un moment demandée d’où provenaient ces tonalités (dans au moins une des chansons que nous avions entendues dans le cadre de nos rencontres préparatoires) qui me l’avaient faite imaginer plus noire que blanche? En cause, une technique vocale qu’elle a bien assimilée mais aussi, nous a-t-elle expliqué, un héritage d’une grande richesse et ouverture lui venant de sa mère. Une grande dame d’une certaine fragilité cependant. Car la fille semble en effet toujours frappée par le fait que cette dernière, sujette à de fréquents rhumes ou autres problèmes s’attaquant à ses cordes vocales, se soit en permanence questionnée sur ses capacités à se produire en public.
La fille a des prédispositions. La voie de la musique s’annonce à elle, en fin de compte, comme une évidence. Elle devient musicienne elle aussi. Elle joue avec les styles. Elle joue avec sa voix.

On ne la reconnait pas, cependant, d’une chanson à l’autre.

Je me suis réveillée ce matin, intriguée, avec à l’esprit ce questionnement: “authenticité…?”. Et celui-ci encore: “compensation…? ” Mais il est possible que mon esprit vagabonde un peu trop… et d’ailleurs, comme l’a dit avec raison Ms Evan, les interprétations appartiennent surtout à ceux et celles qui les donnent. Reste que…

Thank you for joining us yesterday evening, Ingrid and Christine
(Jensen). You are a source of inspiration and great Ladies.
Please come again next year,
Let’s dance

sorry – typos in last 2 words “findhip fascinial”

I meant “finding enjoyable.

Adventures in babysitting, adventures in jazzing, adventures in dialog, rich adventures.

I need to listen to all the bands in my head, give them all a voice, mnemonics for experiences, meandering and noodling through thoughts, our own sense of time, the pleasure of the walk.

We’re survivors, of something, I’m not sure which.

Ring shouts and field hollers and call-and-response, dialogs reflecting the roots of the music; our concrete jungle of Montréal pulling us through the jazz’s transitionary post flood years; our collective soul challenging its present purpose. Somehow they have to get paid while remaining true to their belly buttons; a fine balance of tradition and evolution, prisoners of expectations and solitudes.

Being ‘improvised’ is perhaps too general a description for a music genre. It does have a typical sound, there are rigid boundaries and standard language, and there are orthodox instruments. The difference for me is ownership, an ownership not possible with classical music, a creation of space, a freedom to explore another’s structure and to still reflect the melody of your spirit, your imperfections and vulnerabilities, all while trying to get out of the way.

As our creativity and output is a reflection of our memories and experiences, making sense or breathing this music seems inseparable from our history with the sounds. Faces on the ceiling, exotic sounds on the cassette, foreign and exquisite words on a page, and colourful images: priceless exposure needed to round and to grow and appreciate and gain perspective. For me to simply ‘not like’ something is useless.

Everybody brings their own unique experiences to the sessions, some jazz filled, some bee-filled, some environ-filled, some engine-filled, some language filled, some archi-filled, all compiling into a unity; our own culture of ‘survivors’, with albert as DJ. Wonderful!

Regarding last night’s session: I found it hard to believe that the vastly different compositions – the lyrical pieces in minor key with violin & cello and the jazzy wildly ecstatic huge worlds of sound could be composed by the same person – Matt Herskowitz, whose music I had never heard before. It didn’t hit me right away, but later on, I thought it quite a coincidence that the first lyrical piece for strings we had heard that evoked too strongly for my comfort, feelings of loss and mourning, (the 2nd lyrical piece for strings we heard last night was not going to get me this time, I had been forewarned and kept my distance!!)was from an album called Jerusalem Trilogy. It struck me on the way home, that Jerusalem had been my home for 6 out of the 7 years I lived in Israel, and that I was deeply in love with that city, never imagining that I would live anywhere else for the rest of my life, but leaving because of certain situations, and now feeling unable to return because of the politics. Yet somewhere underneath my anger, there is the memory of those innocent days when I was unaware of how dark was the dark side, and I had felt that I had finally found home, in the deepest sense, and the years there were the happiest of my life.

The Adventures in Jazz series is drawing to a close, Part of me is relieved as the whole thing has been rather intense, not just in terms of time and energy, but emotionally as well, drawing much out of us. And part of me will miss it a great deal. It has opened up a whole world for me. I live in a larger universe for having done this seminar. I did not anticipate receiving this much, and my words are inadequate to express it. Never having liked most jazz I had heard before, it has opened up a treasure chest and a source of pleasure I would not have imagined for myself. I was also astonished at the encounters with the artists, that people of such talent would come to the dialogue sessions, and that they would be so down-to-earth and unassuming, besides.

Thank you Prof. Cornett for an experience that is so unique and precious!

As we are slowly winding down to our very last session of Adventures in Jazzing on July 9th, I’m having difficulty finding the words to describe the exceptional value of the type of education provided by Dr. Norman Cornet. Dr. Cornett’s dialogic sessions have been an eye-opener for me each time (three different series so far), whatever the topic being discussed.

So far, after listening to their music every day over the past 3 weeks, we’ve had the honour and privilege of meeting and dialoguing with such artists as Mistress Barbara, the very accomplished musical sensations Ingrid and Christine Jensen, the lovely and talented Coral Egan, Pianiste Hors Pair – François Bourassa, the intense and creative pianist/composer Matt Herskiwitz … I am simply awestruck and blown away, not by their fame and celebrity status, but by their accessibility, their willingness to take the time to come and talk to a small group of people and dialogue about what we’ve heard and felt. I travelled many places and very much enjoyed learning about their beginnings, their growth as musicians, their views and especially their love and passion for their craft.

I have been listening to Christine Jensen’s and Ingrid Jensen’s CDs for the past two weeks and they are simply fabulous. Everyone needs to run out to buy the new Matt Herskowitz CD – Jerusalem Trilogy) and Coral Egan’s lovely voice is now also part of my iPod Library. I know that more will be added in the next little while.

It is quite an extraordinary thing to listen to music with the senses – music that I have not really been familiar with and discover such an incredible wealth of talent, right here in this wonderful city! I think I always liked Jazz and Blues, however Dr. Cornett’s masterful teaching methods have allowed me and my classmates to explore and get a taste of different styles, different sounds, a variety of musical instruments and arrangements that have taken me on a journey filled with unexpected results.

These sessions have not only allowed me to further develop my appreciation of music, but it has also expanded my mind in such as way that how I listen to music is now changed forever. I am no longer listening from the perspective of whether “I like it” or “I don’t like it”, but rather from what I actually hear, what I personally experience and where it takes me. I’ve also enjoyed dialoguing with my fellow participants and learn from their knowledge and experiences and different fields and backgrounds.

There are still 3 more evenings left and I am very much looking forward to this evening’s session with Ms. Dawn Tyler Watson… I think it will be a SMOKIN’ GOOD TIME!

C’est François Bourassa qui, le premier, m’a fait comprendre que le jazz ça s’apprivoisait, tout comme l’a fait le renard avec le Petit Prince de Saint Éxupéry: l’amitié aussi, ça se gagne, un petit peu à chaque jour. D’abord on trouve étrange ou on n’aime pas. Puis un jour, ça y est, le plaisir est de la partie. Rasstones n’est donc que le premier de la longue série de CDs de lui que j’écouterai dès à présent. Autre belle rencontre à Adventures in jazzing avec le Dr Cornett, où l’on quitte toujours sous le charme.

I didn’t quite know what to expect last evening. We had learned that our illustrious guest was going to be Ranee Lee, known as the Queen of Jazz in Montreal! Of all the guests we’ve had I believed her to be the most famous, therefore expected a diva…Ms. Lee displays not an ounce of “divadom, and is truly a Grande Dame and a Great Human Spirit. Not only is her voice a divine instrument, but I discovered that she is also a performer, a dancer, a writer, an illustrator, a humanitarian, and much much more. What a legacy, what a gift for Montreal, for Quebec and for our country. I will probably say more about how I experienced her music later…. Bye for now.

I’m writing at some distance from the dialogic session with Dawn Tyler Watson. I remember walking out of the session as it ended and feeling that I wanted to keep replaying the session in my mind in order to keep the dialogue going, and in order to somehow keep the connection with this artist alive. This is a session I did not want to end. A bit hard to write about, as it was such a moving experience. Such talent together with such a humane spirit. We went far beyond the music in this dialogue, entering into the realm of dark tragic human experiences, the hard social realities, that are so rarely made the stuff of music: depression, suicide, addiction. I found the two songs we had heard exceptionally moving: “Why” and “Shoot the Devil.” I wondered what it must feel like for those going through these experiences to have them mirrored in music this way, how perhaps they might feel the artist reaching out to them, feel understood, less lonely. It meant a great deal to me that an artist with this exceptional talent would care about people going through this, wanting to reach them through her music. Dawn Watson related to us as well that she had volunteered for 6 years with troubled youth. She is deeply engaged as an artist. And I have a great appreciation of her for this. She was deeply honest with us, sharing her doubts, her struggles. This too meant a great deal to me.
Ms. Watson said that she feels she channels her music, that it’s not her who creates it. I was struck by this attitude, and admire her for it.
I had found it hard to believe that the same person who wrote the dark songs could write that delightful, funny, swinging piece “You Better Latex Your Love.” It’s on an album called “$10 Dress” and I kept singing it to myself, I loved it. It brought me right out of a blue funk!
I left hoping I’d see Dawn Watson again some time soon. I felt very connected to her.

Jai pas vu le docu mais je comprnds pas le lien entre Dr.Cornett et l ecole d art Creativ Boost. Est ce que Dr. Cornett était impliqué dans le conception du programme d’arts visuels. Je sais que maintenant ils n offrnt pas les cours de dessin ou de peinture mais ils envoient leurs étudiants qui veulent les cours peinture Montreal chez Studio Synesthesie. Est ce qu’il est maintenant consultant pour eux??

It was good to be back at Professor Cornett’s seminar series once again, they are so very nourishing. We saw a video of Judy Chicago’s masterpiece “The Dinner Party.” I had read the book many many years ago, but watching the video, seeing the installation and hearing Chicago’s accompanying explanation of her and her team’s process, the impact on me was much deeper and more powerful. I was awed by the conceptual and philosophical aspect of her project, as well as by the sensuous, rich, imaginative beauty of the visual element. All the different layers, the research, the bringing up to the surface of the suppressed narrative of the vital contribution of women in the history of humankind, expressing all this in a brilliant visual form. It was as though I were participating in an archaeological project. Again, I feel that I wish I were able to write poetry to describe the experience as the experience was too complex for me to capture in these words. It had deep resonance for me, as someone coming from a culture where the feminine and women were considered to have so little worth, and who has spent a life-time trying to undo the harmful effects of the internalization of those noxious beliefs. I think this is an almost universal phenomenon, with the only differences being a matter of degree, across cultures. I look very much forward to the next 3 sessions in this series. An aside: I went last night to see a beautiful film, Budrus, produced by a group of women, on the non-violent resistance by a Palestinian village and their ultimate victory in their struggle against the theft of their land and uprooting of their olive trees. Not only were the producers of this film, which has won numerous international awards, women, but the villagers’victory was in significant part due to the active role taken by the women of Budrus. I enjoyed the synchronicity of participating in these two events, highlighting the contribution and suppressed knowledge of the power of women, on the same day.

I came late to the 4 part session with Dr Cornett and Judy Chicago – at the beginning of the 2nd session.

Aside from the Dinner Party, I had not kept up with Judy Chicago’s body of work over the years, so my experience looking at her works was fresh and unmediated. And very focused. Thanks for that are due in no small part to Dr Cornett.

I felt myself being transported back in time looking at images from the Birth Project. The style and the subject matter evoke a part of feminism, as well as art, that is largely ignored – the birth process. As Dr Cornett astutely stated, the only birth we have been gazing at for millennia is the birth of Christ. And it’s a “virgin” birth, to boot. By pulling the subject matter out of the shadows and confronting it literally head on, I could not escape its primordialism. This is life, at its most visceral, its most raw. Period. The images, as with the Dinner Party are sharply contrasted by their medium – the “feminine” art of needlework. The craftsmanship is superb, but what is equally interesting is Chicago’s ability to bring people together – in this case her artisans, women from all walks of life, who translated her work into thousands of stitches. It was heartening to hear these women speak about the process, how it affected their lives, their marriages, their view of themselves as creative spirits.

In less than a week, we will view Judy Chicago’s latest exhibition and then meet her. Dr Cornett’s words: Don’t hold back. Don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions. Oh, and by the way, Judy Chicago does her research and is well informed. So I set out to do some research of my own.

I knew Judy Chicago was a lightening rod for criticism, but I had no idea how much, and how scathing some of the criticism had been. It seems if you are one of her artisans, or supporters, you are viewed by some as being a member of her cult, or a hanger on. Others question her draughtsmanship, say her imagery if out of date, that she is a has-been, or is simply not worth being viewed as a serious artist. Her choice of medium lies in the realm of crafts, and in so doing, separates it from high art. Others criticize her for being too didactic, leaving no space for the viewer to draw their own observations or conclusions. Still others equate her imagery as a stiffly draw line delineating female existence in a masculine-dominated world. The message is a mandate for women to break out, to claim the feminine. And on and on. Courtney Bailey writes about the issue of panic, a postmodern condition which supposedly prohibits one from acquiring real knowledge, being steeped in a state of panic. Whatever position you take, it seems that discussion of the actual work is blurred by the viewer/critics baggage.

The one thing that Dr Cornett manages to pull out of his participants is the ability to truly see and listen, which I think, in the light of our current subject and her subject matter, is particularly relevant. Whether we’ll all be grouped under the category of Ms Chicago’s “cult” members remains to be seen.

This is the first time I’ve been to the musee des maitres et artisans du Quebec. I find the space, in a former cathedral, well suited for Judy Chicago’s exhibition. It belongs in a sacred space. The first two glass pieces I would have – in fact, did – passed by without paying attention to them initially. I repeatedly have the experience in these seminars of an art work that I would barely glance it, come alive and reveal more and more of itself as I take the time simply to look. I felt a bit uncomfortable, however, with the vulvar flower, as it felt too obvious, explicit, to have a strong sensuous quality, to my taste. I actually preferred the backs of the two square glass pieces, where the 3rd dimension revealed itself, and where I had the impression of intense coloured light shining through. The parts of the exhibition that I found most striking were the 3 fists that brought together pain, suffering and power, strength, resolve. And they were simply beautiful. I feel as though the fists have become part of an inner world whose image I can draw inspiration from when I need. The fist of tears, the snake fist, and the burning fist. So simple, and yet such powerful, striking images. I think they were my favourite, although the Rainbow Shabbat stained glass tryptich was a thing of beauty. I would like to see it during the day when the light shines through it. A vision of a world of peaceful cohabitation – different ethnic groups all seated together, their arms around one another, at the Shabbat dinner table, heads turned towards the woman reciting the blessing over the Shabbat candles. It is a beautiful and sacred image. A vision of something probably impossibly ideal, yet forever worth striving for. I felt angry when I read, above, what Kiki had found in her research – the type of criticisms leveled at Chicago’s work. They felt more to me like a search for just any excuses to attack a body of work that makes people squirm and confront difficult issues, in themselves and in the world around. This is not work to be enjoyed passively. It makes one think, ask oneself hard questions, it confronts. To judge it for not falling into artificially designated categories of art, that anyway are arbitrary and constantly change, feels absurd and somewhat dishonest. Why do they have to be judged by extrinsic values and not in their own right anyway? I admire Chicago enormously. The criticisms just prove to me exactly why her work is so very necessary and vital. Thank you for the eye-opening information about how she’s been received, Kiki. I am excited about meeting and dialoguing with Judy Chicago tomorrow. This is a real treat.

Notes from Dr Norman Cornett’s dialogic session with Judy Chicago, September 23, 2010

One of my first experiences of viewing a major exhibition was the Dinner Party, in Toronto in 1982, and it left a huge impression on me. I remember the total discomfort and unease I and my fellow art students felt as we made our way around the table. I was much younger and not yet fully aware of what an homage to women over the millenia I was facing. That memory, along with the pieces’ sheer beauty and high level of craftsmanship is seared in my mind forever. Twenty eight years later, I felt more ready to meet its historic creator. I had done my research and armed myself with questions.

Within 10 minutes of hearing Judy Chicago speak, most of the questions on my list had been answered. Some now seemed irrelevant. I sat there struggling to formulate new ones. This was too great a gift to be given to pass up the opportunity.

What surprised me the most was Chicago’s sense of hope for the world. In spite of being criticized harshly for most of her career (an understatement), in spite of knowing that after 40-odd years that precious little has changed in patriarchal structures, I found a deep love of humanity.

I thought I would be meeting someone who had developed a strong shield of protective armour, and who had become embittered. I found frustration, but not hatred or bitterness or resignation. Instead of utopian idealism (the world would be better with women in charge) I found grounded reality. And hope. And clarity. The armour is there too. I think that is a piece of equipment that every artist needs when they put their art out in the world.

“Let me tell you something about criticism.” she said, responding to a question from a young artist who said her own critics were finding her work too pretty. Chicago stated emphatically that you can’t let the criticism or the critics define your work or you lose your own voice.

Of showing in a smaller venue, an arts and crafts venue versus a contemporary art museum such as the MACM, she said some of the most exciting work happens at the smaller venues. Referring to the MACM, she spoke of hierarchal practices in mainstream museums being still in place leaving little room for ground breaking works. Ironically, her last exhibition in Montreal was in 1982 at the MACM, with the Dinner Party. It still remains the in the top five of the MACM’s most attended and most memorable exhibitions (Chicago in Glass/En verre).

Chicago is well read and well informed. She cited statistics showing that women artists in museum permanent collections have risen a whopping 2 percent, to just under 3%, in the last 30 years. She also said, not surprisingly, that she felt so-called “women-artists” exhibitions serve only to further marginalize women in present day. The integration, the equality, has not happened.

In spite of this, her work still emanates hope, because the alternative is not life supporting.

Thank you, Judy Chicago, for being such a strong voice over so many years, for your fearlessness in the face of constant adversity, and for pursuing your vision. Thank you for having the guts to put yourself out there. It was an honour to meet someone whose contribution to art and feminism will be forever a part of our collective history.

Re dialogic session with Judy Chicago. To be authentic, what I want to write about after the “dialogic” session with Judy Chicago concerns not her art, but rather my experience and reflections about her communication style. I very much regret that I was so taken in by her attacking tone about the question of anonymity. The result was an experience that felt humiliating and exposing. I did not like being addressed in that way in front of 80 people. I had responses to a number of statements she made to me, but I found her tone so attacking, so unopen to dialogue, so down-putting and arrogantly, cockily sure of itself, that I found myself unable to answer her and just kept silent. This had nothing to do with dialogue, was nothing but an opinionated monologue. Dialogue opens to a back-and-forth. This closed it down. It was a one-way harangue. I am sorry I did not protect myself sufficiently, and volunteered that I had written the piece. As someone who has been undergoing constant supervision for her work, I do not need Ms. Chicago to give me lessons about women being unable to take criticism. I take my share and am open to it. This was not criticism, but rather a put-down, which Ms. Chicago evidently takes great delight in doing, as men have done so long to women. For someone as feminist as she is, I was taken by the macho, thrusting, phallic style of her manner of addressing people. No nuances. Black and white. When I am addressed the way I was addressed by her I have no desire to engage. Further, despite what felt like her attempts to disprove that I had read her book because I could not remember the year with any precision, I did indeed read her book – either on the Dinner Party, or Through the Flower, plus read about her Dinner Party – and I didn’t learn much that was new in terms of what she had to say last Thursday. As she herself answered in response to further pieces read out loud – it was the same thing over & over.. There were no new ideas I hadn’t read in her book so long ago. I found her lacking in the spirit of dialogue, unable to be really receptive, and mainly using people’s statements as a board from which to launch into the same old statements. The challenge ahead for me is to not let the experience contaminate the high regard I had for her as an artist and as someone who fights for women’s voices to be heard, collective voices, that is. I learned how vast the gap can be between the development of the personality and the development of one’s art and one’s ideas. I shall be more discriminating from now on, and if I’m challenged to own up to the writing that is meant to be anonymous, I shall first determine the capacity of the dialogue partner for respect and a receptive, truly dialogic spirit. I could not dialogue with Ms. Chicago. There was very little challenging of her amongst 80 people. I wonder why? Did her attacking style contribute to voices of disagreement remaining silent? I certainly kept back all response I had to everything she said to me. This was the most “undialogic” session of any I have attended until now.

such a brief encounter..with such a powerful result. entering each sense in a deeper way ears, eyes and mind rejoices..listen, imagine,write and the world is new and fresh as this automn day of the 2nd of Octobre 2010. Only one word to say:
Thank You Lord Leen!
Merci Professeur
one of the brief.. Colouring

Re what I experienced when I first took off the blindfold: great relief and anticipation of adding the dimension of sight. Asked myself why I closed my eyes at a concert of the Trio Joubran last night, for the pieces I most loved, wanting to just hear, not see – and yet felt disturbed at not being able to see at the concert of Felix Stüssi’s trio. Probably something to do with the music of the ouds being more intimate, and I was closer to the players in the latter case. Also, given that jazz is not an easily accessible musical language for me, watching the musicians play, and interact visually with one another, helped bring the music closer to me. Perhaps watching the musicians make the music through their bodies helps me understand it more, where on purely abstract musical terms, I don’t understand what drives the next notes, and the next, or the way one rhythmic structure gives way to another. Perhaps witnessing the engagement of the body enables one to absorb the music through one’s body – another, additional route. I don’t know. I wonder if people who are very familiar with jazz have the experience of sensing in some cases what will happen next. Unless the music is tonal and very lyrical, it’s always surprise after surprise to me, a mystery.

difference between recorded music and live concert with Mr Stussi?..it feels just so alive and vibrant with energy when watching the musician play and move.It takes all the senses, as on the recorded auditory experience it is done by my imagination..the recognition of the piano and the drum…the touch and the face and expression of the artist!I loved the concert, I wish it will have last longer..Thank you Mr Leen

1]what do you remember about being blindfolded during the concert?
2]what did you experience while blindfolded ?

To be blindfold was very relaxing and a sharp occasion to stay close to myself, more meditative, like preparing the space for the concert. I could still hear the rumor of the crowd but it was must likely as a dream allowing to deepen my own experience of being the witness of all this.

1]what you remember about first taking off your blindfold off at the concert?
2]what did you experience when you first removed the blindfold?

When removed, I was happy to rediscover the full spectrum of perceptions. I was relax and in peace and very present to the sounds surrounding me. I focus immediately on the trio on stage and was very interested by what was going on. The crowd was not my man concern. All my attention was on the stage ears eyes and heart. I felt there, present and aware.

1]what you remember about sitting right above the jazz trio in the corner of the concert hall?
2]what did you experience up there?

Looking above the stage was like to be in the middle of a very busy kitchen where all where occupied preparing the right thing for the pleasure my listening. I was more intimately into the process of finding and discovering what’s fit to what just happened and what fit to the next. I could see the hesitation of the hands, searching to what to do to achieve something and what my heart seems also waiting for. I was delighted!

1]what you remember about sitting in the first row of the balcony [the Briefs went there for the last songs of the concert].
2]what did you experience in the first row of the balcony?

Sitting in the first row of the balcony gives me a more general aspect and vision of the concert. I had appreciated to be close to the musicians before and maybe that position as reinforced my feeling to be part of. Sitting in the first row of the balcony was more and overall sensation in which the concert. Perceptions where filling the whole room including the crowd. I was then in the complete listening of the concert. Appreciating all the play and inventions occurring as pure moment of joy and amusement. An inner smile fulfills my heart and my mind. I was enjoying the show with great delight as if I was part of it. And I was!

Nigeb

Hello.

In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning (it is close to 2 a.m.), after yet another gig. I won’t have the energy to write something long and elaborate, but I would like to thank you all for having stopped and listened to our music. If I say «our», I do deliberately so, and I am including you as listeners. You’re probably not aware of how important you are for us musicians! By exposing yourself to these musical stories, you’ve become yourself part of this creative exchange, and I am afraid to say, you’re stuck with it now, there is no easy way of that, we’ve Put a Spell on You … :-)

I was very honoured to have been invited to the dialogue session and I was impressed to see with what a high degree of openness and curiosity you all approached these strange sounds.

Fun is what music should be about, and a lot fun it was to discuss this all with this beautiful group of people you are.

Musically your. félix

Glad to be back in seminar series & have Priscila Uppal back again. Theme for me this round is “unpenning” my thinking, and poem we worked with quite connected with that, for me. The play of “4″ – reinforced a sense of poetry being also about play – and having fun with words – unseating an approach that expects deep meaning that needs to be deciphered – chipping away at that – once again. Coaxing some more plasticity out of that penned in way of thinking and approaching works of art.

Got annoyed, though, at being asked to repeat too many times the total recall exercise – introducing a note of drudgery into it all – but then my interest piqued again when I realized what a difference readings can make – where space is created around words that ran together previously, thus allowing words to be separate nuclei for their own associations -

The dialogic session with Swiss composer, pianist, ethnomusicologist Félix Stüssi certainly was a one-time opportunity not to be missed. The short biographical note at Mr. Stüssi’s website (http://www.felixstussi.com/BioE.html) provides the following information: “Self-taught on jazz piano, he has later studied with some big names: Irène Schweizer, Markus Bischof, Christoph Baumann, Vince Benedetti, Art Lande, and Fred Hersch.” Whether his lucid summary of “compositional process” – “it all starts with an ‘idea’” – relates to his own experience as a jazz musician, improviser, composer, or to the instruction of his seasoned teachers is beside the point. What is more important is the fact that Mr. Stüssi acknowledges the significance of the “idea” at the initial stages of composition.

Elaborating that only two per cent of any given work is “new” – “the rest is received material” – Stüssi defines “received material” as something that is part of the composer’s established vocabulary. Far from denoting borrowed or stolen material, “received material” can take the form of accumulated knowledge, “learnt stuff,” to use Stüssi’s term. His analogy comes from language – writing poetry or prose involves the use of words and expressions commonly associated with a given language. Similarly, a musical composition relies on melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, instrumental configurations that comprise the “idea.”

According to Mr. Stüssi, the “idea,” that can appear as the initial statement of a piece (Félix Stüssi Trio – TVJazz.tv http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KW5OxLw52o&feature=related) implies its own continuation. Assuming its initial function to be that of a statement, it will instigate a counterstatement or, alternatively, it will set off a repetition (with or without variations). Schoenberg’s “musical idea” – “Every piece of music is the presentation of a musical idea” (Arnold Schoenberg, The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of its Presentation, p.15) – comes to mind.

In Schoenberg’s description “a work originates in an instant of inspiration” but as long as it lacks a ‘comprehensible message’, an idea,” it is worthless (Schoenberg, p.22). It seems that Stüssi’s explanations of an “idea” stem from the practical needs of composition. Yet, the emphasis on the “idea” implies deeper knowledge of musical composition, namely the knowledge of Form.

If an “idea” can initiate its own continuation, then it will also dictate the Form of the composition. Schoenberg defines Form as “the organization of intelligible musical ideas,” with the ultimate goal of articulating these in a logical manner: “Form in the arts, and especially in music, aims primarily at comprehensibility. The relaxation which a satisfied listener experiences when he can follow an idea, its development, and the reasons for such development is closely related, psychologically speaking, to a feeling of beauty. Thus, artistic value demands comprehensibility, not only for intellectual, but also for emotional satisfaction” (Schoenberg, p.22).

Stüssi’s candid evaluation of his own composition seems to aim at similar comprehensibility, intellectual gratification and emotional satisfaction that relates to beauty itself.

Anait Brutian

Hello Félix,
You have raised a couple of good points: “Human beings are born communicators” and “If you take it away from us, we die, at least spiritually.” These are valid arguments that relate to the fact that humans have lived in communities since the beginning. Whether acknowledged or not, verbal communication has been essential for the survival of the species. Classical Rhetoric has taken verbal communication one step further, developing rules, formulating models and enhancing comprehensible thought.
In 17th and 18th centuries, new concepts such as “good taste,” “beauty,” “symmetry and proportion” were also added. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful that first appeared anonymously on April 21, 1757, included an introductory discourse concerning Taste, prefixed to the second edition. Appearing as it did, as a “preface,” the “Essay on Taste” took issue with earlier and contemporary discussions of taste by such luminaries as Abbé du Boss (1719), Hutcheson (1725), Cooper (1755), Hume (1757), Gerard (1759), and the French Encyclopedists Voltaire, D’Alembert and Montesquieu (Burke, xxx).
Burke maintains that “the logic of Taste” now stands in need of systematization: “for if Taste has no fixed principles, if the imagination is not affected according to some invariable and certain laws, our labour is like to be employed to very little purpose; as it must be judged an useless, if not an absurd undertaking, to lay down rules for caprice, and to set up for a legislator of whims and fancies” (Burke, 12). Burke comes up with a general description that summarizes his own notion of Taste: “I mean, by the word Taste no more than that faculty, or those faculties of the mind which are affected with, or which form a judgment of the works of imagination and the elegant arts” (Burke, 13).
Similar sentiments can be found in Addison’s Spectator (1712). “There is nothing that makes its Way more directly to the soul than Beauty, which immediately diffuses a secret Satisfaction and Complacency through the Imagination … ” (Carritt, 67). Addison distinguishes between two categories of beauty. The first exists in our “proper Species” and the second can be found in “several Products of Art and Nature” (Carritt, 67). The constituent elements of the second type of beauty are: the “Gaiety or Variety of Colours,” the “Symmetry and Proportion of Parts,” the “Arrangement and Disposition of Bodies” or a “just Mixture and Concurrence of all together …” (Carritt, 67).
Fifteen years after the publication of Burke’s Enquiry, Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (General Theory Of The Fine Arts) of 1771-1774 devotes an entire article to Taste defining it thus: “Taste is really nothing other than the capacity to sense beauty just as reason is the capacity to recognize that which is true, perfect and just …” (Sulzer, 48). According to Sulzer “The artist of taste tries to give every object upon which he works an attractive form as well as to make sure that it also engages the imagination. His precedent here is nature, who is never satisfied in only making her work perfect and good, but everywhere strives for beauty of form, pleasingness in colour, or the closest conformity of form with the inner nature of the thing” (Sulzer, 49).
Sulzer insists that “inner beauty accrues greater force through the beauty of form” that “the artist of taste will always try to attain both as much as possible” and that “good taste demands carful treatment of the plan” (Sulzer, 73). The plan relates to the “disposition” of material “by which each element follows another” (Sulzer, 69).
As for the disposition itself, Sulzer defines it thus: “One should understand the art of disposition in works of art as the assignment of every element to its proper place. To present an entire work with imagination and in the most advantageous manner following the nature of one’s intention; to make it appear as an inseparable whole without either deficiency or excess; to achieve the very best effect in the placement of every section; to be able to envision the entire work with pleasure yet at the same time distinguish each part (or what is much the same thing, to be able to contemplate each individual section and be led in the most natural manner to an idea of the whole) – all of these are manifestations of good disposition. Without it, no work can be accepted as completely prefect, despite whatever individual elements of beauty it may possess” (Sulzer, 74).
Sulzer maintains that “every work of taste must arouse a single main idea, no matter how extensive it may be.” The consequence of not following this advice is a work that is not a whole but “a hodge-podge of several works” (Sulzer, 75). Sulzer’s model for a perfect whole is the human body: “The whole that incontestably pleases the imagination the most is the one made up of a few, well-connected section, although these sections may themselves be divided into a number of even smaller parts. A good example of this is the human body; it appears to be the most perfect whole made up of only a few main sections, even though it is actually composed of countless smaller elements” (Sulzer, 75).
Sulzer’s assessment of a “perfect whole” – “In such a perfect construction one cannot change anything – either by displacing the parts, or by bringing them closer together – without disturbing the appearance of the whole. So it is with every true work of art. One believes it impossible to move a single part; everything appears to be where it must, and no part can be understood except when viewed in the context of the whole” – establishes the criteria that were operational in 17th and 18th centuries. For better or worse, modern notions of aesthetics have changed. Yet, a full appreciation of earlier works requires an elementary knowledge of the views expressed by Burke, du Boss, Hutcheson, Hume, Sulzer and others.
Anait Brutian

Commentaire sur la projection récente à l’UQÀM du documentaire d’Alanis Obomsawin : Professeur Norman Cornett…, produit par l’Office national du film du Canada.

La présentation, le 2 novembre dernier du documentaire : “Professeur Norman Cornett” de la cinéaste Alanis Obomsawin de l’Office National du film du Canada, laisse songeur sur l’état actuel de la libre circulation des opinions autant que de l’information dans un lieu aussi réputé que l’Université McGill. Ce film généreux et courageux à bien des égards, en nous montrant l’excellence d’une pédagogie, celle du Dr. Cornett, aboutit à une interrogation profonde sur les motifs de son licenciement en 2007 de l’Université McGill où il enseignait depuis 15 ans. Ce qui est en cause ici semble dépasser le cadre de la bonne ou de la moins bonne pédagogie. Si on avait jugé la pédagogie du Dr.Cornett mauvaise ou pernicieuse, on l’aurait licencié bien avant. Si les motifs non évoqués de cette suspension demeurent eux-mêmes assez troublants, il demeure que le spectateur attentif pourra se faire pour lui-même une opinion que personne ne pourra lui enlever et c’est là la grande qualité de ce film.

La manière unique d’enseigner du Dr. Cornett est présentée avec transparence dans ce documentaire d’Alanis Obomsawin et les témoignages des jeunes étudiants et étudiantes de McGill expriment de manière très convaincante l’excellence de l’enseignement reçu par ceux-ci autant que la relation qu’ils surent développer avec eux-mêmes au cours du processus. La pédagogie du Dr. Cornett se résume aisément : amener les jeunes (et moins jeunes), par un processus de libre expression qu’il a nommé « dialogique » à interroger leurs croyances autant que leurs ressentis face aux situations du monde actuel et les partager ensemble. Ce qui au premier coup d’oeil apparaît d’une grande simplicité nécessite, faut-il le préciser, un être d’exception pour en articuler tous les possibles sans tomber dans des prises de positions rigides ou sectaires. Un libre-penseur se garde un doute en réserve, et ceci, quelle que soit la position exprimée. C’est ce doute qui permet de poursuivre la réflexion. Pouvoir étudier ses propres croyances en accédant à ce qui est le plus vrai en soi s’exprime généralement sans contrainte et sans censure. C’est l’objectif de toute réflexion honnête.

Les résultats sont éloquents et les témoignages abondent pour authentifier autant le plaisir et l’intelligence de la démarche. Cependant, au-delà de cette intention de la cinéaste Alanis Obomsawin de livrer le portrait d’un éducateur hors du commun se dessine en cours de route une interrogation qui suscite notre réflexion : en quoi le licenciement récent (2007) de ce professeur émérite de McGill peut-il être relié à une pédagogie estimée et authentifiée par 15 ans d’enseignement et de nombreux témoignages? À ce jour, trois ans après son licenciement, l’Université McGill refuse toujours d’en dévoiler les motifs. Les tentatives de la cinéaste autant que du Dr. Cornett d’obtenir une réponse à cette question crée devant nous une scène devant laquelle nous devons, à l’instar de la pédagogie “dialogique ” penser par nous-mêmes.

Si la pédagogie ne peut être mise en jeu, il reste à regarder le contenu des sujets traités par le professeur dans le cadre de son enseignement. Le film nous les rend explicites et c’est toujours avec beaucoup d’ouverture qu’ils sont traités autant par le Dr. Cornett dans sa pédagogie que Mme Obomsawin dans son film. Par exemple, est-ce qu’un débat sur les brevets pharmaceutiques peut trouver bon accueil auprès de l’intelligentsia universitaire de Mc Gill. Peut-être que oui, peut-être que non. Mais interroger ou examiner le sujet peut certainement déranger certaines autorités qui aimeraient mieux qu’on ne bouge pas trop les choses. Pourtant, le but de cette interrogation n’est pas de menacer qui que ce soit, mais d’ouvrir un débat d’idées comme toute bonne université a le devoir de rendre possible. Alors, voici qu’à McGill ce n’est pas possible puisqu’un professeur sincère et honnête voulant susciter l’intérêt et la curiosité de ses étudiants a été licencié sans qu’il soit possible d’en connaître le motif.

De même, est-ce que parler de sionisme et d’antisionisme, en amenant dans la classe des intervenants importants des communautés juives et en permettant aux étudiants d’exprimer une opinion sincère sur le sujet représente-t-il une menace, toujours pour des pouvoirs bien en place? Il faut croire que oui malgré toute la bienveillance du processus élaboré par le professeur et dont ont témoigné les étudiants au cours des années. D’où cette belle phrase, accrochée au film, et qui révèle bien l’approche du Dr.Cornett autant que de la problématique soulevée ici : « Depuis quand ressent-on l’obligation de répondre correctement au lieu de répondre honnêtement »

Faire réfléchir dérange encore plus que réfléchir. Une véritable pédagogie ne saurait exclure du revers de la main la possibilité de penser par soi-même. Apprendre est vraiment le déploiement de ce cette capacité et de le faire avec les sujets choisis avec grand art par le professeur Cornett mérite beaucoup plus d’être nourrit et encouragé que simplement mis de côté. Réfléchir avec tout ce que nous sommes devient subversif, car on aimerait bien sûr nous faire réfléchir d’une certaine manière et pas une autre. Les plus grands moments de l’histoire ne furent-ils pas ceux où justement la réflexion put s’exprimer et les idées voyager librement? Quels choix devraient faire une université devant de tels faits? Ou posons la question autrement, quelle sorte de pressions peut-elle bien subir pour prendre une décision aussi sordide pour l’enseignement universitaire que de renvoyer un professeur estimé, un enseignant exemplaire?

Que dérange-t-il à McGill serait donc une question beaucoup plus appropriée? Donc, que dérange-t-il? Certainement pas l’éducation elle-même, mais peut-être un ensemble d’idées et de positions soutenu par des lobbys très puissants. Qu’une université ne puisse faire face sobrement à de tels pouvoirs serait pathétique, s’il était démontré que de telles influences puissent avoir lieu. Le film “Professeur Norman Cornett” met en lumière avec beaucoup d’humanité comment on parvient à écarter ceux et celles ne correspondant pas à la norme, à la pensée dominante. Une vieille histoire quoi!

Ce sont là des choses que nous voyons tous les jours, dans le journalisme par exemple. Effectivement, beaucoup d’entre nous prennent conscience qu’avec la convergence actuelle des médias il y a une manière bien précise (bien correcte) de dire les choses et pas une autre. Alors encore une fois, quels sont les véritables enjeux de ce licenciement? Éliminer un pédagogue unique et talentueux, ou éliminer toute réflexion sur des sujets dont on ne veut pas parler? D’où vient cette décision questionne le film? À la lumière des faits relatés nous vient le sentiment qu’elle ne peut venir que des très hautes instances de l’Université et que nous ne pourrions peut-être jamais en connaître la nature. Ce qui laisse, il faut bien le dire, un drôle de goût dans la bouche.

Cela n’empêchera pas le Dr. Cornett de poursuivre son travail. Tout comme cela n’empêchera pas les individus curieux et honnêtes de se pencher librement (et je dirais : amoureusement) sur les grands sujets de l’heure, de la vie, de la mort. Parfois, nous n’avons qu’une parole à offrir, mais elle vient d’un lieu intérieur d’une telle honnêteté qu’elle se répand dans toutes les consciences sans nécessairement passer par l’Université ni par les médias. C’est un verbe puissant qui traverse toute la création et qui nous atteint tous, sans même que nous en entendions le son.

Il est légitime de demander un traitement juste à une université, sinon une réponse honnête. Est-ce une attente déraisonnable? Et si tout ce contentieux ne menait à autre résultat que le maintien d’une dignité d’homme face à ce qui est toute sa vie : un amour des êtres et une véritable pédagogie de la connaissance, c’est-à-dire apprendre à penser par soi-même, alors il serait souhaitable et vital de le poursuivre jusqu’à ce qu’il trouve apaisement dans un lieu de soi où tout est parfait.

Merci à Alanis Obomsawin pour ce beau portrait d’un libre penseur du XXIe siècle et pour sa finesse à nous rendre accessible et intéressant un parcours qui est aussi le nôtre. Merci à Norman Cornett d’être là, telle une balise dans la maïeutique de la pensée véritable.

Nigeb

Fireworks

“…All fireworks are partly human, partly magic.
Look up: fallen angels toss baskets of confetti
into our eyes, taunting us to pike, tuck, rotate.
Splashing us all with wondersky.”
Pricilla Uppal.

Just as you came through the prairie door
your mask slipped. I carried away such
a naked idea of you! – over the bridge, down to
the tawny river. Vegetation in the midst of seasonal changes
can seem such a wise incarnation of coming, going.
I’ve wanted Fall to follow Spring – yes,
I’ve needed to be patient.

The gospels as mouthwash, the old testament scrawling
the windy weather of harsh hope.
I’m no Christian, but how so when I’ve felt in calm
forgiveness the way to be most honest.
You’re so tremendous in your wanderlust through
the traipse & trilling of love projecting.
I keep less dramatic – or mostly – having only loved with
true grit an impoverished handful of times.

On the droning television, another show where
ghosts contact the living, or vice versa.
I once met an alley cat who knew
how to talk. The tender, the fasting, the prevalent –
my world, like your world, bisected by delicacy.
Then we find ourselves going to war for less than
a mouthful of curses – everybody does.

I’ve never believed an angel could save us – that
felt too easy. On a slow night in November only
what I can competently embrace – what figures, half cocked,
like a would be admonishment answering fear succinctly – ah
is this for real – how we crossbreed absurdity with a realistic
3 d model – what we go through to believe in ourselves, believe
in something, anything…

Response to a poem by Priscila Uppal (as was the last post)
Poem (first few words): Remember early morning
First read-through
It’s cute but a bit soppy. “Climbs the hills of life” seems to be a well worn metaphor, aren’t we supposed to be fighting cliché or is it all tied up in the romanticised, hopeful, but naive thoughts about life as young siblings. Maybe stands of solidarity should be simply stated without need for frothing and bubbling language.
Second read-through
It seems more like a dance of cliché and freshness, a fine balance between the two. Solidarity is simply stated but love and emotions provide the thread that wraps around the piece and ties it together. The last phrase “awaiting earned glory” is intriguing, perhaps youthful and naive to think that glory is handed out to the deserved. I wonder what the siblings would say 30 years later.
Third read-through
I imagine a landscape with many hills of life, all with many paths and trails of which some reach the top. They’re different heights, have different slopes and shear drops. I want them to be infinitely distinguishable to represent the different meanings people attach to life but in my mind they’re just different colours in a yellow submarine type landscape. Maybe the hills are optical illusions, tricks of the left-side of the brain, false perceptions of sense or direction, where you only reach the top to realise you’re at the bottom again, a positively curved landscape with no beginning, middle or end, only the comfort to know we’re all on it, all moving, but all lost.
Through a genetic lens: What’s nature’s way of keeping sibling solidarity? In a selfish landscape of gene’s, which will be very similar in siblings, what’s the survival mechanism for keeping the genes replicating? Is there an extra chemistry or love stimulated with close family members? Is that a real thing, or is that love related to the habitude generated while growing up.?

Bone cage

“…In the cold, the body gets ideas.”
Pricilla Uppal

Where we stand a kind of
divide in the neighbourhood not
recognizing us: there’s
change & stranger hood
in these chilly streets,
a kind of worming flaw,
an announcement for
those who think life
can turn out “right”,
even if only in dreams –
where we plant
our staffs of indecision
while “live” & “negate”
get on with it – oh where we
tussle, a maze of marrow
components, anecdotes
all sex & ice, phantoms
full fathom five
& wrestling –
where we park doubt,
then go looking for it,
the embodied idea
scratching at the ramshackle doors
of hope, of suspicion, of looming
tomorrow in fraternity with
oblivious – there goes my insatiable
desire for gentle rain – here comes
winter worth capital wolf bounty,
my hand hiding a rusty key gripped
tight – key to I know not where,
as alive as any mystery coming
nearly regrettably clean…

The Eyres
Penned In
Nov. 13/10
Winter Sport: Poems – by Priscila Uppal
1st essay where Priscila Uppal discusses how not only are poetry and other literary forms and sport related, but that each teaches her about the other, her understanding of “sport as a sister art to my work as a creative writer,” felt enlightening, as Uppal goes into details I wouldn’t have imagined, about the relationship between sport and creative writing. But it also felt liberating – in the sense that categories that one would have stereotypically kept not only separate but even opposed, are broken down, their boundaries revealed as false. This inspires me to see where else I create falsely distinct, even opposite categories, whose unraveling of boundaries could liberate creative energy. I am inspired by this plasticity of thinking, of imagining, of dissolving of rigid structures commonly held to be true. So I ask myself: where else? And what will flow freely from this dissolving?
In a way, once again, with Uppal’s poetry, the old way of approaching poetry as containing difficult to access, deep meaning that one must labour hard to decipher, is challenged (it’s stubborn, that attitude). There is so much fun and humour in many of these poems, so much playfulness. I would have liked to have witnessed the making of these poems. It is clear, and the 1st essay goes into some detail about this, how much discipline and sheer hard work and pain is involved in the making of her poetry, and yet – so much delight, joy in playing with words, making them up even. What came to mind as I read out loud some of the poems was the way a young child learning to talk takes delight in words for themselves, unbounded by rules and regulations makes up vocabulary, plays with words. I feel that kind of delight when I read some of these poems, and then try to imagine how those two – the spirit of fun, humour, playfulness, delight, coexisted with the spirit of sweat and tears in the creation of those poems. Do the light fun ones come more quickly, lightly, effortlessly? What does that mixture of playfulness, delight, acrobatic ecstasy, and the sweat and pain she talks of feel like together in the creative process?
I like her idea of breaking down the rigid boundaries in education. I think the result would be an enormous release of creativity and expansion.
I looked up the stories of some of the athletes to whom poems were dedicated. I found them even more moving and beautiful when I knew the background, for example “Flag Bearer,” “Long Distance” and “Ice Opera.” I have never been much interested in the Olympics, rarely watched it, but these poems have revealed for me the heart, soul and spirit in it that I had never before been exposed to. “My Father as Olympian” I found moving beyond words. There is much love and heart in these poems, and they celebrate and inspire a heroic spirit.
I feel silly now about my response, that I wrote during the seminar, to the poem “Cross Country.” Having no other context, and neatly dismissing the details (mountains and snow coalesce around you, tracks leaping up, the spring is on, the lips of your boots) that didn’t fit – I thought it was about the immortality of the soul!!!! The image of that collapsible form brought immediately to mind the dream I had heard of a young woman dying of cancer, and that association provided the context in which I understood (and dismissed what I did not understand!) the poem. Now I’m thinking: even without knowing the context – it seems to me it would have been so much more obvious to see it as a poem about sport – the sun, the boots, the moving, the hills, mountains, the snow, the tracks, the sprinting!! That 1st association blocked any input that didn’t fit & would have challenged it.
The humour and fun in poems like “Swedaly,” “Luge Love Poem” and Canada is the Hockey Ward: Men’s Version and Women’s Version, which had me laughing out loud in delight at Uppal’s clever word games – were a challenge to the ever-stubborn attitude I have to poetry that it’s hard work to read and understand – and is not poetry unless it’s all deep and meaningful mystery. I also liked, and again, that reminds me of the spirit of children whose way of looking at the world hasn’t yet been programmed, the way objects take on life, for example the helmet and skate.

Ms. Uppal, what I treasure is the open invitation to your readers to engage with your poetry, your desire to have your poetry be accessible, approachable. For someone who’s been scared of poetry as long as I remember, this inspires me to open the door wider to that realm wider still.

Ambition

“…From one molecule to the next, keen desire casts us into the present,
passes us from shadow to shadow, then smashes them more for light.
We then enter pure presence, which places us in harmony with the world –
we hear our heart beat, leaves quiver. We no longer hear anything, and the silence that then resonates against the hours leaves us no longer alone but among things touched, inhabited, named one by one.”
Helene Dorion

My preference for dark
leaves me an ambitious
novice of light.

Stars & stars & stars that don’t
keep it to themselves
sing in the black sky
riding us into not so subtle
wavering, waving.

When the porch light’s turned out
dark marks of travel
disappear yet still
touch & disturb,

in winter holed up silently
in broken snow –
more glimmer, more light…

*

My love likes the way in December
the light through plastic blinds slants
wordless over our bed
mid-afternoon without
agenda.

Come early evening
the shadows that have patterned us
recede into decline
gentle as blank mortality
settling itself.

We pull the duvet over our heads,
look into the wet of black
like it’s everything we stubbornly
elect to recognize, go forward in.

Ever so inhumanly
light never loses the advantage –
hence the way I have to turn away
if I’m to pay proper homage…

The knowing past is never past poem

“A book about a book only ever superficially sheds light on it. The author gives no key, possesses no answer, no truth more worthy than another. We cannot stop meaning. It is a bird that flies away as soon as we approach, a fish that escapes when we thought it was hooked. Meaning breaks down and is immediately reconstructed. We cannot bring aboard the boat a past still struggling in the swirl of the present.”
Helene Dorion

“The proper response to a poem is another poem.”
Phyllis Webb

In order to stay in love with my past
I need certain pleasant habits.
My present is where I live
but my past is how I live
my present –

I was walking all the time – that much
I remember – & the streets wound round
through a fiddling square city
talking to me –

*

In English, treachery
breathing Pig Latin. I dreamt
boy after boy on the dark side streets,
these were rattled
symptoms.

Under a chance lovely willow
I made love with a stranger who deigned
to challenge. Under a bridge like a word
I talked to the pigeons
mouthing my desire.

Lovers came & went,
I landed in love by accident,
it was the third time,
I had no ideal
of lasting.

*

The past on its knees refusing to pray –
this has much to do with how
I come to frothy prayer,
like a long term lover
wrecked with joy,
my desire to believe
wholly untenable.

Today we’ll walk by the river’s edge
our heads together in the clouds,
& still we’ll be separate,
thinking on origins, on fresh impulse –

As in a bite of apple – physical (for Dan Cuddy)

“We open a path in speech, the words escape, sometimes collapsing on the page, sometimes flying lightly above the world, sometimes to brush against it with the tip of the tongue.”
Helene Dorion

Sugar eating the lazy molar,
a taste of pain & the finger moving round
softening enamel, sensitive root –
a short way into a quick
blasphemy of lost
protection.

‘Amanda & Ray lay one upon the other,
first joyous, then grieving, then
angular & sexy like sirloin on
death row – like a treasure map
for palpable sinners holding
fast to wet conclusions.’

Here we are rolling carrot sticks in
fantasizing sweet, the look away coveting
a child who’s never known any better,
the carrot tasting better, ditto
child’s mood, her dream in sync
with lauded health, mild given.

‘Sometimes flying scarred above the world,
another useful word setting off fireworks,
what describes us physically chipping bloat away,
looking for a house well settled in a green field,
an alphabet of remorse planting itself
in dark, brutal earth…’

Dans le cadre des sessions dialogiques animées par le Dr cornett nous avons rencontré le dimanche 27 novembre Madame Hélène Dorion. La conversation qui a suivi nous a montré certes une grande écrivaine, mais aussi une pensée d’une grande profondeur que ses écrits avaient de toutes façon rendus très manifeste.
Meri à tous. Ce fut très éclairant, très stimulant, et la conversation restera avec moi pour longtemps.

The Masters (for H.D.)

“I take the seashell in my hand, bring it to my ear. Only the present enters my body. Yet there is an echo, the slow return of words to my mouth.”
Helene Dorion

It’’s not what I know but what I don’t know
keeps me feline, alert –
not a sound, but a victim of sound
sends me back to change silence.

We in our little igloos unattached –
so much spilling of blank spells.
Oh the tree, the bird, the green field –
& now it’s winter, & now we’re wise
compromised.

Not a bent note, no cyclical spiral,
but oh how we want those things too.
It’s not a game – maybe it’s a game –
& angel hair coveting souls, the less
than obvious missed by accident –
is it now that we say “delete”?

The masters are good at “affirm/deny,
pick up wrong pieces, don’t vilify
more than what’s brutal, lands
all at your feet destroying” –
the masters who feel incessantly,
consult the heart, think, “reap”.

This morning the gentle strut of the matter
giving way to a plush sense of acceptance:
here we touch on recognition gingerly,
pull on a thread, revive slant mystery,
here, knotted up by indignant
& humble both, the first

memory of putting shell to ear
in resurgent childhood playing
havoc with the brain,
bliss with the radical
seashore template…

“…From one molecule to the next, keen desire casts us into the present,
passes us from shadow to shadow, then smashes them more for light.
We then enter pure presence, which places us in harmony with the world –
we hear our heart beat, leaves quiver. We no longer hear anything, and the silence that then resonates against the hours leaves us no longer alone but among things touched, inhabited, named one by one.”
Helene Dorion
What a treasure this open invitation to the readers to engage with your poetry, your desire to have your poetry accessible, approachable despite deep philosophical meaning hiding inside.
I found moving of colors and sounds beyond the words symphony. There is much love and heart in these poems, and they celebrate and inspire an admirable spirit of beauty.
My life is richer today because of it. Thank both of You Mss Dorion and Dr Norman Cornett for this wonderful regal. I can’t wait for the next time !
Cette rencontre a été un moment de pur bonheur !!
Carmen Doreal

Monik Delauriers Décembre 2010

Suite au vissionemment du film – hommage au professeur Cornett j’ai été profondément bouleversée. D’abord j’ai compris pourquoi j’ai détesté l’école du primaire au secondaire pour décrocher complètement par la suite. J’étais parfaitement malheureuse. De nature rêveuse et imaginative, le par- coeur seul n’arrivait pas à me stimuler ni à me motiver d’aucune façon. Dans le cadre de l’enseignement traditionnel, la richesse de mon imaginaire ne fut jamais solliciter. La méthode du professeur Cornett est extraordinaire puisqu’elle respecte toutes les facettes de l’être humain: aucune n’est verrouillée. Quel homme remarquable et respectueux des lois fondamentales de la nature humaine. Merci Professeur Cornett d’avoir le courage de vos convictions; vous êtes parfaitement fidèle aux valeurs que vous véhiculé. Un jour McGill’s aura à répondre à vos questions, j’en suis convaincue.

Ken Stetson
My very first impressions about Ken Stetson’s chapter 1 of The Harps of God are about the language. Is it because I am a fan of the french series of comic books relating the adventures of an english (or welsh?) sailor called Pemberton? The funniness of the conversations of K Stetson’s characters and the expressive way these people talk reminded me of these readings as for example, the use of “Missus”, a word frequently used by Pemberton and his mates for ladies. For me, a french reader, that was particularly amusing to see us women addressed that way.

I was also struck by the unusual use of “them” in the conversations, like in “them seals” . The very first time I read such an use was in a publication “Them days”, issued in Labrador and given to me by an old man, Charlie Ikey, I frequently met in Salluit (Nunavik). I still have some of these magazines. Charlie had left Nain (if I remember well) as a young nine year old boy to work as a translator in the ships sailing along the coasts of the Nunavik. He eventually stayed there, married an Inuk lady and had several strikingly beautiful children and grand children still living there. I used to stay at his place whenever I visited the village for my job. He constantly chew tobacco and always cooked me a good caribou stew saying that my husband would be happy to see that I didn’t loose any weight while traveling. “Them image of Charlie Ikey” slipped on my mind just now.

I also sort of recognized the accent used in The Harps of God. A few years ago I had some work to do on the Lower North Shore of Québec, mostly in Rivière St Paul and Old Fort, not far from Labrador. The people there express themselves in english for they are fishermen originally hired in the Jersey islands. For me their english was different from everything I had ever heard so far. For instance I still remember being addressed to as “M’dear” once I had been accepted. I learned since then that this was the accent of the people from Newfoundland with whom they are in constant contact. The expressions used by Ken S’s remembered me of this part of my life.

Last but not least, since memory seems to play an important role in this first reading, the cruel life of the characters described in the book brought me back to my long time interest for the portuguese young seamen of the “White fleet” that used to be sent sailing along the coasts of Newfoundland for cod fishing. When I was a teenager in Lisbon, we had at one end of our street an important school for codfish sailors. Until today these men and their destiny have been part of my life. Their fishing conditions were particularly hard as they were left alone on a dory (individual boat ) in the midst of nowhere and only came back when crawling under the weight of the cod fish they had fished. Stories like this one and others as harsh were frequently discussed at home.

Reflections on “Harps of God”, first act, second reading… Jan. 12/2011

A microcosm of a low level of a particular society, Newfoundland circa early 1900s replete with allusions to homespun mythology, cut-throat commerce, emerging politics, troubled family dynamics, dire poverty, &, of course, very specifically, the difficult seal trade. Cold unforgiving world & rickety worldviews trying to anchor in a reality as icy as where the sealers in question are lost. The hunted – the seals – & the hunters, the sealers, share a kind of victim hood, the men victims of greedy bosses, the seals obviously victims of hunters & bosses both. The idea of seal hunting gets trashed more because of how the men who hunt are treated than because of seal hunting per se, appropriate to the time & situation at issue. The language is marvellous, I would love to hear it spoken in a production of this act. Ah Levi – how quaint & ironically absurd your holding to a traditional ethics of life & family seems, but I get that there is pride at issue, also a belief in adherence to what you learned growing up. Your sons in varying measure are willing to follow, but in the case of troubled Jessop only so far, no further. The misery of Cold, an actor as much as any other in this section, takes life, puts other lives in jeopardy. Is this a fictionalized version of an actual event? We’re not supposed to read anything but the act itself at this point, so I don’t know if it is but I speculate such is the case. Are these real names or made up names? Obviously the characterizations must be fictionalized, however true to life they seem. The interpersonal dynamics in this little group sizzle with friction, are fraught with colliding difference, throw out tendrils of tough tenderness. Levi the patriarch desires to instruct, to form & shape the young ones including Billy who isn’t his son. Son Andrew is the least formed of Levi’s sons, with Simon, the middle son, seemingly most resembling the father, worldview & all. & all that seal killing punctuation replete with lessons concerning the “how to” of the business! Compelling, along with the repeated allusions to pups calling – creates such a backdrop, such ambience.
I am looking forward to going on with the play, to seeing how this situation plays out. At the moment it looks to be dour indeed – barely slip sliding along…

Ken Stetson’s “The Harps of God” – Act 1 – Second reading

Considering my difficulty yesterday, after a first quick reading, to understand act 1, my immediate reaction consisted in trying to relate it to my own experiences. Memories came to my rescue like: readings about jolly good old fellow Pemberton, his adventures at sea and his appeal for any “Missus” pretty or ugly; trips I made to the Lower North Shore of Quebec where I heard Newfoundland’s accent and expressions for the first time in my life; meetings with an old hunter from Salluit – Nunavik who told me about his youth in Labrador (“Them days”) as well as teen age memories from the portuguese White Fleet (so called because of the color of the vessels) who left Portugal’s coasts, year after year, for Newfoundland’s waters in search of cod fish.

Today, I felt an urgent need to better understand what was really going on in “The Harps of God”.
First of all, I learned that the story takes place in 1914 which is a good choice for Brigitte Bardot won’t interfere.
Secondly, I made contact with the fourteen sealers, ages varying between sixteen and the mid-fifties, who get lost in the ice fields.
Adversity is the cornerstone of the drama. Ice grinds, cracks and groans, blinding snow, howling winds, pouring rain are aggravated by fights between the men, another good idea for I like excitement.
There are Protestant shepherds versus Irish Catholic sheep, a questionable and questioned leadership, father versus son, brother versus brother, blood suckers who own the ships and poor seal hunters who risk their lives. Let us not forget the cute pup seals and their human like calls, so innocent but, mind you, they grow and become cod fish’s greatest enemies (“one less seal, that many more cod fish”). I hope you are against cod fish being eaten by seals. I definitively am, for the Portuguese nation depended for a long time on cod for its survival (we have one cod fish recipe per day on the calendar!).

We are then dealing in this first act with an authentic microcosm of life on earth. The Big eats the Small however lovable the Big can be. The Good faces the Bad but the Bad is not so bad after all. The Wise guy faces the Poor and Ignorant souls who live with beasts in their minds. The latter, however, are not so ignorant after all:
“Wa’s the beast? asks BILLY
A creature wit’ long sharp horns – answers ANDREW
There is no such animal – says LEVI
Indeed there is; WHAT DO YOU THINK THE BIBLE IS ABOUT?… says JORDAN
The beast is mankind’s worst fear.
E’ feeds on human cruelty and weakness.
E’ lives deep inside each and every one of we (TUFF)
There’s times he comes out of his hole in the pit of your stomach (JORDAN)
This is a beautiful piece of conversation. Besides, why shouldn’t beasts exist after all?

.

Ken Stetson’s “The Harps of God” – Act 1 – Third reading

Greediness!
Old man Kean as they call him, the Admiral, having on mind the profit at hand, cheats on the weather and sends his men out to work on the ice fields knowing that the conditions are risky.

Tuff, who has just been promoted as Second Hand (that is the man in charge in the absence of the Captain), wants to please his boss. He likes, as he says, to be out there at the “fat” (and maybe the killing). He is not reliable on some important matters (left without a compass for instance), has no ability to make wise decisions and does not tolerate opposition.

All the ingredients are combined for the odyssey we are about to read. “Money money money” versus men’s lives is the motto. Old as the world.

Ken Stetson’s The harps of God

My own Preface

We are all captivated by survival stories. When hearing about the Titanic, the plane crash in the Andes (where men had to commit cannibalism) or Haïti, just to mention those tragedies, one is horrified. At the same time there is a will, a need to understand.

In The harps of God, when a group of sealers tries to survive in the ice fields of Newfoundland a similar reaction takes place. Which strategy will the survivors find to stay alive and what will happen with the victims? That’s what you will discover in Ken Stetson’s clever and shattering book The Harps of God.

Honey Suckle Rose

Ken Stetson’s The harps of God

My own After words

Since I was a teen ager I have been developing a strong bond with Newfoundland. Like many families in Portugal, ours discussed the epic of the White fleet (so called after the color of the vessels). Every year a ship or two disappeared under suspect conditions (shipowners were suspected to sacrifice men and vessels in order to receive indemnities from their insurance companies). At lunch time, when we listened to the vessel’s horns on the River Tagus announcing a new departure, we always wondered if the men on board would ever come back alive. We frequently met these men at the bottom of our street where they had a school. We also attended the beautiful and moving spring Mass in honor of their departure.

When I arrived in Canada I could hardly wait to go to Newfoundland. When I finally did it, this happened in 1975, I was lucky enough to be invited on board a portuguese vessel. Their living conditions had greatly improved and they were happy to share it with us. I think none of us will ever forget that meeting so far away from our home land. I had accomplished a long time dream. I had met these men on the other side of the Atlantic.

There was part of the teen year old girl in me who read The Harps of God. The same sadness, the same feeling of injustice, the same empathy invaded my heart. Sealers and cod fishermen were brothers. Ken Stetson’s book came as a reinforcement of the bond I have with Newfoundland.

Honey Suckle Rose

Purple Haze 1

Première rencontre et première lecture

Quand vous regardez ou lisez quelque chose que vous ne comprenez pas ou ne reconnaissez pas, un extrait de film ou de livre hors contexte comme ce fut le cas hier, qu’on vous invite à vous y attarder longuement, quelques avenues s’ouvrent à vous:
-ou vous rejetez le tout et vous sortez;
-ou vous vous raccrochez à ce qui vous touche, parfois pas grand chose (un souvenir, des liens possibles…), cela peut vous procurer quelques moments de plaisir;
-parfois, après de vaines tentatives, pour ne pas “capoter”, vous cherchez le petit détail qui vous fait rêver en faisant fi du reste (“qu’ils aillent au diable”) un peu de beauté, des idées originales par exemple…,;
-vous pouvez aussi choisir dans ce qui précède, piquant de ci, piquant de là;
-ou mélanger le tout.
Vous êtes toujours là, c’est bien.
Mais il existe une autre possibilité, une “voie nouvelle “, inconnue de vous, celle qui vous prend par surprise.

Pour ma part, n’ayant jamais été attirée par “l’explication de textes” de ma jeunesse, ce que je cherche en tout premier lieu, dans de semblables cas, le plus facile, c’est le jeu. Parfois cela se fait avec succès, parfois sans. Parfois avec plaisir, parfois sans.
Dans l’ensemble j’essaie quand même de m’assurer que la dimension “plaisir” y trouve sa part.
Parfois tout de même j’en doute.
Je fais alors appel, dans ces cas là, à mes souvenirs. Et je me souviens que parfois, quand j’ai navigué dans l’inconnu, que j’ai marché à l’aveuglette, le jeu en a valu la chandelle.
Il y a inconfort, c’est sûr. Mais aussi quelque chose de moins évident, de positif dans l’ensemble: j’apprends et je me retrouve transformée. Cela se fait sans prise de conscience. Tout d’un coup je ne suis plus la même.
Cette “voie nouvelle” peut s’offrir à nous, si l’on s’en donne la peine. Parfois, mais pas toujours.
Alors? je joue ou je joue pas?

The Hallelujah Sessions – “Blind audition #1″

Beautiful song with an evocative complex idea of Hallelujah – the way everything is double edged, a golden sword of an experience. I am reminded of how love includes sorrow, desire frustration, miracles dead ends. There’s a kind of fantastic freefall to the lyrics of this song, time caught in its own dry throat, then that gasp of awe in the face of both the treacherous & the sacred. Hallelujah here is not so much miracle as amazing event unfolding. The broken hallelujah is as potent as hallelujah all of a piece. Music that touches the heart, the soul, often leading to a kind of profane scarring. Hallelujah as a right response to mystery…

Literary exercise 2

Albion – On re-reading the passage: “The desert is indescribable…..”

1st reading of the text

The imagery of the great tree of life is the clarity punctuation mark of this text. The pursuit of the tree provides the motivation she needs to escape and the form of the tree provides the blueprint to the truth she yearns for. This passage evokes escapism memories: some running away, some delaying the inevitable. There’s an adrenaline rush in those moments of spontaneity that gives you the alertness to drive across provinces and countries, to change landscapes and climates and find something that you’ll never take for granted.

2nd reading of the text

From the simplicity of the sun rising over the horizon there’s an emergent warm texture in the rocks. The morning light slices through our atmosphere, exploring all manner of trajectories and arrangements which form deep tones and hues. The degrees of complexity collapse as the natural order projects onto the back of our eyes; the great tree of life is created and that’s all that matters.

3rd reading of the text

This seems so similar to the tone of a passage in Madeliene Thien’s Certainty (I will find it).
The punctuation is sharp, with concrete and assured steps. There are moments when the silence in between sentences almost carries more weight in the description than the words themselves. There’s space to breath, space to think. Lines of spontaneity and awe stitched together with periods of rational. The grammar grounds the words but at the same time allows them to flourish, bend, adapt and resonate.

Purple Haze 1

Tuesday (the 8th) sight reading #1

Curiously enough that kind of sensation happened to me at… precisely fifteen. I was emerging from the Middle Ages and everything suddenly seemed possible. New friends, new habits, new horizons came to my life. Most of all I discovered the power of ME.

Purple haze 1
Daily meditation #2
Tuesday 8-2-2001

Strange to see what happens at age fifteen. Before I used to think life would always be the same and that I was stuck for the rest of it. Suddenly there was I, smiling as ever before, and daring, daring.

Purple Haze 1

First home reading of the text “I as well acquainted…” after saturday’s meeting

There is only one sentence I can really relate to in this text and that is the one where Lorna teaches the narrator about erosion in the desert, about ghosts living in the stone and dust. You can imagine the adult telling stories to the attentive child with grandiloquence and drama.
The rest for me is still questioning and guessing. As I said earlier this afternoon my guess is that the narrator is a young girl and that she is interested in Lorna’s stories But she is reluctant too: “She is inventing” “I know better” “I don’t like that, and besides, I hate her barking at me”.
Child’s duality or more than that?

Purple haze 1

Daily meditation #2 (Wednesday)

Words are music. And music is everything. Why not enjoy them for the sake of it. Go from one word to the other, just wandering about, there being no need to get anywhere in particular.

Thursday Sight Reading #3

Ever since I read about Lorna, the mother’s friend, enjoying kissing little girls on the mouth, the fate of Anne Marie Swarzenbach keeps coming to my mind. AMarie was a Swiss photographer/explorer/reporter who lived around the first World War. I had read about her in a book by another famous traveler writer named Ella Maillard. They had crossed the Afghanistan deserts together by car, an exploit at that time especially for two women alone.

Last year, in Europe, I came across an exhaustive exhibition dedicated to A Marie who, I ignored, was also well known. There I found many of the pictures she took, books, readings, films. She was a fascinating personage. I became interested to know more about her and bought the book they were selling along with the exhibition.

AMarie belonged to a very wealthy Zurich family. She had many brothers and sisters but she was the only one very close to the mother, following her in all circumstances dressed as a boy. She even accompanied her mother when she was receiving her lesbian friends, a well dissimulated fact in those days. The young girl liked being with them and didn’t appreciate when she was asked to leave. She suffered all her life from depression and was addicted to drugs. Anne Marie died young after a fascinating but troubled life resulting from her relationship with her domineering mother.

All this was very new to me as are in a way Nicole Brossard’s writings.

Mauve Desert by Nicole Brossard

First impressions (Chapters 1 to 4)

It feels good to recognize our readings in due order.
Still it doesn’t change what I’ve said before. We learn a little bit more than we did before, but. This whole reading brings a better sensation of the desert, the reason to be attracted by it, its beauty. It also brings more details about the trio, the narrator, her mother and her lover, Lorna. No big discoveries however. Everything had already pretty much been said or guessed somehow.

I have this feeling of a slow motion history where the important things are yet to be addressed. I am in a state of happy expectation.

Tuesday Sight Reading 1 – Albion
This confidence and sensation of the pulse of life motivates her escape to the desert. The power of dying must relate to her new feeling of independence, a new feeling of personal responsibility for her own actions, which at their extreme could end her own life, but at the same time provides the motivation to explore for herself the infinite.

Daily Meditation 2 – Albion

Thursday

Personal feelings act in any kind metaphorical way on our observations, a physical twisting or a mental leaning; the girl tries to manipulate her reality and thoughts to make them the same shape. We see a projection of reality and from this we try to infer its nature. We try to find the facts without the sunlight.

Thursday Sight Reading 3 – Albion
Today the writing is irritating me. Where is the flow? What do I do with phrases like “braced like an existence” or “between them was just enough silence”. They have to be read and re-read and unpacked. The phrases are beautiful but they don’t carry the story forward for me, they trip the story up, confuse it, remove direction.
Maybe as I get further into the book, these styles are going to weave and from them something will emerge which is utterly compelling. For now though, a lot of investment is necessary to get something out of this book. To me it’s more of a poetic expression or a short piece to be savoured; it’s not a page turner.

Friday Sight Reading 4 -Albion
After reading to the end of the characters chapter a passage like this takes on an entirely different role. Somehow, simultaneously we have the words of Melanie, Laure Angstelle and Nicole Brossard in this piece. The layering of the book provides a confusion where Melanie and Nicole Brossard could be the same or could be entirely different people. They are all writers and the book alludes to them writing about what they know; literally, this could be in part autobiographical.
Is trudging through the thick language of Melanie enough to give you the motivation to get to the core of this book? Her language is beautiful but also cyclic and repetitive; it draws you in with its warm and vibrant descriptions but repels you with its empty language and over use of the abstract poetic mode which hints towards understanding but at the same time clouds rational.
For example; “Eternity is a shadow cast in music” is a description which I like and dislike at the same time. I like the word games, the poetic licence but on some level the imagery wraps the imagery which wraps the imagery and you think to yourself, does this phrase carry wisdom or not.
The most fulfilling reading experiences come when sentences or passages resonate so deeply that they rock your core, as if the author has you in mind. Here some do and some don’t. It’s not consistent.

Writings for Mauve Desert by Nicole Brossard… Blue-cloudy, p. 2, February 2011

Calamity

“A mother makes a difference if she has taught her daughter well. A mother who doesn’t teach her daughter deserves to be forgotten in front of her television set. An ignorant mother is a calamity…”
Nicole Brossard, Mauve Desert

Mother making a difference, for better or all too often for worse – child rejecting the uninhabitable, mother with ’safe’ emblazoned like a tattoo on her overly involved psyche. The prosecution rests – who residing? – daughter darker than the intermittent blood between her legs, mother mopping up decidedly elsewhere. There is pattern broken on the gist of the rumour mill – children unrelated run off in all directions – mothers tap out a morose code of simple ethics – daughters look through it all, spill their sense of entitlement like so much disposable ‘art’, so much crepuscular derision.

It’s in this purple patch the injured mother will secretly sow health – here as the daughter takes to the clean knives of passing roads wilfully allowing. On the television, cops & robbers shows, victims bleeding out, heroes showing flaws, though only those that can be applauded. The daughter is fascinated by the electric field through which she samples the courage as well as the humility of chance women. The mother, bound up by experience, has no way to answer the volatility of all this. Looking out into the desert, calamity ingested like a glass of clear water, not at all what you’d expect, but nevertheless…

It can take a dissatisfied daughter to cull an Arizona sunrise tenderly, fiercely – & all this all alone, the flood of colour reaching a poignant ache in the damaged center – can take a disoriented mother to heighten the contrast between in love & loving, the ample dehydrated, masks slipping, hope a fake gold coin. A mother who fails to teach forgotten as the heightened light loses territory, leaves dim dark. The child all grown up has something to feel in this instance, little to say how ever many words she traces out. “An ignorant mother is a calamity” – by extension, an angrily passionate daughter grieving/engraving…

Purple haze1

Lecture de Mauve Desert du ch 5 jusqu’au portrait de Mélanie

Montréal, Vendredi 11-2 AM

Ouais… je me demande où l’on s’en va avec tout ça. Je fatiguais de plus en plus à la lecture, mais je tenais à ce que quelque chose, au moins le portrait de Mélanie, me révèle quelque chose. Là, j’ai lâché. Vide, frustrée. J’ai aussitôt refermé le livre.

L’an dernier on nous avait donné à lire un autre livre de Nicole Brossard. Je me souviens que jusqu’aux toutes dernières pages je n’avais strictement rien compris, me demandant sans cesse pourquoi je perdais ainsi mon temps. Que font là tous ces personnages? Ce n’est que dans les toutes dernières dix pages (ou était-ce deux?) du livre que j’ai enfin eu la sensation de faire face à de l’humain derrière l’écriture, humain je dois dire qui, dans cet ultime sursaut, m’a profondément séduite. J’ai vécu des moments de bonheur qui ont compensé pour tout le reste. Sans parler de la rencontre avec l’auteure elle même.

Je me suis longtemps questionnée et me questionne toujours sur ces cours de lecture avec le Dr Cornett. Tout le monde fait un effort surhumain pour déchiffrer les hiéroglyphes d’un auteur (quels choix il fait!). Tout le monde y va de son interprétation. C’est ceci. Non, c’est cela. Mais non ça doit être ça. Mais non…Un jour, dans un de ces cours (était-ce Nicole Brossard que nous lisions? cela aurait pu parfaitement l’être), c’était un samedi de midi à quatorze heures, je n’en pouvais plus. Nous étions en Février. J’ai pris ma voiture en sortant et j’ai foncé, foncé sur l’autoroute jusque chez nous à la campagne, à la recherche d’air, d’air et de simplicité. Je n’en pouvais plus de ces exercices. En arrivant, je me suis précipitée dans ma miellerie pour m’inonder d’odeurs de cire et de simplicité. Enfin un peu de sérénité.

Commentaires du Vendredi 11-2 (tard en soirée, à la campagne)

- Friday sight reading # 4

Tranquillement le désert s’immisce en moi avec sa luminosité, sa faune et sa flore.
Je suis à l’écoute. Connivence avec l’humanité. Rejet de la médiocrité. Mais aussi tellement, tellement de fragilité. Les mots suivants me viennent à la bouche…mon corps comme éponge.

- Daily meditation #2

Toutes ces ombres. Cette soif d’absolu et de lumière.
Paradoxalement, je réalise que j’ ai avancé dans ce livre telle une plongeuse en eaux troubles. Je distingue mal les formes, parfois quelque chose de fugitif me frôle. Un poisson? Dans quelles “grandes eaux” suis-je?

Note: Curieusement je constate que ces deux paragraphes se suivent dans le livre.

- Vendredi soir 11-2 encore

Reprise du livre Mauve Desert là où je l’avais laissé (du portrait de Mélanie jusqu’à celui de Maude Laures) quelques pages à peine car…

Je poursuis ma lecture. Pour pas longtemps cependant parce que j’en arrive à l’autoportrait de Maude Laures.

Enfin un personnage en chair et en os qui, de surcroit, se déplace dans un quartier que je fréquente. J’apprends qu’elle a fait la découverte du livre de Mélanie et que ce dernier va changer sa vie. Ma tension se relâche. La plongeuse que je suis ne se trouve donc pas dans la Mer des Sargasses, ni en Mer Morte. Elle a enfin trouvé des repères.

Pas besoin d’en lire davantage aujourd’hui. Je me demande, cependant, si je dois reprendre le livre dès le début, surtout les passages bâclés à la lecture précédente?

Samedi 12-2 AM (toujours à la campagne)

Réveil à l’aube. Je pense à mes lectures d’hier soir.

Non, je ne reprendrai pas la lecture du livre. Car, en réalité, j’ai retenu plus que je ne le pensais de cette lecture dans le vague. J’ai, dans ce demi-éveil, eu des apparitions: Angela Parkins si vivante et tout d’un coup inerte, à terre, le corps encerclé de craie; Lorna, plongée dans son moteur et l’arrivée de la mère de la petite fille; un homme long au corps maigrelet et la jeune fille qui danse avec Angela.
Petites explosions, mais des flash cette fois-ci! Je sais maintenant vers où je nage…

Dimanche 13-2 matin, tôt

Mauve Desert – Scènes (et fin de nos lectures)

Oui…la mère…
…si…
…
absente
…
and, yes…
…the daughter
…
…so…
fragile

Response to Consecrated Ground by George Boyd(pg 7 – 20, includes playwright’s note, set and setting, characters and act 1 scene 1) – Cobalt
I read the introduction and set design passages to myself and then read to the first scene of the play out loud. It establishes Sarah as a strong woman, the matriarch of the community, for example as she says assuredly, “I been all ya mommas”, to Clarice.
This scene is busily adding context to the play. It establishes the atmosphere of africville very quickly as a close community, with a strong community leader in Sarah. They fish for lobster the poor man’s food, dream of store cards at shops in the city center and have to boil water before drinking. Africville is full of rats due to the dump and the government is something to dislike or ignore all together.

Some novels, poems, films, music, pieces of art and scientific achievements help discover other people and their enriched perceptions of the world. This variety deepens understanding of our very own lives because humans are connected on many levels within their race and with the surrounding matter. Such functions represent the top masterpieces of human creativity. It also includes a contemporary mass media “art” production that fulfills the role of integrating as equalizing/brainwashing people by the top social manipulators when even only entertaining them. In fact, each individual life of even the most alien person for us should be treated as the masterpiece of art and it is our common fault that in the most cases their priceless achievements aren’t discovered during their lives and land in the graves with them at the end. It is the biggest loss in our busy lives in this materialistic world that so easily steals from us even tiny bits of free time to analyze deeply enough our very own lives. What is needed is an ignition the first level of life curiosity awaking the true love sleeping in our hearts. Only after it and complex mutual interactions, we can grasp freely wonderful pictures of lives of the loved few nearest people around us shaping our personalities when still being able to clarify and verify our images of their inestimable life paths, as they are alive. In these circumstances our need for interactions with the top masterpieces of human creativity will become complementary. It together can boost our immunity to cultural and social manipulations as provocations by always existing soul/bloodsucker. We always had in human history more or less sophisticated tyrants mastering their art of physical/mental control of others, but never on the present global scale. It requires awakening our higher level of alertness and analyzing why some products of human creativity are more supported by the mass media and other less.
In my first impression “Mauve Desert” had a big chance to be qualified as a magnum opus in its category what justifies it repeated editions and consistent media promotions. Nicole Brossard’s detail descriptions of moments perceived by our senses, multilayered dense reflections that need to be decoded step by step by repeated readings and her profound descriptions of human emotions certainly aren’t ordinary. At this moment, her book can be seen as carrying a complexity only associated with the sacred Bible holding unchallenged the first place in number of printed editions as known for repeated reading of the same passages. This comparison goes too far and let match up it to less recognized fragments treated as apocryphal, because of covering such touchy topics: human desires, sexuality and fleshy emotions. Unfortunately, after the final x-times reading, this book cannot be associated with the Bible even as the apocryphal Gospel because something fundamental is missing there. It is the presence of God who created everything and is present everywhere – in understanding or in natural feelings of 99.876543% (precisely calculated by me ?) of human population that lived in the last 10,000 years. What scares me is that with the same precision of 99. 876543% the author eliminated the name of God from his book. She even carefully avoided indirect associations with implanted in human minds inclinations toward religious way of thinking and she also eliminated such secondary notions connected with religious thinking as: shame, feel of guilt, remorse, regret, sacrifice, conscious etc. Even the most abused and devaluated today word LOVE, that is the best explained when using religious philosophies, is entirely eliminated in the book. Is it because of her perfected understanding of a current political correctness that wants to eradicate religions from human lives or is it her internal resistance toward religious thinking that limits her freedom of choosing only some comfortable elements from the reality to the projected very own concept of life? The religious reality isn’t dividable into autonomous pieces created by some overzealously manifesting own existence personalities as it must graciously include everybody and everything without oppressing their still existing freedom of the chosen inclusion in the world prepared and given to us by … (God or Intelligent Design) for a very short time.
In a biblical concept of human life woman was sharing the same part of body with man and their spiritual needs were treated similarly. In “Mauve Desert”, the man (Longman) is portrayed almost as a programmed robot unable to change his plan determined by “magic value of formula” and ready to explode as a suicidal terrorist fulfilling his mission. Only women are pictured by her as entirely different creatures full of reflections and warm human emotions.
However, at the last description of the same man, not only his name is modified into O’blongman, but also it is humanized his personality. He becomes able to “recite Sanskrit poems”. He gives up the explosion, takes care “of his tie” and feels “almost happy”. He also “regain his true identity, his confident charm”. And this evolution of the man at the end of her book encourages me to propose for Nicole Brossard to write “Mauve Desert -2”, but not as a well marketed – in a Hollywood’s style – repetition of the first successful version. I see it more as a New Testimony logically following perfectly logical the Old Bible (Mauve Desert) that adds the true love and more realistic hope after a scarification of Angela Parkins who died when dancing with the author – at the same time the ‘new born’ Mr. O’blongman goes into the same bar. It seems that this new book was already prophesied in the fifth sentence of the Old Bible (Mauve Desert): “Very young, I was already crying over humanity. With every new year I could see it dissolving in hope and in violence. Very young, I would take my mother’s Meteor (car) and drive into the desert. There I spent entire days, nights, dawns. Driving fast and then slowly, spinning out the light in its mauve and small lines which like veins mapped a great tree of life in my eyes. I was wide awake in the questioning but inside me was a desire which free of obstacles frightened me like a certitude”.
I like very much the last sentence that in my translation means: “my life (desire) without God (without created by Him obstacles) frightens me like a certitude”. In my only suggestion to the author writing the second part is including her reflections about the same desert at the present time of year (Feb/Mar) when it ‘explodes’ with a plenty of short living green plants and flowers. At that time there are many addicted visitors coming from all the places and even “tourist helicopters” are used to place them in the most remote places of blooming dessert. Let she admit, instead of hiding, that the desert can be literally alive at the bright noon, and not only at the night with “all the ghosts living in the stone and the dust” introduced by “bitch Lorna” who “was inventing” this life in the desert for the innocent author who “was five years old” and living with her mother dominated by this manipulative Lorna. I wait for her final unselfish desire to share in the evolving next book her rich life experience expressed in these modified words: ‘matter of fact must bring the desert life close to many’ after fully understanding her previous version “matter of fact must bring the desert back to life in me …” (page 185).

Negotiating Reality

Every few years, through the unforgiving climate, wildflowers bloom ephemerally en mass to attract hummingbirds.

Nicole Brossard’s Mauve Desert is like a poetic experiment. It takes us to the hot inescapable desert of Arizona where colours and lucidity live. Passages have an inner coherence but remain virtual: spontaneity and sexuality, grounded in poetic rhythm, provide the reality.

It’s a book of language and structure, abstractly conversing with meaning and content through mise en abyme, mirrors, translations, and case histories. There are many layers offered but is there enough space to think? Does form replace content? Is there something missing?

It was wonderful, and for me validating, that Nicole Brossard noted that our ‘dialogic’ process recreated her pleasure, energy, passion, desire, intensity, and feverishness at the moment of creation. Our deep reading process calls unto deep, it plays on the affective, and we join her as a foreigner in her adolescent imagination.

Ms Brossard suggested that she doesn’t write ‘real’ novels. After reading Mauve Desert I would suggest there is no such thing as a ‘real’ novel.

Writings on Consecrated Ground, from page 7 to 20, including Playwright’s Note, Set & Setting, Character list, & Act one, scene one (Feb. 2011, Aretha)

The playwright’s notes plus the information regarding set & setting provide guiding context for digesting the first scene, even as they will for the play as a whole. Act 1 scene 1 introduces the three feisty woman characters – Sarah the matriarch, Clarisse the mother & wife, Groovy the “loose” woman. What comes through this scene is the sense of humour all three women share: be they talking about serious or light subjects, always the quips ricocheting through the lively dialogue, & this in spite of, or as part of, the knotty problematic of their situations in the world. The latter is an impoverished community where love may be part of the fabric of being, but nevertheless concrete amenities such as plumbing & clean drinking water are nowhere to be found. At this early point in the play, the women are unaware that they are soon to be displaced from Africville, Africville being the only place where Sarah & Clarrise have ever lived. Judging from their interactions, the women are likely to be less than happy about having to relocate, regardless of the dire poverty at issue where they now are, less than happy because Africville, for all its problems, seemingly remains a tight knit community that affords a tough but appreciated way of life, or not so much appreciated as believed in…

Writings on Consecrated Ground – page 26 to 30, Act 1, scene 3 (Feb. 2011 Aretha)

In act 1, scene 3, the abuse of the fragile black by insensitive brutal whites – Groovey who believes in a white knight coming to save her; Willem, witnessing the beating Groovey took at the hands of some white man, talking of being sick & tired of the position he & his community are in, of suffering because of what the whites do; Clarisse tending to the bloodied Groovey & seemingly angry at Willem for choosing to try to talk sense to Groovey at what is really a poor choice of time. The community of Africville, soon to be no more, for the moment have more than their share of hardships (understatement). The tensions seething through this play are heating up to the point where I am unhappily anticipating things going from bad to worse & worse again. On the lip of a destructive destiny, some of the fictional characters are coming into introductory focus – how hard it is to think that this fictional account is rooted in an actual event…

Blue-cloudy, February 2011, p.1

Reflections on completion of Nicole Brossard’s novel Mauve Desert (English translation)

‘When two words are identical, you must not take undue offence or think you have been wronged in terms of choice. Simplicity is a fine patience of meaning’.
Mauve Desert, Nicole Brossard

I suppose in printed work two words that are identical are literally so – that is, same spelling, same font, same surrounding punctuation. If not, then not identical. Obviously, as well, the words or phrases that surround a word or set of words also influence meaning, can make one interpret said words differently, depending. Then when you get to translating words from one language into another, the issue of identical dissolves near entirely, at least in an oral sense, all those etymological aspects dangling, all that flesh of my flesh whispering the puncturing secret of time flexing semantic midwifery. Oh Mauve Desert, & the enthral of going forward asking, the slick bits of the inevitable folly pacing on cue, love ricocheting – remember how ricochet, the word, is a way to get out of a situation, be it jubilant or deadly, almost or whim…

The two versions of Melanie’s story in Mauve Desert are similar, yet nevertheless different in numerous tiny yet meaningful ways. Flipping between the first version & the so-called translation, I am struck by how subtle choices of words & of phrases are at issue, leading to different connotations. In the “original” version, to give one small example, the narrator speaks of Lorna as “inventing”; in the translation the words used are “storytelling” & “lying”. This tiny change puts a different spin on the Lorna character in the translation, the latter “lying” seeming more judgemental than “inventing”. Throughout the translation there are small changes that seem to make the text more abstract as well as more lyrical, slightly sparser than the original. It is difficult to claim the latter definitively as sometimes there are passages with more concrete imagery in the translation than in the original, though not often. Here is an example of a passage changed ever so slightly:

Original – I was always certain of everything. Of faces, of the time, of the sky, of distances, of the horizon. I was certain of everything except words. The fear of words. Slow fear. Strains to say. Strains to hear. Pain in all my veins.

Translation – I was always certain of everything. Of gestures, of the weather, of distance, of the horizon. Of everything except words. The slow fear of words. A frightful pain in all my veins.

Hard to say why, but I think were it me translating, I’d want to keep of faces, Strains to say, & Strains to hear in the translation – semantically & sound-scape-wise they seem important to me. Then again, I have not read Mauve desert in French, do not know how the two versions differ there, this is where it gets strange, thinking on translation of a translation of a translation. The two versions of Melanie’s first person narrative also work in a way as “friend” texts, with the translation adding to the original & vice versa. I would need to read a number of times more (& it is going to be a pleasure to do so) to see if I can detect a substantial difference in the point of view between the two texts. The titles? Yes, curiously enough, Mauve Desert suits both the substance of the Melanie text & the overarching title for the entire text, even as Mauve, The Horizon in a way I can’t at the moment quite put my finger on works well as title for the so called translation…Wonderful glorious book as much about words, writing & philosophy as about characters & objects, places, relationships…

Writings on Consecrated Ground, page 36 to 43, Act 1, Scene 5 (February 2011 – Aretha)

Listening in on Willem & Clarice, a loving couple with problems threatening to split them up. Again the woman appears stronger than the man, appears to have the power, as Clarice lets Willem know – i.e. her way or the highway – or so it seems. The interaction of Willem & Clarice is just a few steps from all out war, one being staged where the living situation they share has wedged a wall of potentially dangerous daggers between them. On one side there is Willem desiring more of a life than Africville can provide – namely a life with a proper house, a real job, a decent school for his child. On the other side there is Clarice believing Africville to be the best place possible in spite of the ghetto conditions, this because her roots are there, maybe even more importantly because love is there – for her child, herself, her husband. Clarice thinks of the future in terms of improving the life she lives without abandoning it – example, an add-on to the house to be built by the men in the community. Willem, on the other hand, is sick of Africville, more than ready to abandon the life he has to go toward something new with potential. Both in the couple are extremely proud, with pride playing particularly into Willem’s mindset as he makes very clear when he insinuates he’s not a “real” husband, someone who provides for his family & lives with dignity. It is interesting that the bond of sexuality the couple shares is deep & strong , comes to the foreground in their chatter even in the power keg of a situation they find themselves in now. The Elephant in the room is white power tightening chains of bondage to poverty & to lack of dignity. Both Willem & Clarice are really asking for the same thing – a good life – just believe what will ensure their having it are two different plans. I get that the tensions in this couple’s relationship can’t be explained by any explanation that leaves out the deterioration of Africville thanks to the machinations of the Whites – so devastating…

Writings for Consecrated Ground, page 48 to 53, Act 1, Scene 7 (Feb. 2011, Aretha)

Of course the church is the bedrock of the community’s soul, its spirituality, I was failing to realize that when I criticised the Reverend as being concerned “only” about the church, though I find what he says about living in town with all the amenities & as a tight knit group of neighbours slightly wishful thinking maybe? But a family – exactly – the folks of Africville are a family linked in the face of their religion, their ancestry, their affection for one another, there better selves. Clarice so fierce: I’m made to wonder what would happen if everyone had her commitment – errrrrrrrrrrrr – no – I guess the powerful whites would simply squish the blacks like so many flies, but physically as well as spiritually. I wish I could say I can’t fathom how a group of human beings could so mistreat other groups of human beings, but unfortunately not – witness the world today, the jails full of disenfranchised Aboriginals, far too many of the Aboriginals not in jails equally broken in spirit & living in poverty as their incarcerated tribal members are – I mention the Aboriginals because surely today they are the largest & most obvious example of peoples decimated by loss of culture here in Canada. As the playwright says in his opening note, money can never compensate for loss of a way of life, or not really. I do have to say that even though I admire Clarice’s strength, were it me I’d probably be among the ones in Africville tempted to sell in order to have some sort of chances like the ones Willem dreams of having. Then again, like Willem I’m not from Africville, don’t have that attachment going generations back. I guess regarding the Reverend, keeping the church would mean to him that Africville would live on in the must important sense of living on, at least for him…

Monik Deslauriers
28 février 2011
Je suis très reconnaissante que Nicole Brossard aie replongé si généreusement avec nous dans son oeuvre “le Désert Mauve”. Je n’ai pas assistée aux rencontres préparatoires mais j’ai assistée à la rencontre dialogique. J’ai été très emballée de l’approche particulièrement humaine du Dc. Cornett. ll nous permet de prendre le temps d’approfondir, d’exprimer nos émotions et nos questionnements etc face à l’oeuvre et l’artiste. De plus la beauté extraordinaire de tout cela c’est que le partage avec l’artiste nous permet d’avoir des réponses directes et d’assister à la mise en lumière de certaines facettes intimes de son processus de création et là …la magie s’installe. Avoir la possibilité d’échanger avec des gens qui ont réalisés leurs rêves, me nourrit et surtout m’insuffle le courage de poursuivre mon projet d’écriture qui exige constance et courage. Merci au Dc. Cornett d’être le canal à travers lequel prend forme ces évènements où nous apprenons à tendre les bras vers l’extraordinaire et la passion avec laquelle le Dc. Cornett nous y convie, en est le pilier. Merci Dc. Cornett et je sais qu’un jour JUSTICE vous sera rendu. Merci pour votre travail exceptionnel ; nous en bénéficions tous!

Definition of Counter-transference: a therapist’s emotional entanglement with a client
Navigating a path of Motifs
A poetic path emerges in a space of creation and perception, ‘themescapes’ for interpretation.
The analyst, looking for hidden motifs, reflects the poetic medicine of the analysand, mixing reason with expression, transparency with memories, and holds momentum in their steps. As trust solidifies, steps become smaller, unstable, the heavy steps of childhood; steps become weightless as the soul shakes free of the mind and retraces the hidden trauma of diasporas; steps of the analyst fall on the analysand’s footsteps with flawless synchronicity; steps fall with exactitude on the worn footsteps of Adam and Eve; No end appears. Consolation is in the moving. The apple was supposed to be eaten.

A reaction to:
Working through the Counter-transference: Notes on a Lecutre by Christopher Bollas

The mistrust of counter-transference poem: Identity

“If your head is made of wax
don’t stand in the sun…”
(advice from an East Asian psychiarist)

You’re querying like a novice again
immune to the experiential
sloughing off of innocence
with one hand blankly open,
the other sorrowfully fisted.

Your name is just a name you say
& no amount of vague knowing
harvested on trapdoor
mornings after
can make you into
a viable someone.

You’re invariably dynamic, though –
of course you know that –
& the way you seem to see
with all three eyes
the twitch of necessary politics
in the way the streetlight changes –

the way you never shake off
asking after stillborn fates & babies
like everything must be related:

well yes – wicked isn’t it
to be two or three or four
& still somehow
less than one…

“14 Djinns Migrate across the sea”

I’ve been involved in a systemic family therapy situation a number of years back in the role of classroom aid at Douglas Hospital in a day program for children labelled as emotionally disturbed. It was during a time I was studying techniques of specialized education, the connection a 4 month stage in quest of a career I ultimately elected to forgo. Regardless of what I ultimately elected to do, the stage as well as the studies impacted significantly on my being-in-the-world – the children, their families, the programme, the internal processing of the whole. There were children involved who I’ll remember forever, & one in particular who reminds me of the child Abdul in the article at issue here – specifically because he too was the scapegoat as well as the member of the family identified as presenting symptoms – also a member of a family (split) who had migrated to Montreal & had huge difficulties re settling. I was taken by the discussion in the article regarding hybrid identities, the impact of poverty specifically on an immigrant family, the importance of taking into account in a working manner the ethnicity of a disturbed immigrant family, & the importance of examining the whole of family dynamics in order to impact positively in therapy, as well as the need to incorporate cultural identities/religious beliefs with a willing “suspension of disbelief” in order to allow parallel possibilities of healing, the latter something that was left out of the equation in the situation I found myself in.

K was 7 years old, of Jamaican descent, a troubled child who had been expelled from regular school 5 times before landing at Douglas Hospital, the final time for giving his school principal a bloody nose. Working with K included both reading & arithmetic sessions, with the former yielding the most interesting results – that is, K could take great pleasure in reading if the content of the lesson interested him, much less so if the texts at issue were generic as in lacking exciting plot or engaging characterizations. This was interesting psychologically speaking because it lead to all sorts of feelings surfacing, something which I could pass on to the therapy team.

K lived with his crack addicted mother & 4 year old sister (shared a bed with the latter which was problematic at the very least because the young girl was often incontinent). He had 2 other sisters who were doing fairly well living with his maternal grandmother, plus a father in & out of jail as well as in & out of K’s life. The sisters came up fairly often in K’s discourse, as well as the father. In the case of the sisters living with the grandmother, it had to do with the jokes they shared with him, the books with animal or human pictures showing tender familial situations they gave him, the desire to be in their presence that he articulated. Paradoxically in the case of the drifting father, what was at issue were slurs against girls & women which K. ingested to the ends of hilarity. K rarely even mentioned his mother.

Even from the point of view of a classroom aid, K’s family situation impacted like a ton of bricks regarding what was & wasn’t possible at the academic & behavioural levels. Something basically practical like getting to the school bus stop on time was an issue which I tried to rectify by asking his sleep-in mother to buy an alarm clock in a very polite note – she refused, & consequently K came to us less often as the semester went on, resulting in the gains he had been making both academically & therapeutically falling away. Perhaps even more importantly on a psychological level, the family rarely arrived for family therapy sessions, this too happening more & more often as the semester progressed. As I mentioned earlier, little account of the ethnicity of the family appeared to be brought into the equation re relations between the family & the treatment. The article I’ve just read makes me wonder how the treatment would have impacted, had ethnicity been explored & taken in to account.

One thing I did with K in the part of the semester when he was more present, specifically during Black History Month: K came into school one day with an X referring to Malcolm X shaved into the side of his head early that February. I noted how proud he was of this, also how he knew a fair degree about the man if you took his age into account. At any rate, I read in the Gazette that on the week-end kids’ page they would be publishing writing by kids relating to Black History Month, decided this could be something I could share with K in a positive way, got permission from the Specialized Ed teacher to do writing for the contest on Malcolm X with K. Ultimately the Gazette published K’s writing, & when I brought the paper in K was oh, ever so proud. He got to read his piece to the class, & then, on that Monday, I sent a clipping of the writing home with K to show his mother, told K to stick it to his fridge, show it to mom. The following day I asked about the reception of the writing. “Oh” said K – “she told me to get it off the fridge “– grrrrr – operation sabotage, but of course the mother was in need of therapy too…

Some more on the Psychohistoriographic Group article – Storytime
I left tonight’s session with the process/product distinction on my mind.
The Psychohistoriographic Group article describes a Transcultural Psychiatry Workshop which seems to be all about the process of creating a poem or dramatic script and not the product.
The co-leaders keep stirring the waters and blowing air into the fire” are fuelling the process and banishing political correctness (I think).
The workshop approach could be decomposed into similar processes that one could use in the field of process art, namely; gathering, sorting, collating, associating, and patterning in order to try to understand the different hybrid forms of individual personhood and to aid self-articulate of their peoples suffering and history for example.
From these building blocks of process an emergence occurs which could parallel the emergence of the psyche from a collection of neurons. One needs to just see the work of Jackson Pollock or the molten lead throwing of Richard Serra for example. But is the workshop interested in the product? If not, why not?
Is the very supportive environment of drama or art therapy able to provide the adequate criticisms for the workshop participants, who might decide to become actors or artists because of this, so that they can meet professional standards? What is the ‘just in case’ measure taken.
What is the distinction between drama therapy and process drama, art therapy and process art? What’s the difference between a psychiatrist and a good teacher or a curious mind in this context of learning about cultures, narratives, timeline, values, morals and their roots and to unravel the historiography. Managing effectively the psychological health is a key distinction of course but there are similarities with good teaching which I think are worth observing.
What is Gestalt psychology?
I’m going to read about the conference of the birds now

SITA-SHAKTI @ Cultural Collision: Issues in the psychotherapy of diaspora Indian Women
Reflections by Storytime.
Similar to the 4th reading, it’s focus is on gender roles and their literary motifs, family cohesion and dynamics and the need for hybridisation of identity after migrating between different cultures.
I’m very much interested in the confusion and system conflict in the role of the Indian woman, dichotomised, in extreme cases, into roles of reverence and oppression: the Sita/Shakti balance.
Do the Hindu Myths come out of this confusion? Were the metaphors written to articulate this tension? Is the strength of the novel in western society, and its rich range of tone and focus, a way of avoiding this strong dichotomy of roles. Does feminist literature drive feminism? How has Hinduism lasted this long? Why did the Buddism, Sikhims and Jainism break away? What are their differences in their treatment of women and design for family cohesion? Actually bad question, maybe we should ask why most world religions repress women?
If it’s, in the words of Salmon Rushdie, “an open society like India, with a richness of life experience with the complicated culture, colours, smells and excess”, then what’s going on over the border in the fundamental airless Pakistan?
Do psychoanalysts have criticisms of western cultures and family cohesion? Is there a best way to nurture a family or are we stuck with a cultural relativism? Is there a complete healing/or perfect solution? Are psychoanalysts just cashing in on what everyone has to deal with in life? Why don’t we all need psychological help the world and human condition is confusing, chaotic and barely manageable, why don’t we all fall apart?
If social history was to play out again would gender roles come out the same way? Are reverence, oppression and everything in-between natural relations between men and women? Are they natural consequences of the biology we’ve evolved to?
What is identity? How fluid is it? How quickly can it be dismantled/reconstructed? How many things we identify with are imported? Confusing identity with nationality or religion is problematic as national boundaries are arbitrary, and religion and nationalism are dangerous.
More light needs to be shed on the nature vs nurture/culture etc balance. How many of these psychological problems would have come up without a change in culture? In other words is the cultural change the final push over the edge after a building of underlying problems and tension (including mis-firing of chemistry and biology in the brain). The follow-up question is what is the balance of drugs and talking? Do the drugs take care of the nature problems and the talking the nurture problems?
What does the quote in the conclusion mean? “The psychological agendas of joint family life, and malevolent, painful realities of middle class dowry death of pressures promoting female foeticide in India, cannot be reduced to symbolic, imaginary of cultural representations.”

The Dear John Letters #3 (for Jaswant Guzder)

III

“Do not leave me in this wilderness!
Or, if you do, pay me to stay behind.”
John Ashbery

How high the house that John built stands –
can’t reach every poignant detail, posters
of Hiroshima on the walls, bowl
of origami cranes by the window,
faint light of the antique radio playing Roy Orbison –
can’t reach but not for lack of trying
as I count out the ways we do & don’t
belong here, the ghostly flicker of cheap tea candles
handsomely tattooing
a chair, an arm, a mood –

how deep in the cellar Reason hides
trying on chaotic jocular for size,
air trapped in its own throb,
psyche cadaver rolled up in a Persian rug,
our first words exchanged rattling the radiator,
make-shift sleeping space cold & snow-blind,
sure ground, shifting ground, tumblers –
how Folly, the fiddler, keeps sarcastic time
in the moment I’ve realized
no stable leaving exists.

Dear John something of a scandal
has swept up unrepentant residual flak,
released it in the form of cool ash onto the front lawn,
sown seeds of nostalgia, thought better of that, screamed
bloody murder yet remained unheard –
dear John the tirades of our ephemeral hopes
gone on a bender don’t
bleed the way they used to, something
I appreciate remembering how you had
neither coinage nor humility enough
to take the ineffable
to gutsy heart…

Striving to articulate: further thoughts on psychotherapy and the dialogic seminar with Dr. Jaswant Guzder.
Learning about the process of attuning the analysand and focussing on their renderings: suspending censorships and looking for sources of suffering through a journey of self-awareness and hybrid identities; creating condensations and juxtapositions of thoughts, cultures, stories, histories, mythologies with critical rejection of historical and social garbage.
What are we aiming for, what does psychological health actually mean?
Is the work of a soloist, with a single subjectivity, better ‘therapy’ than the use of dialogue (as with the dialogic principle of setting subjectivity against subjectivity)? Instead of discussing the ‘talking cure’, should we focus on the ‘listening cure’? Which process leads to more effective and affective learning? Is psychoanalysis just a paid conversation with a person we want to be
Is getting “ill” with the patient similar or the same as sympathy?
What where writers’ grasp of the unconscious before Freud’s systematic, analytical and formal approach? In the world of literature and theatre before literary motifs and connections were made with psychology, these stories or psychological problems, such as Oedipus Rex, must have been well rehearsed predicaments, clichés or common patterns.
Is the use of a Freudian lens helpful when analysing literature or someone’s psyche? Are plays really about something, is literature clear-cut; does this meaning replace the work; is the reductionism helpful or is the emotional impact of the words themselves the point? Do we need see Oedipus Rex given that we know it contains the incest motif? Does Earnest Jones’ Hamlet and Oedipus with its distilled meanings and incest motif replace hamlet?
Is the pressure to resolve everyone into a category or archetype one of the causes of the problem? I’m thinking of in particular sexual orientation or gender identity? Do we repress sexual urges? Can we repress anger and conflict in a similar way as we have repressed sex?
We didn’t mention Jung at all. Jung’s and Freud’s split, and I’m a novice in understanding this, came out of Jung believing there were different root psychological causes, a greater moral and social landscape, to just repressed sexual urges of Freud’s psychoanalysis.
We also didn’t mention Marcel Proust’s similar work on memory as Freud, for example in A la recherché du temps perdu. Interestingly Freud and Proust were contemporaries who (it’s commonly believed) never read each other’s work.
I wasn’t aware of Nabokov’s critique of psychoanalysis through his work Lolita. In fact on further reading it appears that he detested Freud saying that he thought he was “crude” and “medieval”.
We didn’t get into the interpretation of dreams and how is my life better if I believe my dreams are meaningful. What is the evolutionary purpose of the unconscious mind?
Were surrealists really unlocking their unconscious or are they a bunch of frauds?
It was a shame we didn’t get onto Indian Mythology. I spent a long time reading and preparing those parts. I hope the work is not wasted.
The dynamics of psychology and politics was touched on but could have expanded much further. Do we seek masochistically to be governed, does the ego latch on, with dangerous intensity, with phantasmal creations of people. Sartre has the idea of the fear of freedom. Do we need servility, levels of superiority to survive?
etc etc.

Writings on Handout #1 – reactions, earplugged March 29th, 2011 –Turbulence

“It really did seem impossible that the trip would end. Cleanly, I mean, completely. The way we expect things to end when they do. When a story is told, and the past tense is used.”
Johanna Skibsrud

One word: Integral

One Sentence: So many of our significant stories continue to unfold & influence emerging present long after we’ve ostensibly relegated them to the past, only speaking of them any longer in the past tense, only relating to them as poignant or not so poignant memories we long to either remember or forget…

One Paragraph: When is the past truly over – how to understand the spatial of experience in contradistinction to the linear? Something that has happened years before can remain part of the equation re the psyche, whether consciously or unconsciously, for better or worse – & worse again. Taking trips concretely, taking trips down memory lane, taking a trip via leafing through an album of photographs, taking a trip courtesy of hearing some song that transports you on a sudden back to the times you used to hear it long ago. Travel & trips in so many guises, movements from point A to point B – even from point N to point G – backwards & forwards, all that emotional baggage accompanying. I take it the trip referred to here refers to actual geographical travelling. Nevertheless, there are undertones suggesting the psychological “truth” about voyaging – to wit, the difficulty of managing the fragments of a situation of being in motion, whether literally or metaphorically – the problem of arriving at a sense of event as truly complete, integrated, finished, with the incapacity to do so making “moving on” difficult.

Stream of Consciousness: Using the past tense, flutter of mental/emotional choreography – there goes the moment that meant everything, here comes lining up memorial ducks all in a greasy row – trips to France, vacation heaven, historicity climbing mountains in the Swiss Alps – how & who goes there now? The story you yearn to tell, are too embarrassed to articulate clearly – little scribbles of words caught up in silent analysing, burning clean through bad omens nicked by dread-filled memory – I like travel, the way what goes on can remain indelibly thrown into relief over & over again in the context of all those budding, less dramatic futures – trip to the grocery store, trip to the riverside carrying sac with apple & sandwich, bottle of quenching spring water – tripping on hallucinations – do youth ever try that these days? The Doors of
Perception scrubbed squeaky clean & yet not quite, not quite – impossible conclusions that are neatly wound tight longed for – apple of my eye, that boyfriend I road the train with across Canada from west to east – the trip you never got over, groped on a roof top in India where you’d gone to sleep – you punched back hard – oh wait, that wasn’t you, a young woman you met, rather, her connection to dharma fascinating – stories told, bread broken together in a clearing in a foreign wood – trips rendered dateless, a curling like limbs like smoke like hair, your diaries staples for a patterning meal when there is dearth of excitement to come – using the past tense bravely, provocatively, the time & times & time again surfacing even as you thirst for closure…

Poem:

Tripwire

My altitude, my love for you –
how thick the way I can’t think
beyond the moon smiling down on us
when it’s a pleasant evening.

Many instances of wear & tear
can’t be loosened with a kiss –
can’t be the calling loon from last summer
beautiful with nowhere to go.

Do you see how I like to twist?
As next morning comes slumming
in a topsy-turvy message asking all,
the next affectionate equation keeps us
humming.

You, heartbreaking, know as little as me.
If I didn’t have the nerve to tell you
I get the feeling nothing would help.
This way, the next rut in the road is always
negotiable.

Writings on Handout #1 (earplugged) – Ghost of Storytime
“It really did seem impossible that the trip would end. Cleanly, I mean, completely. The way we expect things to end when they do. When a story is told, and the past tense is used.”
Johanna Skibsrud
First Word: Dense
First Sentence: Sounds like last week’s comments relating to migration and that it was always ongoing.
First Paragraph: A story has certain completeness, a trip or narrative needs a certain resolution, a clean or complete end before it can be told as a story. What constitutes the story? Stories can continue without resolution (everyone’s life for example) but there are periods of clarity, crescendo, boredom, changes in the speed of passing hours that all need to be told. Is resolution needed? Is story/narrative confused with anecdote/punch-line? Does a story have to have a point?
Stream-of-consciousness: There are certain moments where you feel like you are completing a journey, leading up to turning point, emotions and states-of-mind will changes; a resolution is due. At some point your deny the journey is going to end, deny that there is something past it, that meaning afterwards is undefined, denying that the moment of clarity, bliss will end and you will have to wake up the next day and start the next story. There’s a craving for creation and resolution. It’s all artificial; the story could end NOW, as this is being read. It could finish at 2pm, it could finish whenever. Story or narrative and the fashion for it might just be over rational, over reductive, put in place for peace of mind. Healing may come through learning about our family’s story, but is this resolution or is healing in the process of finding out. Maybe there is no such thing as resolution. It’s just that we crave it and construct it none the less.

Writings on Handout #3 (earplugged) – Ghost of Storytime
“When my father said….”
First word: Spatial
First sentence: Time goes and slips; both spatial words
First paragraph: Fargo I think is the film. I’ve never seen it. Somehow there was the sense that time was packaged away after it passed, put in bins, stored, perhaps hiding, but never findable. The question where does the time ‘go’ is already misleading as the answer will reflect the form of the questions. Time goes to….here…..Time goes to….there.
Stream-of-Consciousness: Time as a spatial dimension is all down to Einstein. The English language was not prepared for this paradigm shift. Mathematics was the only tool that could handle it. This poverty in the English language is being explored by the narrator, but at the same time it opens up a space (no pun intended) which can be filled with memories, connections, nostalgia, films; the literary dimension (no pun intended). Again the Rational-Irrational dissonance theme reappears. Or perhaps the irrational or literary provides the cement that holds the rational bricks together. Or vice versa, whatever you like.

Writings on Handout #3 Turbulence – March 30 2011

“When my father said, “Where did the time go, god-dammit?” I thought of it as if it was really a place that it got to. A place that looked a lot like the palace in Fargo, or the inside of my father’s boat, which remains, now, the original image in my mind for the realization that time can somehow just slip away.”
Johanna Skibsrud

One word: Reality

One sentence: Coming up against the recurrent reality of time slipping away colours everything, from hope to blank despair, driven desire to apathetic loss, gracious healing to insensitive dismissal…

One paragraph: The place time got to – what a funny idea, that there actually is a place where time retires, or at least has a cemetery plot. I feel time like a weight that can paralyze, not sure why, only sure that sifting through the past is a precarious endeavour in my case, so much so that I figure it’s probably such for the majority. I’ve often felt time slipping away, wondered about how loaded down by the past the average person is, thought about how cultural differences may make the experience of time lost different, culled a garden of emotional hope thinking on the ones I love, often “in spite of”. When time starts slipping away – & it does so regularly – when there is this kind of slippage I salute the find of gentle weariness, wait for energy to come back, wait…

Stream of Consciousness: Slip sliding along, coming to surface reactions, spilling dark despair – time & how meagre our interpersonal expectations of authentic exchange – where does that thought come from – I lift my hand into the cold March wind, pretend I’m able to healingly wave to everyone who needs such a wave – come hither, hither come – I walk the river’s edge musing on the distressingly destructive act – walk & walk & walk, the day coming into focus along side the hours passing – oh & what’s holy, how does the secular nourish, what is the song chorus playing right now somewhere inside me that refuses me landing space? Where does the time go indeed – I’m flipping through small memories that I can’t put in order with any sense of belief – the last memory I am twisting in the wind I think I picked up at some point when I wasn’t really paying attention – so what’s it doing here now, hogging all my space? I look into the computer screen like into a lit up midnight – throw away all thoughts of harming, commune with what feels deserving…

30 March 2011

Handout #3

“When my father said, “Where did the time go, god-dammit?” I thought of it as if it was really a place that it got to. A place that looked a lot like the palace in Fargo, or the inside of my father’s boat, which remains, now, the original image in my mind for the realization that time can somehow just slip away.”?Johanna Skibsrud

Word:
Slippery

Sentence:
The worst realization is when we see that so much time has been wasted.

Paragraph:
Wow, it is so true that certain places and contexts become for us the great sucking sound of precious time being siphoned. What a feeling of dread that is: the thought, in those situations, that existence has suddenly morphed into something pointless.

Stream:
When I was a child, time seemed to last forever. Summers were endless, until of course the final week. How is it now that, not for lack of experiences and new faces, a decade can fly by in an instant?

An old woman I am close to has spent recent years slowing down. Little has happened. Nothing has been initiated. She has a progressive incurable condition which is causing limbs and organs to malfunction, some to the point of uselessness. She has accomplished little in her 76 years. Yet she remains in good spirits. She laughs easily and often. Nurses, doctors and orderlies are quickly endeared to her. I do not think that she considers the slippage of time the way I do. She does not consider missed opportunities and unmet goals as do my peers. Those of us who want it all from life are perhaps the most conscious of the melting away of time. Like a magnificent snow fortress waiting for spring.

Writings on Handout #2 (earplugged) – Ghost of Storytime

“Now, though, I find it difficult….”

First word: Interface

First sentence: Does this really mean anything?

First paragraph: Does ‘remain’ mean not buried, keeps on being used, or doesn’t decompose, keeps its dimensions underground? The second half is easier to interpret if your replace thing for person for example. It’s not who dies or what we have lost that is the principle focus but how close to each other we are after they’ve gone.

Stream-of-Consciousness: We could say that they thought that memories were buried, that when someone goes that it cuts off memories, nostalgias, emotions, an out of sight out of mind theme. This time there is a realisation that nothing truly goes; in fact it all remains in some form, and what remains should strengthen your relationship with everything else that remains, learning form experience. I probably am trying to understand this is in too literal a way. If this is the correct interpretation the writer has gone to quite a bit of work to hide that. In the middle of the passage is a puzzling phrase “At the very limit; the exact surface of things”. This throws me off. Something material could be said to have an exact surface. Something abstract like a person really wouldn’t. Is this talking about the material world or the emergent world? Does this relate to the presence of people in one’s mind who have died or a cultural persistence or a collective unconscious? All experience is somehow worked into a sense of self and a sense of belonging and the loss of someone isn’t going to remove something, it will actually add to your experience and mould the meaning you have created to understand your place in the world.

Writings on Handout #4 (earplugged) – Ghost of Storytime

“After the meal, we were quiet. My father smoked a cigarette or two. Inclined lightly toward the window by the kitchen table, which he had opened. As he exhaled, he seemed to become emptier – as if he pushed the smoke from his body just a little too hard.”

First word: Draining

First sentence: Breath that contains a piece of spirit

First paragraph: The boundary of material and spirit; crossing the boundary with thinking eyes and tightened cheek muscles, emergence phenomena being disconnected from where they emerged from; a separation of neurons and minds. Why would the mind exist without the neurons? Why are the emergent dynamics treated as if they came from somewhere else? Fish swim in schools, some in close clusters which organically bulge and grow and twist and break. This emerges from the fish having simple rules that they follow, correlating their movements with their nearest neighbours for example, which multiplied produces a chaotic yet beautiful emergent phenomena. If you remove the fish you surely remove the phenomena, the emergence doesn’t persist. In the same way if must be that is you remove the neurons you remove the energy, mind, soul, spirit or any of the other penniless words of the English language.

Stream-of-Consciousness: We get to a stage where we think literature is saying something meaningful about something which is irrational. It seems it just adds more irrationality. We don’t understand this so let’s try and understand it in a poetic language where there aren’t any rules. It’s a beautiful phrase but it doesn’t get us anywhere. I’m struggling with the whole rational, irrational dichotomy which I keep making. It doesn’t help either. This is a stream-of-consciousness rambling, maybe I’ll try and write something more, precise, rational, and irrational or some combination.

Writings on Handout #6 (earplugged) – Ghost of Storytime
“The house my father…..”
First Work: Process
First Sentence: Where is Casablanca? That confused me.
First Paragraph: Something’s feel central to your sense of self, with connections and links which you may hold important but others may not realise or recognise. Others didn’t make a bond with the carpentry house but her father did.
Stream-of-Consciousness: A love for process, meaning by doing, all objects on a transition trajectory somewhere. I imagine lots of people (older men mainly) have sheds that are full of odds and ends which are to be formed into some great idea. Of course they never get there, the aim keeps getting redefined, redefined to extend purpose, redefine to add motivation and excitement.
That was short, I’ll have to write more……

A Thin Line Series
Please post your reflections for the ‘dialogic’ seminars of the series A Thin Line here.

Warning: Spoiler alert
If you’re not taking part in the seminar the reflections below will probably give the story away.

17 Responses to A Thin Line Series
Turbulence says:
March 29, 2011 at 11:25 am
Writings on Handout #1 – reactions, earplugged March 29th, 2011 –Turbulence

“It really did seem impossible that the trip would end. Cleanly, I mean, completely. The way we expect things to end when they do. When a story is told, and the past tense is used.”
Johanna Skibsrud

One word: Integral

One Sentence: So many of our significant stories continue to unfold & influence emerging present long after we’ve ostensibly relegated them to the past, only speaking of them any longer in the past tense, only relating to them as poignant or not so poignant memories we long to either remember or forget…

One Paragraph: When is the past truly over – how to understand the spatial of experience in contradistinction to the linear? Something that has happened years before can remain part of the equation re the psyche, whether consciously or unconsciously, for better or worse – & worse again. Taking trips concretely, taking trips down memory lane, taking a trip via leafing through an album of photographs, taking a trip courtesy of hearing some song that transports you on a sudden back to the times you used to hear it long ago. Travel & trips in so many guises, movements from point A to point B – even from point N to point G – backwards & forwards, all that emotional baggage accompanying. I take it the trip referred to here refers to actual geographical travelling. Nevertheless, there are undertones suggesting the psychological “truth” about voyaging – to wit, the difficulty of managing the fragments of a situation of being in motion, whether literally or metaphorically – the problem of arriving at a sense of event as truly complete, integrated, finished, with the incapacity to do so making “moving on” difficult.

Stream of Consciousness: Using the past tense, flutter of mental/emotional choreography – there goes the moment that meant everything, here comes lining up memorial ducks all in a greasy row – trips to France, vacation heaven, historicity climbing mountains in the Swiss Alps – how & who goes there now? The story you yearn to tell, are too embarrassed to articulate clearly – little scribbles of words caught up in silent analysing, burning clean through bad omens nicked by dread-filled memory – I like travel, the way what goes on can remain indelibly thrown into relief over & over again in the context of all those budding, less dramatic futures – trip to the grocery store, trip to the riverside carrying sac with apple & sandwich, bottle of quenching spring water – tripping on hallucinations – do youth ever try that these days? The Doors of
Perception scrubbed squeaky clean & yet not quite, not quite – impossible conclusions that are neatly wound tight longed for – apple of my eye, that boyfriend I road the train with across Canada from west to east – the trip you never got over, groped on a roof top in India where you’d gone to sleep – you punched back hard – oh wait, that wasn’t you, a young woman you met, rather, her connection to dharma fascinating – stories told, bread broken together in a clearing in a foreign wood – trips rendered dateless, a curling like limbs like smoke like hair, your diaries staples for a patterning meal when there is dearth of excitement to come – using the past tense bravely, provocatively, the time & times & time again surfacing even as you thirst for closure…

Poem:

Tripwire

My altitude, my love for you –
how thick the way I can’t think
beyond the moon smiling down on us
when it’s a pleasant evening.

Many instances of wear & tear
can’t be loosened with a kiss –
can’t be the calling loon from last summer
beautiful with nowhere to go.

Do you see how I like to twist?
As next morning comes slumming
in a topsy-turvy message asking all,
the next affectionate equation keeps us
humming.

You, heartbreaking, know as little as me.
If I didn’t have the nerve to tell you
I get the feeling nothing would help.
This way, the next rut in the road is always
negotiable.

Reply
Toledo says:
March 29, 2011 at 3:55 pm
Handout #1: “It really did seem impossible….”

Word: Lingering

Sentence: Yes, the trip that seems like a prison, though one is supposed to be exulting in the freedom of the open road.

Paragraph: There is a pattern between this passage and the first passage about grandmother’s ghost: things that will not go away. Except this passage is more aggressive: a present that will not go away.

Stream: This passage serves for me as a metaphor for times that cannot pass to quickly. How many times have I tried to console someone who is living through hardship, “This time too will pass.” But to them of course it seems as though it never will go on forever. Nevertheless, sometimes the past does not go away. Sometimes it remains present. I was thinking about war yesterday. When I was a young boy in the 1960s growing up in a prosperous blue collar neighborhood, World War II was still present. We talked about it as if it had just happened. As a young man visiting the deep hollers of West Virginia, I found that the American Civil War was still very much present. Fallen soldiers from a person’s lineage could be talked about as if they had just defended the homeland and paid the ultimate price last week. And then I think of my country today fighting two wars that few talk about in the course of daily life in spite of thousands of losses, and hundreds of thousands risking death bravely. To spend any time dwelling on what our countrymen are doing on the other side of the world would be too much unpleasantry in the course of daily life. World War II was more present two decades later than two of today’s wars are in their own time. How can this be? Time it would seem is quite malleable, but I suspect that as individuals we do not have much control over what shape it will take.

Reply
Ghost of Storytime says:
March 29, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Writings on Handout #1 (earplugged) – Ghost of Storytime

“It really did seem impossible that the trip would end. Cleanly, I mean, completely. The way we expect things to end when they do. When a story is told, and the past tense is used.” Johanna Skibsrud

First Word: Dense

First Sentence: Sounds like last week’s comments relating to migration and that it was always ongoing.

First Paragraph: A story has certain completeness, a trip or narrative needs a certain resolution, a clean or complete end before it can be told as a story. What constitutes the story? Stories can continue without resolution (everyone’s life for example) but there are periods of clarity, crescendo, boredom, changes in the speed of passing hours that all need to be told. Is resolution needed? Is story/narrative confused with anecdote/punch-line? Does a story have to have a point?

Stream-of-consciousness: There are certain moments where you feel like you are completing a journey, leading up to turning point, emotions and states-of-mind will change; a resolution is due. At some point your deny the journey is going to end, deny that there is something past it, that meaning afterwards is undefined, denying that the moment of clarity, bliss will end and you will have to wake up the next day and start the next story. There’s a craving for creation and resolution. It’s all artificial; the story could end NOW, as this is being read. It could finish at 2pm, it could finish whenever. Story or narrative and the fashion for it might just be over rational, over reductive, put in place for peace of mind. Healing may come through learning about our family’s story, but is this resolution or is healing in the process of finding out. Maybe there is no such thing as resolution. It’s just that we crave it and construct it none the less.

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Flying head says:
March 30, 2011 at 2:21 am
Handout #1 – reactions, ear plugged March 30, 2011
“It really did seem impossible that the trip would end. Cleanly, I mean, completely. The way we expect things to end when they do. When a story is told, and the past tense is used.”

One word: “End”

One sentence: “It is about passing time”

One paragraph: “We often experience a sudden end in more intense situations in which we are actively involved/participate. Among such situations we can include trips – especially key journeys involving our big preparations as expectations”.

Stream of consciousness vein: “In my first impression after seven readings of these three intense sentences I saw their interpretation in the most popular now form – a short Youtube’s film episode.
Let us imagine groups of young men smoking, drinking and talking outside of a fancy disco club. While watching them, we notice a fast escalation in their “dialogs” that become louder and quickly convert into gesticulations switching soon after into a very dynamic fist fight. In its apogee there are recorded flashed reflections from moving few knives followed by some loud gun shots. Almost immediately after it we notice an extremely intensive silence with one or two slowly moving men on the background. They do not talk, just slowly turn around their heads when the others lay motionless on the ground. The action is finished and the following seconds seem to last long minutes. We will watch this scene two times from two different cameras; one filming this scene from high above and the second recording the same event from a street level in hands of a skillfully moving cameraman what makes an impression of being seen by one of the surviving it man.
In this way we have a chance to see a dynamic pictorial interpretation of the mentioned “past tense” in a kind of the action liked by contemporary people and in two different perspectives. As a bonus the audience will also notice that the speed of this action influences their ability of experiencing significant changes in their time’s scale perception. Yes, it happens, but according to certain commonly known rules this shift in the time scale becomes significant when the movement reaches higher values comparable to the speed of light.

Can we reach for time to time such high speeds in our ordinary lives? Can we reach it without literal: fast moving our bodies, whistling gun bullets, “pumping” so fast voltage into human bodies by tasers, or burning by laser guns? – instead just by thinking equally fast or deep inside about something important in our heavy (without any moving parts) 3 pound minds?

Flying Head

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Ghost of Storytime says:
March 30, 2011 at 10:08 am
Writings on Handout #2 (earplugged) – Ghost of Storytime

“Now, though, I find it difficult….”

First word: Interface

First sentence: Does this really mean anything?

First paragraph: Does ‘remain’ mean not buried, keeps on being used, or doesn’t decompose, keeps its dimensions underground? The second half is easier to interpret if your replace thing for person for example. It’s not who dies or what we have lost that is the principle focus but how close to each other we are after they’ve gone.

Stream-of-Consciousness: We could say that they thought that memories were buried, that when someone goes that it cuts off memories, nostalgias, emotions, an out of sight out of mind theme. This time there is a realisation that nothing truly goes; in fact it all remains in some form, and what remains should strengthen your relationship with everything else that remains, learning form experience. I probably am trying to understand this is in too literal a way. If this is the correct interpretation the writer has gone to quite a bit of work to hide that. In the middle of the passage is a puzzling phrase “At the very limit; the exact surface of things”. This throws me off. Something material could be said to have an exact surface. Something abstract like a person really wouldn’t. Is this talking about the material world or the emergent world? Does this relate to the presence of people in one’s mind who have died or a cultural persistence or a collective unconscious? All experience is somehow worked into a sense of self and a sense of belonging and the loss of someone isn’t going to remove something, it will actually add to your experience and mould the meaning you have created to understand your place in the world.

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Ghost of Storytime says:
March 30, 2011 at 10:47 am
Writings on Handout #3 (earplugged) – Ghost of Storytime

“When my father said….”

First word: Spatial

First sentence: Time goes and slips; both spatial words

First paragraph: Fargo I think is the film. I’ve never seen it. Somehow there was the sense that time was packaged away after it passed, put in bins, stored, perhaps hiding, but never findable. The question where does the time ‘go’ is already misleading as the answer will reflect the form of the questions. Time goes to….here…..Time goes to….there.

Stream-of-Consciousness: Time as a spatial dimension is all down to Einstein. The English language was not prepared for this paradigm shift. Mathematics was the only tool that could handle it. This poverty in the English language is being explored by the narrator, but at the same time it opens up a space (no pun intended) which can be filled with memories, connections, nostalgia, films; the literary dimension (no pun intended). Again the Rational-Irrational dissonance theme reappears. Or perhaps the irrational or literary provides the cement that holds the rational bricks together. Or vice versa, whatever you like.

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Turbulence says:
March 30, 2011 at 12:56 pm
Writings on Handout #2 – reactions, earplugged March 29th, 2011 –Turbulence

“Now, though, I find it difficult to believe that anything is ever buried in the way that I had once supposed. I believe instead that everything remains. At the very limit; the exact surface of things. So that in the end it is not so much what has been subtracted from a life that really matters, but the distances, instead, between the things which remain.”
Johanna Skibsrud

One word: gaps.

One sentence: How we deal with the gaps in a personal timeline brings to fruition so much living by slippery fiction, the what & who & where & when scrabbling comedy & tragedy alike, the loss of precise memory in spots adding up to a fragmented kind of legend of being-in-the-world…

One paragraph: “the exact surface of things” – how can that be, there is something almost mystical being suggested here. My idea of what remains is more akin to splayed fragments as opposed to any exact surface of things – fragments that offer ideation of events in a life, sometimes vaguely, sometimes clearly. I’d be the first to agree that what has been subtracted from a life is less important ultimately than those difficult distances between the things which remain, just not sure of what the author intends here when she speaks of distances – i.e. is it about how said distances affect, or maybe how they confuse? I would love to be privy to the exact surface of things, find that is not a part of my reality. The lived comes & goes, not always in a way I can recognize – fused, rather, through everything, often enough devoid of the kind of intentionality that would have me recognizing as opposed to making up Socratic days in a life…

Stream of consciousness: The distances between the things which remain – I’m addicted to scratching at memory surfaces, eking out a sense of self as often from reflections about the past as on what happens in the present immediate. Every thought, every feeling is already passed when we reflect upon them, maybe a little like the dead stars whose light we see in the present tense even though it comes from light years away – to be in the moment is to be rather unconscious, yes? & yet we strive for that, when it works out the experiences we have feel intense. Passion for fiddling our harsher memories out, like whittling a stick down to a fragile core – happy memories – oh how many & yet not enough to keep us eager/safe enduringly – what I’ve buried I often dig up again – love, self, the other, fictions, catastrophes, helplessness – what I’ve buried I consistently try to appropriate with wholeness in mind, be what’s buried treasure or detritus, be what’s buried inspirational or false-bottomed, be what’s buried rainbow hued or sullied black & white – somehow can’t not ask after all of it….

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Turbulence says:
March 30, 2011 at 1:56 pm
Writings on Handout #3 Turbulence – March 30 2011

“When my father said, “Where did the time go, god-dammit?” I thought of it as if it was really a place that it got to. A place that looked a lot like the palace in Fargo, or the inside of my father’s boat, which remains, now, the original image in my mind for the realization that time can somehow just slip away.”
Johanna Skibsrud

One word: Reality

One sentence: Coming up against the recurrent reality of time slipping away colours everything, from hope to blank despair, driven desire to apathetic loss, gracious healing to insensitive dismissal…

One paragraph: The place time got to – what a funny idea, that there actually is a place where time retires, or at least has a cemetery plot. I feel time like a weight that can paralyze, not sure why, only sure that sifting through the past is a precarious endeavour in my case, so much so that I figure it’s probably such for the majority. I’ve often felt time slipping away, wondered about how loaded down by the past the average person is, thought about how cultural differences may make the experience of time lost different, culled a garden of emotional hope thinking on the ones I love, often “in spite of”. When time starts slipping away – & it does so regularly – when there is this kind of slippage I salute the find of gentle weariness, wait for energy to come back, wait…

Stream of Consciousness: Slip sliding along, coming to surface reactions, spilling dark despair – time & how meagre our interpersonal expectations of authentic exchange – where does that thought come from – I lift my hand into the cold March wind, pretend I’m able to healingly wave to everyone who needs such a wave – come hither, hither come – I walk the river’s edge musing on the distressingly destructive act – walk & walk & walk, the day coming into focus along side the hours passing – oh & what’s holy, how does the secular nourish, what is the song chorus playing right now somewhere inside me that refuses me landing space? Where does the time go indeed – I’m flipping through small memories that I can’t put in order with any sense of belief – the last memory I am twisting in the wind I think I picked up at some point when I wasn’t really paying attention – so what’s it doing here now, hogging all my space? I look into the computer screen like into a lit up midnight – throw away all thoughts of harming, commune with what feels deserving…

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Toledo says:
March 30, 2011 at 5:04 pm
Handout 2:

“Now, though, I find it difficult to believe that anything is ever buried in the way that I had once supposed. I believe instead that everything remains. At the very limit; the exact surface of things. So that in the end it is not so much what has been subtracted from a life that really matters, but the distances, instead, between the things which remain.”?Johanna Skibsrud

Word:
Residual

Sentence:
“Distance:” what a wonderful word to describe the space between objects of the past and present.

Paragraph:
It amazes me those who conjure their personal past, from last week, or decades ago, as if it happened yesterday. They relive every trauma and triumph at the snap of a finger. And it amazes me more those who recall the past, no matter how recent or significant, with detachment. Both extremes, I suppose, have measured “distance” quite differently.

Stream:
I worked for several years with a very happy man from Lithuania. I once asked him about his daily gladness. He said that life for him is only the future. He was not attached to the past, so he said, so that he was in a way liberated, free to great each new day as something unto itself. But I did not completely believe him. He seemed to me to cherish so much of his many lives. He had more rich history in 50 years than several of his peers combined. I think his handling of the past was a striking example of the “distances, instead, between the things which remain.”

The other thought that come to mind is a bit cynical. This passage applies well to a lucid individual with enough of a life to call a history. But how well does it bode for lost civilizations and Alzheimer patients?

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Toledo says:
March 30, 2011 at 5:44 pm
30 March 2011

Handout #3

“When my father said, “Where did the time go, god-dammit?” I thought of it as if it was really a place that it got to. A place that looked a lot like the palace in Fargo, or the inside of my father’s boat, which remains, now, the original image in my mind for the realization that time can somehow just slip away.”?Johanna Skibsrud

Word:
Slippery

Sentence:
The worst realization is when we see that so much time has been wasted.

Paragraph:
Wow, it is so true that certain places and contexts become for us the great sucking sound of precious time being siphoned. What a feeling of dread that is: the thought, in those situations, that existence has suddenly morphed into something pointless.

Stream:
When I was a child, time seemed to last forever. Summers were endless, until of course the final week. How is it now that, not for lack of experiences and new faces, a decade can fly by in an instant?

An old woman I am close to has spent recent years slowing down. Little has happened. Nothing has been initiated. She has a progressive incurable condition which is causing limbs and organs to malfunction, some to the point of uselessness. She has accomplished little in her 76 years. Yet she remains in good spirits. She laughs easily and often. Nurses, doctors and orderlies are quickly endeared to her. I do not think that she considers the slippage of time the way I do. She does not consider missed opportunities and unmet goals as do my peers. Those of us who want it all from life are perhaps the most conscious of the melting away of time. Like a magnificent snow fortress waiting for spring.

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Toledo says:
March 30, 2011 at 6:28 pm
Handout #4

“After the meal, we were quiet. My father smoked a cigarette or two. Inclined lightly toward the window by the kitchen table, which he had opened. As he exhaled, he seemed to become emptier – as if he pushed the smoke from his body just a little too hard.”

Word:
“Exhail”

Sentence:
I know that behavior well: pushing the air out in a deliberate sigh as if to say that being, far from unbearably light, is heavy.

Paragraph:
This reading, the paragraph turned out differently. The ritual cigarette after a meal becomes a meditation. The leaning toward the open window would suggest a desire for escape into open air. Pushing the smoke out of the lungs and out the window would be a way to send troubles away. To become “emptier”, for the burden to be lightened.

Stream:
As much of an anti-smoking Nazi as I may be, I have to acknowledge its best benefit. Foremost, it seems that burdens, if only for the moment, leave with the exhaling of smoke.

The passage recalls the movie Smoke. It poses the question, “What is the weight of the smoke from a cigar?” The answer is, “The weight of the cigar.” Smoke, in this film and perhaps in this passage, is a metaphor for the past, the weight of which one cannot escape.

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Toledo says:
March 31, 2011 at 3:25 pm
Handout #5 … 3rd morning

31 March 2011
Toledo

“When I was younger, and we had come to Henry’s house alone in those solitary summers of my father’s disappearance, I had imagined that the past really existed, semi-submerged, in Henry’s backyard. Wouldn’t that be enough for anyone? I’d thought. To explain that certain sadness, which I identified sometimes in him. A sadness that would make you, when you saw it, want to pull the edges of your own life up around you, and stay there, carefully, inside.” Johanna Skibsrud

Word:
Grief

Sentence:
Some people carry so much sadness on their faces that it is difficult to look at them, so no-one does.

Paragraph:
What is the source of so much sadness and grief? The question reminds me of when I was single and people would ask, why? My reply, if I knew the answer to that I would not still be single. The passage digs at this question, why is Henry so sad? Would it be too bold to say, if Henry really understood completely his sadness he could free himself of it? I do not know if the understanding of ourselves necessarily leads to a journey out of sadness or relief from bachelorhood, but I suspect that it can’t hurt.

Stream:
The kind of despair depicted in this passage is frightening whenever one comes face to face with it in another person. It feels contagious. Metaphorically speaking, if one does not keep a safe distance and wash one’s hands, a bad cold might ensue. A few decades ago when I was in therapy, my shrink would from time to time take a breath, stare up at the window, and exhale, as if to cleanse her soul of my despair.

The narrator in this passage longs to know the source of Henry’s sadness. Such understanding can make empathy so much easier. When my grandfather was diagnosed with a debilitating cancer, he was immediately forgiven for recent poor work performance. When my mother-in-law was diagnosed with a brain disease, we could all more easily accept her strange and counter-productive behavior. When told that someone has just lost a loved one, it becomes clear why they are grieving. But what of when the source of unwanted behavior is not known or understood? What then? That is when our love, and our ability to express it, is really put to the test.

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Ghost of Storytime says:
March 31, 2011 at 4:05 pm
Writings on Handout #4 (earplugged) – Ghost of Storytime

“After the meal, we were quiet. My father smoked a cigarette or two. Inclined lightly toward the window by the kitchen table, which he had opened. As he exhaled, he seemed to become emptier – as if he pushed the smoke from his body just a little too hard.”

First word: Draining

First sentence: Breath that contains a piece of spirit

First paragraph: The boundary of material and spirit; crossing the boundary with thinking eyes and tightened cheek muscles, emergence phenomena being disconnected from where they emerged from; a separation of neurons and minds. Why would the mind exist without the neurons? Why are the emergent dynamics treated as if they came from somewhere else? Fish swim in schools, some in close clusters which organically bulge and grow and twist and break. This emerges from the fish having simple rules that they follow, correlating their movements with their nearest neighbours for example, which multiplied produces a chaotic yet beautiful emergent phenomena. If you remove the fish you surely remove the phenomena, the emergence doesn’t persist. In the same way if must be that is you remove the neurons you remove the energy, mind, soul, spirit or any of the other penniless words of the English language.

Stream-of-Consciousness: We get to a stage where we think literature is saying something meaningful about something which is irrational. It seems it just adds more irrationality. We don’t understand this so let’s try and understand it in a poetic language where there aren’t any rules. It’s a beautiful phrase but it doesn’t get us anywhere. I’m struggling with the whole rational, irrational dichotomy which I keep making. It doesn’t help either. This is a stream-of-consciousness rambling, maybe I’ll try and write something more, precise, rational, and irrational or some combination.

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Ghost of Storytime says:
March 31, 2011 at 4:38 pm
Writings on Handout #5 (earplugged) – Ghost of Storytime

“When I was younger….”

First word: Safety

First sentence: Are these psychological triggers buried in the garden?

First paragraph: Identifying the sources of suffering, sharing commonalities in difficult memories with other people. The same triggers, laid-out in the garden in the same pattern.

Stream-of-consciousness: Identifying sources of sadness and protecting yourself from them; using parts of your life to block parts of your memory; clouding death with nostalgia, clouding illness with childhood trips to the zoo, clouding social breakdowns with Dickens’ Great expectations and clouding civil war with Pan’s labyrinth. The imagery of manipulating your life by picturing it as a sheet which can be pulled around you is quite beautiful.
There is a sense that you can heal or protect yourself emotionally by pinpointing causes for sadness, much like in a Freudian vein. Not much else came to mind.

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Ghost of Storytime says:
April 1, 2011 at 10:08 am
Writings on Handout #6 (earplugged) – Ghost of Storytime
“The house my father…..”

First Work: Process

First Sentence: Where is Casablanca? That confused me.

First Paragraph: Something’s feel central to your sense of self, with connections and links which you may hold important but others may not realise or recognise. Others didn’t make a bond with the carpentry house but her father did.

Stream-of-Consciousness: A love for process, meaning by doing, all objects on a transition trajectory somewhere. I imagine lots of people (older men mainly) have sheds that are full of odds and ends which are to be formed into some great idea. Of course they never get there, the aim keeps getting redefined, redefined to extend purpose, redefine to add motivation and excitement.

That was short, I’ll have to write more……

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Toledo says:
April 1, 2011 at 5:12 pm
1 April 2011
Toledo

Handout #6 – 3rd evening reading

“The house my father left behind in Fargo…”

Word:
Dreamer

Sentence:
There are doers and there are thinkers.

Paragraph:
It is difficult for those who primarily are thinkers and dreamers to cross the boundary into the world of doers and workers. It is unnatural for them to accomplish anything concrete. As this passage illustrates so well, these individuals do not see how their inability to finish anything they’ve started affects those around them.

Stream:
The last sentence, “As if all objects existed in blueprint; in different stages of design or repair,” comes off to me more positively than it was probably intended. What a wonderful creative gift to see the world that way. It means that what such a person sees in everything is possibility. The irony of the father in question is that his occupation is one that ought to span the divide between designer and labourer. And it is so unfortunate that as a parent he could not recognize his lack of consideration for his family, who desired a solid and complete home in which to grow up. I have known other men like this. They drive their loved ones nuts. To a certain extent I am one of them. This passage really has helped me to see this aspect of myself in relation to those closest to me.

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Turbulence says:
April 1, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Handout #4 – reactions (earplugged) April 1rst 2011 – Turbulence

“After the meal, we were quiet. My father smoked a cigarette or two. Inclined lightly toward the window by the kitchen table, which he had opened. As he exhaled, he seemed to become emptier – as if he pushed the smoke from his body just a little too hard.”
Johanna Skibsrud

One Word: nicotine

One Sentence: To exhale cigarette smoke just a touch too hard from one’s body out a window after supper suggests a desire to release, to surrender to an undemanding pleasure, to float forgetfully…

One Paragraph: “Fulfilled” often means about the same thing as “filled full” – emptied is as emptied must be in the shadow of ending, patience of a sigh. Thinking on the smokers in my family I am opened memorably into fresh air rendered blue. I am a smoker, last year I quit tobacco, I now drag on something non combustible which releases vapour, at the same time delivering a synthetic shot of nicotine, my house smoke-free, my shot a few thousand less poison-ness, compromising chemicals. I understand breathing out a little too hard has something to do with engaging the outside on the back of feeling darkness inside, letting go worry in a manner that calls upon a deep exhalation to center the self. Is growing emptier for moments at a time always negative? Life includes much that is difficult to handle, emptying can be a way of alleviating stress, clearing the head, giving one’s self a break, if only fleetingly…

Stream of consciousness: All our different crutches – sweets, alcohol, illegal drugs, greasy burgers, soap operas, promiscuous sexual acting out, caffeine, video games, obsessive physical working out, social media sites, & of course nicotine – etc, etc, etc, etc – heaven forbid anything is done in excess, anything that interferes with what we necessarily need to do in our lives – show up at a job, look after nuclear as well as extended family members, lend a generous ear to friends & family & strangers even, volunteer at a mission or an animal shelter, take a street kid to a diner for bacon & eggs, study the ways you can reduce your carbon footprint & then follow through, educate yourself to vote responsibly, carry out the ethic that is sound yet difficult – all the murky black & white within striking distance as you exhale wobbly – the family meal reveals ever so much without necessarily meaning to to each & every member at the table – beware of what you leave out re exposing yourself, & let us hope the complicated still works out, if only by crossing over from the light side to the dark…

Poem

“Ivy”

Light the rifts of freedom
not acknowledged as freedom,
the way weather is sensation as opposed
to brand, the airy nature of simply
ticking.

Seated on front stoops, on
rusty fire escapes taking
in the wet dark, the silence
of birds signed off, the single
star that strokes us, flickering.

I dab a finger in water,
hold it up out the car window while you drive –
I feel the brush of breezes, nowhere
do I feel the ghostly sense
of zillions of shells
of prior time cresting –

rather, ivy over a ramshackle house
hidden in the night until
we pull up in the driveway, shine
the car lights on the leafy side wall,
get dizzy because so much has happened
& we’ve almost no space left
inside ourselves
to cleanly acknowledge…

Writings on Handout #6 – reactions, earplugged April 2nd, 2011 – Turbulence

“The house my father left behind in Fargo, North Dakota, was never really a house at all. Always, instead, it was an idea of itself. A carpenter’s house. A work in progress. So that even after we moved him north to Casablanca, and his Fargo home was dragged away – the lot sold to a family from Billings, Montana – my father was always saddened & surprised if the place was remembered irreverently, as if it had been a separate and incidental thing; distinct from the rest of our lives. In this way, he remained, until the end, a house carpenter. If only in the way that he looked at things. As if all objects existed in blueprint; in different stages of design or repair.”
Johanna Skibscrud

One word: bricolage

One sentence: Early evening the father slips into something psychologically comfortable, a memory of where he felt a kind of moving belonging, the tools he’d trusted yielding identity via his usage of them, love trickling believably between weight of place & weight of participation, a building in selective fashion telling more than any opportunity for confession ever had or would have…

One paragraph: “A work in progress” can exist as a possibility as much as a realization, & this is what makes it so seductive for some people – that is, never ending can be always proceeding with desire & heartfelt intention. No need to argue that completion is the goal, except if you are one of those souls who live for the imagining, the suggestive in the picture always rather tantalizing. Bricolage – it’s what Claude Levi-Strauss related to the type of thinking people who are considered “primitive” by European cultures are ever so non-primitively doing. Artists of living & media both tend to tally what they do in such a manner, or so I think. The beauty in the process is as important, ultimately, as the actualization: I know this is only slightly true in some cases, yet I understand & identify with the mindset that believes this.

Stream of consciousness: Beauty & the beast, a correlation of thinking with sensing – love in the shadows, truth behind Chinese screens – we go on & on & stop on a sudden simultaneously judging & accepting. In the world of the savage, fine fine details; under the weeping willow, collage of subtly active. I will build myself a homage to engrossing emotional tapestry. Out by the road, a path that curves invisibly inward – I will talk this way & admit I find it stimulating to do so. There is something in my throat, as I take in the view, that wants to get out regardless of where – something intangible dependent on the tangible – something like the way the sky dictates a horizon come summer or spring, winter or explosive autumn…

Stream-of-Consciousness after reading up to page 106 of The Sentimentalists – Ghost of Storytime
Interesting read. With some super imagery, especially the idea of taking a boat ride over the house you used to live in or to protect your house with a dam. It seems to border on the magical realism. It just happens to be real.
There was an exhibit at the CCA that included newspaper articles and letters regarding the flooding of part of the St Lawrence River, the personal story from the exhibit didn’t hit me so strongly, and I don’t remember too much about it. What was stronger at that exhibit came from the videos of the migration of Newfoundlanders from isolated coastal communities to towns, some of which floated and pulled with tug boats their homes across the sea.
Looking on Google earth you can almost convince yourself that you can see the submerged highway that ran along the northern bank of the St Lawrence. I did manage to find some photos also.
The geography of the book is a little confusing at times; being turned around at the Canadian border when Helene and the narrator were children I didn’t really understand what they were trying to do geographically. That irritated me a little. Maybe this book is too North American. I couldn’t find Casablanca on a map either.
The timing of the story keeps changing and sometimes I wondered how old the narrator is. She could be eight or thirty, people could be dead, they might not be, people might live here, and they might not. It’s as if the narrator’s father’s thoughts that “people should stay eight years old forever” became true.
Nostalgia as something to describe must be difficult, the blueprints, the boat resonated in his lungs, the confusing nature of nostalgia, the sense of being it gives you, putting things into a “more private and less complicated system” (pg91), the sense of place, but not necessarily place of understanding. Hybrid identities, grandmother ghosts, submerged identities, sailing above memories, fishing over past memories, transitioning through memories, persona nostalgia, group nostalgia, centers of ownership and self.
The description on page 93/94 of being blown off course towards different estuaries as a metaphor for finding one’s way through struck me as a profound observation. A few times whilst reading I thought of the Alchemist’s theme that what you are looking for is at home.

Writings on Handout #8 (earplugged) – Ghost of Storytime
“Somehow, thought, long after…..”
First word: Infinity
First sentence: An arctic twilight which lasts the whole day
First paragraph: the persistence of memory, re-experiencing childhood, re-jigging and re-organising memories, a constant shaking of ideas which lights the night sky, keeping memories alive and keeps lost family members present.
Stream-of-Consciousness: This is a very beautiful way of describing the persistence of memory. Imagery of the horizon, hallucinatory flashes and the super choice of the word buoyed – something which fits perfectly with the ever present imagery of the submerged Casablanca. The last 2 lines are intriguing, “walking tentatively along the endless and otherwise uninhabited waters of my childhood.” I sense there is the idea the memory of the narrator’s father is the only thing persisting, pivotal to her story. I’m not sure, I need to think about it some more, it doesn’t make full sense to me.

Writings on Handout #8 – April 7/2011 – Turbulence

“Somehow, though, long after we had turned away, a phantom faith remained in me, long after its object had been lost. It came in bursts, in brief hallucinatory flashes, like the intermittent blinking of a dead satellite which still rouses itself on faulty wiring as though it were a dying star. So that even in those after-years, when my father had disappeared completely beyond the line of our horizon, it seemed as though, on fine days, I could see him still – a faint outline, a trace of himself – buoyed by the stubbornness of my memory, walking tentatively along the endless and otherwise uninhabited waters of my childhood.”
Johanna Skibsrud

First word: tincture

One Sentence: Interesting that the waters of the narrator’s childhood are otherwise uninhabited, the trace of the father a kind of orienting experience diluted therein, one that impacts specifically on fine days, suggesting desire for the father is ongoing, even as the longing for fine days is ongoing…

One Paragraph: The people who fascinated that go missing in our lives like ghosts in the machine – they’re very often family figures, particularly parental figures, those who loomed large when we were young, small, confused, seeking. The seeking may continue together with a desire to dispel what has confused, the latter mostly easier said than done. A phantom faith winding in & out of realization that is more felt than articulated – trying to articulate the felt & the thought of can hold you hostage to the past, yet yield important insight if experiential grasping via tracing of dreaming words comes to pass. This passage strikes me as a lovely instance of such a coming to pass – fictional instance, yes, yet perhaps the poetic & the fictitious are the main ways via which we come to realizations of importance, on the threshold of almost losing ourselves time & time again…

Stream of Consciousness: Fathers as faint outlines on a day in a life – grand turning toward what has evaded you yet still remains present in the subtlest of ways – I walk the river misted over on a bright April morning remembering my father, 18 years dead now, in a way I haven’t remembered for some time – specifically, how he seemed to have shaped me in so many ways even from a distance, how my memory of him is stuck in a few key incarnations on the timeline of my life, how I respected him almost offhandedly & never really needed to tell him, though I wonder now if I should have said – parental tinctures in the long grown child’s sense of being-in-the-world, of being-with-others, of being-with-self – such a splay of ideals of the parent, such resurgences of criticisms of the parent at the least expected of times – my father always doing his best as far as I can remember, & importantly, in contradistinction to my difficult mother, supportive of his children in connection with whatever direction/directions they elected to pursue – my father divorced from my mother when I was 5 & yet weekly, physically & emotionally, available – when he died I couldn’t be there, sent him a note with pictures to the hospital where he lived the last few weeks of his life – hallucinatory flashes of him? Oh many, the most precious perhaps from the mid teen years when I moved in with him & interacted with him daily for roughly 4 years – my father more like an uncle than a father during that time, a lot because he had never really taken on the role of authority figure & didn’t at that time either – yes in my teen years, but also when I was 3 or 4 & I would work to make him laugh, sensing unconsciously the bad air between the parents, & feeling such love for him even when he was sad, particularly when I could see him go from glum to clown, seemingly in connection with my antics – a trace of my father always in the back of my mind, in my belief in humanity, in my own flawed humanity…

After reading The Sentimentalists – Ghost of Storytime
The Sentimentalists is beautiful book which focuses on the tension between the fullness and the emptiness of memory. The writing style seems to complement this tension in a poetic and metaphorical way, for example;
The war incident is cloudy, “and then Owen….Owen drifting…Owen falling, continuing to fall”,
And,
Memories are written, “Establishing an event at the moment of its occurrence as though it were already deeply in the past”.
And,
The burning of the Hooch is distant and quick, the description doesn’t go past; “.They set the village on fire”.
Nothing is fully clear, nothing is fully resolved, things get re-worked or buried, the boat is put away, and Casablanca is flooded. I enjoyed the flooding metaphor; it’s quite a convenient and strong image though.
The fading of memories, the reducing of memories to a few words or actions:”remember me when I am dead and simplify me when I am dead”; her father did crosswords; Henry did maths problems, her mother made a journal to uncover a pattern or system to her grief.
Douglas’s poem seems to arise from a fierce, forensic curiosity, an impatience with sentimentality, a desire to see things uncluttered and unclouded by preconceptions. I’m not sure this is the same desire as in the book, but the choice of poem is great, such a powerful couplet to begin and end a poem with.
There is some humour. “That there they had been, marching along, together, all of them with the very worst feet in the world.”
The ghost them could have been developed much further – taking the book firmly in magical realism.
Clunky sentences: I don’t know how to quantify this but her is an example of a passage I found difficult to read:
“As though we inhabited separate and remote corners of his illimitable and still-coveted prairie. As though all things had been leveled; emptied off. As though – if indeed we had thought to send them out – our shouts would have rung nearly soundlessly in our own ears, swallowed up by the unconquerable landscape between us, so long by then left untried.”

Handout #7
Toledo
8 April 2011

“In this way my mother attempted to uncover a pattern or a system to her grief, but there never did appear to be one, and the pain continued to erupt equally from the sight of an old photograph as from an untwined sock. But after each entry my mother would go on to conclude: ‘it should not happen again.’ And this conviction – that unhappiness, in herself and later in her children, should be staved off, then eliminated entirely – originated from the same source within her that assured her that the progress that my father was making on his boat, and that my mother was making on my father, and that my father’s words were making on her heart, would be measurable and lasting things, upon which each of us could build.”?Johanna Skibsrud

Word:
Hope

Sentence:
Words of love and hope are so powerfully gripping, even if self-deceptive at times.

Paragraph:
The words of love and hope that held her mother captive for so many years are what hold all of us who love and hope. But there is a blurry line that separates love from desperation. It is so easy to put one foot over that line and not to realize. It is so easy to live in both realities and not to see the self-deception of all players.

Stream:
Her mother’s attempt to uncover a system of her grief is so reminiscent of people in psychotherapy who are trying to understand themselves and their personal history. Some learn so much, while others seem to get no-where. This makes me think of Hannah Arendt who said that we really cannot know ourselves, so there is no point in dedicating too much effort to that end. She also said that so long as we are thinking we are not acting. The act of thinking is by definition impractical. There comes a time when thinking and ideas stop and a decision is made. The mother in this case just could not leave her comforting world of ideas, and so she could never come to a decision on how to deal with her dysfunctional life.

Comments on The Sentimentalist
Flying Head

I find/see Johanna Skibsurd’s novel “The Sentamentalists” as a big and very unusual fishing net with differently sized holes that make it possible to catch anything from a whale to the tiniest fish. Nobody reasonable would use it for professional harvesting fish. However the author applies her novel as a net for catching human “souls” characterized by an extreme variety in sizes of their internal surfaces when similarly weighing about 3 pounds. She uses a wide spectrum of different techniques in her prose. It looks chaotic, but allows her to attract a wider spectrum of readers. Even if they will find something small resonating with their experience or perception of human life it represents a big success. The ability to force hardened and extremely defocused modern man to deeper reflections is difficult to achieve. Anyway, if somebody writes something very true and directly from their heart it will always easily resonate with other people. That was achieved the author.

I liked very much the author’s depth in the provided flash pictures of her childhood/adolescence vacations in the same places, ghosts, relation with sister and parents, history of boat, interactions with grandparents and other old people. It was interesting to notice that the author totally ignored a signalized topic about her problems with former boyfriend with him she was living six years. She also did not analyze the marriage problems of her parents. I am sure that 99% of other young authors would exploit the last two topics. We get used to this approach (as hearing the word “love” in 90% of songs) providing many spectacular descriptions of “human surface trips” and not much about “life journeys”. In other words, the author is fully aware about deeper value of human generations’ “vertical” interactions during their growth, in comparison to their horizontal relations in their adult lives.

As I listened to the dialogues between Johanna Skibsrud and the insightful members of the seminar what formed substantially for me was how elemental the Sentimentalists is. The rough carpenter’s house, the unfinished ship in the barn: earth. Being tossed about in the estuary or blown off-course by life’s detours: wind. The watery world atop the primordial submerged city; sailing above the subconscious mind, carried along by rivers of emotion that have their anchorage in forces mysteriously submerged. And the most amazing expression of fire: sparks of insight that appear as epiphanies, penetrating and cutting through the other elements. These moments – and they are brief and precious – are expressions of truth. I reflected on how such epiphanies have shaped my life and I wondered if a personal truth is universal or whether that matters. I believe there probably are universal truths but one’s own truth is sacred. Flashes of personal insight have been signposts for me; simply put, my life was one way before and then another way afterward.

À la lumière des commentaires du public après la projection du film, le professeur Cornett, de par sa méthode pédagogique non-traditionnelle, a réussi à soulever un questionnement sur les pratiques pédagogiques traditionnelles pratiquées dans les universités et dans les écoles primaires et secondaires.

On constate que l’enseignement nous concerne tous: enseignants, élèves, parents, futurs travailleurs, citoyens.

Rapture and Despair: the Bipolar Affect and Creativity –First 9 pages.
The triangle gave me nightmares of teaching college and academic papers on education and their pseudoscientific research. Making it a pure science seems impossible as the number of free parameters that could affect someone is impossible to measure.
There’s a physics joke that comes to mind.
A farmer was having trouble getting his chickens to lay eggs. He went to all sorts of experts to help him. Finally the physicist comes along and says, “I’ve solved your problem, but only if the chickens are perfectly spherical and in a vacuum”
The simplification is great, I just will be sceptical from the off.
Also it struck me that all these people are dead. Also the label of genius perhaps comes, falsely or not, posthumously. It would be nice to look at some living cases. Also the context where these people did their work is going to be very different from today, with crazy social media, Japanese city levels of sensation overload, and much better neuroscience, psychology to understand them.
Saying that this should prove interesting

Dear widower uncle

“My uncle cooked
his own meals,
ironed his days
and polished his own shoes.
We found him
sprawled on the bathroom floor
his bitterness
three days ripened by eternity.”
Dr. John Asfour

See what we’re left with
a storm before a calm
rant without rage & yet raging
how we turn to incite after enticing –
see the little man belittled
by his own lack of confidence,
everything even-handed over-measured.
Seeking the plausible is not necessarily
the best way to get to the heart of things.
See the thin man in shadow disconnecting.
Now comes a moment to stumble through his demeanour,
relish the way we empathize despite the way we darkly suggest,
move into recognizing just barely our own selves,
give alms to the moment, moments to the history –
see how we don’t lack breath for ironic pronouncements.
Uncle is dead – long live uncle –
somewhere in this observing
is a kind of broken lens –
the push-you-pull-me radically deaf,
godhead looking down staying
numbly mum, love
& all the rest of it
another way
to try…

Reflections on Dr. John Asfour’s poem in “Blindfold” beginning “My father visits” – May 31 – Blur

First Word – seminal

First sentence – In many lives fathers loom large in the ominously subtlest of ways, suggest without wholly revealing, touch but it may be self-indulgent, expect & are puzzled by their children, even as their children are puzzled by them…

First paragraph – This was somehow familiar & puzzling all at once, specifically regarding the ending. Family, isn’t it that Russian author Tolstoy who said that happy families have no stories…The family here appear to act towards each other at slightly crossed purposes, at least where the patriarch is concerned. The way the patriarch/grandfather is delineated one gets a sense that he is interested in practical details, less so in pleasures or emotions. This comes through via the selected detail, pleasure in the signature of a boy’s Game Boy & a daughter’s new cat, practicality (& indirectly criticism) in the grandfather’s questions as well as conversational subjects. One gets the sense that the speaker is revealing nothing beyond bald statements as far as the father goes – that is, to get to the heart of the matter you’d need either to decide for yourself based on details afforded what kind of man the grandfather is, or else query the narrator himself. The details do speak significantly, just not in a direct way.

Stream of Consciousness – Families always reading each other between the lines – fathers & their ostensible powers, grown kids with kids of their own recognizing so much of themselves in the mothers & fathers & yet not so – veiled criticisms that bite at the extremities – can we love someone who speaks a different emotional language? Well naturally, but then again, then again – the house with its cracks & all you can do is feel the scrutiny as judgement – mothers, where are they in this book? I’ve yet to read enough to know if there are mother poems – this is the first except we’ve been given that includes a female, a girl child with her new cat – I had a cat young – Bijoux was her saccharine name – loved Bijoux, protected her from the rough play of boys – families & rough play – love is a first & second & third helping of shimmering guilt often enough in the pit of the familial – also first & second & third helpings of tenderness – the practical can drain yet ironically is necessity if you’re going to get through – a fine ingenuous piece of wisdom simple as a child’s nursery rhyme coming up to bite you in the back of the heals – prayers, how do they fit in as you sort through treasures & debris both – treasures & debris on a muggy day in a life, hanging out the family’s unseemly laundry, cottons & silk & denim & wool – the grandfather in that poem missing the apple trees – what does that say – you could see the guy in an entirely different way without much difficulty – I had one of those gentle fathers, lucky me, in yet not such a gentle mother – where are the women in these poems – am I going to find them once I get the book? Or is even thinking about them wrongheaded due to the needs of this memoir…

Say the names – “On the subject of hegemony” – I got the sense that hegemony in this family was anything but clear, that the narrator was talking of being-with-others (in this case the father) more than being-in-the-world because in this case that was the overpowering situation. It is a kind of ironic title to me, anchored in the subtle suggestion of the details re the grandfather given…

Reflections on Dr. John Asfour’s poem in “Blindfold” beginning “I can imagine your faces” – June 5/2011 Blur

One word: brutality

One sentence: The death of children is recurrently shocking, always half cocked, many times the puzzle that can’t be plainly, honestly, understandably resolved…

One paragraph: You have the smiles, razor sharp around the edges, soft as tongues melting in their fullness. Teeth & flesh, crescent moons scrabbled, love of life irrefutable – you have the love uprooted, cut down, stretched painfully. This is how it gets too hard to acknowledge, the young so vulnerable, pining, confident, perplexed. This is everything about us that doesn’t pan out, our children reaping the sins of their elders. Ah sweet Mary, Jane, Frank, John – sweet land of never never names – this is all the equations we are missing viable answers to, all our hope on a torture wheel unyielding, all our sense of justice questioned with impossible concussion directing…

Stream of Consciousness: Violence, violence against children – head-banging, heads shaking – violence & what do we do with what never will add up? I take you out by the river to see if we can clear out our heads, our hearts, our souls – emphatically, just at this bloody moment it’s a no go. & then we break down, & then we break out, & the thought of victimizing ignites anger. Only momentarily, though – it’s as if as far as we’re willing to look hard is a way out of blaming because all our empathy suddenly strengthens: thousands of us victims, children who escaped singing in the key of A minor, A minor a sloughing off of guilt, a mourning of wrong doing, life uplifting among the tragically lost, hope just to the left of everything sacred. Those kids, their lessons ended with a shot – here you go, too difficult to accept, too important by chance to forget just because. We will not forget, we will defy hatred, the next place we land a place to cradle love…

Say the names: “Seeing” – because the seeing at issue here is so important yet distressingly fragile – what’s ‘seen’ whether actually or metaphorically is destined to fade away in spite of intention, the deaths so many piling up & fading, the hope of remembrance slant hope, time & how mortality insures disappearance, love & maybe it’s love that endures, the recollection tempered by heartfelt propriety…

Thank you, Susie Arioli for joining Dr. Cornett’s dialogic close-up and personal last night, July 4th at the Beaux-arts des Ameriques in Montreal.

Unfortunately I missed your concert in Montreal, on July 2nd, and actually, last night was my first introduction to your music and personal charm.

I love that you sing Cole Porter! I am not an expert on jazz, but I know that when I am moved by a piece of music or voice, I automatically become a fan!
Barbara