The Religious Rant
"I seize upon these generic names like essay or opera in despair as I'm sinking under the waves of possible naming for any event that I come up with. I really don't know what to call anything. And if I can ever get some generic name that seems close enough that nobody will laugh out loud, I clamp on it."
- Anne Carson
People in my family have interesting theological history.
I was raised Unitarian Universalist, which means I grew up studying everyone else's religion and my job was to figure out what I believed. That was a very hard job. The study was much more enjoyable.
My maternal grandmother belonged to the Finish Swedish Lutheran church. My great grandfather was one of the founders of the church. She was very upset that my mom wasn't religious. She thought it was the death of her husband, my grandfather, that caused my mom to lose her faith. My mom tells me she had already seen the hypocrisy in people at church before she went through confirmation. They gave lipservice to kindness and charity every Sunday and then said horrible things about people behind their backs and behaved dreadfully during the week.
My paternal grandmother belonged to the most conservative Presbyterian church she could find. I always thought she perceived God exactly as he appeared in the Sistine Chapel. He was an old man with white hair. Definitely male. Definitely old. When my grandfather died she said the best part of her was gone. Her head. The thinking part of her.
Now she won't disagree with anything my father says because he sounds like her late husband. She used to give me bibles on every religious holiday. At first I liked it because they were part of my study. Then I started to feel like she was pressuring me to be her.
I made sure when I got married that we included a prayer in the service so she would feel like it was a real service. It started out, "We pray..." so it could be inclusive. After the service she said how much she liked the prayer.
We pray.
Her husband didn't share her faith. They never talked about religion. According to my dad, his father believed that god was made up of the souls of people. There was a little god in all of us. So maybe I take after him, as I'm discovering my Quaker leanings.
I don't know what my dad believes. He believes in singing at church. He believes in "what will the neighbors think." He believes in covert actions and the importance of keeping up appearances. He believes in the coercive power of tears.
My mom is probably not necessarily non-theist.
My brother in high school said of his friend, incredulously, "He really believes that god stuff."
Both of my brothers went to youth group at the Unitarian church where my parents belonged. I was the churched accompanist. I was clinically depressed, unable to practice the piano, and often stumbled over very simple hymns. That they didn't fire me was a testament to the kindness of the music committee.
None of us can talk about god, really.
It's part of what doesn't feel like home in the Unitarian church for me anymore. There's a level of spritualism or something that's missing. Too often the sermons feel like college lectures. My brain gets a lot out of it, but I need to find a way to feed the soul. A way to talk about god that doesn't make my flesh crawl.
I used to call myself Christian, but it didn't fit most peoples' definition since it incorporated the teachings of Jesus, but not his divinity. So then I called myself an atheist. Which made them tell me I'd burn in hell. I switched to calling myself Unitarian. Which meant either people would assume I was Christian or that I would burn in hell or both. Now I'll try on the Quaker mantle. My beliefs haven't changed much through all these incarnations. I just struggle to find a community that shares more in common with me. A label that fits.
And if I can ever get some generic name that seems close enough that nobody will laugh out loud, I clamp on it.
"Most people think the beloved is beautiful in order to fall in love with them, and I want to know what that force is in human life, an interaction. Because it appallingly isn't identifiable with truth in lots of examples one could think of, and yet we keep following it as if it were. It seems impossible not to."
Okay. I'm going to say a list of words and you respond however you want.
Red?
Necessity.
Water?
Is best.
Language?
Skin.
Husband?
Drudgery.
Truth?
Uncovering.
Beauty?
Justice.
The Disorganized American in Exile Rant
"Personally, I don't think very well about things that I haven't actually touched. For example, I can't enter into conversations with philosophers when they're talking without examples. I have to say, "Give me an example of that concept," and then I can get inside and think. And that's just a drawback of being me, maybe."
- Anne Carson
What is the drawback of being me? The bad PR of being an American woman. In Japan as an exchange student in college this meant a lot of attention from drunk businessmen in their late 50s. Who had watched too many American films in which the lead female role goes to bed with the first man she meets on camera.
I had never been around drunk people before. I had never been accosted by anyone. It was appalling to me. Embarrassing. "Hey baby. Blonde hair." I have brown hair. I could understand what they were saying to each other in Japanese. Once I told them to shut up using a very direct colloquial language. It scared the crap out of them.
No. Those weren't the old men. They were boys on bicycles, not the old men. The old men were never scared. Everything I did was exotic.
The drawback of being me.
I joined the music club at college, but I quit after one day when I found out that the band, which had old dented crappy instruments decided to by a new beer refrigerator with their surplus funds. Also one of the boys in the band made me very uncomfortable by trying to get his girlfriend to admit that western eyes were so much more beautiful than asian eyes and then naturally he wanted her to say that my eyes were so much more beautiful than hers.
A seventeen-year old boy in the English class I taught developed a crush on me. I had no idea until the week I was leaving. He never said anything in class. I mean he never said ANYTHING in class. Which was awkward becuase it was an English conversation class.
In that final week he had his mom call my host mom to ask if he could see me off. I thought, fine. He can come wave at the train. I was taking a train from Osaka to Tokyo and then flying home to Minnesota.
But no. He planned to take the train with me to Tokyo and from there he would fly home. Very odd. But by then I had already agreed. He still said nothing. All the way to Tokyo. But he carried my luggage, which was nice. He sent me a few creepy letters about visiting the states.
Exotic foreigner.
A drawback of being me.
I'm so not used to being exotic. There's something very freeing about being of Scandinavian descent in the land of the Norse in Exile. I can blend in. I am not approached on the street. I am unremarkable. These are not drawbacks. In my introversion I enjoy the annonymity.
My relatives left Sweden to come here when my grandparents were children. I have been back to Sweden with my mother, who is now taking Swedish lessons. When she travels, she is one of those people who puts a Canadian flag on her lapel. We live in Minnesota. We can pass.
I nearly grew up in Canada, but my dad had high blood pressure and an extra bone in his foot which they discovered when he went in for his draft physical.
My mom was at home packing her bags for possible flight across the border. They were in Ithaca, New York at the time.
The Political Rant
"I think it has educated me to always go as far as I can go in a thought or in a sentence and then go around the corner to try to find some pocket of it that hasn't been apparent yet, in the faith that there is going to be one there. That's what the Greek experience gives-- the faith that there's always another corner in a word or in a thought that you haven't gotten to yet. It doesn't close off."
- Anne Carson
How many thoughts do people not turn the corner on. How many people hear one answer and it resonates truth and that is what they run with.
I had a boss once whose brain seemed to hard-wire the first information she got on a subject. Even if it was later disproved, there was no room to encode the correction. (How many people read retractions of stories in the papers. Do they even print them anymore?)
A lot of people, I think, are like this.
It's why we have the following appalling statistics taken from a
poll done by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) in September 2004. (
PIPA is a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA) and the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland.
75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda,
63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found.
60% percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts,
55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission.
Why do so many people believe that Iraq carried out the attack on America on September 11.
Why do people who in their rational lives might be intelligent, cling to the idea that we had to respond with force because
they attacked
us.
"The roots of the Bush supporters' resistance to information," according to Steven Kull, "very likely lie in the traumatic experience of 9/11 and equally in the near pitch-perfect leadership that President Bush showed in its immediate wake. This appears to have created a powerful bond between Bush and his supporters--and an idealized image of the President that makes it difficult for his supporters to imagine that he could have made incorrect judgments before the war, that world public opinion could be critical of his policies or that the President could hold foreign policy positions that are at odds with his supporters." (from PIPA article)
I think in part it's because as a national identity we have to be the Good Guys. Good Guys are allowed to do violence, but only as a response to violence or injustice. Good Guys would definitely not just decide to attack someone because someday they might do something bad to us. Good Guys would not claim war as a last resort and go crashing in before exhausting all other possibilities. Good Guys would have more respect for the men and women in uniform, and more care for the international community and the lives of fellow human beings.
But in addition to the Good Guys we have the Cowboys and Northrup Frye's "bad men-- the outlaws of the west." And that too is part of our national identity. We like to be the rebels. We like to buck the system. No one can tell us what to do.
You aren't the boss of me. How adolescent. I know we're a young country, but do we have to be so blatantly and stereotypically going through this teenage angst crap at the expense of ourselves and the world community?
And of course the Teenager in Chief, the Cowboy of the Whitehouse leading the charge. And proudly declaring that he is incapable of changing his mind on any subject. Inflexibility as a virtue.
I can't remember where I came across this idea but it rang true to me. Terrorism doesn't just harm the victims. It robs a cause of a rational voice.
Once something has blown something up in your name, you cannot get anyone to listen to your cries for peaceful discourse. No matter that you have no affiliation with the terrorists beyond nationality or skin color or religion.
All planes are weapons.
All Muslims are extremists.
All Americans condone "pre-emptive war."
Outsiders like Margaret Atwood heaps scorn upon America and Americans and is a very very angry person. I'm angry too, but I'm angry from inside this nation and I am inseparable from the institution that angers me. She has a voice to speak. I am part of the amorphous all-devouring popular culture machine that is these United States.
I have no voice. People are being killed in my name. I cannot love America without becoming a cowboy. I have no place here if I can't rejoice in the mess we've made of Iraq. What body in the international community will hear my voice?
Majority rules.
So Anne Carson is this incredibly brilliant classicist who knows way more about stuff than I do. But that's okay. She draws me in.
After reading her book
Glass, Irony and God I went out and bought a used copy of Wuthering Heights and a really neat book on the lives of the Brontë sisters.
And I decided to read the book of
Isaiah in my New Oxford Bible.
None of this was really necessary to appreciating the work in Glass, Irony and God, but the essays and verse just sparked an interest in digging further into some of the threads she teased out.
The following posts were inspired by Anne Carson's interview. Originally I had them all posted together and it was a giant scary mess. I also read it as a whole to my Canadian lit class and that is where I decided that it must be split or destroyed. So there.
Blogging
I'm sitting in Leo's house trying to usher him into the twenty-first century. But I'm pretty sure I could swap out his newer computer for my older one and he wouldn't notice. Which would be cool cause his plays dvds.
Here's the story that I wrote about riding horses in Kenya. I thought it was maybe a salvagable short story that came out of a class I took with Pablo Medina this summer.
The class was called Real Time/Imaginary Time and we talked about how to alter real events or real people to suit us in a fictional setting.
I was told that this is not a short story, but the start of a novel. Which it may be. I think I'll play with the characters for a while and see what happens.
Here's a related post we did while we were in Kenya.
Mau Mau
In doing research-based fiction I need to collect some research. I'd like to continue with a story I wrote about a trip to Kenya.
Here is information the
Mau Mau uprising.
Here's the
Aberdare Country Club.
I need to see if that is really where we went and road horses, but I think it is.
Completely Unrelated to Anything
Woke up and couldn't get back to sleep, so decided to do the
Belief-o-Matic and find out what religion I'm supposed to be. Turns out that I was raised as a Unitaran Universalist and lo and behold, I came out to be 100% Unitarian Universalist...
Here are my results:
The top score on the list below represents the faith that Belief-O-Matic, in its less than infinite wisdom, thinks most closely matches your beliefs. However, even a score of 100% does not mean that your views are all shared by this faith, or vice versa.
Belief-O-Matic then lists another 26 faiths in order of how much they have in common with your professed beliefs. The higher a faith appears on this list, the more closely it aligns with your thinking.
1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Secular Humanism (97%)
3. Liberal Quakers (92%)
4. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (90%)
5. Neo-Pagan (70%)
6. Theravada Buddhism (68%)
7. Nontheist (65%)
8. New Age (61%)
9. Bah�'� Faith (57%)
10. Taoism (55%)
11. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (54%)
12. Mahayana Buddhism (52%)
13. Reform Judaism (47%)
14. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (45%)
15. New Thought (45%)
16. Orthodox Quaker (41%)
17. Scientology (40%)
18. Sikhism (35%)
19. Jainism (33%)
20. Jehovah's Witness (33%)
21. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (32%)
22. Hinduism (29%)
23. Seventh Day Adventist (19%)
24. Eastern Orthodox (15%)
25. Islam (15%)
26. Orthodox Judaism (15%)
27. Roman Catholic (15%)
I was glad to see that the Liberal Quakers were on there because that's what I'm investigating at this time.
Margaret Atwood - An Angel
I really wanted to put this whole poem here, and if you checked this blog during the few hours before I amended this you would have caught it. But while I haven't thought of this as publishing, my husband pointed out that it is. I don't want to rip off Atwood. I just wanted to include the poem that sparked my "Angel of Doubt" poem.
Here's the first line and the last line. You should read it. It's really good.
I know what the angel of suicide looks like. I have seen her several times. She's around.
Wings, of course. You wouldn't believe a thing she said if it weren't for the wings.
Here is language from
Monkey Beach which reminds me a lot of
Rainy Lake. It's interesting because
Rainy Lake was about the culture of Lake cabins in Minnesota among the Scandinavian and German descendents who live here... Something I'm very familiar with. And
Monkey Beach was set in British Columbia on the sea in a Haisla community. The parallels came from the importance of water, families coming apart and coming together, and tragedy on the water.
This is just language that I love. Eden Robinson's use of language also reminds me of
Robin McKinley's Deerskin. As soon as I unpack one of the dozen copies I have somewhere in my new house I will quote some of her stuff here. My favorite passage is one in which people are expressing disbelief by saying something like, "It was as if someone had suggested a tadpole might inherit the sea upon the death of water. " Which is not the best example of why her use of language reminds me of this, but oh well.
White feathers tumbled down from the half-eaten chickens caught near the top of the tree, where the hawks had dropped them. The chickens were still alive. They flapped their wings, kicked feet, struggled against the net. Their heads had fallen to the ground like ripe fruit. Their beaks opened and closed soundlessly, and their eyes blinked rapidly, puzzled and frightened. P124
A sea otter dives. Long streams of sunlight wash through kelp trees, undulating like lazy belly dancers. A purple sea urchin creeps towards a kelp trunk. The otter dips, snatches up the urchin, carries it to the surface, where the sound of the waves breaking on the nearby shore is a bitter grumble. Devouring the urchin's soft underbelly in neat nibbles, the otter twirls in the surf, then dives again. The urchin's shell parachutes to the ocean bottom, landing in the dark, drifting hair of a corpse. P131
The rain is easing. Sea gulls circle and land on something between the logs on the rocky shore. A flock of sea gulls is called a squabble, and they are doing that right now, fighting for a place on whatever has washed up on shore. As my speedboat buzzes by, some of the sea gulls hop away, revealing something dark, but then they cover it again. It must be big to have attracted so many. On the other side of the channel from me is a tanker on its way to Alcan's dock. It moves with the ponderous weight of a loaded ship, is low in the water and oblivious to me. When we were kids, Jimmy and I used to watch the tankers through binoculars and try to decipher the names. Some were Russian or Japanese, or rusted beyond reading.
The crows wait at the outskirts of the squabble. They are little black dots that flutter and edge nearer to the corpse until the sea gulls drive them away. A flock of crows is called a murder. P163
My fall from grace was spectacular. If I'd had head lice, scabies, worms and measles, I couldn't have been more unpopular. Rather than sit with me on the bus, kids would sit on the floor. Rather than be my lab partner in science class, kids would claim to be sick and have to go to the nurse's office. Rather than eat with me, kids would throw their lunch bags in the garbage and claim they weren't hungry. P172
Food is dust in my mouth without you.
I see you in my dreams and all I want to do is sleep.
If my house was filled with gold, it would still be empty.
If I was the king of the world, I'd still be alone.
If breath was all that was between us, I would stop breathing to be with you again.
The memory of you is my shadow and all my days are dark, but I hold on to these memories until I can be with you again.
Only your laughter will make them light; only your smile will make them shine.
We are apart so that I will know the joy of being with you again.
Take care of yourself, wherever you are.
Take care of yourself, wherever you are.
P174
Poety Stuff - The Angel of Doubt
I know the Angel of Doubt
I'm pretty
Sure
She's ten
Or eleven
Just moved
To a new school
(Hideously long lunchtables of emptiness on either side)
She thinks
She fell
Not sure there is a God
(They never met)
Minor staff
Least seniority
Maybe she didn't
f
a
l
l
Maybe she was just
L e t g o
The girls with winged hair
And expensive sneakers
Are regular Sunday School Attenders
And have no room for Doubt
When she voices uncertainty
On historical basis of the biblical narrative
Or wonders about errors of translation in the text
They claim she was sent by the devil
To test people's faith
The Angel of Doubt
Wears garage sale clothes
Ten years out of fashion
And reads Jean Paul Sartre
She's pretty
Sure
At puberty
She will grow wings
I would love to write a collection of short stories like this where there isn't a thread running through the whole thing, but there are recurring characters that kind of cement the whole work from beginning to end.
He drops names and refers to past and future stories in a way that doesn't break the narrative of the current story even if you haven't met the character yet. The stories by and large could stand on their own but are much stronger for being put together.
The book takes place in the housing project in Bombay, India called Firozsha Baag. The characters live in different apartments there and the sons and daughters either leave or stay as the years go by.
The character of Kersi seems to be very close to the author, allowing him to touch on autobiographical themes. Kersi begins the book as a young boy in India and ends the book as a young man in Canada waiting for his published book to arrive by mail.
A very clever book, but not so clever that it seems contrived. I was steeped in the world of Firozsha Baag. I believed in the crumbling plaster walls covered with old calendar's from soap advertisements. I could smell the rotting fruit and the drips from the plumbing and I was fairly certain I could hear cockroaches eating the papers underneath my bed.
I want to create a world like this. When I grow up I would love to be Rohinton Mistry.
We read Nourbese Philp's amazing book of poetry called She Tries Her Tongue.
She is a Carribean woman who moved to Canada and became a writer. Since 1983 she has been struggling with the idea of mother tongue for people who were enslaved and whose original language was stripped from them. There is something horrific about creating art with the words of the overseer.
In her quest for original language she has done a lot of work in Patois, but she also writes passionately in standard English. She Tries Her Tongue brings in so many different kinds of language it made my head spin. She begins with an essay on language that starts out entirely in the academic language of English and then moves into Patois and back into standard.
There are poems that make use of definitions, historical edicts for slave owners, the sound of words. It is an homage to language.
It is interesting to think about getting back to an original language. Most of us are not speaking the language of our ancestors, at least not in the U.S. or Canada. We speak the languages of conquerors and imperial powers. But there is a great difference between my speaking English as a granddaughter of Swedish immigrants who chose to come here. Immigrants who struggled to learn English and didn't speak Swedish in the home so their children would not speak with an accent. There's a big difference between that and former slaves whose language was forcibly ripped from them. Sometimes by the roots of the tongue.
For Nourbese Philip, the idea of getting back to her original language has been a very fertile ground for creation of great work. It doesn't send me off and running in any great directions though. I don't think Swedish is my "original language." I think language is a tool and you choose your tool for maximum impact.
I would be interested in doing a paper on Nourbese Philip and the sociolinguistics of language and dialect choice. This might be my first paper. I need to poke around a bit. Read more about her linguistic journey.
Researched immigrants coming to Nova Scotia and wrote “Descent”
Descent
The Hector brought emigrants to Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century.
Water isn’t treacherous
nor is the descent into it,
made easy by a plank held
at an angle on the ship’s rail
so that a small girl wrapped
in a length of flannel could drop
quickly. In the silence
after her body slid on the wood
and the brief splash
I recalled nothing of her,
not the undulating terrain
of her skin, not the sleeping
animal of her hand
in mine, not even the cleft in her chin
which I used to touch,
marveling.
Ideas coming out of Anne Simpson:
• Research-based poem
• Research-based short story
• A list poem like “>”
• Poems based on punctuation
• Myth in writing
• Essay on “A head like hers” with Elizabeth’s mom, Camille’s mom
This I also think is amazing.
>
Aphrodite > Hera and Athena
Paris is only a boy,
choosing between them. What he really wants
is the apple shining in his hand, but they won’t let him
keep it. Anyway, it’s all based on first impressions.
Hera has power and Athena’s got brains. But who sees
these things? Aphrodite has perfect legs,
gilded hair, and blue eyes that open and shut
just like a mortal. He considers, marks each one—
| Hera | Aphrodite | Athena |
| smiled | is all warm smiles | will smile |
| tricked | and small tricks, | will trick |
| brought | bringing her little myths | will bring |
| gave | of love, she gives kisses | will give |
| desired | like petals, desiring | will desire |
| took | him, taking whatever | will take |
| turned | is needed to turn the tables | will turn |
| decided | and decide the outcome | will decide |
—and declares Aphrodite the winner. She laughs,
disappears. The other two pause, gazing at him.
It begins with an apple: heaven’s usual device.
I love the cheerleader chant: Hera has the power…
Wasn’t there something boys got the muscle, teacher’s got the brains, girls got the sexy legs, we win the game!
Also the lines about gilded hair, and blue eyes that open and shut just like a mortal.
Conjuring images of a perfect little plastic doll whose eyes open and shut as you tilt her this way and that.
7 or 8 things I know about her/An unwanted, unauthorized biography
7 or 8 things I know about her/An unwanted, unauthorized biography
Her name is
Carol
Something.
She lives in San Jose
And is the same age as everyone else --
Forty-nine.
She has two or three grown children
Who may all be girls
When she
found out he
Was married
at first
She had nothing
to do
With him.
I would like her she’s fun they have so much in common.
Biking, skiing, hiking, taking
“business trips” to Florida.
Someone named Richard
Found a business card.
And a love letter.
Called my mom.
Read the note.
Written from our home on Christmas Day.
She was secretly engaged for three years before this call.
She never did get married.
Or move to Minnesota.
Or meet my father’s only daughter.
I’m glad.
Poety Stuff - Postcards I Meant to Send
Postcards I Meant to Send
The one from Stockholm – noon at Midwinter
Was for my estranged childhood friend
One postmarked Hell’s Something, Grand Cayman
Was for Mandy
Who toured some other Hell with me in Japan
Handmade paper with flowers I picked
In the mountains outside of Tokyo
Sent to my grandmother 2 years before her death.
Now it’s in the box with the rest.
A yellow lab for my mom.
A gecko or golf course for the middle brother.
Nordic skiers in Finland for the youngest.
Nothing for my dad
(who probably doesn’t even know I’m gone)
For my son cars. Or dogs. Or trains. Or babies.
Or Peter Rabbit. Or Winnie the Pooh. Or Goodnight Moon.
For my love this amazing twisted tree No
The dewy spiderwebs No
rippled sand dunes against a dark sky No
clasped hands of different shades No
All of them.
Everything.
The whole spinning world
And me with my arms around it.
I love how Ondaatje weaves in nonfiction. It makes me interested in the least likely things. The history of architecture. How leather is dyed. What happened to Ambrose Small. What was the immigrant experience like in 1930 Toronto.
I wouldn’t ponder these things otherwise. I have not been interested in how a city is built. I have been interested in the characters who do the building, but in Ondaatje’s work the city itself is an important character.
Comissioner Harris has a grand vision of what Toronto could be. He wants to make it a city that is greater than its myth. A shining example for the world. He is an idealist as are many of the characters. He is so focused on his goal that he doesn’t see the peripheral characters. He even mentions some of this concerning Nicholas Temelkoff.
Patrick is serially focused. And meant to blow things up. Searching for Ambrose gives him focus at first. Then he is obsessed with Clara. Then he takes up with Alice and kind of adopts her cause at her death. And for such an inward, quiet person it is strange to have him always exploding things. But isn’t that the stereotype that you have to watch out for the quiet ones because they are just ready to explode.
Caravaggio is an amazing character. I love his interactions with his wife. Get me some chicken. As he’s hiding in the mushroom factory. Admitting he’s a thief. Here I buy into Ondaatje’s romanticized view of the world. This is such an utterly likeable thief and he encounters no problems from anyone even after admitting his occupation. In fact it is his status as an immigrant that gets him in the most trouble when he is nearly killed in prison,
The women are decidedly odd. The Clara/Patrick/Ambrose/Alice thing is extremely reminiscent of Aspects of Love with the four whose names I cannot remember now. There was even a child. Alex/George/Rose/_______. Can’t think of it. Later maybe. Maybe all complex triangles remind me of that. And maybe Aspects is what led me to believe that Clara and Alice were lovers.
There are things lift hanging
• What happened to Small and Clara
• How did the silent nun become Alice the actress?
The things that are left out don’t necessarily bother me. I thought of it as looking through the window of Patrick’s eyes. Except that it isn’t a perfect window through him. And in class we discussed that it’s actually Hannah who is the narrator. Which is very interesting to think about because she does tie everyone together and she would have heard many more of the stories than Patrick. Although I don’t recall her tie to Caravaggio exactly.
I could do a paper of the things missing from Ondaatje books. Or I could do a short story project drawing nonfiction into them. Or I could do both.
These are some things that Northrup Frye had to say about Canada in an interview with Bill Moyers.
National Hero absent in Canada. (Nothing like a George Washington...)
“Every Canadian feels himself part of a federal unity, but he also feels himself very intensely a part of a more regional unity.”
“95% of what any president can do is already prescribed for him—unless he’s a lunatic.”
“We don’t have the tradition of bad men, the outlaws in the West.”
“The violence in Canadian history has been mostly repressive violence, mostly from the top down. That has made us, to some extent, a country that puts up with pragmatic compromises.”
• Karl in The Suspect “There’s life,” he said, “and there’s conscience, and there’s fate, and then there’s law, Mr. Allberg. I’ve struggled with three of them, and I’ve decided to avoid a struggle with the fourth.”
What categories can we draw around Canadian writers?
What Canadian Archetypes do we see?
• Hazen Lewis – silent Northwoods type
